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Peak Oil and the Doomers’ Dire Predictions

Or perhaps it's only just begun.
Or perhaps it’s only just begun.

Remember those many years ago — circa 2005 — when Peak Oil was all the rage, and people like me were routinely ridiculed by the Church of Environmentalism for writing articles such as this one?

Well, you won’t believe it, but it looks as though some of that leftist dogma was perhaps incorrect after all.

The following excerpt comes from the Institute for Energy Research (IER), in a recent article called “Peak Oil theory may have peaked“:

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The chart above shows why Hubbert was considered such a visionary, at least for a while. After his 1956 prediction, U.S. production did indeed rise and then peak just in time for the window Hubbert had given himself. The gentle decline in U.S. production from the mid-1970s through the early 2000s was also consistent with Hubbert’s theory, which treated the total national output as an aggregation of individual wells, each with a technically defined, bell-shaped curve lifecycle of output.

Yet as the chart also shows, the nice bell shape started turning around in 2009 and took off like a rocket in 2011. Looking at monthly figures, U.S. field production of crude in December and January were the highest values since 1972, and not far behind the all-time record set in 1970. Although the sharp decline in the world price of oil since last year may halt the rapid spike in U.S. output, it is obvious from the chart that the mechanistic model of “peak oil” theory is incorrect.

“Finite” Resources Never Run Out With Enough Ingenuity

The fundamental problem with “peak oil” theory is that it adopts a Malthusian mindset, in which we view humanity as the stewards of a single pool of oil that gets smaller every time we burn a barrel.

Please read this article to find out why the “Malthusian mindset” is not just incorrect but so wildly incorrect.

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Huge New Oilfields Discovered In Texas

Peak oil (so-called) is, as we’ve discussed here before, a fairytale of gigantic proportions, and this latest Texas oilfield discovery illustrates precisely why:

We begin to know about a resource only when we begin to use the resource. Knowing about that resource includes a cursory calculation of its quantity. The more we use of it, therefore, the more adept we become at finding it and calculating its quantity, extracting it and refining it. Thus, the more of it we use, the more of it we’re able to find.

No matter how closely it is defined, the physical quantity of a resource in the earth is not fully known at any time, because resources are sought and found only as they are needed. Even if the quantities of a particular resource were exactly known, such measurements would not be meaningful, because humans have a near-limitless capacity for developing additional ways to meet our needs: developing fiber optics, for instance, instead of copper wire … (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2).

Quoting now from The Old Gray Lady:

The Texas field, known as the Eagle Ford, is just one of about 20 new onshore oil fields that advocates say could collectively increase the nation’s oil output by 25 percent within a decade — without the dangers of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the delicate coastal areas off Alaska.

There’s a catch, of course: as you would suspect, the Religion of Environmentalism — of which church the socialist Barack Obama and his clownish administration are great devotees — fight tooth-and-nail to prevent such extraction. Why? Because extracting oil from rock requires hydraulic fracturing — a process known as fracking — and this in turn means that we must actually use our environment. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

Such is the nature of environmentalism.

In related news, check out this gorgeous photo of some real alternative energy: turning natural gas into diesel.