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“:
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.