There is only so high the price can go. As price increases economically recoverable supplies also increase as the demand decreases resulting in a negative feedback loop. Same goes for when the price falls, as it did recently - demand increases because the product is cheaper and higher cost producers slow down production reducing supply. That is why I do not think prices will go much lower than they are now. Neither will we ever see $200/bbl oil but we will likely be as high as $100 by Summer 2016 at the latest.
Discovery of US oil fields peaked around 1930, and production peaked around 1970.
Your article has this chart.
It caught just the beginning of the recent increase in US oil production due to the shale revolution. Right now US produces about as much oil as it did at 1971 peak. That is not supposed to happen under Peak Oil theories - once peak is passed the oil production irreversibly declines. But higher prices and technological advances thwarted that.
Furthermore, from your link:
Those in Alaska are near exhaustion, since they peaked in 1988 and are nearly dry now. All these slogans about “Drill, baby, drill” solving our problems are just fantasies. The U.S. oil companies have indeed been drilling as fast as they could everywhere in the U.S., and as the figure shows, getting very little no matter where they look.
The "drill baby drill" refers mostly to opening areas for oil exploration that have been closed for political reasons - to wit US offshore everywhere except western Gulf of Mexico or ANWR. If these areas were opened a couple million bbl/day of production capacity could be added.
Prothero continues on ANWR:
One of the favorite arguments is to drill more in Alaska, especially in the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) on the North Slope. The entire issue became a political hot button in the 2008 presidential election, as environmentalists pointed out how much habitat would be destroyed in the short-term search for oil. But the answer is clear, no matter what your politics: such exploration and possible production would be just a drop in the bucket. In 1998, a non-partisan federal agency, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there were at best only 16 billion barrels of oil in the ANWR and most of these reserves are prospective resources, not proven resources. Sixteen billion barrels sounds like a lot until you realize that it’s less than 1% of the total world oil consumption each year. The U.S. alone consumes over 20 million barrels of oil per day, so even if every drop of oil were actually extracted from the ANWR, it would at best provide two to three years’ worth of oil for the U.S.—and then it would be exhausted, and what would remain would be an ecological disaster.
There are several whoppers in this paragraph. First, 16 Gbbl would not be "1% of the total world oil consumption each year" - it would be more than a half actually since world uses about 25 Gbbl/year. Don't know how he came up with "1%".
Second, his way of looking at the amount of oil in a field is very weird (although I have come across it before by opponents). Even at half the number cited here ANWR would be bigger than all but perhaps two dozen fields ever discovered. And most oil fields would be much smaller, especially these days when new giant fields are a rarity. You simply do not take recoverable reserves of a field and divide it by total oil consumption and decide that it's not very long so why bother. No oil producing region, no oil company on the face of the Earth ever used such a calculation to determine whether an oil field is worthwhile to extract. I think Prothero should stick to dinosaurs.
World discovery rate peaked in 1965, and has been steeply declining ever since, even though more and more exploration is conducted in the farthest reaches of the globe in the past 47 years. The “peak oil” effect has probably already occurred, and we are likely on the slow downward decline in discoveries of cheap, easy-to-pump oil.
Cheap is relative. In the 90s oil in the $40s looked very expensive. Now, it looks very cheap. We adjusted to the higher price levels relatively well. Yes, the era of cheap oil is over. We will never again see oil in $20s or even $30s but that hasn't spelled a
"Collapse" of modern societies.
However, we are still too close to the date to pin it down with any confidence. A date likely somewhere in 2005 - 2010.
I don't see it.
There are no polls that show just how many qualified experts (geologists and geological engineers within and close to the oil industry) accept the concept of peak oil and the end of cheap abundant oil, but a lot of oil experts are on the record as supporting it, including a number of oil geologists and executives. My many friends in the oil business almost all tell me that “peak oil” is widely accepted among their colleagues, and they have long been forced to work with extraordinarily difficult exploration problems because there are no easy oil fields any more.
While it is clear that oil, being a finite resource, cannot grow in production indefinitely I think that Hubbert's concept of an identifiable peak after which production inevitably declines is a rather simplistic one, as can be seen in US reaching the old peak again, 40+ years later. And that with wide swaths of possible production artificially closed off.
DP then mentioned other users of oil: plastics, fertilizers, and pesticides.
Fertilizers (more accurately fixing nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process) actually uses natural gas rather than oil. But in general various fuels account for vast majority of oil used. More than half is used for gasoline alone.
If oil were not needed to burn as fuels the very small amount used for other things could be easily met.
He also slammed biofuels as a cure worse than the disease in some ways.
I agree. They are a boondoggle, at least as practiced today. Blame the Iowa caucuses I guess. Using waste biomass is a much more sensible idea.
He concluded by noting Germany's increasing use of wind and solar energy, starting in the 1990's. Such efforts have been bearing fruit, as one can tell from stories in
Cleantech News — Solar, Wind, EV News (#1 Source) | CleanTechnica and other places. However, wind and solar energy are mostly for electricity generation, and the fossil fuels for that are mostly coal and natural gas. Also, electric cars aren't very big competition for gasoline ones. Cellulose digestion could make biofuel production more efficient, but its commercialization is only beginning. So there isn't any good substitute for oil, at least not just yet.
It is also a fact that the cost for this German program are very high. Electricity in Germany costs three times of the US price. Germany never made much economic sense as a pioneer solar country given their low insolation.
As to electric cars, they may not be a big competition for ICE cars, but that is changing. Electric cars are definitely coming of age with the latest generation of electric vehicles like Tesla and Nissan Leaf (which I see all the time on Atlanta roads lately). Other manufacturers are bringing their own products as well. Just the other day I saw an all electric Focus at the park I walk my dog at.
