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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

A thing I learned several years ago that makes a lot of these "running out" articles less troublesome is that having "X years" of reserves for a compound really means "The places we have bothered to look are sufficient to fill demand for X years."

When the reserves start getting low, you go look in some other likely place, and lo and behold, Y more years of reserves!

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More precisely, the peak [insert resource] arguments boil down to "at the current price and level of technology, there is X amount of this resource left." Of course, as the supply diminishes, the price goes up, and it becomes cost-effective to harvest that resource from more expensive places and with more expensive means, AND the incentive to improve the technology for extraction/identification or invent new technology for new types of extraction is increased.

But it is inarguable that there is a finite and ever decreasing amount of {helium,petroleum} in the earth. While we may not now be at peak [insert resource], and may not be in your lifetime or mine, such a point must exist and I would bet that the children of today’s newborns will be alive to grapple with the consequences of it.

The Earth is finite, as is the time until the Sun will swallow it, so "it's finite" it true about literally every resource.

It seems more a way to fuel depressions than a useful way to analyze anything.

No, that is not what peak oil arguments boil down to. Peak oil arguments boil down to the observation that the humans are extracting (and burning) oil faster than it is being made, about five orders of magnitude faster in fact, and therefore at some point extraction will have to fall—presumably permanently, but at least for a few million years.

There are other resource concerns that are sometimes expressed in a form mimicking the peak-oil reasoning, but (with the exception of other fossil fuels and helium) the parallel is specious. Not, however, for the reason you cite (which applies equally well to oil), but because used platinum, phosphorus, lithium, and so on, are not destroyed; they can be mined from landfills or, in the case of phosphorus, the ocean. So intellectually sloppy advocates of conservation of these other resources imitate the well-founded peak-oil argument in a sad attempt to give their shabby arguments a veneer of respectability.

However, while Hubbert’s original reasoning for why an oil-extraction peak must exist is valid, his methods for estimating when it would happen have not held up.

But then things are more expensive.

For those who cannot afford, expensive things might as well not exist.

So although more precise, it deflects from the fact that the important aspect is economics.

Well, maybe, maybe not -- due to increases in efficiency, increases in GDP per capita, and technological progress, most resources have generally gotten cheaper over time with respect to incomes.

In the case of oil reserves, they are defined as the amount of oil which would be profitable to extract at current market prices. So it's not actually necessary to look in a new place; when the reserves start getting low, the oil price increases, and ipso facto the reserves are now bigger.

The reserve won't get bigger but last longer. Small but important difference.

No, the reserve is measured by volume, and when the oil price goes up, the physical volume of the reserves increases. The reserve very literally gets bigger.

I said this already -- the volume of the reserve is not related to the amount of oil in the ground. It's the amount of oil that can be _profitably_ extracted _at current market prices_. If the price increases, so does the reserve.

Similarly, if the oil price falls, the oil reserve shrinks, despite the amount of oil in the ground being the same.

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