Hacker News Reader

Comment by symplee | Hacker News Reader

Anyone still talking about peak oil? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_...

I have to imagine you are being facetious. "good oil" peaked a long time ago, and while it is still being produced, the only reason we have oil at all is because of all the dirty fracking, shale and sand oil out there.

The comment was to lightheartedly point out the incorrect doom and gloom predictions over the last 100 years, where people have been predicting that we're going to run out of oil "soon." Now we have so much we can't get rid of it.

For example:

https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/weve-been-incorrectly-predic...

Really not sure why both of my comments are getting down-voted into oblivion, but case and point, oil is now trading at -$37.00 (negative thirty seven dollars)

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/crude%20oil%20-...

Can someone explain the down-votes?

"Running out of oil" and "peak oil" would be two completely different things. Lightheartedly pointing out something as if it didn't happen when in fact it did happen, will get you downvoted.

It is easy to agree that "running out of oil" sometimes was conflated with "peak oil", but alas, that's just ignorance.

Except it hasn't happened yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_liquids_and_US_tig...

Perhaps I was not clear. This graph you are sharing is shale oil, not the pure stuff found in oil shales. Regular oil production reached peak in 1970. We invented new sources that were considered untappable because of the expense of extracting it at one point. I'm not saying this is bad, I'm just saying that peak oil, as it was originally defined, is very much a real thing.

On the plus side for oil enthusiasts, we will probably not run out of the more dirty variety for quite some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:Hubbert_U...

(also see article refered to by this)

Did the original definition specifically refer to non-shale oil? That doesn't seem too likely. It was just about total production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImV1voi41YY

The fact that we've made new sources viable means we haven't hit the peak yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com