Peak Oil Perspective

To quote: "Most simply, peak oil is about rates, not amounts."

Yes, there are a lot of unconventional resources. They're just a lot harder, more expensive, and most importantly in this context, slower to produce.

On the upshot for me, and the downshot for the rest of civilization, oil (and to a large degree, energy) prices are likely to stay high for the near future for exactly this reason.

However, we haven't developed a viable alternative to liquid fossil fuels in terms of energy-density fast enough. That very, very deeply scares me.

This is a more intelligent way of stating something I've been saying for years. I always explain my position on peak oil by offering an analogy of a fire escape. If the owner of a building chose not to install a fire escape (assuming they could dodge the law), then a fire in the building would be absolutely disastrous; the law would certainly come down on them for anyone who died, and there would major financial ramifications. On the other hand, if they installed a fire escape but it was never used, then the only downside would have been the initial installation cost. Between these two worst-case scenarios, one is so significantly worse than the other that taking steps to mitigate that risk is the logical thing to do, without regard to the likelihood of worst worst-case happening.

Doing nothing with respect to peak oil feels utterly insane.

Keep lofty-goal government subsidies out of it, as they distort the reality of what's viable, boosting lesser technologies while denying funds to what really will work as a matter of economics & physics.

In the meantime, put some of your own energy & money into getting "off the grid": make an alternative energy source viable by actually making it happen on a personal scale, not just hoping somebody somewhere will make it happen the way you want it to.

Peak oil also depends on consumption, with cars like Tesla coming out we'll see a sharp decline in consumption over the next 20 to 30 years, at $300/bl a Tesla starts to make a lot of sense.

The world will never run out of oil, its price will simply continue to increase until other alternatives become economically viable, as those alternatives become viable economies of scale and capital investment will make alternatives that much better.

The traditional "Hubbert curve" shows exponential growth and decline in a any particular region of oil production. Peak oil theorists generally extend this to a world exponential peak/decline (the article doesn't directly say but it take the "we have to plan for the peak" position).

The exponential growth part makes sense because traditional oil of the ground is a really, "high quality", high efficient energy source (whatever the externalities).

The exponential decline at a given location make sense because the supply winds quickly replaced by some other even cheaper source.

But the thing is that since these aspect explain the shape of the Hubbert curve locally, these is no reason to expect the global decline shape to have any resemblance to the rise shape. Oil today is a efficient meaning you get a lot more energy out than you put in. We're already moving to less efficient, more costly forms of extract and the price has marginally increase.

There's no reason a-priori to think that any cliff would be involved with oil production peaking. Production gets harder, prices go up, consumption declines, technology produces relatively more at the higher rate, iterate a number of times and there you are. It's worth saying that shale oil is arguably much less energy efficient than traditional production but it is still efficient to get a profitable product to market (and does involve the, uh, transformation of a large land area).

The main reason to put effort into alternatives to oil is the externalities - especially since pricier oil is going to involve more energy and environmental impact in its extraction. THAT is quite arguably a crisis but unfortunately for people worried about these problem, there's no going to be a "peak point" where oil isn't practical from a purely economic standpoint.

Hopefully, governments will at least resist the urge to increase oil subsidies to keep the prices the same. Instead they should be looking at building electric car infrastructure in their countries, faster, so when the gas prices start climbing, the population switches "smoothly" to electric cars, and doesn't feel much of a shock.