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Comment by CookieMon | Hacker News Reader

> The real constraints we face are technological and economic, they say. We're limited not by the amount of oil in the ground, but by how inventive we are about reaching new sources of fuel and how much we're willing to pay to get at it.

This is exactly what the peak oil people have been saying, you can't claim they're "looking at it the wrong way" and then restate exactly what they were claiming. Peak oil was never about running out of oil, it was always about the rate and economics of extraction. "the size of the tap, not the size of the tank" etc.

This "recent boom" in the US remains cash negative - about 600b capex for about 500b in oil. And we don't know yet whether that's going to change.

Currently "geology is not only winning, it is crushing technology" http://blogs.platts.com/2014/07/30/peak-oil-forecasts/

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I thought the peak oil people were saying we are running out of oil and that production would peak then decline relatively soon. If they were saying that prices would simply rise encouraging new technology to allow continuing increased production then I think they were very poor at communicating their ideas. More likely they actually believed what they were clearly saying: oil production would peak in X years.

See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06peak.html

As per your wiki link, it is about the extraction rate, which is not to be confused with how much oil there is - there will always be vast amounts of oil that's uneconomic to extract, or slow to extract, or both. The only "running out of oil" claimed by peak oil people is that we're running out of cheap oil.

They do claim the production rate will decline, and conventional crude has. The wells from this boom in the US have a production rate decline of 40% per year, so production is already declining nearly as fast as we can drill more and is predicted to peak soon.

Edit: Myself, I guess it's true that by throwing even more resources at oil (e.g. pursuing tight oil in other countries like in the US) we could still kick the peak down the road a little more and raise the production rate, but when the world economy can't afford such prices and the EROI is so poor then it seems more like playing word games than an honest rebuttle of the implications of peak oil.

They certainly got the shape of the curve wrong, but the fact that you'll eventually have to stop using a finite resource is axiomatic, isn't it?

Agreed - it is either wrong or a contentless axiomatic statement. My sense is many "Peak Oil" people were predicting something dramatic would happen (not just price increases) and were simply wrong. What is strange is the strong appeal of the idea to some people.

> This "recent boom" in the US remains cash negative - about 600b capex for about 500b in oil. And we don't know yet whether that's going to change.

Yes! This is the critical point: Peak Cheap Oil. We're pouring money into more and more costly holes in the ground.

We'll never run out of oil; it's never been about running out of oil. We've just run out of the cheap stuff. It's not coming back.

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