Originally Posted by Chimbu chuckles
If you guys wanna believe a bunch of BS from the extreme left of the green movement fill you boots.
Urm... extreme left?
http://www.bnp.org.uk/peakoil/index.htm
Peak oil spans all political persuasions, the most active US politician on peak oil is a Republican member of the House of Representatives Roscoe Bartlett and the best selling peak oil author is Matthew Simmons, a former energy adviser for President Bush.
The fact that
peak oil (not running out but just the peak in the rate of extraction before it starts to fall back down) is likely to occur within a decade and most likely before or around 2010 is proved in my opinion.
The alternative view of a peak at some 120 million barrels per day in 2030 is fanciful (yet less than 25 years away so even that far off we should take action now), it isn't rigorously supported by the data. The evidence point to peak around 2010.
As you may be aware there are two distinctly difference approaches to evaluating the timing of peak oil;
a) The annalists approach considering the production profile of all fields, those in decline, those in ascension, those holding steady then to this add the new projects we know about – and over the time scale of six years we have complete visibility because it takes that long to bring a new project on line. This analysis is predicting a global peak around 2010. There just aren’t the projects post 2010 to offset depletion.
b) The geologists approach based on two key points, an estimate of ultimately recoverable reserves (URR) and that the profile of the extraction rate curve is the derivative of the logistic curve and follows the well known bell-shaped curve, the area under the curve representing the URR. These two points and historic extraction data allows the complete curve to be calculated complete with date and extraction rate at peak. This approach has been verified on many individual fields and countries – it follows that the summation of the many oil producing countries in the world will behave similarly. This analysis (developed by Shell’s chief consultant in general geology M. King Hubbert and successfully carried out in 1956 to predict the peaking of the lower 48 states of the US in 1971) also predicts a global peak around 2010.
I really don't see how people have difficultly accepting peak oil, the available evidence is pretty clear on the matter.
This article covers some of the reasons
why peak oil is probably about now.
Finally, to extract oil first one must discover oil. Here is the oil discovery profile:
The amount of oil discovered to date produces a peak around 2010, the die are already cast.