CC, I realise you don’t want to startle the horses but please try to use reputable sources to support your arguments about “****loads of the stuff in the ground and trillions of barrels of oil available from tar sands and oil shales here in Australia” if we could only bolt the door and keep it all for ourselves. It simply doesn’t work that way otherwise why not close down the whole of the NW Shelf and keep all that LNG and tell the Chinese and Japanese to go jump? It’s a world market and the almighty dollar always wins the day. Then there’s that mountain of the shale and tar sands you say Canada is sitting on and the huge reserves in the Arctic if only those f%#king Greenies would get out of the way and let us get at it. Who knows what is there but it is not going to be available in great enough quantities for decades and put simply can all the unfound and unproven resources be exploited quickly enough to more than offset the peaking and decline of the known and proven reserves?
Sorry CC the liquid oil that’s still available is held in reserves that are shrinking, getting harder and more costly to pump out and the stuff we have yet to find is by definition getting harder to find otherwise we would have found it already and 80% of the oil we use today is being extracted from fields found and developed prior to 1973.
“What about the massive reserves of tar sands and oil shale?” I hear you say. While it was used by the Nazis in WW2, it was a necessity in the absence of alternative supplies of oil and when price did not matter and still used in South Africa as a legacy of their need to overcome sanctions during the apartheid years. Granted the costs to convert tar sands to oil today are more favourable but it still takes energy equivalent of two barrels to produce one of oil and with unacceptable environmental impacts.
All other factors, from the machinations of hedge funds to the lack of twin-hulled tankers compound and complicate the current situation and the price may rise and fall but to $40 a barrel me thinks not. The fact that the Australian dollar is currently at record levels and almost parity with the US dollar protects us from oil prices being up to 50% higher than they are currently. The most likely direction of the Aussie dollar in the longer term is going to be downwards greatly exacerbating the situation for the price of fuel in Australia.
It is as if no one wants to know that the stuff is beginning to run out at the same time as our appetite for it is increasing exponentially. There used to be 5 million bicycles in Beijing but now there are probably more like 5 million motor vehicles increasing at a rate of 1000 per day. India aspires to have a middle class of 300 million living at a similar standard as we do presently by 2025. It is not just their desire to drive a car but the increased use of oil to support every aspect of their economy, everything from plastics, pharmaceuticals to fertilisers and the inputs to grow and transport the food they will eat.
There have been warnings for the past 50 years about the point where oil available for future use was getting to a point where it was less than what had been consumed so no one should now be surprised. In the past ten years these warning have become subject to public debate and yet they have still been ignored by both the public and governments as the consequences were simply too dire to contemplate. Hell, both sides of politics have just spent two weeks debating the merits or otherwise of a 2 -5.5 cent a litre reduction in excise on the stuff. It was akin a discussion on the flight deck with bells ringing, lights flashing and the first decision made was whether to offer the passengers a discount on their airfares on account they were not going to make it.
I think it is obvious that absolutely nothing would be done until we first had a liquid fuels crisis, which is probably what we are having today. The International Energy Agency is predicting a "supply crunch" within five years, while other experts, such as Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens, believe we are already one year beyond the peak and have now begun a downward production slide. The German Energy Watch group has just published a report asserting we are past the peak and predicting a 50 per cent decline in oil production by 2030 and an ex-vice president of the National Iranian Oil Company, Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, predicted a 30 per cent decline in production within the 13 years to 2020. A survey by researchers at Case Western Reserve University collating the opinions of 155 oil industry experts rated peak oil occurring before 2010 as "highly likely".
A search in Google for ‘Peak Oil’ produced 4.6 million hits while a search for ‘Peak Oil myth or lie’ revealed 136,000 hits of which many I looked up at random were actually arguments in the support of Peak Oil.
In conclusion I do not subscribe to the idea that it is the end of life as we know it but it will take some serious changes in the way our economies work and the way we live. Treat it as a challenge that we can meet.