The inaccuracy and fallacies of pick oil theory Part 2

Will there be peak oil? The answer is actually yes. However, it won’t be the same as the peak oil situation described in Hubbert’s peak oil theory. As my title said, the peak oil is inaccurate. One of the biggest reason for that is that it oversimplified the situations and elements associated with oil production. According to Gold Russell’s Why Peak-Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True, what will limits the oil production is not the natural limits but the economic limits: “When the oil industry overcomes an obstacle and boosts oil production, costs typically increase. That opens the door for a better and cheaper energy source that will eventually displace crude oil.” As Michael Shellenberger,president of the Breakthrough Institute, an energy and climate think tank in Oakland, Calif, said: “There will be peak oil, but it will be [because of] peak consumption…What we all want is to move to better, cheaper and cleaner sources of energy”, the end of the oil industry will be the result of other efficient clean energy forms’ pervasive appealing and the negative economic effect brought by the overdeveloped oil industry (which is not associated with the natural reserves of the oil). “No mineral, including oil, will ever be exhausted. If and when the cost of finding and extraction goes above the price consumers are willing to pay, the industry will begin to disappear,” wrote by Morris Adelman, a late petroleum economist and a professor emeritus of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in “The Genie out of the Bottle: World Oil Since 1970,”

peak oil 2

Why Peak-Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-peak-oil-predictions-haven-t-come-true-1411937788

 

Leave a Reply