[Keith_McClary]

Peak oil isn’t dead; it just smells that way Chris Nelder
There must have been other good ones over the years, but none come to mind right now.

[Loki]

Peak oil isn’t dead; it just smells that way Chris Nelder
There must have been other good ones over the years, but none come to mind right now.

That was an excellent article, I hadn't come across it before.

Now let’s talk about price. Since 2003, who forecast the global repricing of oil best, the peakists who expected prices to spike into record territory, or the Cornucopians who consistently predicted that oil prices would return to historical levels? The answer is indisputable: the peakists.

For the past decade, the Cornucopians have told us that a new abundance was coming from deepwater oil, tar sands, enhanced oil recovery, biofuels, and other unconventional sources. Global oil production would rise to 120 million barrels per day, and prices would fall back to $20 or $30 per barrel. Those stories were all completely wrong. The peakists called it.

Here’s what happened: Oil repriced in response to scarcity. Triple-digit prices were responsible for the new flush of unconventional production. That production, including fracking for tight oil in the United States, raises prices, it doesn’t lower them. We’ve hit and fallen back from the consumer’s price tolerance repeatedly for the past six years....

Eventually, the price will become too high, and we’ll have “peak demand” alright, but it will be primarily because of price, not efficiency gains, and will lead to economic contraction, not growth. That price will owe to increasingly marginal and difficult -- hence, expensive -- prospects. In that sense, it’s a supply side problem, a concept at the heart of peak oil. Is it clear now why the “peak demand” vs. “peak supply” argument isn’t really that interesting?

If U.S. consumers are able to tolerate, say, $5-7 a gallon for gasoline by 2020, then it’s possible that the production plateau could extend a bit farther, and my expectation that global supply will begin to slip around 2015 could be wrong. It won’t be off by much, and in the grand scheme of what it means for the global economy, a year or three plus or minus is essentially irrelevant.

[Quinny]

Excellent article, and digging in the links discovered his article on Randy Udall - following his death.

Over the past several years, I was lucky to exchange emails every few days with Randy and some other fellow energy geeks. (Some of them wrote this touching tribute.) In a kind of ongoing workshop, we passed around data and charts and observations, working through arcane details, trying to detect the reality of our energy situation amidst a growing crescendo of industry propaganda. Randy always had the best lines though. Here are a few excerpts from an email he wrote to a fellow analyst on March 24 this year:

Global exports of oil -- oil available for purchase by importers, including the United States -- are falling. This is the biggest overlooked energy story in the world.
Energy independence? The United States is importing $4 to $5 billion of crude oil every week.
It is taking 800 rigs to do in Texas what the Kuwaitis are doing with 35. [Fellow analyst] Richard Nehring points out it will take 5,000 wells in the United States to produce 1 billion barrels, an increment the Saudis do with 50 wells.
The [U.S. Energy Information Association's] estimates of tight oil are equal to about four years of U.S. consumption -- just 30 billion barrels. That's huge on the one hand, but in a country that's already produced 200 billion barrels, [it’s] hardly a revolution, particularly since Americans are consuming our body weight in the stuff every eight days.
Randy had a remarkable, intuitive grasp of energy data, and an ability to visualize and convey it in a memorable, concrete way. When a fresh assessment of the Green River Formation, a large deposit of kerogen oil shale under Colorado and Utah, was released late last year, it got the usual breathless coverage in the mainstream press: “An American Oil Find That Holds More Than All of OPEC,” gushed ABC News. After reviewing the report, Randy quipped that the best parts of the shale “had less than half the energy content of dried pig shit.” Such startling observations often sent me scrambling in search of data to prove or disprove what he had said. I don’t recall ever proving him significantly wrong, but I did learn a good deal from those exercises. And it was fun to fire back to him a small spreadsheet summarizing my research -- showing, for example, that the best oil shales actually had more like one-quarter to one-third the energy content of dried pig shit. I don’t remember now how many barrels of oil per ton there are in those shales, but I’ll never forget that it’s less than the energy in pig shit.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/the-take/randy-udall-an-energy-heros-journey/