ROCKMAN wrote: ......there is no guarantee we won't see a new monthly PO in the near future.
Of course. Isn't that obvious?
No one can "guarantee" anything about the future. As Yogi Berra famously said, "Its tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
Nonetheless, anyone who doesn't try to plan for the future is just asking to be caught unawares by future events. I think every human being, to some degree, tries to anticipate what lies ahead in the future so they can prepare for it.
AND, even though it is very tough to make accurate predictions, its a fact that some predictions actually are accurate and useful.
For instance, the stock market is basically a mechanism for making bets about the future of specific companies and the economy as a whole. When you buy a stock in a company you are betting/hoping/predicting that the company is question will do well and your stock will go up. Of course there are no "guarantees" your prediction will be right, especially in a year like 2022 (thats a little stock market joke for those of you who don't follow the market). But overall people who "predict" the stock market will go up tend to be right more often than not.
So lets bring this back around to peak oil.
Can we all agree that in the oil market the group of scientists who foresaw a peak in conventional oil production occurring in ca. 2010 turned out to be pretty accurate, at least according to peak oil critic Michael Lynch (see my link above).
However these same scientists who successfully predicted conventional oil production would peak ca. 2010 utterly failed to predict the large amount of "unconventional" oil that could be produced....and failed to predict that the unconventional oil would enable total global oil production to continue to increase year after year up to the present day.
And that brings us back to the rationale of this thread.
I'm interested in the future of unconventional oil production.
Given the fact that it didn't go up in spite of a big run up in oil prices suggests that unconventional oil production is maxed out and can't go up much more.
And if unconventional oil production can't go up, then it is at risk of going down.
Thats why I'm wondering if unconventional oil production is going to peak sometime in the 2020s......
And thats also why I'm wondering if anyone else has an intelligent opinion on this question.
So far I've gotten a thoughtful opinion from Tanada, who opined that he thought unconventional oil production might peak about 2025. Personally I think that is a reasonable date. Thank you Tanada.
Adam weighed in with his usual Ad hom attacks. That added nothing to the discussion.
And Rockman said no prediction can be guaranteed....Therefore I excuse Rockman from making a prediction since R apparently doesn't believe in making precautions that can't be guaranteed in advance to be accurate.
I'm still wondering if anyone else has an intelligent opinion about when Unconventional oil production might peak.
Here's your chance----does anyone else have any thoughts on this topic?
CHEERS!