Is "peak oil" a near-term myth?

Michael Lynch in the NY Times yesterday put together an excellent (in my opinion) op-ed explaining why time spent worrying about "peak oil" in the near term is a time wasted. FTA:

A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum.

While Lynch may be a bit over-dramatic in his attacks, he makes good points to counter the proponents of the theory on their contentions. Among them (FTA):

One leading proponent of peak oil, the writer Paul Roberts, recently expressed shock to discover that the liquid coming out of the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest known deposit, is around 35 percent water and rising. But this is hardly a concern — the buildup is caused by the Saudis pumping seawater into the field to keep pressure up and make extraction easier. The global average for water in oil field yields is estimated to be as high as 75 percent.

...

Let’s take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don’t report that additional recoverable oil as “newly discovered,” the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.

...

In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.

Now I'm no oil expert (my heritage notwithstanding), but these arguments seem relatively well-founded. And the NY Times commenter population seems to have roughly the same intellectual capacity as a toasted marshmallow, so when I turned there for intelligent discourse I came up short.

So anyone have any idea if this guy is talking out of his ass or not?

Read the article HERE if you missed it earlier

(via NYTimes)

PS: This picture is cool-->



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