Peak Oil - Risky Behaviour Tells the Story

Many people, with very high level connections appear to be taking very significant risks in countries that have oil. The only possible fact that could justify such extravagant risks, that is also associated with oil, is peak production. The implications of that fact are very severe if they were to arrive without adequate preparation and there is frankly zero preparation being conducted in the general population right now. The concept that there is no longer a tap we can open a bit more every time we need more oil, is never addressed for a moment in mainstream media, but when someone suggests that the available amounts of oil are now shrinking, and will never again reach current levels; that will start a major panic. And yesterday I came across First signs of a global decline in oil. Now, although it is reported on Al Jazeera, it refers to British trade journal Petroleum Review which has reviewed the 2003 Statistical Review of World Energy, put together by British Petroleum, to look for signs of depletion. Its study claims that a large group of producer countries are now in decline - putting even more pressure on those countries who have spare production capacity. There are several worrying aspects to this decline. The first is that added to the current increase in global demand, it means other countries must produce more just for the market to stay still. Secondly, as those countries are forced to produce to their capacity, it only hastens the day when they too will have declining output. Depletion speeding up "What surprised me was the rate of decline among the 18 countries whose production is going down," Petroleum Review editor and oil analyst Chris Skrebowski told Aljazeera. "For fourteen out of the eighteen countries the rate of depletion is speeding up. This has confounded a long held view that decline was a slow, gradual process.

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  thanks to Politics in the Zeros

The above link led me to his archive of peak oil articles. It looks like a good place to follow this issue.

The Mike Runge Peak Oil Archive

To put a picture on this issue, here is an interesting little graph.

The Future of Energy: How Soon Is the Global Peak Oil Production Year?

Another way to look at this chart is to see it as a demand curve. The oil is being pumped to meet the demand, except for the dip in the 70s due to political differences between the Arab producers and the Western buyers. The production of oil reflects the demand for oil. The scary part is that, as the production of oil peaks and falls, the demand curve keeps rising. The difference between that demand rise and production fall equals price increases. We aren't only talking about the price of gasoline at the pumps. The price of oil touches just about everything we do. Earl Mardle, in the first link of this post, also had this:

Last year I had a new floor put on my house. It could easily have been built by my grandfather, there were very few materials that he would not have recognised or understood. But instead of a hammer, a handsaw and a set of screwdrivers that he would have used, tools with a relatively low energy cost that last several lifetimes if handled properly, the builders used nail guns, screw guns and electric saws that saw the job done in maybe a tenth the time. But the energy cost of those tools is also many times higher. The guns cost energy to build and replace muscle, so do the gas cartridges that power them and the nail cartridges that replace a box of loose nails that the carpenter holds in his mouth and drives in with his muscles. Because paying people is more expensive than buying and using a gun, the whole process is not only faster, but more profitable. As long as the energy costs are trivial. Start paying the real cost of spending non-renewable resources in that way, and the equations change massively. And I saw a suggestion the other day that a realistic price for a barrel of oil would currently be $185.