Peak oil - Fact or fiction?

[Skean Dhude]

Oil is the left over after bodies, dinosaurs for example, have been crushed and formented for millions of years.

Like everything else these is only so much of it and because it takes so long to make naturally it is not being replaced at anything like the rate it is being used and it is something we cannot cost effectivly replicate in the lab.

Imagine you see a tap in the ground. You turn it on and oil comes out. We can find out with technology how much oil is available from that tap. So we can calculate how long it will last at the extraction rate we are using. Simple maths.

The three issues are;
1) We keep finding new sources to plug the taps in.
2) not all oil is in big lakes,some is in rock.
3) Extracting the last of the oil from the tap is very expensive.

So we abandon wells, taps, because they are too expensive to get oil out of. As it becomes more expensive, economics means that the price goes up as demand does, then we can revisit the wells to get more out.

We also find new ways of extracting the last of the oil and new ways to extract it from rocks that we couldn't before.

However, logic dictates that we have found most of the easy stuff, the remainder is more expensive to get out and that as it is finite we will run out some time.

When nobody knows but they still think we are looking at after 2050.

Personally, I think we will have moved on by then. If not we are in more trouble than just oil.