Evidence for peak oil? Your thoughts please?

Question

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23780300-5001024,00.html?from=public_rss

Answer 1

It's a funny thing. We all expected peak oil would be demand being relatively constant, and production would reach a "peak" and then fade.

Didn't go that way at all.  What happened is production continued to increase, but demand overtook it and continued to increase much faster (thank you India and China and the middle east).

Now there's no way production can ever catch up with demand, so we are at peak oil, in effect.

Answer 2

Yes I believe in peak oil.

Presently the supply is 85 million barrels per day and the demand is 87 million barrels per day.

That is why the price went up to about $60 per barrel last year and then $80 this year.

The reason for the recent increase however is not due to market forces - it is the USA Federal Reserve. Last september the interest rate was 5.5%. In order to reduce the pain over the sub-prime mortgage real estate crash, the Fed has lowered interest rates from 5.5% to 2% now.

The Fed also bailed out Bear Stearns and the other stupid banks and this put $200 billion into the money supply (M2).

Due to the $200 billion and the easy money interest rates, foreign speculators have been buying oil futures which has bid the proce of oil up from $80 to $130 and driven the cost of gasoline fro $3.30 to $4.00 per gallon.

The Fed will have to 'shock' the speculators out of the oil market with a sudden interest rate increase. This will happen one way or another before the election. Then the price of oil and the price of gold will drop back.

Answer 3

We have reached peak oil production from wells and soon we will be facing declining productions from oil fields. But as mission cat points out, most of the recent price hikes in gas have been due to a dollar that is worth much less than last year. Pick up a book and look at the prices. Note the price is higher in Canadian dollars? That's no longer true since their dollar is now stronger than the US dollar. http://www.forbes.com/reuters/feeds/reut... Which means every barrel we import costs us more and we currently spend $750 million on imported oil. We can only hemorrhage money that way for so long before we run dry.

We do have untapped reserves in ANWR and offshore, we're not even sure how much oil we have in reserve since few test wells have been drilled for decades. We have enormous coal reserves that can be converted to oil and a trillion barrels of oil locked up in tar sands and oil shale in the western US.

But sooner or later we will run out of oil so we should start encouraging alternative energy use and production, maybe even underwriting some of the cost as Germany has done with solar power for German homes. There's no reason to panic but it's stupid to pretend the party will never end if we don't alter our energy dependency, since the Gulf states could cut off our supply at any time and Canada and Mexico would have to struggle to make up the difference.

There is also a bidding war due to under-production and as mission cat said, we can end that any time we choose by producing more energy domestically. Nuclear, ethanol from switchgrass (not corn), fusion research and solar and wind are all viable at current prices.