[Peakoil] The death of peak oil

[Keith Thomas]

Jenny,

It's pointless to provide a commentary on Alan Kohler's piece as he and I (we) operate and think under different paradigms.

Basically, Alan Kohler is an economist. Economists assume that demand brings forth supply (or a substitute), externalities can be ignored, the planet is - to all intents and purposes - infinite in reserves, substitutes and capacity to replenish and repair itself, that technology can substitute for energy. These are all wishful thinking and almost impossible to drag into the world of commonsense.

I would like to see Kohler's comments on the books by William Catton and Joseph Tainter. If we could read those, the nonsense underpinning this piece would become more obvious.

I note that this week Jim Kunstler wrote:

"The public's gross misunderstanding of these issues arises over a set of mis-statements made in recent years especially focusing on the Bakken shale oil basin on North Dakota, the various shale gas plays around the country, and the tar sands of Canada (which so many spinmeisters seem to regard as belonging to the United States). The true state of the US oil industry is that we only barely stalled a 40-year decline in oil production by throwing massive amounts of money (capital) at oil reserves that are very expensive and difficult to get. In so far as we've entered the terminal stage of a long debt cycle, one thing we can be sure of is a shrinking pool of real capital investment. Hence the frantic propaganda effort to funnel remaining available money into the shale plays.

    " A companion fantasy to all this is that the US has a hundred year supply of natural gas. President Obama is guilty of this whopper. (One commentator, financier Bert Dohmen, made the ridiculous claim in a recent podcast on the Financial Sense News Network, that the US has a thousand year supply.) These are the kinds of irresponsible statements that will eventually inflame a public yet again swindled by authorities they desperately want to trust. The truth is we probably have perhaps a seven-year supply of shale gas, and maybe 20 of all gas including the regular old conventional gas. And even that could easily be reduced by the disorders in capital formation now underway in the destabilizing banking sector."

Now, I know this is just one person's set of numbers and assertions against another's. But we ought to know that there is an alternative perspective out there.
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Keith Thomas
keith at evfit.com
www.evfit.com
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On 29/02/2012, at 11:06 AM, Jenny Goldie wrote:

[I would very much welcome comments on this - please. Does it mean we can all go home or will production crash after an initial spike?Jenny )

The death of peak oil 

by Alan Kohler

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/peak-oil-shale-gas-fracking-energy-nuclear-budget-pd20120229-RWR7C?OpenDocument&src=sph&src=rot