Kind of OT: Doom and Gloom Options

[TimT]

Have any of you seen this?

Peak Oil

I read the site and found it somewhat disturbing!! Do you guys think this guy is nuts? I didnt thins the sandbox would be an appropriate place for this post, and Im not asking political opinions..

anyway

lets hear what ya think

[lapuwali]

There's been a lot of publicity over this kind of thing recently. My ultra-cynical side wants to cite an article that predicted we were going to run out of oil very soon due to the extreme rise in consumption...published in National Geographic in 1912...

One of the assumptions made in most of the "peak oil" studies is no new extraction technologies will be developed. There's actually a LOT of oil left in the continental US, but it's hard to get out, and simply not economic to do so until oil prices go a lot higher. There's a tremendous amount of oil in Alberta that's only now getting tapped, thanks to new extraction technologies (some numbers show the fields in Canada are as much as 60-70% of the size of the ones in Saudi Arabia). The Saudi oil fields have good oil that's cheap to extract.

There's also something of an incentive for oil companies to continue to push the idea of scarcity, to prop up prices, rather like DeBeers and diamonds.

I don't think there's an infinite supply of oil, but I've also seen estimates of how much remains differ by factors of 100, which makes me question all of the estimates.