Talk:Peak oil/Archive 2

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Tacit assumptions in introduction

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 15:56, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The current introduction reads "Peak oil is the point in time at which the maximum global petroleum production rate is reached, after which the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically."

This appears to state as fact that petroleum production will reach a peak and then immediately and monotonically decline. This is quite possible, but it is not a fact. For example, production could briefly spike, then drop, then rise again, never quite reaching its earlier peak, but only declining significantly later.

You are quite right ; this entry should be corrected accordingly :-).--Environnement2100 (talk) 23:03, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Similarly, mitigating demand before the peak is neither necessary nor sufficient -- from a strictly logical standpoint -- for keeping availability for dropping.

Before everyone rains hot flaming death upon me, I'm not saying that there is no case for peak oil, or it's "only a theory" or whatever. I'm only saying that the current intro appears to state as fact the case that is in fact only made, and disputed, later on. With that in mind, it might better be tweaked to something more like the following [with notes inserted]:

"Peak oil is the point in time at which the maximum global petroleum production rate is reached [A mathematical necessity, unless the level remains at its peak for some period of time], after which the maximum rate [see below] of production is expected to enter a steady and terminal decline. If global demand [consumption cannot exceed production, but demand can] does not also decline, the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically."

You could also keep in mind the possibility of several maxima, depending on the economics.--Environnement2100 (talk) 23:03, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Note also "maximum" rate of production. I'm trying to distinguish here between a "soft landing" scenario, in which production declines because demand declines (by some combination of increased energy efficiency and availability of alternatives) and the feared "hard landing", in which demand does not decline but it becomes prohibitively expensive to meet (in which case demand will necessarily decline, but painfully). -Dmh (talk) 01:28, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

This seems to be making some news recently. NJGW (talk) 07:41, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

With respect to the "several maxima," that is true, just as the Prudhoe Bay oil field added a bump (a local maximum) to the U.S. oil production decline curve, but the absolute maximum occurred around 1971, so that was the U.S. oil peak. We can expect a few bumps on the decline curve for world petroleum production, due to new discoveries. However, discoveries peaked long ago. And the more years the world is past peak, the lower production will be, and thus the harder it will be for new discoveries to drive production back up to some new global maximum. Once oil production starts its decline, it might not be smart to fight the decline too hard, since any short-term increase in production will only make the later decline even steeper. That is the nature of a finite resource. See Mexico's Cantarell Field, which is declining rapidly now, and experts are blaming the enhanced recovery techniques used to fight the natural decline of the resource. --Teratornis (talk) 06:27, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

The thesis statement does not say anything about the shape of the production rate curve after peak oil. A second peak like Hubbert observed in Coal production is certainly possible due to a new technology. But the observation is that the second peak is lower than the first. I don't see an issue to resolve here.Kgrr (talk) 15:56, 10 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Effects of peaking on major oil producers?

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 – Kgrr (talk) 16:02, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

How much of the recent history of the US has happened partially because of reaching an oil production peak in 1970? I mean, three years latter there's a worldwide oil crisis, the oil markets get ALL shook up through the 1970s while the world shifts gears on industrial and economic growth, then in 1980 this happens [1], followed by a flood of oil on the market (I'm starting to think that article is fundamentally flawed). Detroit gets back on track and we really care about the Middle East! Isreal has started looking important for a while... And now we have to figure out what moves to make while China and India grab for more oil, prices are through the roof, we have NO idea what will happen in the Middle East.

Are there any sources that talk about these sorts of things authoritatively? There's at least one article that mentions other producers peaking. What happened to the other nations that have peaked and/or become net importers? NJGW (talk) 23:23, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Most if not all of the books about peak oil discuss some or all of the factors and events you mention. Also try searching YouTube for "peak oil"; you will find many videos on the subject, along with the CEO or Exxon denying peak oil. It's a simple matter of history that the U.S. began ramping up its military activities in the Middle East shortly after becoming an oil importer, with the scale of activity increasing as the U.S. began importing increasingly more oil. --Teratornis (talk) 08:27, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

There is a documentary about Cuba's response to its oil crisis resulting from a loss of imports from the former Soviet Union. See: The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. --Teratornis (talk) 08:30, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

The US peaked in 1971. The oil crisis was due to an oil embargo on the US and OPEC seizing control over the oil resources. Is there an unresolved issue with the article? Kgrr (talk) 16:02, 10 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Worldwide

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 16:04, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

On 7 January 2008, User:Loodog added the worldwide template indicating the article didn't have a worldwide viewpoint and focused only on the U.S. I beg to differ. I think this article has great worldwide perspective, and in fact much more than most other articles on Wikipedia. I don't see the basis for Loodog's edit, so I think the tag should be removed. ~ UBeR (talk) 18:06, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. If anyone feels different, they should express their concerns here instead of plopping a tag and leaving with no explanation. NJGW (talk) 18:44, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

I think section four could probably be a bit more diversified--where information is available. That's about all I can see. ~ UBeR (talk) 19:35, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

 Done

External Links

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 – Kgrr (talk) 16:07, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

There seems to be a ridiculous amount of spam there, and a lot of the links should be removed, especially in the general "websites" category. --TheSeer (TalkˑContribs) 03:05, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

I didn't see any spam in the "websites" category (besides that chat link that keeps reappearing somehow), but I did see a bunch of stuff that was extra. I took that out, fixed a few links, and moved a few links to the mitigation of peak oil and predicting the timing of peak oil articles. I don't have time to go through the rest. NJGW (talk) 04:44, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

This really is way beyond normal. We don't need to link to every site with "peak oil" in its name. We already provide many external links in the "further reading" section, not to mention in references. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:55, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

The links have been de-spammed since. Kgrr (talk) 16:07, 15 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Questions

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 – The talk page is not a forum.Kgrr (talk) 16:05, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

If there are 1.5 trillion barrels total resource and we have used .5 trillion, .5 trillion are uneconomic to extract and .5 trillion or 500 billion remain; then at a rate of consumption of 85 million barrels a day, the numbr of days remaining till its all gone is 500,000/85 or 5882 days. that brings us to 2024 till the last drop is gone. 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I've seen estimates closer to 2039 (assuming constant rates of production and consumption, which isn't likely). Accepting the issue as a given and addressing it directly is more important than this particular prediction though. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

How much short of when the last drop of oil is gone, is the last drop of patience with CAFE standards that allow SUV's to be averaged into an automakers fleet rather than broken out to determine fuel efficiency. 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

The last drop will never be gone, it will just be so expencive that no one will want to buy it (or as some say, once alternatives are in place (cross fingers), it will be cheap again, but not attractive). The auto industry has always had a strangle hold on the US: many cities and small towns had pretty extencive public transportation systems in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until the auto industry pressured governments to dismatle the infrastructures (to make room for auto roads) and disband the services (to encourage driving). The auto industry has long been deeply tied to petroleum, ever since the diesel engine's patents (originally designed to run on peanut oil) were bought out and licenced only as petroleum burning. That's a long history of private power and public complacency to try and change. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Aside from the obvious conclusion that some people aren't going to be able to get theirs at any price in the very short future, and most people aren't going to be able to afford to commute to work in a car using a gasoline engine, doesn't that also affect the use of oil to make plastics, lubricants and other petrochemical products we don't intend to burn.? What happens to electric cars when the electric plants burning fossil fuels to make electricity cease to function?

What happens to our ability to develop alternative energy if people can't use cheap fossil fuels to provide the energy to develop the alternatives. 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, plastics which need to be subjected to heat (in any electrical/computer or cooking applications for example), as well as many (majority of?) everyday chemicals come from petroleum. Forget electric cars, what happens to all vehicles, all computers, most fertilizers/pesticides/herbicides, many pharmecuticals, and just about anything else we take for granted in the modern world? Electricity can be generated (solar, wind, biomechanical, tidal, etc) but what of the power plants and infrastructure needed (not that it matters if we can't make electronics)? It might turn out to be a very different world if we keep burning all our oil in our engines and not recycling (pretty ineffecient from what I've heard) what we've already turned into plastic. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Petroleum is not the only feedstock for making plastics, just the cheapest and most convenient one. While replacing petroleum as a feedstock will be difficult, that's probably not as serious a problem as replacing petroleum as a fuel for motor vehicles, because transportation adds so little value. Converting petroleum into petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals creates far more value than burning petroleum as fuel, so vehicle applications will come under pressure first. And nobody knows of a viable substitute for liquid fuels from petroleum that could possibly scale up enough in the next 20 years to sustain the current level of gaswasting, let alone the projected growth. The result is that people are almost certainly going to have to travel less as the supply of petroleum declines. --Teratornis (talk) 08:38, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Factoring in global warming and rising sea levels will all the nuke plants using the oceans to cool their process find themselves underwater, and likewise the wind turbines being placed offshore? Will the greenhouse affect dampen the ardor of those who want to go electric with photovoltaics? 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I think there are bigger problems than if we'll have enough electricity. See above. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Do biofuels expend more carbon than they save? 69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Maybe. Partly because the infrastructure isn't in place, partly because corn is so energy intencive to grow, and partly because lots of natural land (forrests and rain forrests for example) are being plowed under to make room for biofuel crops. This is a global warming problem though, not a peak oil problem. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

This is one of the big problems with allowing big agribusinesses to drive crop selection and farming practices. They have no long-term investment in the land being farmed, so they have no multi-decade incentive to promote soil conservation and improvement. They're happy to deplete carbon reserves in the soil if it means more profit this year.LeadSongDog (talk) 19:46, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Regardless of how much carbon is expended, biofuels rely on photosynthesis for their energy, and that's even less efficient than photovoltaics. —Preceding unsigned comment added by ThVa (talk • contribs) 09:56, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

What happens to long term solutions if we have already killed everything that walks or crawls or swims in the seas before we get to the solution part?69.39.100.2 (talk) 18:29, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Don't worry. We may kill ourselves and 99% of all living things, but unless we literally blow up the earth, something will be left over. Just not us. NJGW (talk) 20:33, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

It's unlikely that ecological collapse will totally wipe out humans. For example, see Easter Island, where Polynesian settlers completely destroyed the lush native forests of the island and most native animal species. With no trees to build fishing boats, the Islanders could not get out to fish, the food supply greatly decreased, and the Islanders resorted to warfare and cannibalism, as the human population crashed 90%. By the time Europeans reached the island, the survivors were living primitively, and unable to resurrect their almost-forgotten culture because they had destroyed their ecosystem. We might have a chance to do better, because unlike the Easter Islanders, we can learn from history. But judging from all the gaswasters who are out on the roads wasting gas like there's no tomorrow, it's not clear that we are much smarter. I do have hope, however, because of Wikipedia itself. It we can build something as complicated as Wikipedia, without any need to physically commute to central offices, what can't we build this way? We might survive peak oil if we can convert almost the entire economy over to something like the wiki model. This can work even for manufacturing; see open source hardware. --Teratornis (talk) 19:24, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Hubbert's curve vs. Moore's law

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 – The talk page is not a forum. Kgrr (talk) 16:08, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I've been reading a lot of doom and gloom about peak oil, and the worst-case scenarios certainly sound grim, but it seems none of the peak oil experts have a solid handle on Moore's law, other than some recommendations in passing to replace some physical travel with telecommuting (but I have yet to see any discussion of how the economics are shifting with time). Similarly, it seems almost none of the information technology folks who are driving Moore's law know much about peak oil or what they should be doing about it. A large fraction of transportation essentially occurs only (or largely) to move information, either in the form of human brains (personal transporation) or packaged into finished goods (freight transportation). (We manufacture goods in centralized factories primarily to cope with the information and skill demands; but the open source hardware paradigm may someday give us decentralized manufacturing, allowing small communities to get closer to self-sufficient in terms of materials, while shipping the manufacturing know-how through wires at near zero cost thanks to Moore's law.) Once we hit the back side of Hubbert's curve, the cost of physical transportation will steadily increase. At the same time, Moore's law continues driving down the cost of telecommunication. Thus it seems staggeringly obvious that perhaps every workable scheme for replacing some instances of physical transportation with telecommunication must eventually become profitable if it isn't already. I'd like to locate some reliable sources that explain this coherently, but I'm not finding any. The scope for eliminating physical transportation with telecommuting, telerobotics, and open source hardware is enormous. Although it would be a self-reference, it would be nice to mention Wikipedia as an example of a vastly complex remote collaborative project that almost completely eliminates the need for personal travel (even though we have the hugely ironic exception of Jimmy Wales who jets constantly around the world to meet Wikipedians, such travel is incidental to the actual work of building the encyclopedia). If we can build Wikipedia this way, what can't we build this way? The mass adoption of corporate wikis could play a key role in the "emancipation" of the work force that Matthew Simmons recommends as a response to coping with life after the peak. Anyway, I hope that this isn't original research, but that somebody somewhere has elaborated on these obvious points in a reliable source we can cite. Does anybody know of one? If no such sources exist, I may have to write one. --Teratornis (talk) 09:06, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

It's interesting to think of a technical civilization which manufactures distributed and decentral. However, while it is relativel easy to replace business travel partially with teleconferences, any number of bits transmitted would get me something eadible beneath my laptop. Consider, also, that since ancient times, cities were founded at river passages, harbours, and waterways, and that transport of such goods as salt and silk formed antique merchant routes. Up to the point that some continent was discovered accidentally in 1492 when some spanish captain was looking for ways to get to west india. Now, while silk was relatively irrelevant to the daily life of the 15th century, today there is a host of raw materials which are transported around the globe. While you can produce clothes almost everywhere, the cotton you need doesn't grow in Canada, and the steel for the loom may not be found in Arkansas. It would be difficult to get things done without physical trade. --82.113.121.16 (talk) 08:59, 25 June 2008 (UTC) (Joise)

 Done

"Bell shaped", it's not "bell shaped"

(moved discussion to Talk:Hubbert curve as it's much more relevant to that article)

Peak oil has arrived

Resolved

 – the talk page is not a forum. Kgrr (talk) 16:10, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Peak oil has arrived: the price went from 90 dollars a barrel to 110 in a week; that seems to be peak oil... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.211.20.5 (talk) 15:42, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Well, the price of oil would certainly go up if production had peaked, and there are plenty of people that say that it has... but we can't just go by price alone. Look at the skyrocketing demand, look at economic fears. On the other hand, one indicator that we can look at is the fact that OPEC claims not to want to increase production (which can only hurt them once we start cutting back on consumption en masse)... NJGW (talk) 19:51, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and I should say that this is a space for discussing the article and what could be added, removed or changed in it. Not a discussion of our interpretations of current events. NJGW (talk) 19:53, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Oil isn't really going up much, the dollar is just dropping. 76.90.49.187 (talk) 23:31, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

That all depends on how you define going up or down... the purchasing price of the dollar (in electronics, food, other manufactured goods etc.) isn't going down, so maybe the other currencies are actually going up. But then again their purchasing power isn't going up, so what the h#ll is going on??? It's all so artificially influenced at this point anyway that we don't have any really useful tools for evaluating anything but the dropping of production rates, and even that is hard to find out. I've tried to bring some real economists in on this discussion with no luck. NJGW (talk) 14:21, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but many food products are made in America which limits the dollar impact (although inflation still affects them). A vast amount of electronics and manufactured goods are manufactured in China which whose Yuan has a very limited float against the dollar.76.90.49.187 (talk) 18:20, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

 Done

I don't get why the 'everybody panic' angle

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 – The talk page is not a forum. Kgrr (talk) 16:11, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The concept comes across as so doom & gloom, but from the article, I can't see why this is considered to be a likely possibility. If the prices started going way up, people would find lots of their little trips and so forth aren't so necessary after all, and would reduce usage. We've had shocks before, and while they harm the economy, it's hardly disastrous. Consider the rationing that goes on during wars as well. While it might not be pleasant, it hardly seems like it would be catastrophic. 76.90.49.187 (talk) 23:35, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Several factors make the post-peak oil production (extraction) decline different from previous shortages:

• Previous shortages were temporary. It's easier to go several months, or even several years, with a problem that eventually goes away, than to have a shortage that gets worse every year. It's like holding one's breath for a minute, even two minutes, which almost everyone can do, vs. never breathing again.
• Oil is not just fuel for personal transportation. There is a lot of slack in personal transportation as you note; just count all the single-passenger SUVs on the road. However, about half of transportation oil goes to goods shipment, and about 10% to air travel. Those two applications don't have much slack to cut. Trucks and airplanes are already running at close to their practical full loads.

• Oil is also important as feedstock for petrochemicals, and is vital for industrial agriculture. Again, in those applications there is not much slack to cut. At the moment we are essentially eating petroleum, with some 10 calories of petroleum input to create 1 calorie of food.
• World population is still growing.

• Demand is surging in the huge developing economies of India and China. The whole world aspires to American model, more or less.
• Oil exporting nations have their own internal demand growth.
• Almost everyone is either in denial about peak oil or hasn't heard of it yet. This general lack of concern is the real danger, as the problem would be manageable if everyone had understood it soon enough.

After oil extraction peaks and begins its irreversible decline, oil-importing nations such as the U.S. may have to live with 4% less oil each year than they used the year before. For years and years the liquid fuel shortage will get worse and worse. A large fraction of the U.S. population lives in sprawling suburbs built after WWII which can hardly function without personal automobiles. There is no doubt the skyrocketing price of oil will force consumers to conserve, and their reward for conserving each year will be to conserve even more the next year. It looks to be quite interesting. I've already adapted to not owning an automobile, bicycling for fun and personal transportation, learning to edit collaboratively on wikis (something the peakniks should mention more often but usually don't), and I've learned to live with almost no heat during Ohio winters (we have a natural gas crisis on the way too). I suppose next I need to take up gardening. As you mention, many of the adaptations are not rocket science, but when the economy starts contracting that makes it harder to generate capital investment to rebuild everything for what comes after petroleum. If things get bad enough, civilization could start to break down, and then we won't be able to rebuild and there could be a massive die-back of world population to the pre-industrial level. That's the worst-case scenario. Given that the worst-case scenario is realistic I'd say there's reason to panic, or at least take the threat seriously. Obviously panic isn't going to help anything. --Teratornis (talk) 08:14, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

If you prefer optimism, however, check out Amory Lovins. His book Winning the Oil Endgame is free for download. I haven't read the book yet, but I watched his TED talk, and it seems Lovins relies on the official Energy Information Administration forecasts of oil production which may be too optimistic. Plus the book is from 2005, which means a lot of the research was probably from around 2004, before the Oil price increases since 2003 had gotten very far. But to Lovins it seems higher prices for oil only make his ideas for conservation and switching to alternatives more profitable for corporations to implement. It is rather interesting how the oil supply situation seems to have recently changed a lot of thinking. For example, a National Geographic article about peak oil from just a few years ago has a suprisingly unalarmed tone. --Teratornis (talk) 07:09, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

But I wasn't asking for a rebuttal here, I was saying the article itself doesn't represent this argument, it merely assumes it. 76.90.49.187 (talk) 18:00, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The somewhat bland tone of the article might have something to do with Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, so anything that sounds over-the-top alarmist (even if it turns out to be correct someday), will seem non-neutral now. It's hard to describe how bad peak oil might be without sounding alarmist and thus one-sided, leading to a content dispute. (On Wikipedia, a person can write whatever he or she wants, but the more forceful a claim is, the more it is likely to attract other editors who will disagree with it, and change it. The trick for everyone who writes on Wikipedia is to guess what other editors will not change.) Also, Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. Unfortunately, since the average reader has probably only heard the media reports about rising costs for petroleum and food, which usually contain no serious analysis as to why these prices are rising, nor usually any prediction of how high prices could go in the future, the reader may not have a grasp on the worst-case scenarios for peak oil. The section Peak oil#The Hirsch Report is merely an overview of the report's conclusions; this brief summary of the report is a lot more sobering to read. The various doomer sites such as Life After the Oil Crash dispense with the neutral point of view and paint a very bleak picture. For comparison, during the 1973 oil crisis, the U.S. experienced a temporary, one-time shortfall of 5%-7% in petroleum. The economic impact was substantial, but not the same for everyone of course. After peak oil, the petroleum available to the U.S. may continuously decline by comparable amounts every year. The impact on the world's poor may be catastrophic; already we are seeing the 2007–2008 world food price crisis, even before world oil production has begun to decline much. (Reading the media reports cited in the food price crisis article is interesting; the reports tend to focus on how bad the food crisis is right now, but no one seems to be aware that if Hubbert peak theory is correct, the recent run-up in oil and grain prices is barely just beginning.) People who are rioting over food prices today may be actually starving in large numbers next year, or the year after, or in five years. Wealthy nations like the U.S. won't be able to bail them out with food aid indefinitely, because the steadily worsening oil shortage will shrink the economy and force all available capital, farmland, etc. to go toward renewable energy projects. I would imagine that by the time the U.S. has seen two consecutive years of declining oil supply, the realization will sink in that the U.S. is facing its own national emergency that it should have started preparing for 20 years ago, but did not, and at that point saving the rest of the world may no longer be an option. The U.S. and other industrialized nations may be lucky to save themselves. Of course the future is unpredictable; who knows, there might be a miracle breakthrough in cold fusion tomorrow that would take care of all our energy problems for a while. Not that I would bet on it. The only thing I would bet on is the future turning out to be not exactly what anyone expected in all the details, but it looks to me as if peak oil is going to be a big, big deal any way it plays out. --Teratornis (talk) 05:40, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

I see what you're saying. I guess to me when I read "peak oil" as basically a simple concept that at some point production will peak. This seems fairly mathematically obvious (even if oil is being regenerated, which I don't believe), so apparently the term "peak oil" also includes assumptions of apparently dire consequences. This seems implied by your statement that people are in denial about peak oil, to which my first reaction was "what is there to deny?"

Although I don't see why the market won't be able to handle this. If gas ends up $10+ a gallon, I think carpooling will stop seeming so inconvenient and difficult, for instance. Lots of inefficiencies will be found and squeezed out. There are more and more Prius's appearing. If gas continues to be expensive, the reluctance to use Nuclear power will evaporate and can effectively replace oil based power for most uses.

But, who knows, I don't have a crystal ball either. 76.168.64.243 (talk) 21:30, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I suspect (a) peak oil is a reality but (b) it won't bring "the end of industrial civilization". For one thing, coal can be fairly easily substituted for oil for most purposes. And we still have plenty of coal. Whether we WANT to start burning coal in a big way is another question, but we may have little choice. It's only in the last 50 years, for instance, that cities have spread out as the assumption that everyone has personal motorised transportation has taken hold - in another 50 years - the lifetime of a house - the trend can be reversed (in some countries this has already started) and we can go back to high-density cities (thus freeing up agricultural land as well). The internet means we don't NEED to commute miles to work every day.

Exile (talk) 18:45, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia itself is a model for high-efficiency telecommuting. Not many people are doing anything more complicated than what Wikipedia is doing, and we do it all without needing to physically travel anywhere. However, Wikipedia only has 48,257,747 registered users in the English version, and of those, only maybe 5% to 10% are far enough along with learning how to edit that they could do actual paying work on a corporate wiki. So this is small compared to the global workforce. But we have the proof of concept right here, and if telecommuting had to expand enormously, it could, and probably fairly quickly. See my comments above about the interplay between Hubbert's curve and Moore's law. However, not everybody is a smart computer geek. Lots of average working people will get squeezed hard by rising oil prices. The main question is how fast the supply of oil falls below the amount people "want" to burn. A gradual decrease of 1% per year would probably not cause civilization to collapse; people would have time to adapt. But if supply drops by 10% per year, that might create feedback cycles that cause one sector after another to break down, possibly leading to a collapse. The Hirsch report tried to analyze this. --Teratornis (talk) 05:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Commuting to work is only perhaps 20% of total trips in the US, the rest being things like shopping, kid transport and visiting. These are all much less practical to telecommute. And a considerable portion of transport energy is used in the movement of goods (as mentioned earlier). Railroad companies in the US are frantically laying more track (trains are considerably more efficient than trucks, and can be moved to electrical energy more easily), but chances are, if we really are looking at 4%/pa decrease in supply we'll run into real shortages long before everyone is doing their work via wikipedia.--Jaded-view (talk) 06:10, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

The breakdown in the U.S., I think, is about 70% of oil for transport, 20% for agriculture, 10% for petrochemicals. (Rational discussion requires accurate numbers, so it would be worth analyzing our petroleum use in detail, as well as the trends.) The U.S. has mostly moved away from oil for electricity and heating, although a small percentage of oil still goes for those uses. Of transport, about half is for personal transport (what traffic engineers call "primary consumption of transportation"), and half is for goods shipment ("secondary consumption of transportation"). The part of personal transport which is critical for the economy is commuting to work, and that is also the primary reason why people buy automobiles, since most other forms of personal transportation are optional or negotiable by comparison. Online shopping is already far more advanced than online working, and can easily expand to the degree necessary. One fully-loaded delivery truck can eliminate 50-100 lightly-loaded personal automobiles, so shopping can become far more efficient. People physically travel to stores so they can obtain information about products by looking at them (or in many cases, by looking at their packages). The actual payload of a shopping trip is usually just a small fraction of what a personal automobile can haul, so there is huge slack for the market to eliminate there. As far as kid transport and visiting, these are expendable forms of entertainment, which are in no way essential for maintaining industrial civilization. If the kids have to start riding their bikes to soccer practice, instead of having soccer mom drive them in the minivan, it's no big deal. Bicycling can only become steadily more practical as crushingly high fuel prices begin emptying the roadways of cars. Perhaps 95% of personal travel is not necessary, as in, we could easily live without it, at no threat to civilization, or we could virtualize it, in the case of shopping and telecommuting. We will still need emergency services and trips to the doctor, at least until Moore's law iterates far enough to give us telerobotics sufficiently good to allow service workers to do any job remotely that they can do with their own hands in front of them. You are correct that the other sectors of petroleum use have less slack to give. Replacing trucks with more-efficient trains and barges takes time. Agriculture and petrochemicals will continue to need either petroleum or some sort of in-kind biofuel/biofeedstock replacement. Our biggest source of slack petroleum use by far is personal travel, so we can expect the market to hammer personal travel the hardest as oil prices continue to skyrocket. If personal travel accounts for about 30% of the petroleum use in the U.S., and if personal travel will absorb the best part of any import supply reductions, that gives us about 10 years' worth of slack if the oil available on the import market drops by 3% of our current level per year. Moore's law will continue to improve computers in the meantime - ten years ago, not only did Wikipedia not exist, but probably nobody would have believed Wikipedia in its current form could be as successful as it is. Therefore, it is plausible that ten years from now, computers will be that much better for remote collaboration. Which is to say, we may have online systems in ten years that are as unimaginably good to us now as Wikipedia was unimaginably good to us ten years ago. And then in twenty years we could have a similar increment of improvement. --Teratornis (talk) 15:38, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Massive destructive edits by Bobo159

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 16:12, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I started going through Bobo159's edits point by point, but soon realized he/she was massively missrepresenting sources and removing sourced data. I went ahead and changed all but one of his/her edits (one by one with reasoning), though only the last batch are complete reverts. These changes undid months of consensus building (much of it from before I started editing this article) and needs to be discussed here before being applied to the article. My main reasoning is laid out in the edit summeries, though I am happy to discuss individual issues here. NJGW (talk) 17:06, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Reasons for all edits were given in the edit summaries; that you don't like my changes is not a valid reason to delete them. For example, consider this change you reverted: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peak_oil&diff=200833466&oldid=200832661 Your edit summary makes no sense in terms of what I wrote - I said the EWG was talking about the USGS's 95% level, same as the original. Based on that, you seem to be simply reverting my edits without reading them. I'm going to revert back any where your edit summaries clearly show you haven't read the edit.

I started reading them, and when I saw that you were misrepresenting sources, selectively reporting information to fit your POV, and deleting sourced material, I decided it was not worth my time and that the burden of proof was on you to show that your edits were needed. As far as this edit goes, are the numbers reported in the source you provide p95 EUR? p50? p5??? Are those the only surveys that were done from '00-02? what about those done after '02? We can't tell because the source doesn't tell us, therefore how can you compare these to specifically stated p95 numbers? What is the notability of your author and publication? NJGW (talk) 17:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Again, consider this edit of yours: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peak_oil&diff=200810907&oldid=200724793 The article was claiming that oil production per capita has been declining, I added numbers to show that that is simply a false statement, and you called me "misleading". What's misleading is to cherry-pick a single data point (1980) to give the impression that per capita oil supply has been falling constantly, when the fact of the matter is that it's been stable or rising for the last 20 years. Changed the text to present both the sharp fall from 1980 and the slow rise from 1985.

Again, you are misrepresenting both this article and the data. It states accurately that oil production per capita has decreased since the 70's. You cherry pick the one date when oil consumption happened to have bottomed out because of the 1979 oil crisis, after consumption per capita did rebound slightly, but also because population growth has slowed a little. Like my summery said, the numbers are dynamic (just look at the way oil prices have bounced up and down seemingly wildly while the average rises steadily since 2003). NJGW (talk) 17:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Or this edit - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Peak_oil&diff=200820590&oldid=200816416 - where you complain that I'm deleting sourced material, when I'm actually restoring a source! Not to mention that the article was factually wrong - the EIA does not show a production peak in oil supply in May 2005 - and your reversion has restored that error. I'm restoring this edit, and basically all the other ones you reverted, since you appear not to have read them. If you want to change what I've written, at least read it first. Bobo159 (talk) 10:41, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Again, you're cherry picking numbers. A slight rise here or there does not change a flat trend. Peak oil is about crude sucked out of the ground, not natural gas, not refinary growth. Then you erase the January data by the US EIA and replace it with February data from the IEA (who by the way also count strategic reserves in supply, meaning they count what's already been pulled out of the ground in previous years). Want to debate the merits of these two sources? Fine, but be aware you're not the first to make the mistake that those two are the same and that supply equals production. If you're just going to pop in every few months and make big changes with no discussion, that's not so fine. NJGW (talk) 17:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

(Undent) Please explain how this is POV? It explains the the point for the section, as well as how CERA gets their figures. NJGW (talk) 18:28, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

What specifically is wrong with what you have removed here? OPEC has not aknowledged peak oil, the projected that oil would remain around $50-60 until 2030, and they use the USGA's p05 numbers to do so (well they claim to use USGA numbers, but the 3300 and 1700 figures don't apear in the USGA figures, so I wrote (sic)). Again, you push your POV. Out of curiousity, do you have a job that gives you a [wp:COI] for editing here? NJGW (talk) 18:34, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

It'd be nice if you two would slow down a bit so the rest of the world can follow what you're arguing about. Taking the last point first, bobo deleted <quote>OPEC has never acknowledged imminent Peak oil concerns.</quote> Clearly this is simple follow-through on a fact check. If someone can provide a WP:RS reference in which OPEC acknowleged imminent peak oil concerns there would be no debate, but to find a RS saying they never did so may be somewhat more of a challenge. As NJGW above says <quote>OPEC has aknowledged[sic] peak oil</quote> it is unclear what the intent of the objection is.LeadSongDog (talk) 19:45, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

:::Whoops, thanks for catching my missing "not" LeadSongDog. I've fixed it above, so if you want to you can fix it where you quote me and erase this statement. NJGW (talk) 20:11, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I specifically didn't re-revert any of Bobo's edits a second time, and put in a request for protection of the page (which hasn't been commented on or acted upon over the past 3 hours)until more than just me and Bobo have had a chance to discuss this. I've gone through the history a bit and see that Bobo pops up ever few months just to edit this article (Nov. 07, Aug. 07, and then a big gap in any editing until Aug. 06). I wonder if he/she does any other editing in the breaks (which would suggest that this account is for avoiding scrutiny or stiring up controversy). At the very least this account is avoiding consensus building by trying to disappear for a while until people aren't paying attention to the article changes as closely. NJGW (talk) 20:22, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

If you really suspect that practice, there are of course proper responses short of edit wars. I'm not going down that rabbit hole.LeadSongDog (talk) 20:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I see there's a recent development at User talk:Bobo159. Continuing the above, is there an uncited source for the statement OPEC has not acknowledged peak oil in the article or was it truly unsubstantiated? Leaving a fact tag on it for five months seems like long enough....LeadSongDog (talk) 21:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the history of that particular statement is. I have found this, but at that source's source the OPEC rep is not an OPEC rep at all, rather he is Libya's representative to OPEC. He does voice concerns over peak oil, but in OPEC's statements from July 2007 claim the opposite. Those OPEC statements (that the conventional oil resource base is sufficient to satisfy demand increases over the projected period until 2030 at a price of $50-60 per barrel, increasing afterwards to account for inflation) show that OPEC are either trying to look good or are out in LaLa land. It also shows that they don't officially view any force other than inflation acting on the price of oil for another 22 years. NJGW (talk) 00:41, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Do you always assume maliciousness on the part of anyone you disagree with? Had it not occurred to you that I only edit this article every few months because I only read this article every few months? Browbeating is not the same as building consensus.Bobo159 (talk) 11:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

(undent) If there is no more discussion on the rebuttles I've made to Bobo above, or suggestions for what the article should say, I'm going to assume Bobo is not interested in concensus building or correct representation of sources, and I will revert his/her changes in 48 hours. NJGW (talk) 16:43, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I support this. I would also suggest to User:Bobo159 and future editors that rather than make many controversial deletions to Peak oil at once, a better approach would be to pick one change and discuss it on this talk page first, so we can deal with each change one at a time. How about a rule of one change proposal per talk page heading? It's hard to sort out many changes under a single heading. Side comment: I noticed that one of the changes contains the term 'peakist' which should be peaknik, a jargon term for which we have a defining article. I'll go edit that if it's still there. --Teratornis (talk) 18:46, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't realized that most of those edits would be considered controversial, although I should - this appears to be a touchy topic. So that's a good suggestion, and I'll certainly keep it in mind.Bobo159 (talk) 11:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A rather less self-serving assumption would be that I was simply busy, and don't have time to immediately leap to discuss your every concern. Apropos that, though, you don't have to worry - I have neither the time nor the inclination to get into an edit war with someone who obviously has much more time and emotional investment in the topic than I do. From my perspective, what happened was I had some free time, tried to update an article (attributing statements to the staters, updating numbers to the most recent data, softening what I saw as POV, etc.), and someone came along, started insulting me, and reverted everything I'd done with reasons that made it clear he hadn't read what I'd written. There are, to my eye, still problems with the article (it rambles, makes a few dodgy claims, and has substantial areas with POV), but it kind of removes the incentive to try contributing if it all gets immediately deleted out of hand by someone who insults you for your effort. If I do try contributing to this article again, however, I'll follow the wise suggestion of Teratornis and assume any changes will be controversial.Bobo159 (talk) 11:18, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A surprising number of topics on Wikipedia are controversial; some are really controversial. That's kind of unavoidable with 48,257,747 registered users and a similar number of unregistereds. Any article which inherently involves predictions about the future, with vested interests on all sides, is sure to be controversial. George W. Bush was probably correct when he accused his fellow Americans of being "addicted to oil", and I can't think of any form of addiction which is free from controversy. However, Peak oil is downright genial by comparison to some topics on Wikipedia (try making substantial changes to anything relating to Islam, Scientology, etc.). The safest assumption is that usually additions to articles may be less controversial than substantial changes to existing material, and it's better to test the waters with small changes before trying big ones. Asking for discussion on an article's talk page and getting responses before making a serious change invites other editors to weigh in. That may avoid triggering territorial defensive urges from reptillian hindbrains by changing an article with no prior warning. As an example of a potentially controversial change I made, which seems to have "stuck", was to add a section to the Aviation history article. The section 2001-Future is incredibly optimistic compared to peakniks such as David Goodstein and Richard Heinberg who claim that passenger air travel will effectively cease by a decade or two after peak oil. So rather than hack up the existing section, I simply added another subsection, fairly bland, The challenge of peak oil, which at least puts the idea out there that hey, aviation may have a serious fuel shortage in the future (with the implication that if you care about aviation, you might want to look into it). I don't claim to know the future anyway; if I did, I'd become a billionaire commodities trader like Richard Rainwater. --Teratornis (talk) 06:17, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Peaknik as a pejorative?

Resolved

 – There is no peaknik article. Kgrr (talk) 16:25, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Peaknik is an epithet or pejorative. Please refrain from using it. Peakists do not call themselves Peaknik. It's like calling a feminist a femonazi or a black person an (N-word). I really resent this POV. Kgrr (talk) 01:19, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

The Peaknik article does not mention this. Do you have a reliable source for this claim? I don't necessarily dispute it, I would just like to see it sourced properly in our peaknik article. I guess I'm a bit puzzled as to why anyone who knows about peak oil would resent being called a peaknik - I'd like to think we hope we are wrong, and everyone can have a good laugh at our expense. (If civilization collapses, any satisfaction I might draw from telling people I told them so probably wouldn't make up for the downsides of, uh, the collapse of civilization. I'm not an anarcho-primitive, although I do look forward to a world with fewer automobiles.) Also see Euphemism#The "Euphemism Treadmill". If "peaknik" has taken on negative connotations for some people, then as long as those people dislike the objects of their pejorative, it's only a matter of time before they transfer those connotations onto the next euphemism. Which is to say, it's hard to outrun the euphemism treadmill by endlessly relabeling oneself, and anyone who tries to do that probably hasn't listened to Steven Pinker. In any case, I'm encouraged to hear someone claiming that peaknik is a pejorative; that suggests some "outsiders" have heard about peak oil. When I ask people in real life if they've heard of peak oil, most have not. The main danger of peak oil is the near-total ignorance of the public, so I would say there's no such thing as bad publicity. The peak oil crisis will unfold in slow motion, so people will have plenty of time to recognize that things are transpiring the way those crazy peakniks predicted. I mean come on, the first guy to figure out anything new and different that challenges the status quo gets laughed at, or worse, until indisputable evidence comes in to support his ideas. The end of unlimited growth in petroleum consumption is more than most petroleum addicts can imagine, after all. We can't expect everyone to instantly embrace the idea. Most will have to be in severe pain before they wake up. In the United States, for example, automobile dependency is nearly universal, and for lots of people it is three or four generations old. Almost everybody drives, and every living relative has used cars as far back as the oral tradition goes. But the year is 2008, and we have the fivefold oil price increase since 2003 to talk about. It's getting a little harder for people to laugh at the peakniks now. When petroleum hits $300/bbl, there will be a lot more peakniks. --Teratornis (talk) 06:05, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

 Done

A general note about the complexity of peak oil

Resolved

I'd like to mention that Peak oil is a very complex topic, and while it seems likely to affect almost everyone who can afford a computer (and thus have a chance of participating on Wikipedia), the vast majority of people haven't heard much about it yet. Many claims of peakniks are likely to seem absurd to an average person in an advanced nation, who sees the roads jammed with automobiles every day and has never known anything else. Some editors have tried to help by collecting a basic collection of links into the {{Peak oil}} template. I would suggest to anyone who wants to substantially edit Peak oil or a related article to at least read all the articles linked from {{Peak oil}} carefully first, and follow their external links to understand the state of the subject and its controversies. (I happen to think the prominent peakniks are generally a little too dismissive of the work in renewable energy, not to mention that only Matthew Simmons seems to have something of a handle on the potential of telecommuting, but I share their conclusion that oil-dependent economies are almost certain to experience severe upheavals. People won't change their engrained habits until the pain becomes unbearable.) Amidst all the emotion, try to remember that nature doesn't care what we write on Wikipedia; deleting what might look like bad news here won't magically put more oil in the ground. However, Wikipedia should always strive to be as factual and neutral as possible. --Teratornis (talk) 19:01, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I would not encourage a substantial edit of this article. It has had many, many reviews of professionals in the field and has met GA status. Please discuss major changes before making them. Kgrr (talk) 01:00, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

 Done

NPOV / Criticisms

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 16:27, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I have been a main contributor to this article and have worked hard to achieve GA status on this article. Part of getting GA is to have an objective, bias free article. There used to be a fairly extensive section on criticisms of Peak oil. It dealt with cornucopians, on abiotic oil theory and CERA. It seems to have been systematically removed. None of it remails. I would like to revert that section back into the Criticsms section so that we can avert NPOV issues and edit wars. Please let me know how you feel Kgrr (talk) 15:48, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I assume you mean this section. It looks like it never made it out of Hubbert peak theory when this article was split off from there a year ago. My only concern is that the criticisms are mostly that Campbell or Hubbert didn't get the date exactly right. That's mostly covered in the timing section of the article, as well as the Predicting the timing of peak oil article. The CERA report is integrated into the article (lead and timing sections) as well. I'm actually in favor of beefing up the sections that were integrated as well as integrating the current criticism section (though due consideration should be given to the notability of the sources), and perhaps spinning off a separate Criticisms of peak oil article. What are the main crits? So far I see:

1. the more oil costs, the more ways will be developed to get more oil
2. there's plenty of oil we haven't found yet
3. we'll fix out dependency by the time it's important
4. abiogenic hypothesis of petroleum

Am I missing anything?

No need to re-create nearly all of it, this whole section was deleted somewhere in the last four months while I was off working on other articles:

==Alternative views==

===Non-dramatic peak oil===

Not all non-'peakists' believe there will be endless abundance of oil. CERA, for example, instead believes that global production will eventually follow an “undulating plateau” for one or more decades before declining slowly. In 2005 the group had predicted that "petroleum supplies will be expanding faster than demand over the next five years."

Dr. R.C. Vierbuchen, Vice President, Caspian/Middle East Region, ExxonMobil Exploration Co. believes

"A peak in petroleum liquids production, resulting solely from resource limitations, is unlikely in the next 25 years. Predictions of an imminent peak [based on the methodology developed by Shell Oil Co. geologist M. King Hubbert] in 1956 do not adequately account for resource growth from application of new technology, knowledge and capability, which combine to increase recovery, open new producing areas and lower economic thresholds."

"Supplies from OPEC and non-OPEC countries, gas-related liquids and unconventional resources are growing. Furthermore, nations with the largest remaining resources produce under long-term restraints not envisioned in Hubbert’s method. The ultimate peak in petroleum production may result from factors other than resource limitations."

Similarly, some analysts believe that the rising oil prices will instigate a move toward alternative sources of fuel, and that this will take effect long before oil reserves are depleted. Some have argued that while OPEC ensures through its regulations that oil prices do not fall too low, it also shows concern that overly inflated prices will cause many countries to move toward alternative energy sources, for economic as well as political reasons. In 1990 Saudi Arabia in particular flooded the market to prevent prices from going to high. The recent rise in oil prices to nearly $100 per barrel in November of 2007 brings the price well above where analysts have speculated that this process could take place, although it is expected that this would happen over an extended period of time.

===Energy Information Administration and USGS 2000 reports===

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects world consumption of oil to increase to 98.3 million barrels a day in 2015 and 118 million barrels a day in 2030. This represents more than a 25% increase in world oil production. A 2004 paper by the Energy Information Administration based on data collected in 2000 disagrees with Hubbert peak theory on several points:

• Explicitly incorporates demand into model as well as supply
• Does not assume pre/post-peak symmetry of production levels
• Models pre- and post-peak production with different functions (exponential growth and constant reserves-to-production ratio, respectively)
• Assumes reserve growth, including via technological advancement and exploitation of small reservoirs

The EIA estimates of future oil supply are countered by Sadad Al Husseini, retired VP Exploration of Aramco, who calls it a 'dangerous over-estimate'. Husseini also points out that population growth and the emergence of China and India means oil prices are now going to be structurally higher than they have been.

Colin Campbell argues that the 2000 USGS estimates is methodologically flawed study that has done incalculable damage by misleading international agencies and governments. Campbell dismisses the notion that the world can seamlessly move to more difficult and expensive sources of oil and gas when the need arises. He argues that oil is in profitable abundance or not there at all, due ultimately to the fact that it is a liquid concentrated by nature in a few places having the right geology. Campbell believes OPEC countries raised their reserves to get higher oil quotas and to avoid internal critique. He also points out that the USGS failed to extrapolate past discovery trends in the world’s mature basins.

===No Peak Oil===

Some commentors, such as economists Michael Lynch and Michael Moffat, believe that the Hubbert Peak theory is flawed and that there is no imminent peak in oil production; such views are sometimes referred to as "cornucopian" by believers in Hubbert Peak Theory. Lynch argues that production is determined by demand as well as geology, and that fluctuations in oil supply are due to political and economic effects in addition to the physical processes of exploration, discovery and production. Moffat contends that as prices increase, consumers will find alternatives to gasoline, arguing that changes in consumer patterns and the emergence of new technology driven by increases in the price of oil will prevent the oil supply from ever physically running out.

Abdullah S. Jum'ah President, Director and CEO of Aramco states that the world has adequate reserves of conventional and non conventional oil sources for more than a century..

OPEC has never acknowledged imminent Peak oil concerns.‹The template Talkfact is being considered for merging.›  In OPEC's 2007 annual book, which discusses issues such as future supply position, forecasted demand, and ultimate recoverable reserves (URR), the authors state that the conventional oil resource base is sufficient to satisfy demand increases over the projected period until 2030 at a price of $50-60 per barrel, increasing afterwards to account for inflation. It also states that, comparing the 5% confidence (P5) URR of 3300(sic) billion barrels from the 2000 USGS survey to what appears to be (there is no reference given) the 95% confidence (P95) URR of 1700(sic) billion barrels from the 1980 Rand corporation, production after 1980 has been only 1/3rd of reserve additions happening during the same period, in contrast with statements from Peak oil advocates. Four other surveys from 1980 give estimates of 2600, 2400, 2280, and 2015 billion barrels. Comparing the average of the five 1980 estimates (2219 billion barrels when using the actual Rand estimate of 1800 billion barrels) to P95 URR from the 2000 USGS survey (2272 billion barrels), production after 1980 has been over 10 times more than reserve additions.

===Abiogenesis===

Main article: Abiogenic petroleum origin

Biogenesis remains the overwhelmingly majority theory among petroleum geologists in the United States. Abiogenic theorists however, such as the late professor of astronomy Thomas Gold at Cornell University, assert that the sources of oil may not be “fossil fuels” in limited supply, but instead abiotic in nature. They theorize that if abiogenic petroleum sources are found to be abundant, it would mean Earth contains vast reserves of untapped petroleum. However, M. R. Mello and J.M. Moldowan counter that biomarkers in all the samples of all the oil and gas accumulations found up to now prove conclusively that oil comes from a biologic origin and that oil is generated from kerogen by pyrolysis.

So here is the list so far:

1. Non-dramatic peak oil - plateau and slow decline (CERA et al)
2. EIA & USGS2000 - we'll just produce more to meet demand
3. No peak oil - the more oil costs, the more ways will be developed to get more oil (Cornucopians)
4. There's plenty of oil we haven't found yet
5. We'll fix out dependency by the time it's important
6. abiogenic hypothesis of petroleum - oil is continually produced by the earth

4 and 5 have not been researched.

>>>---> The merger with peak timing had been *voted down* because it muddles the minority viewpoints. They must be preserved in order to remain fair and balanced.

Kgrr (talk) 22:36, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't see where the merger got voted it on... it looks more like it just didn't get any discussion. I think the the distinctions over different views were made in the lead (Pessimistic vs. Optimistic) and soon the body followed that pattern. One could argue that calling the alternative views "alternative" weakens them ;) The biggest problem with the list just above is some of them are extremely similar arguments: EIA/USGS and the two that follow it seem to me to be essentially the same thing from different sources--or rather different people leaning on basically the same sources--while non-dramatic we'll fix our dependancy are about the same. A big problem is that currently the press and even the oil companies (minus most of OPEC) admit to some form of peak oil issue, meaning much of the older refs in this section may be out of step with current opinions. Thoughts? NJGW (talk) 23:49, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Check the section

<nokiki>== Merging </nowiki>Peak_oil#Alternative_views with Peak_oil#Timing == No one came forward with reasons pro. I voted con. Therefore it was not done.Kgrr (talk) 01:29, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

"A big problem is that currently the press and even the oil companies (minus most of OPEC) admit to some form of peak oil issue" Yes, clearly the consensus viewpoint is that we have been in Peak oil since 2006. The EIA/USGS is way out of step with where the mainstream is now and so is CERA, the cornucopians, and abiotic theorists, etc. Consider that for every 9 barrels of oil that we use, they are only discovering 1 barrel. Clearly what is being found cannot meet the demand. Peak is when demand clearly exceeds new discoveries. This means the demand is being met by draining the known reserves faster than they are being replenished by new discoveries. The OPEC and the international oil companies are in the business of providing returns to their stockholders. If the stockholders knew that the supply was dwindling quickly, they would not be able to sell their stocks for a lot of money. This explains the EAI/USGS position as well.

To prevent POV, we need to let the facts speak for themselves. To fairly represent all the leading and minority views it is sometimes necessary to qualify the description of an opinion, or to present several formulations of this opinion and attribute them to specific groups. For example, we do need to mention the abiotic theory but do mention that *all* oil samples ever tested have been shown to have a plant origin. We do need to mention CERA's opinion, but that CERA has not been able to put money where their mouth is with the $100,000 bet. Etc. See Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

Now how to organize this... NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each. I'm biased about the consensus about peak oil. My Dad is a petroleum geologist. They are not looking for oil on land anymore. It's all been found. They are looking offshore. But the prospects are really not good and very expensive. Oil shales and tar sands are really not a solution since the cost of recovery depends a lot on the cost of energy which keeps going up.

Opinions? Kgrr (talk) 00:52, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

The discussion above is hard to follow (see my comments below). If you want my opinion, a proper treatment of peak oil skepticism might also document the "peak skepticism" phenomenon, if we can find any reliable sources to document this. At the risk of making an original observation, I will point out the obvious. Just as a peak in oil production occurs at some point as a result of geology, a peak in skepticism about peak oil also occurs, as a result of psychology. In the early days of oil discovery and extraction, supply seems limitless and almost everyone is optimistic. Unrestrained exponential growth promotes optimism. In the 1950s, the U.S. consumed an amount of oil equal to all the oil it had consumed in the decades prior; and again in the 1960s. During the heyday of exponential growth, most people thought M. King Hubbert was crazy. In the 1970s, the rate of increase in oil consumption slowed, U.S. domestic oil extraction peaked, and Hubbert gained some converts. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, world oil extraction increased, although not nearly as fast as it had before the 1970s, and optimism abounded as Julian Lincoln Simon and others made their bets and enjoyed twitting the resource pessimists. (This reminds me of the phenomenon in medicine when a terminally ill patient briefly regains strength just before dying.) Then came the 2000s when world oil extraction appears to have peaked, and oil underwent a steady run-up in price. Optimism among the experts also appears to be peaking - for example, anybody who believes oil is currently overpriced is free to short sell oil on a commodities exchange. How many peak oil skeptics are just now shorting oil? There is, of course, a huge disconnect between the experts who study the data vs. the general population, most of whom have not even heard of peak oil yet, or have only the vaguest notions of it. Most petroleum consumers seem to be trying to process the ongoing run-up in price in terms of optimistic 1960s assumptions, as evidenced by all the anger over higher fuel prices. Getting angry over a fuel price increase suggests the angry person believes the price should not be rising, which would imply disbelief in the reality of the peak in oil extraction. Contrast this with the emotional response to a catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina - nobody got mad at the hurricane, they got mad at the failure of government to rescue citizens from their own lack of preparation. There was no skepticism about the fact that the hurricane had occurred. Thus I would suggest the order of peaking is:

• Oil discoveries peak -> Oil extraction peaks -> Disbelief peaks among experts -> Disbelief peaks among nonexperts

Since experts function closer to reality than nonexperts in almost every field of nonfiction where expertise exists, we can predict that disbelief among the experts will probably peak at a time very close to the peak in oil extraction. Of course if the experts were competent, their disbelief should have peaked long before the peak in oil extraction. --Teratornis (talk) 16:25, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Units

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 16:28, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

We had agreed early on that units would be barrels of oil instead of cubic meters of oil. Why are changing the article mixing up units rather than having them follow the consensus view? We had a huge discussion to arrive at the consensus, now people are going through the article without discussion making wholesale changes. I request a new discussion on Units. Let's settle this issue and straighten out the mess. Kgrr (talk) 22:48, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Here is my opening suggestion:

Initially when the article was written, we had decided on Imperial units. But you are welcome to add the metric translation to all of them if you do it right.

Here are the standard industry units and abbreviations we had decided upon:

1 bbl = 1 barrel 1 Mbbl = 1,000 barrels 1 MMbbl = 1,000,000 barrels

(These Imperial measures are a bit arcane. The M in this case is Mil for thousand, not Mega as in the metric system)

The metric standard industry units and abbreviations are:

1 m³ = 1,000 liters 1,000 m³ = 1,000,000 liters = 1 ML 1,000,000 m³ = 1 GL

Instead of:

"Demand will hit 118,000,000 barrels (18,800,000 m³) per day (bpd) from today's existing 86,000,000 barrels (13,700,000 m³), driven in large part by the transportation sector."

Can we please write this concisely as such? This way, we should be able to quote the article exactly and also translate into metric units with the same number of significant digits. I really don't want to see long strings of zeroes that I need to count in order to understand the quantity.

"Demand will hit 118 MMbbl (18.8 GL) per day from today's existing 86 MMbbl (13.7 GL) per day, driven in large part by the transportation sector."

Please see Barrel (unit)

Comments please. Kgrr (talk) 00:07, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Some links in WP:EIW#Units might be relevant. The general guideline seems to be WP:UNITS. We might use the {{Convert}} template (or a variant) to standardize the presentation and make everybody happy, without requiring a ton (or tonne) of tedious manual unit conversions. --Teratornis (talk) 06:25, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Teratornis, tons/tonnes of Thanks! I don't have a problem with both Imperial and Metric measures. After all, Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. The problem I have is the large string of zeroes with the current presentation. It makes it very difficult to read. We need to use units that are in the correct range. If the template does not work for us, we can certainly create a template that converts MMbbl to GL or Mbbl to ML for example. Also, we should make sure that the dangling per day or per year is properly placed after the measure.Kgrr (talk) 14:19, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Just looked on here, and are the conversions correct? In "Production" section, the following "85.24 million barrels per day (135,520 m³/d)" and the same conversion follows throughout. this would be 0.00159 m3 per barrel. Seems it should be 13.5 million m3. Have I missed something? The reason I looked on here was to get a conversion from barrels to m3, and it threw me off a bit.Stainless316 (talk) 17:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

There definately seems to be a mix up. In the Demand for oil (the first section aftre the lead), we get "Demand will hit 118 million barrels per day (188,000 m³/d) from 2006's 86 million barrels (13,700,000 m³)" which seems to be two different conversions in the same sentence. Can I confirm that the true conversion is multiply barrels by 0.159 to get m3? I don't mind going throught he article to give consistency, but I am not an expert, so confirmation that I have got the right conversion would be good before I made any changes.Stainless316 (talk) 11:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Back again. Having made a couple of small edits, i have now noticed that the conversions are from a template. it looks to me that the barrel / day to m3 is different from barrel to m3 by a factor of 100. Am I missing a proper reason for this? if not, then the template needs fixing for barrels per day, I think. I am not familiar with templates.Stainless316 (talk) 12:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Those that need to know are aware, and it will be fixed. Stainless316 (talk) 09:47, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The conversion templates have been created. Please use them where necessary.Kgrr (talk) 16:28, 10 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Removed possible weasel words

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 14:22, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I removed from "Timing of peak oil" the sentence "Not all non-peak-oilists believe there is an endless abundance of oil."

My reason is as follows: Saying that "not all" of a group adhere to a particular belief implies that _some_ in that group _do_ adhere to that belief.

There is no one who believes an endless abdundance of oil exists. To believe this would be to have a magical or nonsensical view of the universe. Hence, the opening sentence of that section seemed to be establishing a straw man, paper tiger, or some such creature.

Ordinary Person (talk) 08:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Abiogenic petroleum origin supporters, such as Alex Jones (radio) www.prisonplanetcom/archives/peak_oil/index.htm and others. Also, see Cornucopian. NJGW (talk) 13:18, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

A cornucopian seems to believe commodity shortages stimulate greater human creativity, eventually reducing the price of the formerly scarce commodity to lower than it was before the shortage, either as a result of technological advances increasing the supply of the commodity, and/or the discovery or invention of substitute goods which reduce the demand for the commodity, such that the shortage ends and the price falls. History shows examples where this occurred (e.g., kerosene replacing whale oil) as well as counterexamples where substitute goods did not magically materialize in time to prevent catastrophic die-off (e.g., Easter Island). Thus a cornucopian could admit that petroleum is finite, but consider that irrelevant. I don't think cornucopians call themselves cornucopians; the word is probably more an exonymic pejorative. I'm sad that Julian Simon (leading exponent of cornucopianism) died a few years before the Oil price increases since 2003, not to mention the coming petrocollapse should it occur. It would be interesting to read his last optimistic dispatch just before the lights go out for good. --Teratornis (talk) 00:34, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Technically, abiogenic origin supporters do not believe in endless abundance, since abiogenic production still relies on the finite energy source of nuclear decay in the planet's core. Therefore, Ordinary Person is correct. ThVa (talk) 10:11, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

That may be, but it is used to argue against the existence of Peak oil (eg Stanley Monteith and www.infowarscom/articles/economy/peak_oil_globalist_scam.htm Alex Jones]). NJGW (talk) 01:10, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

You're playing with semantics. Grow up. ThVa (talk) 13:50, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't believe that I am. Read the beliefs of the two I mentioned above, as well as F. William Engdahl... they actually believe that we can't run out of oil. By the way, was there something about the article you wanted to discuss further, or can we assume this thread is resolved? NJGW (talk) 17:05, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Weak quote

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 14:12, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

This quote is in paragraph 2: "a growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day."

We need a better quote for the intro. Problems:

• The linked source is a peak oil advocacy website that's quoting the Wall Street Journal; it's secondhand.
• The sources that the WSJ attribute this attitude toward are not named; they are "two senior industry officials".
• Weasel term: "a growing number"? What is the number and how much is it growing?

• The quote talks about hitting a limit but doesn't talk about any subsequent decline. True, this would be a peak oil scenario, but I personally think since there's so much attention focused on this subsequent decline, the quote in the intro should discuss it.

Sorry to complain instead of just finding a better quote but this isn't my area of expertise and I'm short on time currently. Tempshill (talk) 16:02, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Yup. It's weak. "Secondhand" isn't a problem (we want to cite secondary sources), but using an advocacy site is, especially absent a balancing POV. Weasel is definitely a problem. In fact there's no real need for a quote in the WP:LEAD. It should be rewritten. Care to propose a new version here? LeadSongDog (talk) 19:13, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Here is a video from Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Catalyst (TV program) series that may be a possible source, or give a clue about where we might find a possible source:

• Peak Oil (part 1) on YouTube
• Peak Oil (part 2) on YouTube

The video features interviews with several oil industry figures, including Jeremy Leggett and Eric Streitberg (Managing Directory, ARC Energy). At 4 minutes into part 2, Streitberg mentions asking the attendees at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Conference how many believe peak oil had arrived. 50% of the audience raised a hand. "These are practicing petroleum industry professionals." That was in 2005, when oil was trading for less than half the current price. Also see my additions to Oil price increases since 2003#Forecasted prices in which blue-chip investment banks Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs are revising their oil price projections upward because demand continues to grow while supply remains flat at best. In particular, "non-OPEC supply ... continues to under-perform dramatically relative to consensus expectations." Simultaneously, OPEC "refuses" to increase its output, despite record high prices, leading some to speculate that OPEC cannot increase its output, which is to say, OPEC may be collectively at or near peak. According to Matthew Simmons, once it becomes clear that OPEC has peaked, there will no longer be any doubt that the world has peaked. --Teratornis (talk) 06:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Agriculture

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 14:10, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I removed the following statement from the document and some users have taken exception to that so I have started a discussion here :

Additionally, application of agricultural biotechnology including transgenic plants holds great promise for maintaining or increasing yields while requiring fewer fossil fuel derived inputs than conventional crops.

Not only does the document not reflect the language used in the article, but there are plenty of documents around that do not agree with it. I think that a clear look at the source and supports of each piece of documentation needs to be looked at. I think that the above is definitly not a clear cut "fact" that can be present. The jury is certainly still out as to whether GMOs are actually a way to mitigate peak oil. Primarily because they support mono-cultures which forces huge forces larger amounts of fuel to be used on transportation. Amongst other reasons.

Bottom line, seems to me that the above statement is controversal and as such does not belong on Wikipedia untill verified.

Sources to come.

Paullb (talk) 10:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I had already removed the colourful wording of "great promise" to which you objected on your talk page and have further clarified the statement by inclusion of the word some which now reads thusly:

Additionally, some applications of agricultural biotechnology including transgenic plants can allow for maintaining or increasing yields while requiring fewer fossil fuel derived inputs than conventional crops.

Furthermore nowhere does wikipedia imply that "controversal" information is to be excluded until all sources in the world are unanimous in their support of the information. It is appropriate to add contrary sourced information but it is not appropriate to remove sourced information simply because you find other sources that conflict with it.Zebulin (talk) 10:50, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Automobile Mileage Reporting

Resolved

 – spam Kgrr (talk) 14:09, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

While not a direct edit of the Peak Oil page, the Wikiproject Automobile discussion page is having a discussion about whether or not to include fuel economy as part of the Automotive Infobox. If interested, please share your opinion. 198.151.13.8 (talk) 18:17, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Brazil

Resolved

 – Brazil is not a counter-point to Peak oil. Kgrr (talk) 14:08, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me like Peak Oil is about as real as the North American Union. The huge find made in Brazil makes for a strong argument against peak oil. Also, the real reason for any shortage of oil is not decreased supply, but increased demand from places like China and India. This article seems to make it out to be a proven fact, rather than the theory/hypothsis that it really is.

Anyway, the big find in Brazil should be included into a counter-argument inside the article. Contralya (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 22:26, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean this? That's only 12 billion barrels, even smaller than Jack (see first section of this page). We use about 87 million each day, so even if they somehow get ALL the oil out of it (not possible with today's technology), that's still only about 137 days of oil (assuming car sales in China and India stop yesterday), and it won't even ramp up to full production until 2020. NJGW (talk) 03:23, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

That is a good point. Though what I am talking about is how they make new oil finds and start drilling in new places all of the time and also, about how the increase in demand leading to shortage, rather than decrease in supply. Contralya (talk) 17:12, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

In the article it's explained that oil discoveries peaked a long time ago, and production per year has passed discoveries per year in 1980. New discoveries are factored into most calculations of Peak oil. Also, you have a point that higher demand doesn't lower supply, but keep in mind that as demand is rising every day, supply isn't (according to the average latest supply numbers from the last few years). Therefore, rising demand exacerbates the effects of steady or falling supply... the two are pretty intimately connected precisely because we are at or near the peak (before that on the curve and it wouldn't matter as much). NJGW (talk) 17:31, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

The other problem with new finds like Jack 2 is that they are in more difficult locations, such as deep underwater, or in the Arctic, etc. Difficult locations mean they take longer to develop. By the time Jack 2 is delivering oil, the older producing fields will have declined that much more. There just aren't enough new discoveries in the pipe to make up for declines in existing fields. And note that demand was always part of Hubbert's original theory, since there is no significant storage of oil after it comes out of the ground. The model assumes (or, more accurately, observed) that during the initial phase of exponentially increasing oil extraction, consumers will demand all the oil that is pumped. And they do. Demand for oil tends to grow exponentially as long as the price is low enough - which is another way of saying that whatever we are using in a given year, we want to use even more the next year. Thus as the rate of oil extraction reaches its peak, the price must rise as necessary to choke off the exponential growth in demand, and keep consumption matched closely with extraction. The rate of oil extraction levels off at some point and begins to decline because all the easy oil gets pumped first. As we get to progressively more difficult oil, it just doesn't come out of the ground as quickly, no matter what we do. Getting oil from the ground is not like opening a spigot on a tank, except in the early days when oil is easy to get, like it was at Spindletop. --Teratornis (talk) 06:59, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry but i fail to see why this find could be used as an argument against peak oil. It can only change its date but can't prevent it from happening because it doesn't change the fact that oil is a finite ressource. 134.157.119.4 (talk) 07:57, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore even if oil were an infinite resource, peak oil would still be observed so long as total production continued to steadily decline while total demand continued to increase. Peak oil just means that production 'peaks' in spite of demand not having 'peaked'.Zebulin (talk) 08:09, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Even a renewable resource can "peak" if it renews at a finite rate. This leads to the phenomenon of "peak water," in which people pump "fossil water" out of aquifers faster than it recharges from rainfall. Because the aquifer built up some storage over thousands of years, people can pump water from it at an unsustainable rate. At some point the pumping rate must decline to match the recharge rate. The aquifer has essentially unlimited production capacity over geologic time, but the maximum sustainable production rate equals the recharge rate, which may be far less than the short-term drawdown rate when people first begin to exploit it. --Teratornis (talk) 16:11, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Peak oil is not about running out of oil, it's about the eventual decrease of the rate at which oil can be produced. The theory has been proven in country after country that has already peaked and declined. In many cases, oil has completely run out in some countries. This discussion is closed. Kgrr (talk) 14:08, 11 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Timing of Peak Oil

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 14:03, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I just edited this section.

• Old: All of these, however, indicate a peak of oil production, however, will happen at some time, for the resource is unrenewable and will eventually run out.
• New: All of these predictions indicate peak oil production will happen.

Originally, I was just going to remove the redundant "however," but the statement itself was inaccurate. Oil is renewable, just not fast. Our rate of consumption outstrips the rate of new oil forming. This makes it functionally non-renewable, but not factually. --McC (talk) 15:40, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

It does not fall under the commonly accepted definition of renewable: "A natural resource qualifies as a renewable resource if it is replenished by natural processes at a rate comparable or faster than its rate of consumption" Kgrr (talk) 14:03, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Free oil

Resolved

 – kgrr

In the macroeconomic sense, we still treat oil as free: demand remains largely price-insensitive. At present pricing a barrel of oil at market is about two days pay for a minimum-wage worker in a G8 economy. This really hasn't changed much for many years. It would be instructive to compare demand per person across or within different economies for signs of the retail gas price (in minimum-wage days) that changes consumption. LeadSongDog (talk) 15:42, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. When I was in high school, I was earning $2.15 per hour (minimum wage) and gasoline was $0.29 The minimum wage has not been adjusted for inflation in many years due to resistance from Republicans.Kgrr (talk) 13:59, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Reference Book Catalog, Non-Verifiable Sources

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 13:23, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

This article has an almost obscene number of promotional book references (almost the entire authorship by certain peak-promoting individuals), promotional movies, and all sorts of things; it comes across as an attempt to promote the theory rather than reference individual points. This is unencyclopedic, unprofessional, and full of clutter. And, of course, a lot of the references don't come even close to meeting WP:V. I went bold and got rid of the "book and movie catalogs", and trimmed the articles down to only those from WP:V sources with these changes, but they were RV'ed. Thoughts? -- Rei (talk) 03:19, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

To put it another way: is the further reading section of the article on Mormonism full of books and movies trying to convince people that it's the One True Faith (because there sure are a lot)? Of course not; it wouldn't be encyclopedic. Why shouldn't we have the same standard here? -- Rei (talk) 03:42, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd be interested in your impressions of this: Scientology bibliography. One difference between peak oil and Mormonism is that Mormonism explicitly denies the need for evidence of its faith claims, whereas Hubbert peak theory is a scientific theory, and as such it is entirely testable and falsifiable. For example, the Book of Mormon makes many claims about the prehistory of Mesoamerica for which no archeological evidence exists, and for which the discovery of evidence by now would seem likely, but Mormons believe the claims anyway. In contrast, we know for a fact that U.S. oil production peaked around 1970. We also know that in 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted U.S. oil production would peak sometime between 1965 and 1970. Hubbert peak theory models the oil production trajectories of individual countries reasonably well. The world is just a collection of countries, so we would expect Hubbert peak theory to have some predictive value for all countries in the aggregate. Virtually all oil industry professionals agree that petroleum is a finite resource, it is nonrenewable on the human time scale for all practical purposes, and therefore world petroleum production must eventually reach a peak and then decline. Almost everyone agrees the peak will be sometime in 20xx. The only serious debates are about the value of xx, and about whether peak oil will be a serious problem when it does occur. "Early peakers" claim the peak has already occurred or is soon to occur, and they tend to make dire predictions about the general lack of preparedness. (It's hard to argue that humanity is ready right now for any substantial decline in oil production, but if you can find a reliable source which presents such arguments, the article could mention them.) At the other end, organizations like the Energy Information Administration and International Energy Agency have been projecting the peak to occur later (in the 2030-2070 range). So we have this odd situation in which almost everyone believes in "peak oil," but only the people who think it's a problem are considered "peak oil proponents." (The remarkable Oil price increases since 2003 have confounded the resource optimists, so they are now revising their projections of future oil production, most likely downward. As Richard Nixon once famously said, "We are all Keynesians now", and perhaps it won't be long before someone equally important says the same thing about peak oil.) There are a few abiotic oil fringe theorists who believe oil continuously re-forms inside the Earth, and therefore oil production need never decline, but the article already accounts for them. In other words, almost everybody whose beliefs are connected with physical reality believes in peak oil; the only question is whether it's a problem for now or for later. Someone who believes in peak oil 30 years from now may be less likely to write a book telling people not to worry, although Bjørn Lomborg and a few others have done just that. In other words, it's hard to find many reliable sources that refute what you call "promotional" books based on actual facts (especially while the actual facts of oil prices are screaming "scarcity"). More typically, skepticism about an early peak in oil production involves large elements of wishful thinking or simple ignorance, or appeal to nostrums such as the magic of the market or slogans such as "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones." The general media reaction to the current oil price increase has bordered on incredulity, with people casting about for scapegoats such as commodity speculation or inadequate investment.

In any case, I agree that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, and we must repect the holy grail of neutrality, especially when it hurts, so we should cite our sources instead of merely listing them as a bibliography. However, Wikipedia has many articles which list books (Lists of books), writers (Lists of writers), and films (Lists of films). Perhaps someone could start new articles:

• List of books about peak oil
• List of peak oil writers (see: User:Americanus/Peak Oil People for a start)
• List of films about peak oil

and then attempt to fend off the deletionists. People who want to raise awareness of peak oil (waves hand) could use (or start) another wiki (not connected with the Wikimedia Foundation) to compile bibliographies. We can then link to one or more external peak oil bibliographies on Wikipedia:List of bibliographies. Another option is to develop bibliographies on user subpages, to support research for further improving the peak oil articles. Editors benefit when they have ready access to source material, so we don't all have to redundantly search for it. We have the {{Peak oil}} navigation template to list any books and movies relating to peak oil which satisfy WP:N, so there is no need to separately list external links to these titles. Any book or movie which is not notable enough for its own article here probably does not deserve separate mention in the main Peak oil article, except as a citation (and subject to the normal challenge). --Teratornis (talk) 20:17, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

In May, I had gone through all of the references to spammy materials. I had eliminated all of it them.Kgrr (talk) 13:23, 11 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

WP:OR

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 15:13, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Arguing against the USGS report by piecing arguments together from other sources without a reference is a textbook violation of WP:OR, so stop RV'ing. Secondly, the earlier and later studies are both using the EUR rating -- the *mean*.

This is a textbook case. You can't argue against a WP:V reference without another WP:V reference that explicitly makes that same argument. -- Rei (talk) 06:21, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I have removed the OR that said that understandings of oil reserves have been rising. NJGW (talk) 02:50, 21 May 2008 (UTC) Done

T. Boone Pickens

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 15:11, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

My appologies to 12.203.84.60. I dug a little deeper and found that T. Boone was on Beck's show tonight, but it still isn't showing on their website. But I still don't see any indication that he mentioned peak oil rather than high oil prices... not that it matters. This can only be settled in retrospect anyway. NJGW (talk) 02:27, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

T. Boone Pickens is very much a believer in Peak oil. He's touring the country with his wind farm solution. He's deploying the largest wind farm on earth in the panhandle of Texas.Kgrr (talk) 15:11, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

If you go to the Pickens site there's a video there where he's talking to congress and he talks a little about peak oil. TastyCakes (talk) 17:12, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Supply surpassed demand?

Resolved

 – Link provided below. Discussion strayed off-topic. Kgrr (talk) 13:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

So I finally found some information about the Glenn Beck interview with T. Boone Pickens discussed above[2], and I see there that Pickens claims that production is only 85 mb/day while demand is 87 mb/day. Has this been reported anywhere else? Is it a question of light sweet crude supply diminishing only, or is all oil production combined down to 85? As we can see from the discussions above, production numbers can be hard to ferret out, so I'd hope someone with a better understanding of industry could help us out. Interestingly(?), I went to the EIA to see their annual May report, but it's been pushed back to June [3]. NJGW (talk) 00:48, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Nobody really knows how much oil is being produced because some countries tend to lie about their production when it suits their purposes. However, T. Boone Pickens is no fool and he knows oil (he didn't become a billionaire by accident), so I would be inclined to say he's correct. It is beginning to look like there is a supply problem. In all previous oil crises, when the price went up, it pulled new non-OPEC oil onto the market, which drove prices right back down. In this crisis (it's not even a crisis, it's just business as usual), prices have been going up and up and up since 2003, and there's no new oil coming on line. The inference one would be inclined to draw from that is that there is no new oil coming on line because there's no new oil, period. So, 85 million barrels per day may be all there is, and from this point forward it's all downhill.

Now the Saudi's claim that 1) they can increase production any time they want to, and 2) there's no reason to increase oil production because supply and demand are in balance. They probably know that #2 is a specious argument because, having taken Economics 101 at a variety of expensive universities, they know that in a free market supply and demand are in balance at any equilibrium price. What oil shooting up to $135/barrel for no apparent reason tells you is that $135 is the new equilibrium price. The most likely explanation is that the supply curve has shifted left due to tighter supply, and market is rebalancing supply and demand by reducing demand to match they reduced supply. As for #2, Saudi policy is to flood the market with cheap oil any time the price gets too high to prevent non-OPEC oil from getting a foothold. They said they were going to increase production a few years ago, and they didn't. They claim that is because they don't feel like it any more, but the satellite photos appear to show a lot of drilling activity despite no new production coming on line, and the skeptics are arguing that the Saudis are not producing more oil because they can't. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 05:36, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

While no doubt petroleum is a finite resource, the fact that it is priced in dollars and subject to Futures contract trading, along with large surpluses of global capital looking for a safe place to earn returns in the wake of the sub prime lending failures makes me, at least, question if the current prices quoted are, in fact, reflective of supply. While the article's focus is on the phenomena of a diminishing supply of a finite resource, the futures markets (rarely discussed, I've noted, with respect to Peak Oil) are often used to gauge how much remains of a given commodity. Might hanky panky in the commodity markets explain price surges to 135/bbl? By the way, as to why the financial aspect is important to this issue in terms of evaluating sources, T. Boone Pickens said he was "short" on crude oil futures as late as 22 Feb 2008 but that he would go long later in the year. There is additional data that indicates something is "off" in the futures markets: fewer cars on California highways and the Saudis' token production increase of 300,000 bbls per day . In a "transparent" futures market, this information would push the price down, if only a little. Instead, the markets continue to signal (irrationally?) that demand is expected to surge. Since futures markets can be pushed (for a time) on psychology and big moves of capital, it's not as simple as saying we've hit a new supply/demand equilibrium. The same thing happened in the housing markets (and a lot of that money that was pulled out of that bubble ended up in -- you guessed it -- the commodities markets). TinkerTailorSoldier (talk) 04:46, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

The reference that I added to the article yesterday, Asia Times Online article (which was reverted back out by user:Otolemur crassicaudatus on the very next edit) discussed this, pointing out that the Bush administration in the USA has taken the oil futures market out of the jurisdiction of the regulator. This has made all sorts of underhanded dealings possible. Arguably, current prices have little or nothing to do with supply and demand. --Athol Mullen (talk) 07:08, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

The Asia Times article falls into the "This can't really be happening, it must be a conspiracy" category. So, let's cover all the bases. On the supply side, non-OPEC division, British and Norwegian North Sea production is in long-term decline and getting to the steep part of the decline curve. Mexican production is falling off the table as their Cantarell field tanks. Russian productions is down and one of their oil execs just said they can't keep up rates. On the OPEC front, Nigeria is having problems with civil unrest, Venezuela is down due to government mucking about, and nobody else is increasing production. The only OPEC producer with surplus capacity is Saudi Arabia, and they are not leaping into the gap. On the demand side, US and European consumption is down a hair, but China is coming on gangbusters with double-digit growth rates, stockpiling for the Olympics, and running diesel generators after their recent earthquake. India and other growing economies are also consuming more. And, here's a factor that people don't often consider, OPEC members are consuming more and more of their own production. Most of them have very high population growth rates (there's nothing like having four wives to increase the birth rate), and they don't charge world price at home, so their people don't see any reason to conserve (drive fast, freeze an American). So OPEC is consuming more and more of its own production, leaving less for the developed world. The net result is that global consumption is increasing while production is not. So, it's crunch time, folks.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 17:57, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand the 4 wives thing, surely the ratio of men to women in OPEC countries is still roughly 1:1, so all you have done is shift the production from 4 fathers to 1. --Jaded-view (talk) 04:09, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I was being facetious. Some of the Arab oil princes have 40+ children, but that's beside the point. The real issue is that in some Muslim countries, the average woman has eight children (in the rest, it's less but still high). Regardless of the number of fathers involved, that constitutes a long-term demographic problem in terms of population overrunning resources.RockyMtnGuy (talk) 19:42, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Ok. Incidently, without oil might the US might also be over populated? The UK almost certainly is.--Jaded-view (talk) 00:32, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Other than oil, the US has lots of resources to support its population. It has more farmland than China to support a population 1/4 the size. The problem it has is that its consumption of oil far exceeds its ability to produce it. Even the UK has enough farmland to support its population, and until recently it produced more oil than it consumed, so it isn't really over populated. Since its population is not really growing it can keep going indefinitely if it can deal with the depletion of oil. OTOH, Saudi Arabia's population has grown from about 5 million in 1960 to about 27 million today. By the time it runs out of oil it will have more people than the UK, and it doesn't have the resources to support that many people. When it runs out of oil, and it will inevitably run out of oil, things are likely to get unpleasant in Saudi Arabia. And by unpleasant, I mean something probably involving people dying. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 01:40, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

...as distinct from the way things are today in Nigeria, Iran, and Afghanistan. Many countries have less than equitable benefit to their citizens from their natural resources. National "leaders" who take personal profit from natural resources are better able to hold on to power than those who don't. That's an ugly reality of the human condition that goes back a very long time. It worked pretty well for the Pharoes for many generations. Now however, we are getting into the Lake Woebegon era, when "everyone is above average" and there are a lot of us. Perhaps a global one-child policy? LeadSongDog (talk) 18:07, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

(undent)Okay, this is getting out of hand on many levels. This talk page is for the discussion of the article, not the subject matter itself. If you have ideas on how to improve the article than by all means talk about them, but while there are a great many excellent web forums for discussion of this subject matter, this isn't one of them. See WP:NOTFORUM. Trusilver 02:16, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about what you say here Trusilver... many of the issues discussed here, properly ref'ed, should be made part of the article (or perhaps Oil price increases since 2003). NJGW (talk) 15:09, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

One way to elevate the discussion would be with some more references. Check out this citation tool: {{Google scholar cite}}. For example, try these searches:

• peak oil
• peak oil (same search, restricted to papers from 2007 and 2008)

--Teratornis (talk) 21:55, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Click the "{{Wikify}}" link below a search result to generate a {{Cite journal}} or {{Cite book}} template, with fields prefilled with bibliographic information. --Teratornis (talk) 21:56, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Here is a reference to T. Boone saying that demand has outstripped supply of oil... Jerry Shottenkirk (2008-04-25). "T. Boone Pickens Predicts Oil to Go to $150 a Barrel". RedOrbit.

I will close this item because this has strayed into a forum discussion, not a discussion about the article. Kgrr (talk) 13:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Citations

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 15:08, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Why do the citation numbers not match up? i.e. ^[142] points to 141--Omnipotence407 (talk) 19:41, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Try purging the page. --Teratornis (talk) 21:51, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

 Done

"there are finite resources in the ground, but you never get to that point"

Resolved

 – not a notable example of a naysayer. Kgrr (talk) 15:08, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

That quote is not that important as the exceptional position it has in the article indicates. It is clearly chosen by someone that has no idea what peak oil means, and has not taken the time to even read the basics around the theory surrounding it. In short, one has to be mentally deficient to not understand after reading a lot of relevant material that oil will never be "totally" depleted; what's more obvious than that? Of course there will never be "100%" depletion; that's like saying if the air becomes unbreathable because of toxic gases and people perish, that oxygen will be "100%" depleted; it won't be 100% depleted, it will just be insufficient. --Leladax (talk) 02:12, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

The position is of a nay sayer, although he's an oil engineer. I will remove the quote because the naysayer's position is much better

exemplified by Abdullah S. Jum'ah, President, Director and CEO of ARAMCO. I will be bold and remove it.Kgrr (talk) 15:08, 10 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Peak Oil "theory"

Resolved

 – Of course it's a theory. Kgrr (talk) 15:01, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Peak Oil is not a "theory", though it is referred to thusly in so many places it is probably not fixable. Though I support it heartily, it is a hypothesis, with much supporting evidence but not yet proven (and as noted in the excellent article, probably only provable in the rear view mirror - of an SUV, noted while the driver is not paying attention to the road ahead).

A quibble, but it is pertinent in relation to other domains. 130.221.224.7 (talk) 19:18, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

It seems to me that peak oil, as it is related to the availability of a commodity, is an economic theory rather than a scientific theory (and how often do we hear about economic hypotheses?). Its basis is that as production (driven by consumption of course) of a non-renewable resource rises, the unavoidable decline of production of that resource grows nearer. There doesn't seem any room to argue that at some point oil production will begin to fall, other then the question of when... therefore it makes more sense to call it an economic theory than a hypothesis. What's funny to me is when the abiotic hypothesis of oil gets called a theory. NJGW (talk) 20:41, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

The scientific method isn't really useful for economic forecasts. As soon as a model/hypothesis is published that shows consistent ability to predict historic trends (retrospective experimentation), some players use it to predict the futures markets for their own advantage, distorting those markets in the process and rendering the model/hypothesis self-defeating. LeadSongDog (talk) 21:21, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Hubbert peak theory is a theory which is testable against the historical production curves of many mineral resources in many regions of the Earth. People have extracted several resources to local exhaustion in various places, giving fairly complete extraction histories to test Hubbert peak theory against. (For a drastic example, see Easter Island, but unfortunately the survivors did not leave records of exactly how fast they chopped down all the island's trees, so the date of "peak lumber" for Easter Island is unknowable today.) "Peak oil" is a prediction that the world is the sum of its parts - that is, if Hubbert peak theory is useful for predicting the oil extraction schedule for different regions of the Earth, it should be useful for predicting the extraction schedule for all those regions summed together. As to whether the scientific method "isn't really useful for economic forecasts," the only way it wouldn't be useful would be if the underlying physical phenomena did not obey laws of nature. Economics is (in principle) reducible to social science, which reduces to psychology, which reduces to biology, which reduces to chemistry, which reduces to physics. Physics is orderly, so everything deriving from physics should be orderly (although the order may be stupefyingly complex and beyond the current grasp of science in many domains). It will be a long time before scientists can predict economic behavior from first principles (indeed, just predicting chemistry from physics is incredibly difficult, see the protein folding problem), but scientists have all sorts of ways to model higher-order behavior. If publishing a predictive model changes the system that the model predicts, the model can account for those changes. Ah, but then some players will account for the model accounting for them, and further subvert it. Ecologists and behavioral scientists have used the scientific method to study those sorts of phenomena (game theory, predator-prey dynamics), in which opposing players react to each other in turn. Also, one should note that merely publishing a theory does not instantly inform all players of it - knowledge takes time to spread, even knowledge which is very useful, in part because everyone has to sort through overwhelming amounts of mostly irrelevant information, and because of various cognitive filters people apply, such as not invented here. Hubbert peak theory is not so much a prediction about how much a commodity will cost, but a prediction of the extraction schedule. Politicians and traders can force prices up or down to some extent, but they don't have much effect on the shape of the extraction curve, because they lack the ability to put more oil in the ground. Hubbert peak theory is not a prediction about the short term behavior of commodities markets, but it can give some insight about when to take long or short positions (as Richard Rainwater demonstrated, by grasping the concept of peak oil several years earlier than most other traders). --Teratornis (talk) 16:59, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Hubbert's peak oil theory only deals with the rate at which quantities of oil are supplied. It deals with a how a finite resource can at first be delivered exponentially, but then later as the law of diminishing returns applies begins to taper off and eventually deplete. His initial model followed coal which did peak and is currently depleting quickly. It does not deal with commodity trading, dollars or changes in demand. The Hubbert Peak theory has been tested and proven oil field after oil field, country after country. The aggregate of all of the countries applies to the world. The theory has been refined from Hubbert's original paper. For example, the original paper does not contain any real math in it. Today's theory has defined the math in much more detail, can deal with a series of problems that Hubbert's original theory could not deal with. Kgrr (talk) 20:30, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

 Done

numeric results of burning oil

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 14:59, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

May I suggest the addition of the following topic?

What will the atmospheric concentration of CO2 be if the proven oil reserves are combusted to CO2?

Same for probable reserves?

Same for p/p natural gas reserves.

Same for p/p unconventional sources.

The article covers many interesting details about the supply side of carbon-based energy, but doesn't mention much about the (non-controversial) stoichiometric effects of exploiting it.

Lllbutcher (talk) 08:17, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Bogus discussion. It's completely rate dependent. If you take a billion years to burn it, there's no significant effect. Do it in one day, you wipe out the mammals.LeadSongDog (talk) 14:24, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Also more appropriate type of topic for a different set of articles. This article doesn't cover pollution. NJGW (talk) 03:12, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't actually know if "Do it in one day, you wipe out the mammals" is true. This is because I don't know how much proven or probable carbon is available (moles). That calculation is missing in this article.

An interesting number to compare available carbon to might be the amount of carbon presently in the atmosphere (moles), since at present most or all carbon-based fuels result in atmospheric CO2.

The production rate dependence is important, because carbon doesn't stay in the atmosphere. The Atmospheric_CO2 wiki page has an interesting discussion about where carbon ends up, and how quickly it moves. Surely a cross-reference would be welcome, as well as a reference to a discussion of other ways to dispose of combustion products.

I recently read a popular press article which says that an average M**2 of earth produces an average of 0.5KG/year in plant mass. This sort of factiod, converted to mass of carbon, would also be interesting to compare to proven/probably reserves of carbon-based materials.

(Another interesting number ot compare against might be the CO2 in the sea.)

I am asking a quantitative question, and it has no political content. It's counting isotopes. It is identical to asking how much dirt was excavated while constructing the Panama Canal, and comparing it to, for instance, the size of a familiar mountain or a familiar volume KM**3.

I don't agree that there is a need to avoid the sensitive topic of "pollution". CO2 is not "pollution". It is mass balance.

Mass calculations, and comparisons to other reservoirs of carbon, would improve this article. EVEN IF there is another article elsewhere discussing movement of C and consequences thereof.

Lllbutcher (talk) 09:00, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Reading my response here, I see that I am really suggesting something different from my first suggestion. I was wrong to originally mention "effects of exploiting it". That doesn't capture the improvement I imagine.

I think the article could be improved by doing numeric calculations of the amount of carbon (here oil) in comparison to other carbon reservoirs without speculating about consequences.

Lllbutcher (talk) 09:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

It's still outside the scope of this article. This topic is about a specific point in production levels of petroleum. This petroleum may not even all be burned once extracted (plastic & lube). The topic you're suggesting would make a whole article by itself, and is an environmental issue rather than economic/geological. Divorcing a discussion of carbon released from burning fossil fuels and the consequences doesn't seem possible or constructive to me. NJGW (talk) 13:57, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia has more articles about Global warming than Peak oil. Compare these two navigation templates:

• {{Global warming}}
• {{Peak oil}}

I.e., the scientific community has paid much more attention to global warming than to peak oil, thus far, and this shows up in the gross Google hit counts for each term:

• "global warming" - Results 1 - 10 of about 55,700,000 for "global warming"

• "peak oil" - Results 1 - 10 of about 4,700,000 for "peak oil".

Perhaps not coincidentally, Wikipedia's articles about global warming are generally farther along than the articles about peak oil. The odds are pretty good that if you think of something worthwhile to add about global warming, it's already in Wikipedia somewhere. Before suggesting that an article needs to include some peripheral topic, search to see what Wikipedia already says about the topic elsewhere. You may find Google to be a better way to search Wikipedia than Wikipedia's built-in search feature (I do):

• Search Wikipedia with Google for: climate effect petroleum combustion
  • For example, burning enough fossil fuel in a short enough time might trigger another anoxic event, which would result in a dieoff of many species, and could form the next round of petroleum for the next sentient lifeform to squander millions of years from now.

See Wikipedia:Building the web - if another article already describes the potential effects of burning "all" the Earth's petroleum by a certain date, then it might be worthwhile to link to it from somewhere in the Peak oil article, or perhaps from somewhere in the {{Peak oil}} navigation template. --Teratornis (talk) 17:21, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

For more information, check the backlinks from Anoxic event:

• Special:Whatlinkshere/Anoxic event
  • Effects of global warming links to Anoxic event

--Teratornis (talk) 20:57, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

 Done

thermal depolymerization

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 14:55, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I know I ought to be bold but I'm not famililar with the topic. Is the paragraph on the thermal depolymerization hype really valuable? I'd delete it because there's more serious stuff to discuss in this section and the article is long enough already. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.205.89 (talk) 17:42, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

It's well sourced and interesting (trash into oil... what are we waiting for!), and it's definitely an unconventional source. Do you have some links that show it to be hype? NJGW (talk) 17:53, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I just remember reading about it when it was hyped several years ago. The claims made were ridiculous and it was hyped precisely because the idea sounds great. Don't get me wrong: recycling is great but this stuff can't compare to tar sands for instance. There's unconventional stuff that can make a difference and that deserves to be in the peak oil article and there's plain weird stuff that can't scale even if it works as advertised. If we're not talking millions of barrels a day (potentially at least), is it relevant to peak oil? I'm of course not disputing the thermal depol article, only its relevance in this article.

Oh, and thanks for editing that link... I'll be careful not to let my proxy do that next time!

I tried asking at your talk page, but if you're using a proxy that might not work... Can you give us a link to the t11 spreadsheet you mentioned? As for the depolymerization, if there's some source that shows it's not scalable I agree it should go... NJGW (talk) 18:24, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

It worked. I answered at the place you referenced on my talkpage. I guess I need to learn proper wikimanners. :-) Where did you expect it?

As to the scalability of thermal depol, I think it's about as obvious as it gets and I'm not going to research the topic... which is why I posted here rather than deleting outright. It would be unorginal lack of reasearch on my part. ;-) Hopefully someone who's current on this stuff (assuming there's still something happening in thermal depol) will see this and do the right thing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.205.89 (talk) 19:29, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

We have a separate thermal depolymerization article, which would be a good place to document the potential of the technology. Creating oil from trash is at best a niche market, because there isn't actually that much carbon-based trash compared to the oil we burn for energy, and because thermal depolymerization has a low oil yield for many types of trash (see the article). We notice trash more because it is persistent, rather than because the annual flux is high enough to significantly substitute for petroleum. This is not to say that niche technologies are unimportant; perhaps with enough niche technologies, they can start to add up to something. --Teratornis (talk) 23:38, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

So do you think that the paragraph should be removed from the peak oil article? I checked the thermal depol article by the way. It's about as dubious as the company... at first I didn't want to touch it but the potential amount of waste available for processing (disregarding other uses for the stuff) was overstated by about three orders of magnitude and I couldn't let that stand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.205.89 (talk) 12:58, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Since nobody spoke up for the paragraph I'm going to remove it to see if that makes some people react. Feel free to revert if you've got a case for thermal depl belonging in the peak oil article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.191.207 (talk) 23:33, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Petroleum manufacture

Resolved

 – As discussed below, peak oil by substitution is original research. WP:OR Extractive petroleum is off topic Kgrr (talk) 14:46, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Peak oil inherently depends on oil being an extractive process. If you could manufacture it, peak oil becomes irrelevant except as a curiosity. For NPOV reasons, it should be made clear that peak oil does not effect non-extractive petroleum and cover at least by reference some of the non-extractive ways people are exploring making oil. I tried to get a bit in along these lines but was quickly reverted. TMLutas (talk) 22:48, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Moved from above:

Actually, I believe there are several Silicon Valley funded startups addressing the fuels situation. The Moore's law people are a diverse bunch and some seem to be paying attention. TMLutas (talk) 22:28, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I deleted your addition to the lead because I don't see any discussion that this is happening/is going to happen. If you can provide some sources which state that enough is being/can be produced to make a difference that's different. NJGW (talk) 22:32, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

(undent) Manufacturing synthetic oil is not the trick... that's been done at least since WWII (though not in useful quantities). If you have reliable sources that show that the manufacture of oil could cause "peak oil [to] become irrelevant", or indeed even put the smallest of dents in the issue, then by all means lets discuss it. But to come in and say that you've heard of some start-ups so lets make changes to the definition in the lead of a GA is a bit premature. NJGW (talk) 23:02, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

You'd need a source of energy as well. If that source is going to be fossil fuel (and it would have to be for now and the foreseeable future), then you're still going to be stuck with a peak. Even tar sands are processed with fossil fuel energy... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 23:18, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

You asked for sources so try here or maybe here. So there are at least two companies that have pulled this off in the lab. This is not synthetic oil like CTL which is still extractive and will run out in the reasonable near future.

The second source is right out. There is no way of verifying anything written there, and so it violates wp:rs. The second source is a start, but there's no indication of scalability or a time frame. Also, it's only gasoline, so it fits in the mitigation section of the article, not the crude oil sections. NJGW (talk) 00:59, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

"There is no way of verifying anything written there" is such a confession of poor research skills. Did you try Google? virent biogasoline would have netted you a powerpoint from the midwestern governor's association energy summit last here. here's an html view. It took me less than a minute to find that link. A few seconds more yielded this which points out that there are at least two other companies on the same trail of using manufacturing techniques to generate petroleum out of simple sugars. TMLutas (talk) 02:59, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Like I said, the first source is not usable in wikipedia. The two you give now are just pointing to startups, and don't indicate commercial success or scalability, and once again, do not create crude oil. You are bordering on being uncivil with your comments. I suggest we keep this discussion about the facts surrounding sources. NJGW (talk) 18:09, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Why is commercial success or scalability part of the criteria for inclusion? Please do not make up your own standards. TMLutas (talk) 22:58, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

If it ain't scalable it ain't touching Peak oil. Pretty simple. NJGW (talk) 23:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

They're working on it, much like peak oil enthusiasts are still working on the date of the peak (and from the commentary on the petroleum page have been doing so longer than I had thought). Very often such technologies can and do scale so we should be mentioning them in the abstract as a way out of the more garish "end of the world as we know it" peak scenarios and do it early enough so that people who don't dig through the whole article aren't mislead. TMLutas (talk) 23:39, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

How about mentioning my pet mitigation in the lead as well? Surely the fact that nobody knows (it's not mere debate: the data is simply not there) the ultimate date of the peak means that any fantasy would do? No numbers required, right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 00:02, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

At synthetic fuel, the definition states "Synthetic fuel or synfuel is any liquid fuel obtained from coal, natural gas, or biomass. It can sometimes refer to fuels derived from other solids such as oil shale, tar sand, waste plastics, or from the fermentation of biomatter." If we're talking biofuel, we're past talking about Peak oil. Otherwise, with the other feed stocks mentioned, it's all still petroleum (or at least coal) related anyway. These issues (such as coal liquification) are discussed in the article already. NJGW (talk) 23:44, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Since I *am* talking about biofuel petroleum using sunlight and simple sugars and it's currently in the "we can do this but we haven't ramped up yet" phase, it's at least as worthy of discussion as peak oil itself. TMLutas (talk) 00:47, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Are you talking about biofuel or petroleum? They are two different things. See my comment about mitigation vs. crude above. Peak oil is about petroleum production, and mitigating the effects of peak oil is a topic that does deserve discussion. I definitely welcome more wp:rs links about this, especially ones that indicate success. This could be further expanded at the mitigation of peak oil article. NJGW (talk) 00:59, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Do you read the links I've been supplying? The two are not mutually exclusive as one can tweak organisms to excrete petroleum. Petroleum can be described as a range of liquid hydrocarbons irrespective of how you get them. And let's be honest, nobody cares whether they come out of the ground or out of some cellular soup as LS9 is doing or using some solid state catalyst as Virent is doing. If they burn nicely using the current petroleum infrastructure and are chemically the same as the stuff we have been pulling out of the ground, it's petroleum. TMLutas (talk) 03:04, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

See my continuing concerns about your links above. Also, the two are muntually exclusive in re: to peak oil. This article is not called peak biofuel for a reason. Biofuel you put in your tank, crude oil used to be much cheaper than biofuel but had to be shipped and refined. Crude's applications have been much more widely researched and implemented, and that's why we have a petroleum economy, not a biogas economy. If you don't understand those issues, you are missing the big point surrounding this article. NJGW (talk) 18:14, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I've no issue in researching and improving links. That's par for the course in the development of any article. I do have an issue in POV pushing and the I thought I'd try to drive toward a more balanced article before I started tagging it. 23:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

This article has passed GA review, so new links need to be at least of that caliber. Stating that an unproven technology will affect Peak oil is POV. I still haven't seen any sources that state that petroleum production is being researched. The sources you provide only mention biofuel, which is covered in the mitigation section. The whole mitigation section is about things that can affect the timing of Peak oil. Feel free to expand it with wp:rs links, as well as the Biofuel page and the Mitigation of peak oil page. NJGW (talk) 23:18, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

TMLutas, I reverted your edits because you were essentially vandalizing unrelated parts of the articles to make a point. Unless I missed something, there's nothing groundbreaking in the information you're presenting: people have been making synthetic crude, biofuels and such for a long time. There's a section of the article for that stuff as well as whole specific articles (mitigation, biofuels and such) linked from the peak article. There's a reason the article heading is the way it is despite the fact that we can convert other hydrocarbons (or carbohydrates) into oil or oil substitutes: in order to make peak oil a historical curiosity as you say, you'd need *a lot* of those hydrocarbons. You're talking about converting single sugars... well, where are those sugars going to come from? Please stop a moment and think about the amount of oil that are being extracted (about 73 million barrels a day). Every one of these barrels packs a whole lot of fossil energy. Maybe you're unfamiliar with the unit or this talk of millions and billions make you glaze over but I'm sure you can picture how much that is if you try. Now, unless and until there's a reasonably practical way to produce that much (or even a quarter as much) of the stuff, alternatives won't meaningfully impact peak oil. Right now, CTL and tar sands processing seem to have the most potential as alternatives and the date of the peak (2005 or now) already depends on whether one includes those in "oil". The thing is, both of these are subject to peaks unlike fuels made out of plants. The problem with plant-based oil substitutes is producing enough of them without expending too much energy in the process. Do the math! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 09:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

From your revert "reverting all changes by TMLutas because it's easier that way". That's simply uncalled for. Subsequently you said "like I said I removed everything, justified on unjustified as the article is long enough as it is" when you reverted what Driftwoodzebulin put back in. These are not your only reversions. In fact, you seem to have 4 reverts of three editors in the past 24 hours. (timestamps: 18:19, 30 June 2008 08:48, 1 July 2008 10:51, 1 July 2008 and 14:15, 1 July 2008) You may wish to take a break. TMLutas (talk) 23:15, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

You're not paying attention. I did not revert: I just corrected a glaring factual error that Drift missed as well as some really poor phrasing. It's NGJW who reverted it because, as it turns out, your ref support you claim. I don't think that such a claim really needs to be supported but it was a wrongheaded edit to begin with so I'm not going to defend it. I reverted NGJW as well, in support on your position on extraction vs. production for instance. But when I revert NGJW, he follows up with a better edit that I don't need to revert. Why don't you try that? Alternatively, your could admit you're not knowledgeable enough about peak oil to edit this article without bringing it up in talk beforehand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 23:37, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

It's important to remember that this article, after having passed GA review, was edited and tweaked still further by many editors from a variety of POV's, all moving towards FA status (the main thing holding us back is someone with enough time to improve the way the links look, and sort out all "cn"'s and the criticism section). Any substantial changes especially to the lead need to be discussed here. This has been pointed out in previous threads. NJGW (talk) 23:24, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

For what that's worth I don't think this article is very good. It's a bit of a mess, it's too long, there's information in there that's going to get outdated quickly if it's not outdated already... and so on. I guess I'm a perfectionist. Still, the topic isn't easy to say the least not to mention controversial so it's not surprising there are much neater articles. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 23:49, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Please discuss major changes and changes to the lead in the talk page before making them. Kgrr (talk) 12:53, 11 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

"Extractive petroleum"

Resolved

 – NJGW (talk) 23:20, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Googleing ""extractive production" petroleum" returns links where a distinction between liquid (extraction) vs. solid (mining, ie coal) production is needed, as well as cases of "extrative, production". Total results are 167. As such it appears to be a neologism in regards to a fossil fuel vs. synthetic oil discussion, and therefore I don't think it belongs in the article (definitely not the lead). Besides that it just sounds like bad English. I really don't think this word belongs in the first sentence of the article. NJGW (talk) 23:44, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure how you got 167 results. For me "extractive petroleum" had 694 results, without quotes, 308,000. Since making petroleum was 100% an extractive enterprise until recently, I'm not surprised at the low numbers. I didn't quite catch your alternative construction how you want to present bug and catalyst created petroleum manufacture. Surely you're not just being a linguistic pedant in hopes of just keeping the info out or not prominently placed. TMLutas (talk) 01:19, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I guess you didn't know about Wikipedia:Avoid neologisms, which states "A new term doesn't belong in Wikipedia unless there are reliable sources specifically about the term — not just sources which mention it briefly or use it in passing." The reason for this is because the terms are not clearly defined. Did you find any usable sources that discuss the fossil/synthetic difference in terms of "extrative" vs. "manufactured". Also, keep in mind the discussion above about more petroleum vs. mitigation. We have to decide which one we're talking about here.

You're misusing the term neologism. Extractive is not a neologism nor is petroleum one. Extractive petroleum is simply a description of the ordinary process of pulling petroleum out of the ground as opposed to the brand spanking new "have petroleum crapped out by yeast cells" process that they've invented in the last year or two. It wasn't often used in the past because the extractive nature of petroleum drilling was assumed because, guess what, nobody had figured out any other way of acquiring the stuff so the adjective was not needed at the time. Now it is needed to differentiate between traditional petroleum extraction and the new techniques of petroleum creation/manufacture which may just relegate peak oil to the status of a historical curiosity. Again, where's your better alternative? TMLutas (talk) 03:12, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

This thread was already moot as the phrase has been rewritten. It does still indicate that peak oil is about extracted petroleum. Is there something else you are after now? NJGW (talk) 18:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Nah, I just hadn't seen the rewrite prior to my most recent comment in this thread. Peace TMLutas (talk) 23:17, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Also, as you can see I searched for "extrative production" petroleum because that's the phrase that is highlighted in the first sentence at the moment. The term highlighted is actually "extrative petroleum production" , which gets zero google hits besides this article. Also, the Wikipedia:Manual of Style does dictate the need for good sounding English. NJGW (talk) 01:44, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

My intent in siding with TMLutas on "extractive" was indeed to distinguish between liquid oil extraction which peak oil is about and stuff like tar sands which is outside the scope of peak oil. I thought it also made TMLutas point (two birds with one stone). Now, if it sounds bad, by all means delete it! Maybe someone will find a better (but still *terse*) way of stating this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 09:55, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

This discussion is off topic and thus closed.Kgrr (talk) 02:31, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Oil no longer forming?

Resolved

 – Kgrr (talk) 12:48, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

The article says:

It is widely assumed that the world's oil supply is essentially fixed because it is no longer being naturally produced. Several hundred million years ago, plankton and bacteria thrived in the oceans of the then carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. Also at that time, volcanic sulfur lined the ocean floor, preventing living creatures from inhabiting, and therefore consuming, the plankton and bacteria after their death. Those plankton and bacteria that settled in porous sandstone or limestone and those plankton and bacteria that were then capped by shale or salt were allowed to heat and become pressurized to form oil.

Is this accurate? My first guess would be that the same processes that formed the oil we use today millions of years ago are still in play, but that they act so slowly that for our purposes the amount of oil in the world is a fixed value. The paragraph above says the processes that formed the oil simply no longer exist, and fail to give a reference for this claim. TastyCakes (talk) 23:27, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

There are some who hold that reservoirs refill and that new oil is being created but they've hardly proven their case yet. The majority believe that oil formation is over for the most part. If we're going to get more oil, we're going to have to make it. TMLutas (talk) 23:41, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

I understand what the article says, I'd like to see a source for that information though. I am not saying "reservoirs refill", I'm saying that I find it more likely that environments exist in the world today that over millions of years will result in oil (specifically kerogen) generation. These environments include any anoxic environment that allows preservation of organic matter in sediments, such as shallow (but not too shallow) seas and ocean shelves. My petroleum geology class certainly led me to believe that oil creation is an ongoing process in the earth, although of course different eras have different sea levels and climates which change the amount and type of hydrocarbon created. While, according to my text book, the majority of our oil today came from the middle jurassic to the "Aptian-Turonian" eras (88.5 to 169 million years ago), more recent eras like the Oligocene-Miocene (as recent as 5.3 million years ago) also contribute a significant portion of our hydrocarbons, particularly the shallow ones. In fact the more I look through this text book the more convinced I am that this point in the article is incorrect. TastyCakes (talk) 01:25, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

The paragraph quoted in italics above is mostly incorrect. It is basically true that the worlds oil supply is essentially fixed, but that is because the world's oil reserves formed over a period of about 500 million years, from the Cambrian age to the present, and that's a long time compared to the few hundred years it will take to use it all up. The truth is that oil is still being formed in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea, but not at any great rate. The rest of the text, "carbon dioxide rich atmosphere", "volcanic sulfur", "settled in porous sandstone", etc. is misinformation from someone other than a petroleum geologist. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 04:22, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, this formation process is explained in detail in http://www.abc.net.au/science/crude/ . I don't know how kosher this is in the geological community. Perhaps you can find out. (I'm not so interested in _your_ opinion of it, only what is verifiable in scientific papers) --Jaded-view (talk) 06:15, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Well if I was only concerned with _my_ opinion I would have injected it into the article without stopping here first, just as whoever put that stuff in in the first place did. TastyCakes (talk) 16:47, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

The Australian documentary seems to be fairly accurate and reflects the scientific consensus on how oil was formed. There are a few red herrings: the presence of dinosaurs is only relevant insofar as there were dinosaurs wandering around other parts of the planet at the same time that oil was being formed in the sea that would later become the Arabian desert. And the Jurassic is only relevant insofar as that was when the biggest of the middle eastern oil fields started forming. Other regions had their oil formed in different time periods. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 01:29, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Cool, now if it will only load fast enough for me to actually watch! NJGW (talk) 01:35, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

So what needs to be done to the article to close this issue?Kgrr (talk) 13:42, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Delete the inaccurate paragraph, which I believe someone has already done. In addition to being wrong, it's off-topic and is covered in other articles. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 17:13, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The inaccurate paragraph was deleted.Kgrr (talk) 12:48, 11 July 2008 (UTC)  Done

Resolved: This is no longer a good article

Resolved

 – Having no {cn}s is a requirement of FA's, not GA's Kgrr (talk) 13:59, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

NJGW asserts above that this article has passed good article review. Unfortunately, we've got 13 citation needed tags live as of writing. That means it simply does not qualify as a good article. Any objections to delisting? TMLutas (talk) 23:47, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, my objection is that with all the time you've spent arguing these minute points you could have been trying to track down the sources in question or else removing what isn't factual. Are you trying to improve the article or derail it? NJGW (talk) 23:57, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Also, having not {cn}'s is a requirement of FA's not GA's. From Wikipedia:Good article criteria:

A good article has the following attributes.

1. It is well written
2. It is factually accurate and verifiable
3. It is broad in its coverage
4. It is neutral
5. It is stable
6. It is illustrated, if possible, by images

-NJGW (talk) 00:09, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

That's very nice you trying to assign my volunteer time. I'm neither the boss of you nor you of me. And contrary to your post on my talk page, a discussion of article status does not mean "not constructive". It just means I felt like putting on horns and playing devils advocate for a bit. Shall we keep our discussions limited to the article?

The article fails on GA criteria two and speedy fail criteria 3 in the good article criteria you linked to above. It has a large number (13 when I counted yesterday) of citations needed. Once you hit a speedy fail reason you stop the review. There might be other problems beyond. It very well likely passed the GA criteria at some point. It's drifted since then. TMLutas (talk) 13:19, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Of course it passed the GA criteria at some point. It's drifted since then. So far, all I see is the result of a lot of POV pushing. I tell you what. I will give authors on this article one month to resolve the 's. On 8/9/2008, I will delete any sentence that is controversial and not properly referenced. Finished. Kgrr (talk) 02:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

 Done

"there is still plenty of oil in the world"

Resolved

 – This discussion is off topic. See Oil depletion. Kgrr (talk) 14:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

In an edit, this followed "while not disputing the concept of world wide peak oil". This is essentially a strawman argument and one should not let the reader believe that peak oil is about a dearth of oil. Indeed, it is about "challenges to extracting it in sufficient quantities". I guess the disagreement between these guys and peak oil theorists would be on the nature of the challenges. People with different backgrounds will of course point at different challenges and some will emphasize minor challenges when it suits their political goals. Also, I have not checked the ref but I doubt it can speak for "most" executives. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 09:08, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Of course peak oil is about a dearth of oil. It is about 1) the point after which there is less oil being pumped each year, which, according to the bell shaped models pushed here, 2) happens at roughly the point the world has used 50% of its extractable oil. When production decreased in the 70s, criterion 1) was filled but criterion 2) wasn't. Because of that, the 70s drop was not "peak oil", as is plain to see in hindsight. As I read it, you are saying that another political disruption would cause peak oil. I believe that to be fundamentally out of step with what people mean by peak oil. BP and other major oil companies have all given similar predictions on oil production, that it will increase for decades to come. I think you would be surprised by how similar the opinions on this matter are from the top people of all the big western oil companies. I am rewording and putting it later in the article, although I think this point (that the people most involved with the industry have a totally different opinion on the timing of peak oil) is a very important one and should be in the lead paragraph. TastyCakes (talk) 16:32, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

No, I'm not trying to predict "political disruptions" (of what? some fantasy non-political production). I'm saying that peak oil is not about the amount of oil underground but the speed of extraction. You seem to understand that so why do you think this thing about there being plenty of oil left in the ground is anything but a strawman?

Peak oil is not about that 50% business. That's a heuristic used in the case of regions where production wasn't restrained. The world case is very different. Also, there is no such thing as "the world's extractable oil" actually. You're most likely referring URR which is something else (and a moving target too).16:52, 2 July 2008 (UTC) 80.238.240.15

Show me why you think peak oil is not about the "50% business". If you want to consider political issues boundaries that effectively eliminate that oil from extractable reserves, fine. But the whole idea behind the "roughly bell shaped" peak oil concept is that production begins to decline at the point when you have extracted approximately 50% of the oil you can. The oil companies say we've extracted a quarter or a third. I'm not saying they're right, I'm saying that is where the fundamental disagreement lies between "peakers" and "big oil" and it should be pointed out in the article, sooner rather than later. TastyCakes (talk) 17:01, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

What do you want me to show you? The historical part of the curve looks nothing like a Bell curve. The reason is not merely "political" either: it's got to do with imperialism, bolchevism and global inequalities in development. Extraction has been retarded for lack of demand from the global poor for decades. That much is obvious, yes? Also, because there are no other worlds to pick up when depletion kicks in, the second half of the curve is not likely to look like any region.

There's no shortage of "peakers" who're saying that we're well past 50% actually. I don't think URR forecasts are all that relevant in the current context. They used to be back when the limits to production were not apparent yet. But yes, there's clearly a discrepancy between the Internet and Wall Street and it should be explained eventhough forecasts keep changing. The position of major governments should be noted as well. What I'm opposed too is editing the lead in isolation of the articles and its siblings such as the article on timing. 17:26, 2 July 2008 (UTC) 80.238.240.15

I agree timing is controversial, but I think it is the central, and in some ways defining, controversy of peak oil. TastyCakes (talk) 17:24, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Not anymore. It's all about the decline rate now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 17:29, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Says... you. This is exactly my point. You are apparently of the opinion that we have already passed peak oil. "Big Oil", the US Department of Energy and others disagree. The severity of the problems entailed are hugely dependent on the amount of time we have to mitigate them. Consequently, there is huge disagreement of the importance and urgency of the issue. The article shouldn't take one point of view or the other, but rather spell out both. TastyCakes (talk) 17:41, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

No, I'm agnostic as to whether we already peaked or not. I'm saying that we're on a plateau (that is not controversial anymore, see CERA for instance) and that the exact date of peak does not matter much. Clearly, supply is already constrained. What matters is the depletion rate because there's more uncertainty there. A late peak with a steep decline rate would be way worse than an early peak with a slow decline. 17:49, 2 July 2008 (UTC) 80.238.240.15 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk)

According to the BP Energy Statstical Review for 2007, oil production in the world has increased from 74.9million barrels a day in 2000 to 81.5 million barrels per day in 2007, an almost 9% increase. That doesn't seem like a plateau to me. Of course we could be at the beginning of a plateau now, but with the information we have at hand it is impossible to say for sure. Perhaps CERA has some divining powers I am unaware of. The decline rate bit is interesting, maybe it should be in the article somewhere... TastyCakes (talk) 17:55, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

There are some very good discussions on these subjects above. If what you are asking is not answered there, feel free to make some suggestions about the article here. NJGW (talk) 18:11, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

These are not oil numbers: they're way too high. The plateau started in late 2004, not in 2000. You can fact-check if you think I'm making this up but please read the fine print for your data first. Obviously, no one has got a crystal ball and that plateau might already be over for all I know. 20:34, 2 July 2008 (UTC) 80.238.240.15 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk)

Maybe I'm reading the data wrong, but I don't see any qualifiers given in it. You can download the Excel sheet of the data at the BP site. There doesn't seem to be a plateau starting in 2004. I had heard the "world is using 81 million barrels of oil per day" statistic before, it doesn't seem too high to me. But perhaps you're right and there is something I'm missing. TastyCakes (talk) 05:44, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

I downloaded the spreadsheet last year and that version has the following small print: "* Includes crude oil, shale oil, oil sands and NGLs ( the liquid content of natural gas where this is recovered separately)." Are you sure you gave it a good look? Not sure what they mean with their comment but NGPLs are not really liquid. My figure included condensate but excluded NGPL. This might seem arbitrary but there's some logic in the madness. For lack of data (crude and condensate are often reported together and sometimes blended), all I can give is a poor guesstimate of condensate production: 2.5 to 3 mbpd. So that would put Q1 production of oil proper at 70 to 71 mbpd based on EIA's estimates (after removing condensate and the stuff from Alberta). You hear all kinds of misleading figures. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 11:00, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Condensates are one thing, but I don't see why including oil sands and oil shale production is misleading. The oil that comes out of the plant is used just like conventional oil... Anyway, in summary world oil production is a fuzzy, complicated picture. TastyCakes (talk) 16:42, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Which is why the exact date of the peak is not a big deal and +-1% is effectively flat. You've got to be careful about tar sands and such though because the reserves are huge and the production dynamics are different. Obviously, if you include them in your URR, that 50% rule of thumb goes right out of the window. Peak oil theory is about a specific pattern of discovery and extraction which follows from the nature of the resource (and from ecnomic and political factors as well of course), not from the chemical composition of the processed products. It's important not to confuse the oil curve from the "mitigation curve" (aggregate substitutes) or else we're talking about peak liquids or some such which is a different matter.

This question is completely off subject. Peak oil deals with the *rate* at which oil can be supplied, not with its depletion. It has nothing to do with the quantity of oil left. In fact, there is plenty of oil left, but the *rate* at which it can be extracted slows after peak oil. The article that deals with how much oil is left is Oil depletion. Kgrr (talk) 20:37, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Not quite. In calculus terms, the production rate is the first derivative of the quantity of production with respect to time. The quantity curve is probably an "S"-shaped curve, in which case the first derivative is probably a bell-shaped curve. People looking at these kinds of trends often get confused by these curves if they only see the first part, which look like hyperboles, and assume they will go on increasing forever. No they don't, they have a second half which they haven't seen yet. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 00:46, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Not sure what you're replying to. Do you mean that the quantity of production curve goes flat when there's no oil left? That's obvioulsy not the case because some of the oil is never going to be extracted... so I wonder what your point is exactly. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.191.207 (talk) 14:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually he's talking about the total amount extracted in the past. The production per time unit curve is the derivative of that. Here's an example of the two curves (though not actually peak oil graphs) that a quick web search got me: [4]. The problem is that we are about half-way through the two curves, but if you are only looking at the blue set of data in that link, it looks like we'll keep extracting oil forever. If you factor in the rate of production however (the red data), then you see that the true picture is very different. I believe RMG is saying people get confused by only looking at amounts (instead of rates), which is essentially what Kgrr is saying as well (as far as I understand it, the oil depletion page was made so people would stop talking about the "end of oil" here, which is more contentious and full of prediction than the observable science behind this topic). The difference may be (correct me if I'm wrong) that RMG might be suggesting we make it more explicit here how the two concepts are tied together. NJGW (talk) 16:21, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

That's basically correct. Calculus is all about limits, and you never actually reach the limit, you only approach it. Newton figured it out, but unfortunately most people don't understand the math involved. These types of curves pop up all the time when you're dealing with natural phenomenon. If you put some bacteria on a Petri dish with some food, the amount of food consumed will follow an "S" shaped curve and the number of bacteria (i.e. the rate of consumption) will follow a bell-shaped curve somewhat like the example NJGW gave. The peak of the bell-shaped consumption curve will probably occur when half the resource has been consumed, not when all of it has been consumed. So, the question with respect to peak oil is not "has all the oil been consumed" but is "has half the oil been consumed", which brings up the other questions, "are the OPEC producers lying about their reserves and have we hit the half-way point already." I'm not going to put anything in the article myself, since it would be considered wp:OR, but someone somewhere must have done something similar because it's really basic math (if you consider calculus to be basic math). RockyMtnGuy (talk) 17:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what makes you think this kind of math is difficult. The math's not the issue. The issue is that there is no big tank of oil underground as in your petri dish analogy. If anything, it's the discontinuous nature of the resource that's responsible for the shape of the extraction rate curve. There's a neat image at the French peak oil article which illustrates this (ability to read French is not required to get the point if you're familiar with the topic). On the top of that, we're dealing with highly complex social and economic processes that are much less efficient than bacteria. This ensures that there will be a whole lot more oil left over than in your analogy and I don't know how you figure mathematic limits can help with that.

The "half" idea refers to the "recoverable oil" and not to the total amount of oil. The thing is, no one knows how much of it is ultimately going to be recoverable. It doesn't matter much for the timing of the peak or the initial decline rate but the amount of recovered oil doesn't need to move a whole lot to meaningfully change the shape of the rightmost part of the extraction rate curve. This also implies that the better part of the curve is not driven so much by the amount of "recoverable oil" as by the amount of easy oil. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.191.207 (talk) 23:52, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Again, the discussion of how much oil is left has nothing to do with the Peak oil article. Peak oil deals with the peak rate that oil will be produced. The production rate curve will go flat and then go to zero when the recoverable oil is economically depleted. How much oil is left has to do with the Oil depletion article. Let's close this discussion. It's not going anywhere since it does not even have to do with writing this article.Kgrr (talk) 02:24, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I just found a copy of the original paper by Hubbert. It's quite current for something written in 1956. He actually does use calculus to relate production rate to quantity by P = dQ/dt, which is what I just said. Thus, production rates and depletion are intrinsically related. Also, the peak is not flat, it could be quite sharp, which makes hitting it an economic crisis for people who do not have time to adapt. And the curve never goes to zero except at t=infinity. As Hubbert points out, oil will never be completely be exhausted, it will just become very scarce. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 05:11, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Hubbert's original paper was one of the references in the lead of Peak oil. Some recent editors have done so much stripping that the fundamental reference was thrown out. I have replaced it. Thanks.

Now let me take this conversation with the topic at hand - this article. And the discussion about "There is plenty of oil left" is off-subject here and now closed here and will continue in the talk pages for Talk:Oil depletion.Kgrr (talk) 13:31, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

 Done

Breaking up the lead

Resolved

 – There is no support for "Peak oil by substitution". Wikipedia does not allow original research WP:OR. Kgrr (talk) 14:04, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I've made a sandbox to illustrate what I think would be an improved lead in for this article. I think that if we can identify the two ways that we might peak (hubbert style peaking and substitution style peaking) we're much less likely to have edit wars. TMLutas (talk) 22:40, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

There are many other potential causes for peak oil such as supply cuts, sabotage and wars all of which happen in the real world. If the lead dwelled on everyone's fantasies on the top of that, how long would it be? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.238.240.15 (talk) 23:45, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree with the two topics you've split it into either... It also ignores all the middle cases, where supply is short but this spurs the development of sufficient alternatives in time to "save the day". As I said before, I think the controversy behind peak oil can be wrapped up as 1) when it will happen and 2) how effectively will we be able to deal with it. And I think the first thing has a strong impact on the second. To me an intro should have: The definition (permanent oil production decrease), the importance (heavy reliance of modern life on hydrocarbons), the increasing world demand for oil, the controversy (when, how bad) and maybe a passing mention of early thinkers on the subject (Hubbert). Possibly retain a mention of current high oil prices. TastyCakes (talk) 00:05, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't be averse to the addition of a third break entitled "mixed cases" or some better sounding equivalent but you'd actually have to write it. Click the link and show me how the original sandbox version could be improved. But don't imagine that the only controversy is over when peak oil will happen. When did we peak in whale oil? Who cares? We figured out that petroleum was better and moved on. Peak oil only matters if we don't move on so whether we will or not is vital to the importance of the article. TMLutas (talk) 21:59, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to let you guys hash out what you think the lead should look like for a while in the sandbox; I've worked to much on the present lead to be useful in the planning stages of a new lead, other than to restate my feelings above on what the lead should contain. I'll also point some old editors of the page to this discussion so they can help. NJGW (talk) 00:33, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

NJGW and TMLutas, I disagree. I don't think the lead should be broken up or changed to accommodate a fringe theory - peak oil by substitution.

First of all, as one of the original editors of this article, having worked to get the article to GA status and a son of a petroleum geologist, I come with a huge amount of bias. Furthermore, I have not been watching peak oil because I've had to fight my own battles with the Peak uranium article. Unfortunately, it appears that this article has been visited by people pushing their POV.

In its early days, this article was inundated with people insisting that abiotic oil was a reality. When all oil ever discovered has biomarkers that point out that all oil has biotic origins. Therefore, the abiotic oil theory is fringe science.

I see no evidence that peak oil will be induced by a substitution by any credible source. Although some substitutes for plastics have been found, and there are a few alternatives in transportation such as electric cars, there is simply not enough energy out there currently to substitute petroleum. There is nothing mainstream about the peak oil through substitution theory. Thus it's completely fringe. At best, I think that the peak oil by substitution theory should be moved into a separate article. Kgrr (talk) 22:00, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

First of all, we're talking about manufactured oil that comes from simple sugars. That doesn't fit most people's definition of abiotic oil. In fact, I wrote elsewhere of my personal doubts that there's any significant reservoir refilling going on. One of the petroleum manufacturers, LS9, is apparently saying they're going to commercial scale production between 2011-2013, an event that is certainly close enough that it deserves mention. I suspect that other competitors like Virent will either are aiming for similar dates or their business plans are going to be shot to hell. But even if LS9 is alone, the successful creation of an industrial scale petroleum manufacturing process would radically change the game.

I'm not sure if something with real investors, including major oil company money, that can create actual product today and is at the stage of trying to scale production to significant quantities deserves being called a theory at all, much less a fringe theory. Alternative labels would include nascent market and promising real world alternative. Either LS9 et al are committing massive commercial fraud or we're way beyond theory and into application development. TMLutas (talk) 04:47, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I was not trying to say that synthetic oil or fuel from sugars was abiotic oil. What I was saying was that synthetic oil or fuel is no way going to cause a peak in oil production. I am saying that peak oil due to synthetic oil is fringe science. There is no way that the world is going to produce enough synthetic oil or fuel at a low enough price to displace the demand for petroleum.

That's a statement of fact. It's not even entirely on point because for substitution to cause a peak, it is not necessary to displace the demand for petroleum but merely to be available for manufacture at a price lower than the marginal "last barrel" that would supply demand. If, while on the upside of the Hubbert style curve, the last barrel was being lifted out of the earth @ $50/barrel and you could effectively manufacture petroleum at $49 taking into account all costs, you're not going to drill for $50 but manufacture for $49 and you have your peak even though demand is largely satisfied by traditional oil. On the downside of the curve, if manufacture can be scaled past the depletion rate of traditional oil, you will have steady/declining prices and less oil being lifted out of the ground to the extent that less expensive barrels will be manufactured in preference to more expensive drilling. This role for oil substitution is important to gain a realistic, as opposed to hysterical understanding of what is/will be happening in the real world. TMLutas (talk) 22:07, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I did read the Grist article you posted about LS9 and their "renewable petroleum". But there is no way that they can grow this technology to begin to displace the 88 million barrels of oil produced a day by the world, not even a small fraction of it. I am not calling "renewable petroleum" fringe theory. I am calling "peak oil by substitution" fringe theory. I hope you understand the difference.

You were unclear before. Thanks for clarifying. Peak oil by substitution is not even a theory but rather eco 101 applied to this situation (see below). Feel free to improve the term. TMLutas (talk) 22:07, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I am going to be very clear: Someone else has to have written a scholarly article about peak oil through substitution. Then, we can write a Wikipedia article about it. I'm sorry, we are not going to break up the lead of a well recognized theory to include a fringe theory that has not been published anywhere. Wikipedia cannot accept original research. Kgrr (talk) 02:12, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Now as far as creating two peak oil theories inside this article, I'm still against it. 1) The current article is about peak oil, specifically Hubbert's peak theory about oil, not about other theories that have been advanced by others. 2) Wikipedia does not allow original research. Everything in Wikipedia must be referenced. I see no articles that come from a credible source (think Google Scholar) that even talk about peak oil induced by substitution. If you can find credible references, I have nothing against writing an article about an opposing theory. (in the same way that some people wrote a very POV and fringe science article about abiotic oil which does not exist). 3) This article is already to its maximum size. Adding a new, off topic theory to it would cause it to tear by the seams. If an alternate theory does actually exist according to scientific circles, it would have to be in another article. It certainly would be referenced in the See also section. 4) I do see the need for a section introducing alternatives for oil such as Ethanol, Corn plastics, oil from cellulose, and "renewable petroleum"... and I would appreciate your contribution here. Kgrr (talk) 20:42, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

It's pretty much eco 101 that substitute goods of equal utility that are lower in cost than the original goods cause the original good to stop being produced, either entirely or substantially. The terminology used for this blazingly obvious observation have not been generally talked about in terms of "peak" production of buggy whips, whale oil, or any of the other myriad goods that have been subject to the phenomenon. I'm more than happy to label it as you like but I do not find it fringe at all that such substitutions happen and would be astounded to hear of any credible economist who would doubt that such things do happen.

Separately, you say that there is no way that they can possibly scale enough to cause a peak. I'm taking the position that we don't know whether they'll be able to scale or not but the phenomenon is interesting and enough on point that it should be included in the article. This seems to put things in your court. You're the one making the definite claim here. I've provided some evidence (involved investors, schedule for industrial scale production) that this is not impractical snake oil. You, on the other hand, have provided nothing. I await your links and evidence, without which you are not actually making a positive contribution. TMLutas (talk) 22:07, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I fully understand substitute goods and understand the possibility of peak through substitution could possibly exist. The "evidence" you claim (involved investors, schedule for industrial scale production) does not make for a "peak oil by substitution theory". But this is your theory or POV and not one that has been published by a scientific journal. You have not provided one credible source to back that this even an accepted theory. Futhermore, Wikipedia does not allow original research. I'm sorry I have found nothing searching in Google Scholar for your theory. None of the articles mention any of this fringe theory. You have to provide the source(s) for your claim of this fringe theory, not me. This is how Wikipedia works. Again, I still disagree with modifying the lead with your theory or a fringe theory in it. The discussion is closed. Kgrr (talk) 02:04, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Could you dial down the arrogance to a dull roar? That being said, you're right that it needs better documentation before a revamped lead with this in it gets put in. That doesn't mean the discussion is closed on your say so though. It just means there needs to be more work done. 207.145.26.125 (talk) 20:16, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm glad you agree that the lead needs to be fixed. However, we cannot have original research in Wikipedia. See WP:OR Kgrr (talk) 05:28, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I've already said more or less the same thing earlier, but here is how I think the lead should look:
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. Because the world's petroleum supply is effectively fixed, if the heavy dependence of many countries on oil is not mitigated before the decline phase begins, a world energy crisis could develop as the availability of oil drops causing prices to rise, perhaps dramatically. People have predicted the possibility of reductions in standard of living, economic output and even a breakdown of society as a result. While there is little argument that peak oil will eventually occur, when it will occur and the consequences of the event are subjects of significant disagreement.

This is very close to where it should be.Kgrr (talk) 05:17, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I think we should forget all this substitution peak vs exhaustion peak stuff... TastyCakes (talk) 20:26, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Kgrr (talk) 05:17, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

 Done

"the world has adequate reserves for more than a century"

Resolved

 – Added more supporting text to support Abdullah S. Jum'ah, President, Director and CEO of ARAMCO's position. Kgrr (talk) 14:31, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

And this gave *me* pause. One of the refs seems to be behind a paywall and the other only talks reserves (in passing), not peak. It seems that this, inasmuch as it belongs at all on the peak oil page, concerns reserves and should be in the reserves section, not in the "no peak" section. I did not remove or relocate the paragraph without bringing it up here first because it seems some of you believe peak oil is not strictly about flow rate (mbpd) but also about reserves (see above). To me, the statement "the world has adequate reserves for more than a century" is meaningless because "adequate" is not defined and because it seems clear enough that some reserves are going to last a long time. In other words, having "adequate reserves" does not preclude a peak, especially if we go by Aramco's definition of "adequate". I think we should concentrate on the flow rate and purge such statements from the article (except possibly from the reserves section) in order not to confuse anyone by reproducing strawman arguments. Perhaps it should also be made clear early in the article that peak oil is not about oil "running out" or something.

A couple of problems here. How long the reserves will last is the topic of Oil depletion, not Peak oil. But I agree with you that peak oil is a rate problem, not a quantity problem. If that is not obvious from the initial thesis statement, then we should emphasize this point better. Thirdly, it does belong under the no peak section because Aramco has not admitted to the existence of peak oil. They fully believe that there is plenty of oil.Kgrr (talk) 21:09, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Kgrr, you keep saying this, but as has been said several times before, Peak Oil is to some degree about quantity. Because the models are "roughly bell shaped", it means that at the point of peak oil, there is roughly half the extractable oil that there was initially. If you integrate the production rate bell curve, you a big S, which in this case is cumulative production. The inflection point of the S is at the 50% point. At least in theory, improved technology, new sources with different extraction profiles like tar sands or shale and political issues can throw off the decline side of the curves, but a key concept in the Hubbert peak oil theory is that it occurs when half of all the oil has been extracted. Whether it is accurate and world production does follow a bell shaped curve is another matter. TastyCakes (talk) 18:48, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

TastyCakes, No. You are confusing cause and effect. Peak oil is due to the production rate of all oil fields together. The curve is caused by two things: it climbs due to new discoveries being put on line and declines due to fields depleting. The observation that the resource may be about half-way depleted when peak oil happens is a rule of thumb, but it's an effect and not the cause.

Again, how long the reserves will last is a part of Oil depletion. The reserves to consumption ratio is another discussion that is inherently part of Oil depletion. The problem is that often the oil field is drained quicker due to advanced recovery methods. Also, often the reserve estimates are overstated. So in turn very often, the oil field will deplete much faster than expected. Kgrr (talk) 01:47, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

No Kgrr, I am not confused on this subject. I get the feeling you aren't listening to anything I or the other people here are saying on this issue and are not going to change the definition of peak oil in your mind so I'm going to stop trying to convince you. But I will say one more time: an important part of Hubbert peak theory is that peak oil occurs at approximately the time half the oil that can be extracted has been extracted. Whether it's cause or effect is irrelevant, call it an observation if you want. But this observation has its place in the peak oil article (as well as the depletion article). TastyCakes (talk) 18:04, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

TastyCakes, Here is the point I'm trying to make to you: The peak is caused by the production rate, not that the total production is at its halfway point. For example, Cantarell was a very quick producing field. However, it peaked quickly and is now depleting very quickly (10-15% per year). We don't know yet if the peak was its half-way point. It's a rule of thumb. Also, note that the peak is defined by having hit the peak production rate, not that the oil is half depleted. We can talk about this 50% rule of thumb, but I feel it should be in the Oil depletion article and not in the Peak oil article.Kgrr (talk) 13:19, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Kgrr has a very good point, it is Peak oil that is causing interest in petroleum alternatives and changing their development, not petroleum alternatives that have affected Peak oil. His request for citations is important, and this article is about the causes, timing, and immediate effects of Peak oil, not about the timing or predictions surrounding Oil depletion. They are linked and this should be expressed, but with an article this size there's no point in significantly expanding it... only creating daughter articles. I suggest considering a way the issues your talking about could be made into a new article, but most importantly you need sources which discuss this specifically. NJGW (talk) 18:27, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

NJGW, you are making two very important points. 1) There is no peak oil due to substitution. We are well into peak oil and are new discoveries have peaked worldwide in 1964. The known reserves have been depleting since. And there has not been enough production of any substitute or combination of substitutes to even make up for the rate at which the new discoveries are being depleted. 2) No one so far has been able to provide adequate documentation for the existence of the so called "peak oil by substitution theory" Wikipedia does not allow original research WP:OR.Kgrr (talk) 13:19, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Do you have a ref for Aramco's position? I'm not versed in aramcology but I got the impression that they're masters of ambiguity. Maybe you've got acces to the first ref and can verify it but the second one doesn't really make a claim one way or the other as to peak. Flow rates are only brought up in the context of Saudi production. As to URR, the second ref defers to the USGS instead of providing an independent assessment.

I gave the article a quick read and, while it's clear enough that peak is about flow rate, it brings up reserves in the same breath and the relationship between flow rates and reserves is not explicited (because it would be controversial perhaps?). I feel there's some ambiguity as to the difference between the challenges that the finiteness of the supply creates and actually "running out". I think it's quite possible for a naive reader to picture the world's oil as being in some kind of a big tank with peak oil happening because we're "running out". Some of the vulgar peak oil litterature uses precisely this imagery...

A lot of what the Saudis say is misleading and self-serving. They should add "at a steadily declining rate of production" to the sentence. And by "adequate", I think they mean "Adequate to keep Saudi Arabia rolling in money," and definitely not "Adequate to allow everyone in China and India to drive a car," which is what the latter two countries have in mind. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 04:37, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I will take a look. In general, Aramco are masters of deception. IMHO They have been injecting salt water into Ghawar since 1986. They have peaked and are depleting. Note how Russia is now the #1 oil producer. Kgrr (talk) 01:47, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Not for long. Russian oil production has been dropping since the start of the year and the Kremlin is reported to be very concerned (oil is their main source of revenue.) Personally I think they have been damaging their oil fields by overproducing them, and are going to see a very rapid and unexpected decline in production due to their bad practices. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 04:44, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, they are cashing in on their oil for a quick buck and probably going to cause water intrusion if they are not careful.Kgrr (talk) 14:19, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Also note that the Saudi's recently increased production by 700,000 bbls/d and pledged to increase it 1.5 millions bbl/d more in the next few years. They have historically been the only country with a significant "shut-in" capacity and their recent boosts indicate they still possess this ability. Whether they can increase production to the levels they promise, I guess time will tell. TastyCakes (talk) 18:19, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

This discussion has gone off-topic here. Let's take the discussion back to how to fix this article. Here is where we left off...

"I did not remove or relocate the paragraph without bringing it up here first because it seems some of you believe peak oil is not strictly about flow rate (mbpd) but also about reserves (see above). To me, the statement "the world has adequate reserves for more than a century" is meaningless because "adequate" is not defined and because it seems clear enough that some reserves are going to last a long time. In other words, having "adequate reserves" does not preclude a peak, especially if we go by Aramco's definition of "adequate". I think we should concentrate on the flow rate and purge such statements from the article (except possibly from the reserves section) in order not to confuse anyone by reproducing strawman arguments. Perhaps it should also be made clear early in the article that peak oil is not about oil "running out" or something."

To clarify things: Peak oil is strictly about the peaking of the flow rate. This is our thesis statement for the article: "Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline." I see no mention of reserves, running out of oil... etc. This is how it's defined by the petroleum industry.

However, there are some people that do not believe a peak will ever happen. Abdallah S. Jum’ah, Aramco's president and CEO does not believe that his oil will ever end. Recently he pronounced "We have grossly underestimated mankind’s ability to find new reserves of petroleum, as well as our capacity to raise recovery rates and tap fields once thought inaccessible or impossible to produce.” "Aramco Chief Debunks Peak Oil". Jum’ah believes that in-place conventional and non-conventional liquid resources may ultimately total between 13 trillion and 16 trillion barrels. "To put those figures in perspective, to date we have consumed only 1.1 trillion barrels of oil or 7 to 9 percent of oil in place"... "I do not believe the world has to worry about ‘peak oil’ for a very long time." In a sense, Aramco is led by a nay sayer. Perhaps we need to expand the one sentence to further describe his position.Kgrr (talk) 14:19, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

It's possible that the Saudis are getting a bit delusional - that happened to American oil producers when U.S. oil production peaked and started to decline after 1970, and people started asking "Where's all that oil you said you had?" Historically, Saudi Arabia acted as "swing" producer in OPEC, increasing and decreasing production to hold the world oil price close to the OPEC target price. However, they're not doing that anymore. The oil price is far above OPEC targets and yet they do nothing, contrary to their stated objectives. Also, Saudi oil production has been declining since 2005, but the number of drilling rigs operating in the country has tripled in that time frame. This leads analysts to speculate that something is rotten in the state of S.A. (and it's not just the smell of hydrogen sulfide from the sour oil wells.) RockyMtnGuy (talk) 23:46, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Simply dividing reserves by yearly consumption is obviously an inaccurate way of determining "how many years" of present consumption we have left because as the reserves approach exhaustion you produce at a slower and slower rate. That, in my opinion, is why statements like "we have enough oil in the ground" are misleading. You can't just extract an arbitrary amount at a whim, as time goes on you have to wait longer and longer to extract the same amount of oil. TastyCakes (talk) 18:14, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

You are correct. That's the fallacy of the reserves to production ratio everyone hurls around.Kgrr (talk) 05:21, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The reserves to production ratio fallacy should definitely be discussed in Oil depletion. It's an important topic as to why depletion will actually happen sooner. I'm going to move this discussion to Talk:Oil depletion.

Whoa! Reserves to production ratios are a very important performance indicator in the oil industry and are commonly used by oil companies to predict what their future production rates are going to be. They're not fallacious, they're just misunderstood by the general public.

Nonsense - A reserve to production ratio tells you the number of years left assuming the current production rate. (xxx bls / yyy bls per time = time) It does not tell you anything about the change in production rate and therefore cannot telly anything about the future production rate. And, yes, they are often used to mislead the public into thinking we have much more of a resource than we actually do because the rate of production goes down over the life of oil fields.

The production ratio is out of the scope of this article because it does not affect peak oil, it can tell you how fast the oil is depleting. But we definitely should discuss this in the Oil depletion article. Kgrr (talk) 12:42, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Field decline rates are highly predictable if it's geologists and engineers (and not politicians) doing the predicting. When you get below 20/1, which is where Russia is now, you start to have problems maintaining production and need to get the geologists out looking for new oil ASAP. When you get to the point that the U.S. has reached, a 12/1 ratio, it doesn't mean that the U.S. will run out of oil in 12 years, it means that the U.S. hit its production limits long ago (1970) and is now just producing dribs and drabs of what used to be a huge resource. 12 years from now (2020) it will probably still have a ratio of 10/1 or so, but by that time its production rate will probably be lower than Canada's. If you put a field on nitrogen injection, as Mexico did Cantarell, it doesn't mean you will produce more oil, it just means you will produce the same amount of oil, just faster. This is indicated by their R/P ratio, which is actually worse than the U.S. one. Cantarell production has fallen about 35% since last year and we are now looking at what is known as a "right-skewed" bell curve instead of a conventional symmetric one. Mexican production is going into freefall. Saudi Arabia's biggest field, Ghawar, has been on water injection for some time and analysts are getting concerned about what's really going on there. Another Cantarell?

The fact is that oil discovery peaked in 1964. It's not like you watch the ratios and send out geologists when the ratio gets too high. Geologists have to be looking for new oil all the time - in fact, harder and harder because of diminishing returns. Oil companies have fired pretty much all of their geologists nearly a decade ago. Most of the easy oil has been found. The oil companies know all of this internally. However their CEOs don't like being told no and are into the bottom line and not engineering. The reason is that geologists have not been able to bring in enough new oil in order to justify their own expenses.

Yes, Cantarell is dying quick. Ghawar has been on salt water injection since 1986. Yes, Ghawar is on its last legs according to everyone except for ARAMCO. Typically, you don't start water injection until peak is hit. But ARAMCO is opening up smaller fields that are going to produce 1/2 mil. bbs per day.

And how does all of this affect the peak oil article?Kgrr (talk) 12:42, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Now the issue from the standpoint of Saudi Aramco, there is obviously a political fight going on within the company since the ex-VP of exploration flatly contradicts the current CEO. So if we include this statement, we need to make clear that ex-Aramco executives don't agree with the current CEO. And his statement is misleading because only a fraction of oil in place is producible oil. Most will never be produced, so referring to it is pointless unless you are trying to mislead people. Which happens a lot in the oil industry. RockyMtnGuy (talk) 18:24, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't know .. most of the company seems to be in a top-down party-line delusional state: "Amin al Nasser, the senior vice president for exploration and production at Saudi Aramco, called such “peak oil” theorising “unscrupulous”, as he outlined his country’s plans to boost capacity to 12.5 million barrels per day by the end of next year. He said that even Saudi Arabia’s biggest field, Ghawar, which had been pumping for 50 years and produced five million barrels per day, was still early on in its production lifespan." "Saudi project to start in August".

Certainly you can quote some ex-Aramco executives, but this does not represent the peak oil naysayer viewpoint of Aramco that is being illustrated. The balance exists in the article due to other viewpoints towards peak oil being represented.Kgrr (talk) 12:42, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Peak oil/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Currently, this is not a good article. It's POV and has several citation needed tags. TMLutas (talk) 04:01, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Last edited at 04:01, 1 July 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 21:52, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

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