peak oil in two minutes

Submitted by Jeremy on November 7, 2007 - 7:10am.

One thing that appears to be missing is how to say what peak oil is, quickly, and here is my stab at it.

  1. We are not running out of oil, there is at least one trillion barrels of recoverable oil left.
  2. Current daily useage is roughly 84.7 million barrels and the daily extraction of oil is roughly 85 million barrels and this is not likely to increase.
  3. The problem is we are switching from buyers' to a sellers' market and the oil that is left is:
    1. harder to extract
    2. harder to refine
    3. and mostly located in countries that don't like the USA much.
  4. [what's next]

So I want to include something about cheap oil but don't know how to say it quickly.

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Response to Peak Oil in two minutes

Submitted by Leon Breckenridge on January 15, 2008 - 3:42pm.

You are both 1000% correct and 1000% incorrect.

Twenty years ago I gave a paper at THE major conference on energy. The CEO gave his paper which said the same thing you said. The Sec. of the Department of Energy gave a paper that said we are headed down a path that is not sustainable. BOTH were correct. The CEO chose not to mention that sometime around the year 2000 it MAY require more energy (from somewhere) to extract, transport, refine and get it to the end user than the energy contained in the oil in the ground.

You apparently are not knowledge on that part of the problem.

HLB