Fracking seems to have slain this resources issue, once and for all.
Or maybe not. Some Peak Oilers, enablers of the hottest meme of 2005, are still out there. They’re just biding their time, sure as shootin’ that their pet issue will return to haunt humanity and send us all back to the horse-n-buggy era: few medicines and consumer goods made of wood and paper.
Environmentalism is a religion, you know?
Via Instapundit.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
We will never actually ” run out ” of oil but we ran out of cheap oil a decade or longer ago depending on how you define cheap.
It never rains oil. It comes out of holes in the ground. These holes run dry and the oil companies keep moving to new ground.The ground they are moving to is lower quality with every move.
We don’t know yet how far the good tracking ground extends. But we do know that the older oil fields that supply the vast majority of the world’s oil are depleting at a rate of around five percent a year.We KNOW fracked wells deplete at several times that rate.
The oil industry is doing better than any of the peakers expected but sooner or later they are going to be right.
And that sooner is going to be a lot sooner than you expect because the capacity to frack as fast as the old conventional fields decline does not exist.It may never exist if the so called ” sweet spots ” are not as big as hoped for.
The production of oil in barrels is not the best measure of production. The energy contained in those barrels is a far better measure and almost all of the increase in production with the exception of American tight oil over the last few years has been of stuff that has been relabeled as oil.Natural gas liquids and moonshine (ethanol) may add to ” total liquids” and ” barrels of oil equivalent” very nicely but they are much lower in energy content.
Think one hundred proof booze compared to eighty proof and how much it takes to get drunk.
The actual energy content of the liquids we are using is falling about as fast as total production is increasing.
The companies in the tight oil business don’t seem to be making any money for the most part indicating that pretty soon if they don’t get a higher price they will be out of business.
I don’t know how high the price of oil can go before it breaks the back of the economy.
Do you?
The people who believe there will always be plenty were telling us ten or fifteen years ago it would be selling for under twenty dollars a barrel these days. It averages over a hundred now world wide.
Who is closer to the truth?
I still say that we are stupid for using hydrocarbon in the ground as fuel. It is much more wisely used for making polymers. Nukes are the way to go until there is a breakthrough in the solar to electric conversion. We aren’t even close to that, yet.
True enough. But the First Church of Environmentalism is opposed to nuclear power, while trying to kill electricity (coal) and internal combustion (oil).
“Nukes are the way to go…” – what I was going to say, but jdallen got there first. And if the world would be driven by tree-huggers, we’ll all be in caves in no time.