Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
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Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
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Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#2It's more basic even than this. Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl.
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#3No one with any credibility actually believes he can forecast the price of oil.
Oil is very inelastic in the short term, which is why small drops in supply lead to massive price increases. The long-term effect of unavailable or expensive oil will be "demand destruction"-- many of those who currently use oil will either move to alternatives or go out of business-- and political fallout with unpredictable results.
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#4It's more basic even than this. Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl.
It could certainly get to $500/bbl, but it's unlikely that it would. Before reaching this point, it would have wrought misery on the world economy, as you've described (and "recession" is an understatement).
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#5> Societal complexity is a function of excess energy availability
That's true in it's most trivial sense, and false in any non-trivial sense. Quick examples - Qatar, Venezuela, Japan.
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#6I got pretty into peak oil circa 2006, when peak was supposedly already occurring or was going to occur by 2008. It will happen eventually, but I'm not going to get into playing this guessing game again.
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#7Why is bbl the abbreviation for "barrel"?
Ahh, wikipedia knows: The "b" may have been doubled originally to indicate the plural (1 bl, 2 bbl), or possibly it was doubled to eliminate any confusion with bl as a symbol for the bale. Some sources claim that "bbl" originated as a symbol for "blue barrels" delivered by Standard Oil in its early days; this is probably incorrect because there are citations for the symbol at least as early as the late 1700s, long before Standard Oil was founded.
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#8It's more basic even than this. Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl.
> Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl.
Above $80 a barrel, alternative fuels (such as liquid fuels from coal) becomes profitable. I sincerely expect that this will expand extremely rapidly in the next 15 years.
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#9> Societal complexity is a function of excess energy availability That's true in it's most trivial sense, and false in any non-trivial sense. Quick examples - Qatar, Venezuela, Japan.
Your Qatar and Japan examples, at least, make his point: the complexity of those cultures reflect the resource conditions in which they developed. Not sure about Venezuela. Japan, in particular, was the only place in the world where hunting and fishing could support large settled populations, if I remember my Jared Diamond correctly.
Re: Why Peak Oil Will Never Lead To $500/bbl Crude Oil
#10It's more basic even than this. Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl.
> Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl. Above $80 a barrel, alternative fuels (such as liquid fuels from coal) becomes profitable. I sincerely expect that this will expand extremely rapidly in the next 15 years.
And resources such as natural gas are at very low prices right now, due to recent development of huge deposits such as the Marcellus Shale. In the medium-to-long term, I think that substitutability between oil and natural gas would go a long way, once oil prices get to a point where oil looks less attractive.
While I'm not entirely unconcerned, I don't think there's any reason to panic.