A Peak In World Oil Production Just Isn't Going to Happen Soon

A peak in world oil production -- due to supply limits -- just isn’t going to happen anytime soon, perhaps not even in our lives or the lives of our children. _Alex Wilson

Despite multiple failed predictions by peak oilers such as M. King Hubbert, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrere, Matt Simmons, and the rest of the usual suspects -- living and dead -- peak oilers continue to adhere to their one true faith.

Why are peak oil-ers like Jehovah’s Witnesses? Answer: When the definitive JW prediction of the ‘Day of Wrath’ failed in 1914, they did what false prophets have done in every generation: shifted the goalposts (to 1975 in the case of JW’s—and wrong again). It’s what false prophets do to save face, enabling them to keep fleecing the inherently gullible. Peak-oilers do likewise. _Peter C. Glover

Peak Oil is a religious cult, and like all religious cults it is resistant to objective reality and the changing facts on the ground.

A USGS report of 171 global regions in 2012 further estimates that the world’s undiscovered conventional and technically recoverable oil resources, much of it in deepwater, stands at 565 billion barrels of oil (BBO). That’s a figure that only represents known conventional resources. But it pales in significance when unconventional resources, such as heavy oil, oil sands and shale oil, are taken into consideration. As the USGS reports, the mean estimate for recoverable heavy oil from the Orinoco Oil Belt in Venezuela alone stands at a mammoth 513 BBO. The shale oil potential of Russia’s Bazhenov Formation in Western Siberia may well prove to be 80 times larger than America’s Bakken Formation. At present six of the world’s largest oil fields in Ghana, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Brazil and Venezuela (the Orinoco Field) all still await development—the last directly due directly to President Chavez’s anti-West politics. _Peter Glover

As technology of unconventional hydrocarbon production and refinement improves, the distinction between conventional and unconventional oil will continue to diminish on all levels -- technical, economic, and practical.

....the once all-important distinction between "conventional" and "unconventional" oil will break down over time. As technologies improve for very deep drilling (measured in miles rather than feet), such wells will become more common. Fraking will become more common as a strategy for rejuvenating oil fields that had been considered depleted. _Alex Wilson

More and more people who formerly belonged to the peak oil cult, are getting tired of being slammed over the heat time after time with contrary evidence from the real world. Much "backsliding" and slipping away from the one true faith is to be expected in such an environment of cognitive dissonance.

There are conditions under which peaks in world oil production could happen, however. Most of them would be due to political decisions and events, such as war or top down policy change.

But the most hopeful likely cause of a long-term or permanent peak in world oil production would be if humans developed advanced, new generations of nuclear power that allowed them to abandon hydrocarbons for everything except chemicals, plastics, other materials, lubricants, etc.

A large scale move to an electrical infrastructure based upon safe, clean, cheap, scalable, and quickly implemented new generation nuclear power reactors, is the most logical choice that humans could make, if they wish to provide an abundant future for everyone on the planet -- and not just a few.

The current course being plotted by Obama, Putin, the EU, and China's CCP leads to a great deal of suffering, violence, and death.