Peak Oil? hasn't that been debunked?
There have certainly been a lot of attempts to debunk it. And why would anyone want to mislead us about oil depletion? It’s only a $1.8 trillion-per-year business, with big profit margins. Lee Raymond retired from Exxon Mobil with something like $400 million in compensation—do you suppose anyone could be persuaded to tell an itsy-bitsy fib or two for that amount of money? But enough of sarcasm and ad hominems—facts is what we want.
So, what do the peak oil deniers claim? Vast stores of undiscovered oil, vast stores of unconventional oil, abiotic oil bubbling up from the bow-els of the Earth, technological mar-vels to extract more and more of the oil already discovered—all ready and waiting to provide more oil just when we need it. Of course, during almost all of the history of oil they supply capacity was found before it was needed, and one might wonder why—with sustained high prices—there’s no longer any spare produc-tion capacity. So let’s take a quick look at the cornucopians’ arguments.
Oil exploration has been con-ducted around the world, with stead-ily increasing sophistication, since Text Box: the 1850’s. After many decades of phenomenal discoveries in the 20th century, the trend has been a dramatic decline since the 1960’s. If it’s going to get dramatically better, there will have to be a new paradigm—right away.
Unconventional oil—tar sands and the like—are vast, but they take huge energy and capital inputs to extract and refine. They scale slowly and can’t support high production rates—Canada’s tar sands are expected to produce just 3 million barrels per day a decade from now, in a world expected to want over 100 million.
Abiotic oil is the most implausible of all. Oil is seldom found at great depth, because the heat of the earth decom-poses it. Carbon isotope ratios in crude oil are C12 enriched, like plants, relative to atmospheric carbon. Aro-matic molecules, characteristic of cer-tain plants, are commonly found in oil. And, if the earth had been producing oil over geologic time at the rate we use it, we would be swimming in it.
Finally, extraction technology has been improving continuously for dec-ades—and consumption caught up anyway.
Oil production is reaching its peak.

M King Hubbert predicted in 1956 that oil production in the lower 48 US states would peak in the late 60’s or early 70’s:
Not just the lower 48 peaked in 1970—the whole US peaked—and never again reached that level of output. The addition of the North Slope of Alaska was only a bump on the downslope. Rising prices seem to have stimulated a little blip in produc-tion about 5 years after the his-toric maximum price spike. New technology was developed and deployed as output slid. Offshore drilling didn’t make up for the de-cline. Now the US, once the greatest producer and exporter of oil in the world, with the best re-sources and technology and capi-tal sources at its disposal, can’t reverse its declining oil produc-tion and imports more than 60% of the oil it uses. Who will do better?

IT’S POSSIBLE TO APPROXIMATELY PREDICT WHEN AN OIL PROVINCE WILL REACH ITS PEAK AND DECLINE

The modern version of Hubbert’s method uses a curve-fitting technique to estimate the total oil that will ever be produced in a province, based on historical oil extraction there. The peak of production is expected when about half of that amount has been extracted—and after that comes a permanent decline. The US has been in decline for 36 years, and Alaska has been in decline for nearly 20 years. Who else is experiencing declining oil production? Oman, Vene-zuela, Indonesia, UK, Norway, China, possibly Saudi Arabia, and many, many others are also in decline. Hubbert’s method fits most of those places very well. Where does the updated Hubbert linearization place the estimate for the peak of world oil extraction—December 2005, according to Kenneth Deffeyes. Where is that abiotic refill when you need it?

All of the mainstream ideas for dealing with scarce energy seem to concentrate on continuing to make more of it available, while the greatest potential lies in using less.