Letters to the Editor
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WSJ
The article is WSJ mentions how "The oil industry was stunned." Do you know who wasn't stunned? The PO-ers who know that Mexico and Cantarell were peaking right on schedule. The oil industry was similarly stunnned when the North Sea went into decline right on schedule, which PO-ers had accurately predicted. World peak is right around the corner. Prepare for a hurricane of Mexican immigrants that will make the current immigration problem look like a gentle breeze.
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"the cold hand of the market will save us"
Sure, oil sands and shales can smooth the decline in oil stocks, but one thing economics cannot do is change a basic thermodynamic reality: oil retrieval must never require more energy than it delivers (unless, of course, the oil is being used for something other than energy). At that point it becomes easier just to use the energy that WOULD have been used for retrieval to supply the energy that the retrieved oil was going to provide. The United States was the Saudi Arabia of its day, and its oil fields still contain plenty of oil. For many fields, however, the energy required to recover that oil is greater than the energy in that oil, and so it must remain in the ground.
This problem plagues many other "new energy" technologies such as biofuels and even solar. If, for example, it takes more energy to make a solar panel than it can ever collect from the sun, of what benefit was it to build it? (This problem plagues some or perhaps all photovoltaic technologies.) There are many technologies that do not have this problem: hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, nuclear, Brazilian sugar-cane-based ethanol, and solar-hydronic. The problem is that they are inconvenient to use, dangerous, or environmentally problematic.
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Peak oil isn't specifically about price
"There is undoubtedly a good bit of truth to that theory -- the power of the price mechanism is a mighty thing -- but it certainly doesn't negate the premise that the era of cheap oil is over."
Just to be clear, Peak Oil is not about cheap oil per se, it is about our ability to sustain or increase the amount of energy available at any one time. So we are getting about 85 billion barrels per year out of the ground now. Peak Oil occurs when we are not able to increase that to 86. That's why all this talk about "total reserves" and tar sands and wind farms etc is moot - the point is that if we cannot get more and more net energy out of the ground/sand/corn field/waves etc *PER YEAR*, and our demand continues to grow, we have a problem. Most alternatives produce energy orders of magnitude more slowly than oil.
That it will result in higher prices is a given, but that is not what Peak Oil is about specifically.
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Peak Oil, or Peak Fiat Currency
While crude oil prices are rising nominally, in real terms they continue to decline. Against a backdrop of central banks manipulating their currency, causing monetary inflation, and falling commodity prices, while deflation takes hold in real terms, the tendency is to withhold supply. Oil grows more dear, which is a better word than cheap, while the money continues to expand. Hyperinflation is just around the corner, why sell your product at deflationary fire sale prices.
In one recent month the producers went net long in Copper, which is almost unheard of. Producers short the commodity to protect themselves from a drop in prices, but futures contracts contain the right to delivery. Even if the price falls, you keep your own product.
Peak oil is a huge fraud, prepetrated for reasons of national self interest, against the cunning and self interested Central Bankers of the major industrial countries. One huge fraud deserves another. At the extreme Americans can expect another oil embargo, who says history doesn't repeat itself. Only history tells us that was OPEC's way of playing politics with oil, when logic tells us that oil should be a bit more scarce, and the price should be rising not only in nominal terms, but in real terms as well.
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oil field exploitation
One big problem with "modern technology" is that it results in a fair amount of oil being left in the ground, unrecoverable.
If Cantarell and, more importantly, Ghawar, had been allowed to produce oil at a much slower rate at the wellhead, quite a bit more oil could be extracted. Ghawar has been so badly abused by seawater injection that it will probably peak well before it might have otherwise.
In short, if we had extracted oil from these fields more slowly, there would probably have been more ultimately recoverable oil to extract. Our greed has actually deprived us of oil we might have otherwise had.
As for the poster who claims that "peak-oil" is a fraud...tell me, dude, when you are proven completely wrong, will you be posting here to apologize? I think we'll both live long enough to see that you are as wrong as you can be.
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Wolf! Wolf!
The problem the peak fill-in-the-blankers are having is that they've been screaming this for over 30 years. There's been someone saying we were right on the verge of running out of something for so long now, without it actually happening that no-one believes them any more. Eventually, it will happen, these are all finite resources, however they've been way off on when it'll happen up to this point. They may be correct now, but they've lost credibility.
There's a semi-famous individual (economist? scientist?) who has been offering bets that commodities will be cheaper in 10 years then they are at the time of each bet. So far, though no-one has taken him up on it, he wouldn't have lost a single time. At this point, we'll need to see something run out before anyone starts believing again and unfortunately, it'll probably be oil that provides the example.
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Alternative Energy
"If, for example, it takes more energy to make a solar panel than it can ever collect from the sun, of what benefit was it to build it? (This problem plagues some or perhaps all photovoltaic technologies.)" - Judas Gutenberg
While this is no longer true (if it ever was), there can be reasons to build such a hypothetical device. One is to arrange for more distributed power generation. If power is difficult to transmit to an area or the additional costs of transmission push the cost higher than the cost to make the solar panel, then the panel becomes the better bet. Also if reliability is an issue.
Alternately, it makes sense to build such devices if the building of them allows scientists to learn enough to make more efficient and cheaper successor devices. Eventually the balance shifts and the construction pays off.
Most of the arguments I've seen claiming that X technology costs more to create than it generates are based on faulty assumptions and/or faulty logic and/or outright lies. There are a great many people out there who want to cry DOOM for some reason, so they naturally claim that advance is impossible.