Expect a Shortage of Petro-Fuels Sooner Rather than Later

Opec, China, and India are the major factors that need to revise the price, supply, and demand equations. The alarmists had mad max predicted by now. I'm just trying to inject some sanity and revised models into the equation.

My estimate of the peak is between 2030 and 2070. Higher oil prices and low economic growth gets to the longer projections, low (sub $120/b) with economic growth gets the earlier figures. Bad fast projections will cause bad decisions, like huge public investments in nuclear, and british imperialism to take oil fields (my bad that is the past).

On the Alaska point, it mostly wasn't really a point. Its just important to look at model assumptions and how they change.

 

And if you look at production, it has been flat for 6 years. Saying that we have more oil reserves now doesn't mean squat. What counts is how much it costs to get that oil out of the ground. All the easy oil has been found. There has been no significant easy oil find in years. Everything has been farther and farther underground in tough (and expensive) to get at places.

So you think that production can match demand without issue?

You should try again, because nothing you have said so far successfully argues that oil production is either at or near peak production levels and that demand will soon outstrip supply.

That is the real issue - oil prices will not increase steadily in the face of production shortages. They will follow a pattern of price spikes and drops - much like the one we've seen the past couple years. This huge amount of volatility will not be easy to deal with.