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Seven myths used to debunk peak oil, debunked

By Andrew McKay - posted Tuesday, 8 May 2012


Then compare the Madagascar finding to the largest conventional oil field in the world, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia. It's extracted 65 billion barrels of oil since 1951 from initial reserves of over 100 billion barrels. The Madagascar field extends down to Mozambique where Anadarko have found 1.3 billion barrels of oil. Further inland Tallow has found 1 billion barrels of proven reserves in the Ugandan Albert basin. Plenty of other African countries are now being explored by a number of interests but they have yet to show any major finds.

Oil pundits might be saying "game on" but really all there is to show is a lot of wishful thinking which, at the end of the day, won't fill the gas tank. I should know, I tried that plenty of times in my student days.

The truth is that most of the new oil finds throughout the world are less than 2 billion barrels each. The global annual consumption is currently a little less than 33 billion barrels per year. There is a huge disconnect between the size of the fields currently being discovered and the predicted future demand for oil.

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7. There's always a new frontier

The question is, Why do we need new frontiers if oil production isn't peaking?

It's an odd concept that oil companies would spend millions of dollars in politically unstable countries and areas where the physical barriers are immense - such as the Arctic - just for the hell of it.

The truth is the low hanging fruit has been picked. All the easy to access oil has been found and developed. What we're seeing now is increased exploration in increasingly economically dubious areas such as the Canadian tar sands, deepwater drilling, and fracking and horizontal drilling in tight oil plays.

It 's as if the pundits pushing this line have never seen a globe before. The world is round.There is a finite amount of land and ocean that can realistically be developed to economically extract and refine oil. From all the evidence collated over the last few years it appears that we're pushing up against these limits right now.

The biggest oil find since the 1960s, the Kashagan oilfield in the Caspian Sea, has 13 billion barrels of proven reserves. Development of the field has, however, been plagued with funding problems after Shell shut its Caspian office in May last year. At this stage it's unlikely this field will produce anything close to the original estimates due to ongoing delays with development.

After denial, acceptance

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You have to give the deniers credit for being so tenacious about drumming up new magical thinking on how to outsmart Mother Nature. But in the end, their denial, especially as the lackeys of industry with their plutocratic ties to government, puts us at risk in terms of smart transitions to other ways to live and do business.

At some point, the "peak oil debate" needs to go the way of the phony "global warming debate." Into the dustbin of history, where it belongs, so the rest of us can get on with civilization 2.0.

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This article was first published on Transition Voices.



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About the Author

Andrew McKay is a trained ecologist currently working as fisheries observer in New Zealand. When not out on the ocean he blogs about peak oil and related issues from a New Zealand perspective at Southern Limits. Follow him on Twitter@southernlimitnz.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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