If you’ve been following me for any length of time you know that I am a strict observationalist. If I can see that something is happening, I don’t struggle with wondering if it’s happening.
Peak Oil is not a theory, it is an observation that individual wells produce up to a peak, and then the output declines as the well’s initial bounty is depleted.
What’s true for every single individual well is equally true when averaged across an entire set of wells placed within any given oil basin.
And what’s true for any given basin is true for all the basins in the entire world. Eventually, they will collectively peak out and that will be that for the part of our economic story that is based on oil-fueled economic growth. Which is kind of a doozy because what we’ve really done is built an entire system of debt-based money the smooth operation of which is entirely based on one idea; that oil-based economic growth will never end.
What happens when that’s revealed to be a rather ill-formed and rather silly idea? I don’t know for sure, but I bet it involves massive financial losses spread across everyone, but more upon those who simply didn’t see this coming. Rather like what happened to those who trusted the various spokesmodels for the Magic Holy Shot. It didn’t go so well for far too many of them. So, Caveat Emptor!
You may recall that I got into a bit of a back-and-forth with Doomberg over Peak Oil and you may have noted that he later went back and forth with one of my very favorite oil and resource analysts Adam Rozencwajg of Geohring and Rozencwajg.
Today I interviewed Adam Rozencwajg and asked him to expound on the models and analyses that his firm has conducted that project that the one final and last mega oil basin in the US – the Permian – is set to hit peak output in 2025.
If it does, I predict this will set off alarm bells within the US and across the world, and result in vastly higher oil prices. But will it? And why do they think it is close to peak? What about the Marcellus – the monster US natural gas shale field?
Tune in to find out!