After much consideration a couple of years ago, I realized that "peak oil" is largely a scam designed to make the doomsayers wealthy selling books, seminars, and other material on what to expect and how to survive. Walk into any bookseller and you will see numerous books in the current affairs and science sections with scaremongering titles such as The End of Oil and The Party's Over. Reminds me of Y2K, various economy/market crash scenarios, nuclear war, etc., hyped to scare people in the past. In all cases a kernel of truth underlied the scenario, but the probability of its occurrence and its effects were blown out of reasonable proportion—not to mention your likelihood of surviving such events intact had they come true, whether you tried to follow those books' recommendations or not.
But! That doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned about fuel supplies down the road. I see real reason to worry in several years. The main oil field in Kuwait is in decline. That was the one we fought Operation Desert Storm over in 1991. It produced less in 2005 than in 2004. (I don't have the 2006 results.)
A number of people in the oil industry are concerned about the true state of the Saudi oil fields that are currently in production, as these fields have been pumping since the 1970s and should be in decline, yet the Saudis have not made the investment to start production in new fields. The book Twilight in the Desert, by an American oil industry banker who toured the Saudi fields and was appalled by their condition, summarizes this. It will take time to get new fields going to replace the old. The only people able to provide figures on Saudi oil supplies are—the Saudis. They don't allow outside experts for such estimates. Or if they do, the outsiders are not permitted to publicize the findings.
Other countries in the Middle East are expected to go from oil exporters to net oil importers over the next several years, including Egypt and Syria. Dubai expects to be out of oil by 2020, which is why we're seeing the huge investment in tourist-trap silliness there now: that's to keep money coming in once oil revenue declines.
I suspect there is plenty of oil around to replace declining production elsewhere. But we should start thinking about how we can conserve and using sense in what we do consume. The reality is true that China, India, Vietnam, and other industrializing countries with rising standards of living will all require more oil as time passes. If anything, the US has stopped producing a lot of things and should cut back its resource consumption anyway. We consume more resources per capita than any other nation, but our manufacturing capability has withered. Our continued high consumption doesn't make sense, and I fear a rude awakening might be around the corner as oil prices continue their rise.
A few weeks back I got into a dispute with one of the administrators on BITOG because I dared to criticize the beloved Bugatti Veyron that can go 250 mph. He threatened to lock the thread in question over my comments. My grounds were that the engineering talent and money used to develop that car should have been used to create a family vehicle capable of high mileage, and I mentioned in passing some of the concerns about future fuel availability that I spelled out in detail above. The horsepower race among the European luxury and sports car manufacturers looks a bit ridiculous to me as well, and not just for the fuel consumption reason. (If the highest US speed limit is 80 mph, why are so many high-end cars capable of double that speed? Why don't we require new vehicles to have governors set to, say, 100 mph? Japan has mandated them for years.)
Don't forget that the automakers are under the gun to improve CO2 emissions—that is, increase fuel economy—so there's another reason to question the need for conspicuous-consumption halo cars such as the Veyron that are capable of speeds far in excess of any posted speed limit in the world. The recent US Supreme Court decision directing the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions means that we will have tighter fuel economy standards. An automaker that has the resources to create another superfluous supercar probably has the resources to design the kinds of economical vehicles we need now to weather the coming storm.
I've made this prediction before in these forums, but I'll make it again: in 10 years' time these vehicles will not be a significant part of our personal transportation mix: SUVs, supercars, sedans with much more than 300 hp, pickups used as personal vehicles, and most two-seat sports cars.
As I said, I don't buy the peak oil scenario. But we are likely to see fuel shortages, and the long-term trend for fuel prices is nothing but up, no matter what resources get developed down the road. We need to grow up and prepare now.
