The Oil Drum

Bondad, who is otherwise ok, does the recent trending a lot:
http://bonddad.blogspot.com/2007/09/gas-market-update.html
for an example of trends only over the last year for gas.

bjj,

That is still one of the most fascinating charts to me, and always keeps me on my toes....

I mean, you want to see the peak, what must have been the REAL CLASSIC PEAK, look at that world profile between 1974 and 1982....is that CLASSIC or not?

Man those were the days....you could get V-8 car engines just for being willing to haul them away, after all, what IDIOT would own a V-8 car coming into what was sure to be a phenomonal crisis!! If I had told you that 20 years from the late 1970's, you would see V-10 and V-12 engines in cars and trucks, you would have said I was COMPLETELY MAD!!

In central Kentucky, a massive Coal to Liquid plant was planned in the late 1970's...it was a done deal, becuase the only thing that could stop it was if crude oil went back down, and what IDIOTIC MORON believed that was going to happen? Helll, even the CIA was telling Jimmy Carter that access to oil was declining around the world.

I still have a copy of a book by a convicted moonshiner who was using solar panels to distill alcohol at home so he could get around...he actually got a permit from the government to do it, so desperate was the government to learn how to make what we now call "bio-fuel".

And my father, who commuted 22 miles to Fort Knox as a civil servent mechanic (working on Army tanks and vehicles) decided he had had enough....so he traded a 1971 Oldsmobile in for a 1976 Diesel Volkswagen Rabbit....even he had thrown in the towel, and admitted that gasoline and oil prices were NOT going to come back down....with the Diesel, his cost per mile actually declined by over half right into the face of the highest oil prices in history....

And then....1982. Oil prices collapsed, the energy industry, both fossil fuel and alternative collapsed. Companies and individuals who had bet the best years of their careers on the PEAK (and I mean look at the chart....it looks even more like a true peak after the fact than did at the time....IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE PEAK! But the rear view mirror failed!

Look at the world chart above....consumption did not return to the old 1979-80 high for fifteen years!!

So anytime a "PEAK NOW, HOW CAN IT NOT BE! IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR A STUPID DENIALIST!!" type talks to me....I smile....you bet your money, your lifestyle on your own infallable certainty. As for me, I am hedging. There are a hundred good reasons to reduce fossil fuel consumption. The assurance of peak is not one of them. We better hope that this time it is not a false alarm, or anytime to get people to make commitment to fossil fuel consumption will be lost for a generation....and there really will be little chance of saving ourselves this time.

RC

The EIA guys must really be in la-la land, as per the standard operating procedure for this administration.

If you look at their World Oil Market Analysis document here,, even though it is dated 2007, they show no historical production past 2004. World liquid production goes straight upward to about 120 million bbls per day by 2030.

And best of all, "In North America, U.S. output that rises to 10.1 million barrels per day in 2020 and remains fairly flat through the end of the projection period is expected to be supplemented by significant production increases in Canada."

This is is the best news I've heard all day! The US is going to reverse a 35 year decline, and get to 10 million bbls/day!