I'm predicting a war with Iran in the near future. These market moves will have a negative impact on the oil industry and future projects well beyond the current price decline. Even if I'm wrong about war with Iran in the short term in the longer term the chance of war in the world just went up 1000% fold.

These above ground events and others will serve to disrupt supply and to some extent demand over the coming years masking the geological potential production. In many cases producible oil will be left in the ground because of war.

This is what I mean by we will never know. We may never pump oil at anything like the current rate literally any day now. And we may never return to the point that we ever again extract oil at its maximum rate.

In my opinion these above ground factors have probably resulted in and effective peak geologic or not I doubt we ever pump as much oil going forward as we are right now. But on the same hand we will never know when the real i.e geologic peak happened.

I understand the idea of a chemical phase transition but struggle to map this to time periods -does Bakhtiari's 'Transition' indicate a brief period of economic dislocation as we move between periods or does it refer to the periods between these dislocations?

E.g. if transition 'T1' is now (2008) and T2 is in -say- 2012 then what is 2005-2007, 2009-2011 refered to as? (or does it mean T1=upto 2008, T2=2008-2011, etc.)

[Remember that he thinks the transition periods relate to shifts of ever increasing decline rate and the shockwaves that this will cause...]

Nick.