Talk:Peak oil
From Silent Revolution
What about "peak cheap oil"?
The version of the theory I heard essentially said that the recovery cost of the "cheapest barrel" was going to continue to go up in real terms, because despite the advance in technology, the difficulty of extraction really *does* increase as you switch to harder-and-harder-to-extract sources of oil -- no technology is going to make tar sands oil as cheap as the old "gushers". Meanwhile, the price of renewable sources of energy certainly isn't going up, so the economic incentive to switch away from oil increases continuously. (Of course, this causes a decrease in the market price, but not in the cost of production.)
This means *at the production end* oil will get continuously more expensive; in other words, oil company profits will continuously drop in real terms. The price of oil at the consumption end is largely determined by demand, but at the production end not so much.
This doesn't seem to be debunked at all by the article here. I guess it's what's called "demand peaks"? In fact, it seems to actually have been happening. It may also have happened with coal already. Coal mining companies are not very profitable -- they used to be profit centers.
67.241.20.26 23:53, 6 May 2009 (CDT)
I agree with the first comment. Peak Oil theory is about the consequences of running out of cheap oil, not running out of oil. This site's painstaking documentation of progressively more expensive methods of generating synfuels thoroughly supports Peak Oil theory.
peakoildebunked.blogspot.com does not contain a huge collection of well-referenced resources on the subject. For the most part it contains adolescent vulgarities and unsupported debunking of Peak oil 'myths'. The first post is a rather uber doomer "Why Humans Must Grow Into Space (Or Die)" and contains a laughable reference to 'Unlimited Space Energy'. We are talking about some seriously disturbed people here. Linking to this site with a positive referral seriously degrades the authority of this site.
