Peak Oil Debate

It doesn't matter what they predicted; global oil production likely peaked in the last few years and no amount of wishful thinking is going to make more of it suddenly appear. Almost nobody in the industry seriously believes that production will increase in the medium to long-term; a lot of people don't even believe a short-term increase is possible. Falling production, rising demand and the lack of effective substitutes are all driving up prices. Over the next 10-20 years there is just no fores

At what price does oil enter a death spiral, where it is best to just never use oil for anything ever again?

It's running out of oil reserves that are easy to get at. There will always be more oil, but some portion of it will always cost more to extract than it is worth.

Why is this getting downvoted? I think its very relevant, that the cost of oil production at lower volume, could be a tipping point. Here en nothern europe, this is already effecting non profitable oildrillings, which are beeing closed, and new drillings beeing postponed or altogether cancelled.

No, I'm saying there's really no reason to expect a "rapid" change after peak. It's not like all the world's oil is coming from one upended bottle that'll just suddenly run dry, there are many different fields with different amounts left and different costs of extraction. Right now it looks like some of the larger fields (particularly the alberta tar sands) are becoming economical, and also various alternatives (wind, solar) are becoming economical.

Your contradiction is only temporary. The countries which product oil at today's price will eventually exhaust their oilfields. In response, oil prices will rise and other countries will be motivated to drill their own reserves.We will consume all convenient oil sooner or later.

My impression is that there are vast amounts of oil at increasing levels of extraction cost. As cheap oil is used up, the price rises and it becomes financially viable to extract more expensive reserves. Eventually, the remaining oil may be so costly to extract that renewable energy will be cheaper, but it seems unlikely that we will ever extract the last drop of fossil fuels.(Ignoring all the other reasons for cost fluctuations.)

I never heard that projection before. Because demands will plumet?Then It might just be not cost effective at all to go dig deeper or use more complex process to get it.How does that works with current recent trends? Globally we consumed more oil in 2023 than 2022 for instance.If demand plumet somehow … can we still support a extraction industry ? Recently ( pre 2019 ) shale gaz was worth it because of high prices… then it switched again to lower price and extracting it made little sens

It's the right decision. If we keep extracting every last drop of oil, the effects of climate change are going to irreversible (see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/09/tipping-...). If less oil is extracted, the price will go up, and that will hasten the transition

It's not that we'll never run out of oil, but if the price of oil rises to arbitrarily high levels then alternatives start to make economic sense. Those alternatives in the short term may be alternate sources of oil that were too difficult to extract earlier, but alternatives can also be completely difference sources of energy. And once economies of scale start to apply to those alternatives then their price starts to reduce, which further increases demand, etc. Not sure where the long