Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Not Scarcity but Plenty

Thirty years ago I assisted a former chairman of Texaco with his estate planning. Along the way, he gave me a paper to read about the history of oil discovery. The thesis of that paper was, essentially, that we were not going to run out of the stuff anytime soon. The paper recounted the cycles of perceived plenty and perceived scarcity, with the doomsayers in full-throat during the down part of those cycles. Yet there was always another find or another technology developed to rejuvenate abandoned wells or to reach depths considered unreachable or to process crude that once seemed too expensive to process.

Here we go again on the upside - this piled on top of the recent oil-shale and natural gas discoveries here in the US. Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

1 comment:

Sean Meade said...

Peak Oil is a complete myth. It makes sense on the surface (no pun intended). But just a little data dispels it.

Some of the current extraction methods, esp. fraking (sp?) are truly not good, but, all in all, the situation is not what most people think.