your way is much better. truly, an argument with a fellow Texan is one of life’s underrated simple pleasures. (below sex or finding money or a really good chicken-fried steak, but better than…. tequila, say. or having to watch the aggies stumble around like drunk, confused chickens at football games.)(“coach! all them big guys are chasing me!” “then RUN, you sorry little inbred peckerwood! no wait! NOT THAT WAY!!! head for OUR goal line!”)

Thanks for your feedback. Maybe I wasn’t clear when I mentioned shale. I agree that getting oil from shale is not the answer. I was referring instead to shale gas wells.

I just returned from an oil industry conference in which the numbers presented were that for the last 10 years, the world has discovered (proven reserves) 10 to 15 billion barrels of new oil each year – that includes the estimates for 2009 (a very good year). When compared against a 30 billion per year consumption rate that is a worrisome number. Discoveries of proven reserves(not production) peaked in 1964 and have been declining ever since.

The average worldwide recovery factor for all oil fields is about 35%. This means that almost 2/3rds of all the oil in place is effectively stranded ─ it is not economically recoverable using existing technology. Despite great research & development efforts by the oil industry, recovery factors are not likely to increase much in the medium term. There is no applicable “miracle” technology, a silver bullet, that will increase production rates enough to offset natural declines. The “new” recovery technology technologies that some people cite are all 20 years old and have been used to achieve that 35% factor.

The decline will be slow and may not be evident except in the rear view mirror, but we are slowly heading into decline.

I do by the way share your beliefs about new inventions and technologies – having spent my career in technology development. It is just that I make a big distinction between technology and energy. Technology makes better and better use of energy – but needs energy.

However – let’s shut this debate down. We will only continue to disagree over numbers and I don’t want to clog up the excellent Coyote Blog with a side issue.

Thanks for your input.

so, in the last 3 months, oil companies have “discovered” an extra 70,000,000,000 barrels of oil.

in 3 months.

rumor also has it the canadians have just about figured out a way to refine the 2.5 billion barrels of heavy oil they’ve got up there; peru just figured out they’re sitting on 300 million barrels of the stuff; the washington post says angola just figured out they’ve got 20 billion barrels; mcmoran stumbled onto a 2-4 billion barrel field that exxon gave up on last year……and that’s just the 1st 2 pages of google searches.

ok, i’ll admit it: *IF* we never find any more oil (not likely, based on recent events) and *IF* we never invent new technology that doesn’t depend on oil (not likely, based on the ever-increasing avalanche of 3rd-world PH.D.’s, nanotechnology, and the ever-closer day in the pipeline that AI and massive-parallel-linked supercomputers merge), THEN we might someday be in trouble. of course….there were those who darkly predicted a worldwide technological crash based on the ever-decreasing supplies of whale-oil (they called it the “peak whale-oil theory”) back in the 1870′s, too. then along came john d. rockefeller to save us all. even the whales.

pessimism is an entirely-justified mindset when it comes to things like politics and the prospects for world freedom, i’ll be the first to admit. but when it comes to new inventions and new technologies – things driven by the profit motive that is INTEGRAL to human nature – i see no reason for anything but optimism.

But I also believe in looking at the data – and looking hard. It takes a lot of analysis but the evidence is convincing. Read my post a little more carefully. We are not running out of oil – there will be lots of it around in 2100. But it will be very expensive and that is the problem.

Dr. T: Again, please read what I said. It is rather difficult to say that “Limits to Growth” has been wrong. Because it basically presented a case that said it will be business as usual (good economic growth and more than adequate resources) through the first half of the 21st century but that in mid-century both economic growth and population would peak due to declining resources. We can look back in 2060 and say they were wrong but we simply can’t say that now.

It is remarkable to me that so many writers, including main media writers, have repeated the notion that “Limits to Growth” predicted massive die off and starvation by the year 2000. The book simply did no such thing. Die off and starvation was a Paul Erhlich thing – not the Limits to Growth.

What it did do though – and it bothers people – is to try to show the eventual result of continued economic growth and non-renewable resource depletion. And what they were trying to show is that it eventually results in a slowdown of growth. And that they could not come up with scenarios that changed that other than moving the slow down back closer to 2100 and into the 22nd century.

They could be wrong. We will see.

Dan: Appreciate your comments and agree with most of them. I may have sounded more pessimistic than I meant to sound. But I respectfully disagree with your views on alternate energy sources like deepwater oil and especially oil shale. I know oil shale rather well and it is not oil (nor shale). The problem with it is that it has to be mined (not pumped)and is incredibly slow to extract with massive investments. But that requires a dissertation. Deepwater oil is doable but again rate limited without massive investment.

Americans are not all the same. Most of us look at the economics and time demands of raising children and decide that more than two is too much of a sacrifice. However, some couples value children more, and look at it not as how much they have to sacrifice to support more children, but rather as how many they can support. E.g., my aunt, married to a doctor who also has a quite good business sense, has four children because they decided that adds more to their lives than another $200K in spending money would. They are not religious, and I don’t know if their kids will also choose large families. There are religious couples that have all the kids they can possibly support, a half-dozen or more, and are quite likely to pass their convictions on. Finally, there are those who depend on welfare to support their kids, including the irresponsible or too stupid and impulsive to use birth control as well as polygamous Mormons – and they get paid for each additional kid! I’ve got neighbors that are in the third generation of welfare-dependent poor white trash, so they’re certainly passing on their breeding rate.

If the rest of us are having two children per couple or fewer, and these other groups are having four to eight kids per woman, and even a few of them pass it on, what happens in the long run is that the low-breeding groups are submerged by the high-breeders. I don’t see anything that can stop that aside from mandatory birth control and abortions, or a return to the days of letting the irresponsible starve to death with their kids, coupled with a steep rise in the cost of supporting kids so middle-income religious fanatics can no longer afford huge families even by giving up all luxuries.

Secondly, technology will probably keep pace with population for several more doublings, but there are limits to geometric expansion. If somehow we keep expanding the population even at a small rate, eventually the mass of humans would equal the total mass of water and carbon in the atmosphere, oceans, and crust of the Earth. A few millenia beyond that, humans would outmass Earth, then the solar system, then the galaxy…

Not that our greatgrandchildren will have to worry about that yet.

The key reason Malthus and his followers have been proven wrong over the years is because they couldn’t imagine the leaps in technology that allowed the world to grow its population to current levels and still feed (most) everyone. Much of this technology – fertilizers, bio-engineered seeds, diesel-powered combines, highway and railroad networks that efficiently deliver food from farms to population centers – is currently based on fossil fuels.

I’m not a “peak oil” theorist, but I do think we need to acknowledge that none of the energy sources that have delivered this food revolution over the last 150 years is a renewable resource. So far, humanity has done a great job of finding ways to expand its energy production, and those who forecast imminent declines in energy output have always been wrong. But we can only continue to deliver the energy we need by continued technological leaps that allow us to access harder to find fuels, such as oil under the Atlantic and shale formations under the western U.S. Much of this is already happening, even as older fields lose production.

We’re not about to fall off a cliff, as Texas Engineer asserts. But continued growth depends on being able to find enough new energy sources to make up for the ones we’re running out of. To date, humanity has proven very good at this, and I’m optimistic this will continue to be the case.

How is “understand how things will eventually play out” different from “forecast[ing] the future?” They made widely publicized predictions that were wrong. Writing a disclaimer doesn’t give them a free pass on the errors.

Though I was a teenager and young adult in the 1970s, I knew better than to trust the media. I’ve been a skeptic since age 10, when I started questioning Sunday school teachers about the contradictions within the Bible. The major media never have been accurate and reliable, though there were periods when reporters and editors were more ethical. Unfortunately, this is not one of those periods.

dude.

change the word “energy” into “food”, and what you’ve written is an almost perfect copy of malthus. we’re almost outta food; people breeding too fast for crops to keep up; we’re all gonna die starving; etc etc. only now what’s going to kill us is…not enough oil. same song, different verse.

each and every word of which time and history has proven to be wrong wrong wrong. rather than focus on (or even admit) that uncomfortable fact, you’ve merely chosen to change the point of the (entirely wrong) argument. “it’s not FOOD we’re gonna run out of and DIE DIE DIE!!! it’s *energy*!!!” you have chosen an imaginary hobgoblin to try to frighten the people, in an attempt to get them to run to their good and wise governments for protection. why is that, i wonder? there wouldn’t be a -you know – a POLITICAL reason for you doing this, would there?

When you say it was completely wrong you are showing you have not read it. Back in 1970 when it was written it showed the most likely scenarios involved world population peaking the the middle of the 21st century. Which is what you just said may now happen! It also showed industrial activity and non-renewable resource starting to peak in the same time frame.

Yet critics like you always say it predicted we would be starving to death by 2000. It said nothing of the kind – in fact it’s graphs showed continued prosperity in the early parts of this century.

You have a great website which I read daily – and I will continue to read. Because I consider myself a complete libertarian and you express libertarian ideas wonderfully. But I can be a libertarian and still understand that we do live on a finite planet and feedback loops do work. Eventually world economic growth will stop and go negative. Because growth requires cheap readily available energy and eventually we will leave that cheap energy life behind. That is not a liberal statist idea. It is the law. The Meadows (authors of Limits) did an important piece of work trying to help us understand how that will play out. We have had 150 years of cheap readily available energy and will have a few more. But it is almost over.

Peace