Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Has peak oil peaked?

The notion of Peak Oil, the theory that capacity to find new deposits has, or is soon to, fail to keep up with increasing demand (or even continue at current production) was mostly off in kook land until a few years ago, though not an opinion held exclusively by kooks. It has been working its way into the mainstream slowly but surely, and with oil around $80 per barrel it seems to have finally arrived.
But it seems that the Russians are not convinced, according to F William Engdahl at the Asia Times in his article "Russia is far from oil's peak".

I'm certainly not qualified to know how far out in left field Engdahl and the Russians are, but it certainly is going against the general consensus to say that oil is not of biological origin:
An entirely alternative theory of oil formation has existed since the early 1950s in Russia, almost unknown to the West. It claims that the conventional US biological-origins theory is an unscientific absurdity that is unprovable. They point to the fact that Western geologists have repeatedly predicted finite oil over the past century, only then to find more, lots more.

Not only has this alternative explanation of the origins of oil and gas existed in theory, the emergence of Russia as the world's largest oil and natural-gas producer has been based on the application of the theory in practice. This has geopolitical consequences of staggering magnitude.
I guess it really doesn't matter how the oil got to where it is, but evidently the Russians, based on their theory, find oil in places it's not supposed to be, enough to now be the largest oil and gas producer in the world. Fuel for thought, anyway.

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