{"id":31961,"date":"2018-03-06T07:13:40","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T12:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31961"},"modified":"2018-03-06T07:13:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T12:13:40","slug":"new-u-s-record-level-oil-production-peak-oil-theory-disproven-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31961","title":{"rendered":"New U.S. Record-Level Oil Production! Peak Oil Theory Disproven! Not."},"content":{"rendered":"
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New U.S. Record-Level Oil Production! Peak Oil Theory Disproven! Not.<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Well, I\u2019m amazed and impressed. Tight oil production has pushed total United States petroleum output to more than 10 million barrels a day, a rate last seen almost a half-century ago<\/a>. It\u2019s a new U.S. record. Fifteen years ago I was traveling the world with a Powerpoint presentation featuring a graph of U.S. oil production history. That graph showed a clear peak in 1970 and a long bumpy decline thereafter.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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My message: as went the U.S., so would go the world at some point in the fairly near future. Peak oil\u2014the inevitable moment when global oil supplies started drying up\u2014would be a watershed for industrial societies, leading to economic contraction, geopolitical crisis, and social upheaval.<\/p>\n

So is it time for a retraction? The optics are certainly unfavorable for peak oil theorists like me. Our forecasts obviously failed, in that none of us expected the current surge in U.S. output. But permit me to offer some context.<\/p>\n

Everyone agrees that the surge is almost entirely due to tight oil (globally, there has also been growth in bitumen from Canada, deepwater oil, and other unconventional sources). The application of hydrofracturing and horizontal drilling to low-permeability source rocks in the United States represents an amazing success story for the oil industry\u2014at least in terms of raw petroleum output. But what conditions led to this bonanza?<\/p>\n

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear\u2014the year 2005, to be precise. That\u2019s when the rate of world conventional oil production stopped growing and hit a plateau that continues to this day. Oil prices were already scrambling upward; by mid-2008 they had zoomed to nearly $150 per barrel. And it was at that moment that the global financial crisis erupted. Which was, by most accounts, a survival threat to industrial society.<\/p>\n

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…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New U.S. Record-Level Oil Production! Peak Oil Theory Disproven! Not. Well, I\u2019m amazed and impressed. Tight oil production has pushed total United States petroleum output to more than 10 million barrels a day, a rate last seen almost a half-century ago. It\u2019s a new U.S. record. Fifteen years ago I was traveling the world with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[124,164,19093,617,6665,1081,827,1474,846,1893],"class_list":["post-31961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-central-banks","tag-conventional-oil","tag-non-conventional-oil","tag-peak-oil","tag-resilience-org","tag-richard-heinberg","tag-united-states","tag-us-oil-production","tag-us-shale-oil","tag-us-tight-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31961"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31962,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31961\/revisions\/31962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}