http://americaspeaksink.com/the-conservative-reconstructon-project/

The day of “peak oil” may be postponed indefinitely, if new technology makes shale oil and oil from tar sands commercially viable. (The U.S. alone has well over a trillion barrels of such oil waiting to be tapped.)

But there’s that pesky problem of greenhouse gas emissions. We can’t burn another trillion barrels of oil, even if it were cheap.

OTOH, the opposition to nuclear power is totally irrational. The argument about nuclear waste is a red herring. We could resume reprocessing and get rid of most of the waste that way. We could store it in Yucca Mountain and get rid of it that way. The opponents of nuclear power are sublimating their opposition to nuclear WEAPONS by demonstrating against all things nuclear.

And that’s totally irrational. It would be like demonstrating against Boeing 747s as a way of showing your opposition to B-52 strategic bombing.

Luckily, (for us) the Middle Eastern countries are also finding it more difficult and expensive to produce oil. The days of oil literally bubbling out of the ground are all but over. Case in point, the Saudis are about to bring a field online that required the construction of hundreds of miles worth of water lines, pumping stations, and filtration sites in order to pump sea water into the ground, thus creating enough back pressure to bring the oil out of the ground. This level of expenditure is only possible if oil stays in the $80+ range.

Finally, one thing all of the articles and reports regarding the BP find have seemingly ommitted is that in most cases the amount of oil that is actually recoverable from these super sites is far less than the initial estimates.

The BP find is large, but 3billion bbl is not “that” large, especially when you consider how deep it is, and how hard it will be to recover. Cantarell (which was really large) was initially estimated to contain 35 billion bbl, nearly 10 times what BP found. At any rate there will still be large discovery in 100 years, the problem is that what is considered large today and what was considered large in 1976 (Cantarell) are very different thing.

Peak Oil may or may not be here, but you cannot infer from $147 or one large oil find anything about Peak oil. You need to look at the global picture (very difficult, especially in the Middle East, Africa and Russia e.g. the biggest producers), but it would seem that new discovery while still large, are just not occurring as frequently as they used to, and this despite massive exploration budgets — based on 2008’s $147 price tag.

You may object to peak oil based on your philosophical outlook, which among conservatives seems to be ’steady as she goes”, but that’s just your opinion. There may be lots of oil left in the ground (since apparently you are an executive in the E&P sector), we may be very far from peak oil, but one thing for sure, the new stuff is harder to extract (and harder translates into more expensive), so either way a primary component of the “American way of living” — cheap energy is on the way out. Will we see oil at $200 maybe, will we see oil at $13 probably not unless the world economy has a “depression”.

While we certainly should diversify our energy production as a matter or national and economic security, with also considerations for future generations and ecological welfare….

this fearmongering isnt very productive. But I dont put this in the same league as the Anthropogenic Global Warming religious belief system used to drive a Socialist Leftwing agenda.

It’s a good concept to sensitize our economy to the use of a finite resource, but we are at peak oil yet.