As Monbiot writes..."There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground". Read full article here. However not all see it this way. Richard Heinberg who spoke in Stroud to the District Council and Transition Network has this view - see here. He says: "And so a spurt of new production from “tight” shale deposits now serves as a pretext to declare victory. The peaksters should have seen it coming, after all: high oil prices do indeed trigger increases in reserves and production from lower-quality resources. Indeed, some of the better analysts did see it coming. I recall Jeremy Gilbert, the former BP chief petroleum engineer, speaking about the potential of new production technology at an Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference a couple of years ago."
Update - see also Transition view: http://transitionculture.org/2012/07/04/transition-reflections-on-george-monbiots-announcement-that-we-were-wrong-on-peak-oil/
2 comments:
Jeremy Leggett: George Monbiot says We were wrong about peak oil. There's enough to fry us all. The many misunderstandings he relays begin with the title. There is more than enough potential oil resource below ground to create the climate disaster he refers to. Peak oil is not about that. It is about when global production falls never again to reach past levels: a disaster, if the descent hits an oil-dependent global economy years ahead of expectations. This descent depends on flow rates in oilfields, not the amount of oil left. What worries those who believe the global oil peak is imminent is the evidence that the oil industry will not be able to maintain growing flow rates for much longer.
Guardian 4th July 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/04/monbiot-wrong-peak-oil?intcmp=122
Useful debate here:
http://theautomaticearth.org/Energy/peak-oil-a-dialogue-with-george-monbiot.
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