Peak Oil

When alarmists aren't trying to scare us to death with global warming and bird/swine flu there is always the ever-popular peak oil.

"We're going to run out, real soon", they say. Yet the oil companies keep finding more oil in places where they should have already run out, like the North Sea.

Peter Glover writes:

I’ve been hearing dark mutterings about the imminent ‘end of North Sea oil’ all my life, with the dramatic impact that would have for the UK economy. North Sea oil was a diminishing resource that would be “gone by the end of the century” experts constantly assured back in the 1970s. But the rigs just kept right on drilling and producing into the new century – and the experts just kept right on being confounded. And it looks like they are to be confounded yet again as a new North Sea boom is set to boost oil reserves – and the UK’s economy.

“The North Sea remains an important hub for investment and will continue to be at the heart of the UK’s energy security for years to come,” Charles Hendry, the new coalition government’s energy minister, said at the end of June. For once, an energy minister wasn’t shooting the political breeze. Hendry was announcing the grant of 356 new North Sea exploration licences – a record number of licences since they were first issued in 1964.

Around 37 billion barrels has already been extracted from the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS), leaving around 25.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil – or so it was thought. That figure has just been upped by around a fifth to well over 30 billion barrels, the effect of new technology, higher oil prices, renewed interest in fields, as well as the discovery of new ones. A growing body of opinion believes that even upping the reserves by a fifth will prove a conservative estimate.

Towards the end of the article is this:

In 2008, British economist Peter Odell of Holland’s Erasmus University argued that every year more barrels of oil are added to the world’s reserves than are used up.

The very interesting article is here