Since oil prices took a nose dive over the last few weeks there has been much gloating from those with interests in denying oil depletion and the ill informed, claiming that somehow the peakist position was now discredited. Typical was The Australian, which happily conflated recent fears of spiking petrol prices with the peak oil position, before going on to uncritically confuse Exxon’s recent propaganda with reasoned argument:

“During the chaos of record prices, Goldman Sachs warned that the world could soon be paying $US100 a barrel for oil…The doomsday scenarios of Peak Oil theory - that we have already found most of the oil available and are rapidly running out - gained fevered currency. That interest has since subsided and the theory itself has been dismissed by oil companies.”

Whilst more informed commentators noted “What we have now is a moment of super volatility.”

It is with grim satisfaction therefore that we note, at the world’s most prestigious energy forum held last week in London - the 27th annual Oil & Money Conference - Robert Hirsch (author of the authoritative US Department of Energy report on oil depletion mitigation scenarios) told reporters he expected peak oil “within the next five to 10 years.’’ He went on to say that the mitigation effort required is on a par with “the race for the moon, or the mobilisation for World War II,’’ and that the world needs to spend $1tn a year on alternative fuels, starting 20 years before the peak in conventional oil production, in order to mitigate fuel shortages. According to Hirsch’s best guess, then, we are 10 to 15 years and 10 to 15 trillion dollars behind schedule. Source