Michael Giberson What do changes in the domestic U.S. natural gas market have to tell us about the world oil market? Hirsch, Bezdek, and Wendling wrote, “The North American natural gas situation provides some useful lessons relevant to the peaking of conventional world oil production.” Here is their assessment of the North American natural gas …
Michael Giberson Vaclav Smil wonders, now that 2012 appears to have yielded a new record level of global oil output, will “some catastrophists and peak-oil cultists” have to back off their gloomy outlooks? See Smil, “Memories of Peak Oil,” in The American. Here is my prediction: No peak oiler will find 2012 oil production data as …
Smil: No Imminent Danger of Peak Oil, but Will Peak Oilers Admit It? Read More »
Michael Giberson Earlier this week the International Energy Agency released their annual World Energy Outlook, and new is a forecast that the United States would surpass Russian and Saudi Arabia to once-again become the world’s largest oil producer, sometime around 2020. The news set off a wave of happy press, i.e. the Wall Street Journal, …
Before Getting Too Excited About the Iea’s Forecast of Us Oil Production Leadership… Read More »
Michael Giberson Not all peak oil analysis comes across as sloppy, misleading, and a bit tedious, but this one does: “Peak Oil Driving The Global Gas Shift.” Of course sloppy analysis abounds on the internet, and the best approach is usually to ignore it, but this example appears on the somewhat respectable site of the …
Tedious Peak Oil Claims from the Eu Energy Policy Blog Read More »
Michael Giberson One of the classics of resource economics is Harold Hotelling’s “The economics of exhaustible resources,” Journal of Political Economy (1931). The article gave us what is now called “Hotelling’s rule,” which links resource prices and extraction rates for resources in finite supply. The article was simple, logical, and pathbreaking. It also, by the …
Michael Giberson Daniel Yergin’s peak oil commentary in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal has set the econoblogosphere to chattering, or at least those of us in the energy corner. In addition to the clash of the titans, i.e. James Hamilton’s “More thoughts on peak oil” rejoinder to Yergin, the mere mortals are going at it, …
Michael Giberson Clash of the titans: one of the world’s most prominent academic energy economists reacts to the peak oil commentary of one of the world’s preeminent establishment consulting energy economists. Self recommending, worth additional thought. James Hamilton on Daniel Yergin on peak oil.
Michael Giberson I second Lynne’s recommendation of Yergin’s column in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. On the topic of Hubbert’s peak and peak oil generally, I particularly recommend these two paragraphs: Hubbert insisted that price didn’t matter. Economics—the forces of supply and demand—were, he maintained, irrelevant to the finite physical cache of oil in the …
Michael Giberson There is a lot of natural gas locked up in shale in the world. Once shale gas was mostly a footnote to the energy industry, known about but inconsequential because mostly inaccessible. But the technology, and hence the economics, of shale gas development has improved. And those improvements are reshaping the world’s energy …
The International Possibilities of Petroleum from Shale Will Reshape Markets Read More »
Michael Giberson I’m sure I haven’t yet come to grips with the views expressed by commenters on my last post about economics and peak oil, but here is another paper on economics, Hubbert’s Peak, and peak oil. In short the authors model resource extraction scenarios in the manner that economists sometimes do, and conclude that …
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