Peak Oil

In some ways, it matters VERY little of Peak Oil is three years or 30 years down the road.  The reason is simple--it required over 100 years to build the current infrastructure running on oil so a replacement infrastructure will require at least 50 years to build.  Worse, we have a President who claimed this conversion would require $180 billion in federal government spending over 10 years during his acceptance speech in Denver (2008).  Since then he has been forced to spend the government's spare change bailing out the crooks on Wall Street and those running the nation's "health care" system.  So even that pathetic sum has not been appropriated and spent.  It's embarrassing.

Oil reserves 'exaggerated by one third'

The world's oil reserves have been exaggerated by up to a third, according to Sir David King, the Government's former chief scientist, who has warned of shortages and price spikes within years.

By Rowena Mason, City Reporter (Energy)

The scientist and researchers from Oxford University argue that official figures are inflated because member countries of the oil cartel, OPEC, over-reported reserves in the 1980s when competing for global market share.

Their new research argues that estimates of conventional reserves should be downgraded from 1,150bn to 1,350bn barrels to between 850bn and 900bn barrels and claims that demand may outstrip supply as early as 2014. The researchers claim it is an open secret that OPEC is likely to have inflated its reserves, but that the International Energy Agency (IEA), BP, the Energy Information Administration and World Oil do not take this into account in their statistics. more

And Oil Drum's analysis

The growth in OPEC reserves, without any corresponding discoveries, is an issue The Oil Drum has talked about various times. I know I talked about the issue about two years ago, in an article called The Disconnect Between Oil Reserves and Production. This was a graph I showed at that time, of published oil reserves.

 

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