Dismissing Peak Oil

on Aug 26 in Peak Oil tagged by Trevor Hicks

Michael Lynch writes in The New York Times that Peak Oil isn’t really worth discussing.  You may recall that I think Peak Oil is a far more pressing economic and geopolitical issue than Climate Change.

Unfortunately this really isn’t a very good article, despite its high-status pedigree. I recognize the word limit constraints of an op-ed page, but Lynch does a lot of hand waving and references very few facts. For instance, Lynch brushes off Matthew Simmons because he raised a concern about the use of “fuzzy logic” to estimate reservoir size. Unfortunately this quote is unreferenced and more tellingly devoid of context. My intuition, having met Mr. Simmons and seen him speak a few times, is that he probably made such a remark in a colloquial sense meaning “questionable reasoning” and not with the precise meaning of the term that refers to a form of reasoning under uncertainty. That Lynch would seize upon such a comment indicates a rhetorical style more concerned with scoring points against an opponent than discussing facts and inferences from those facts. Matthew Simmons has a lot more of value to say about Peak Oil than one throwaway comment.

Lynch similarly dismisses any concerns about the fact that injected seawater now accounts for 35% of production from the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia by noting that such enhanced oil recovery techniques are commonplace and that 75% water cuts are not unusual. Perhaps in ordinary fields, but this is Ghawar. This is the king of all oilfields. We should be concerned about any injection and any water cuts. The fact that the Saudis now have to manage reservoir pressure in this field is very, very worrisome.

The entire article is like this, it winds up discussing the cornucopia of oil that is in the ground yet to be recovered. What he fails to address is that Peak Oil is not about running out of oil or claiming that there aren’t still vast reserves of it left to be produced. But that the combination of technological, geopolitical and environmental limiting factors mean that the world may not be able to grow the rate at which this oil is extracted from the ground. The concern is not about the size of the glass, it’s the size of the straw. Maybe Lynch is right and Peak Oil shouldn’t be high on our national agenda, but he will need better arguments than what he presented to convince me.