Why Peak Oil Predictions Haven't Come True -- The WSJ -- September 29, 2014

Today's WSJ has a special section on energy.

The front page, full-page article: why peak-oil predictions haven't come true:

To the peak-oil adherents, this is just a respite, and decline is inevitable. But a growing tide of oil-industry experts argue that peak oil looks at the situation in the wrong way. The real constraints we face are technological and economic, they say. We're limited not by the amount of oil in the ground, but by how inventive we are about reaching new sources of fuel and how much we're willing to pay to get at it.

"Technology moves so quickly today that any looming resource constraint will be nothing more than a blip," says petroleum economist Phil Verleger. "We adjust."

And then Mason shows up again (and some people say he's a "smart" peaker:

If M. King Hubbert were alive today—he died in 1989—would he admit defeat?

Probably not, says Mason Inman, who has written a biography of Mr. Hubbert that will be released next year. He argues that the recent shale boom is just a temporary respite in a long march downward. U.S. oil production could be about to hit a second peak, and then return to its terminal decline.

The production boom "makes things better for a while, but it doesn't change the long-term picture," Mr. Inman says.

If Mr. Hubbert were around, he might be dumbstruck by what he sees, Mr. Inman says. Mr. Hubbert, he says, advocated turning to solar power and energy efficiency to break the dependency on oil.

As for the power of innovation to reach new oil reserves, Mr. Hubbert believed that technology would help extend the limits of oil production, but thought its impact was exaggerated, Mr. Inman says. He felt people would invoke technology as a kind of panacea—which it isn't.

There will eventually be diminishing returns, Mr. Inman says, since oil is a finite resource, even though we don't really know its limits. "He would probably say, 'You guys are crazy to be drilling this so fast and using it up and pretending it's a solution,' " says Mr. Inman.

And Mason still doesn't have his own wiki page. 

Reason #3450 why I love to blog: one week ago I did not know who Mason Inman was; now I do, and my life is much richer. Not.