Random Note On Peak Oil -- May 28, 2019

Not to beat a dead horse, but a bit more on the "peak oil" discussion. This goes back to an earlier post today.

A reader commented at that post:

Yes, Adelman is really good. Every now and then he went a little overboard. But I'm about 95% aligned with him. And way better than James "hundred dollars here to stay" Hamilton.

One good remark Adelman had was that oil depletion (drilling it out) tends to move the cost curve up. But technology (broadly defined to include discovery, drilling, completion, etc.) moves it down. So he actually acknowledged the peak oiler argument. Just said that you can't consider only one side of things. This is the main error of the peak oilers, including light peak oilers like Hamilton.

A couple more oil economists I really like: James Griffin (Texas A&M) and Fereidun Fesharaki. Both think in terms of supply and demand, rather than time series. 

I was going to write more but I got side-tracked. I doubt what I was going to say was anything new.

Maybe later.

Along with James "hundred dollars here to stay" Hamilton, one could have added Art Berman. LOL.

This post is unimportant in the big scheme of things, but it reminded me to add the "Commentary_2019" tag to this post and others. I think we might come back to 2018 - 2019 some years from now and opine this was the year there was a tectonic shift in thinking about:

• peak oil
• the "Red Queen"
• swing producer: baton passed from OPEC to US shale
• OPEC: policy-driven; US shale: market driven
• conventional vs unconventional

If so, one might reflect on the fact that when tensions seemed to be flaring in the Mideast, to include attacks on tankers in the strait and drones attacking Saudi's oil fields, the price of oil actually went down.

I would like to write more but family commitments intervene.