Quote:In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, then the nation’s leading oil producer, warned that the U.S. had only four years of oil remaining. Forty years later, in 1914, when oil still hadn’t run out, the federal government said the U.S. had only a ten-year supply remaining. In 1940, the government announced that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half.

An article published on August 3, 1966, reported that “a geologist stuck a figurative dipstick into the United States’ oil supplies Tuesday and estimated that the country may be dry in 10 years,” placing the projected date of U.S. exhaustion at 1976. The most widely cited doomsday prediction came in 1972, when the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report calculated that global petroleum reserves, growing at then-current consumption rates, would be exhausted within 20 years, implying oil would run out by 1992.

For the past several decades, the claim that oil will run out has been used to promote the green energy transition, framing the use of solar and wind power as necessary to preserve human life. However, the people and institutions promoting the “oil is running out” narrative are the same people and institutions advancing the climate crisis narrative. As with other forms of propaganda, new vocabulary had to be invented, including the term “peak oil.

Peak oil is the theory that global oil production rises to a maximum point and then declines irreversibly as a finite resource is depleted. Yale Environment 360 reported that Rystad Energy expects natural gas production to peak and decline as renewables take over, and that the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021 called on oil companies to immediately end oil prospecting and pull back on production as part of a net-zero pathway explicitly grounded in the “peak oil” framing.

The context of the Yale report, and the peak oil claim in general, is somewhat dishonest. If they really believed the world was running out of oil, they wouldn’t need to warn anyone or demand that we stop looking for or producing oil. Instead, they could simply wait ten or twenty years, or whatever the latest prediction is, until oil runs out naturally. At that point, the world would transition to green energy out of necessity, and the climate advocates would win. The fact that they continue pushing the issue suggests they don’t really believe oil is running out.

A Cambridge University Press academic text states plainly that the peak oil belief is a myth, “at least for the next decades,” and warns that peak oil framing can backfire on climate advocates because the oil industry echoes the peak oil argument to convince governments to approve, and even assist with, new fossil fuel projects whenever prices spike. Effectively, the article presents circular logic. It suggests that the peak oil argument should be abandoned to prevent the oil industry from drilling for new oil, which would prevent the world from running out of oil.

All of the peak oil predictions had a common flaw: they made straight-line mathematical projections, assuming that no alternatives or solutions would be found. Each treated known reserves and existing extraction methods as fixed, when, in practice, both variables continued to change simultaneously.

Beginning in 2009, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing opened reserves previously considered inaccessible, reversing a U.S. production decline that had been treated as permanent since 1970. Secondary and tertiary recovery methods, enhanced by improved seismic imaging and deepwater drilling, allowed producers to extract oil from fields once considered depleted or unreachable.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s concept of “reserve growth,” the tendency for estimates of recoverable oil in already discovered fields to increase over time as technology improves, captured this directly. Fields assessed as near-exhausted in one decade were reassessed with significantly larger recoverable volumes in the next. In 2012, this process led the USGS to estimate potential undiscovered conventional reserve additions of 32 billion barrels for the United States, constituting about 10 percent of the country’s overall oil and gas endowment at the time.

Estimated ultimately recoverable resources (URR), the total volume of oil believed to exist and eventually be producible, have grown consistently since the concept was first quantified. In 1956, M. King Hubbert estimated U.S. Lower-48 conventional URR at 200 billion barrels, a figure still considered approximately accurate today. By the 1970s and early 1980s, global conventional URR was estimated at 1.8 to 2.5 trillion barrels. In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey’s World Petroleum Assessment estimated total global recoverable oil at approximately 3 trillion barrels, noting that about 710 billion barrels had already been produced.

The most recent peer-reviewed estimate, published in 2022, places global URR at 2.5 trillion barrels for conventional oil alone, rising to 5 trillion barrels when unconventional sources such as shale and tight oil are included. Even the conservative end of the current estimate matches the upper end of the 1970s range, while the full estimate is roughly double the highest 1970s projection, despite the world having produced and consumed well over a trillion barrels of oil during the intervening five decades.

Additional resources beyond what these URR estimates capture continue to expand the world’s usable oil supply. The U.S. Department of Energy has projected that enhanced oil recovery techniques, including carbon dioxide injection into existing reservoirs, could add roughly 89 billion barrels to U.S. reserves alone. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s 2026 National Assessment estimates 65.80 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil across the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates a total of 4.285 trillion barrels of oil in place in the oil shale deposits of the Green River Formation across Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, a resource not yet economically viable at scale but available if extraction costs decline.

Extra-heavy oil and bitumen deposits are similarly vast: the Government of Alberta reports 165 billion barrels of established oil sands reserves, with an additional 250 billion barrels potentially recoverable under more favorable economic conditions or improved technology. None of these mechanisms were accounted for in the straight-line projections behind past peak-oil doomsday forecasts.

Link

Trust Rupert, folks. Fossil fuels are a growth industry.

Does this look like a man who plans to sell short?

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(07-02-2026 03:19 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

Quote:Beginning in 2009, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing opened reserves previously considered inaccessible, reversing a U.S. production decline that had been treated as permanent since 1970. Secondary and tertiary recovery methods, enhanced by improved seismic imaging and deepwater drilling, allowed producers to extract oil from fields once considered depleted or unreachable.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s concept of “reserve growth,” the tendency for estimates of recoverable oil in already discovered fields to increase over time as technology improves, captured this directly. Fields assessed as near-exhausted in one decade were reassessed with significantly larger recoverable volumes in the next. In 2012, this process led the USGS to estimate potential undiscovered conventional reserve additions of 32 billion barrels for the United States, constituting about 10 percent of the country’s overall oil and gas endowment at the time.

Additional resources beyond what these URR estimates capture continue to expand the world’s usable oil supply. The U.S. Department of Energy has projected that enhanced oil recovery techniques, including carbon dioxide injection into existing reservoirs, could add roughly 89 billion barrels to U.S. reserves alone. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s 2026 National Assessment estimates 65.80 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil across the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates a total of 4.285 trillion barrels of oil in place in the oil shale deposits of the Green River Formation across Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, a resource not yet economically viable at scale but available if extraction costs decline.

Link

Advancements in technology are the great equalizer.

Quote:July 4th is more than marking America’s independence with patriotic flags, parades and fireworks. It's about celebrating American ingenuity, our firm belief that our country can engineer solutions to achieve the impossible, from launching the modern age of aviation to landing a man on the moon.

Some of the most compelling evidence of American exceptionalism today is happening thousands of feet beneath the surface of the Gulf of America, where our offshore industry has spent more than a decade solving one of the hardest engineering problems in the history of energy.

More than 100 miles offshore from the Gulf Coast sits a geological layer of sandstone and shale rock deep beneath the seabed called the Paleogene that holds tens of billions of barrels of oil. For years, most of it was considered unattainable. The reservoir pressures – up to 20,000 pounds per square inch, equivalent to an elephant standing on a quarter – exceeded anything existing technology could handle. No equipment had ever been built to work under those conditions.

Transocean developed the first drillships in the world built to work in these high-pressure conditions. Their Deepwater Titan and Deepwater Atlas are currently operating in the Gulf of America. Trendsetter Engineering designed subsea systems and manifolds capable of operating reliably at pressures once considered beyond reach. Other offshore companies have developed similar equipment that has unlocked the Paleogene.

The results speak for themselves. Chevron's Anchor project came online in 2024, representing roughly $5.7 billion in development spending. Beacon Offshore's Shenandoah is also producing oil and natural gas. BP's development plan for its $5 billion Kaskida project has secured federal approval and is moving toward first production. Together, these projects mark the opening of a new chapter of American offshore capability.

There's air and there's oil.