Federal government can’t solve alone

Cards that will answer potential add-ons or new advantages

No Peak Oil

Peak oil theory discredited

Klare 14 (Michael T. Klare – Author and Professor of Peace and World Security Studies, January 1^st, 2014, The Huffington post – green, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-t-klare/peak-oil-is-dead_b_4567978.html)//JS

Among the big energy stories of 2013, “peak oil” -- the once-popular notion that worldwide oil production would soon reach a maximum level and begin an irreversible decline -- was thoroughly discredited. The explosive development of shale oil and other unconventional fuels in the United States helped put it in its grave. As the year went on, the eulogies came in fast and furious. “Today, it is probably safe to say we have slayed ‘peak oil’ once and for all, thanks to the combination of new shale oil and gas production techniques,” declared Rob Wile, an energy and economics reporter for Business Insider. Similar comments from energy experts were commonplace, prompting an R.I.P. headline at Time.com announcing, “Peak Oil is Dead.” Not so fast, though. The present round of eulogies brings to mind the Mark Twain’s famous line: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Before obits for peak oil theory pile up too high, let's take a careful look at these assertions. Fortunately, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Paris-based research arm of the major industrialized powers, recently did just that -- and theresults were unexpected. While not exactly reinstalling peak oil on its throne, it did make clear that much of the talk of a perpetual gusher of American shale oil is greatly exaggerated. The exploitation of those shale reserves may delay the onset of peak oil for a year or so, the agency’s experts noted, but the long-termpicture “has not changed much with the arrival of [shale oil].” The IEA’s take on this subject is especially noteworthy because its assertion only a year earlier that the U.S. would overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s number one oil producer sparked the “peak oil is dead” deluge in the first place. Writing in the 2012 edition of its World Energy Outlook, the agency claimed not only that “the United States is projected to become the largest global oil producer” by around 2020, but also that with U.S. shale production and Canadian tar sands coming online, “North America becomes a net oil exporter around 2030.” That November 2012 report highlighted the use of advanced production technologies -- notably horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) -- to extract oil and natural gas from once inaccessible rock, especially shale. It also covered the accelerating exploitation of Canada’s bitumen (tar sands or oil sands), another resource previously considered too forbidding to be economical to develop. With the output of these and other “unconventional” fuels set to explode in the years ahead, the report then suggested, the long awaited peak of world oil production could be pushed far into the future. The release of the 2012 edition of World Energy Outlook triggered a global frenzy of speculative reporting, much of it announcing a new era of American energy abundance. “Saudi America” was the headline over one such hosanna in the Wall Street Journal. Citing the new IEA study, that paper heralded a coming “U.S. energy boom” driven by “technological innovation and risk-taking funded by private capital.” From then on, American energy analysts spoke rapturously of the capabilities of a set of new extractive technologies, especially fracking, to unlock oil and natural gas from hitherto inaccessible shale formations. “This is a real energy revolution,” the Journal crowed.

Their evidence doesn’t assume “reserve growth” – data

Leonardo Maugeri June 2012 (“Oil: The Next Revolution¶ THE UNPRECEDENTED UPSURGE OF OIL PRODUCTION ¶ CAPACITY AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE WORLD” The Geopolitics of Energy Project at The Harvard Kennedy Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Oil-%20The%20Next%20Revolution.pdf)

Reserve growth is a crucial element in the evolution of oil supply, and is often ignored or ¶ underestimated. Most analyses on oil reserves and supplies focus primarily on depletion rates of ¶ already producing oil basins, subtracting from reserves, and assuming a reduction of future ¶ production, without adequately factoring in their reserve growth. This underestimates the ¶ production of several oilfields, particularly the larger ones. ¶ Two prominent geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey conducted a brilliant examination of ¶ “reserve growth” on a global scale. According to their extensive analysis, the estimated proven ¶ volume of oil in 186 well-known giant fields in the world (holding reserves higher than 0.5 ¶ billion barrels of oil, discovered prior to 1981) increased from 617 billion barrels to 777 billion ¶ barrels between 1981 and 1996.¶ 7¶ Because of “reserve growth,” a country or a company may increase its oil reserves without ¶ tapping new areas if it can recover more oil from its known fields. One of the best examples of ¶ the ability to squeeze more oil from the ground comes from the Kern River Field in California.

Their authors assume knowledge of oil fields are static – they aren’t, proves no peak

Leonardo Maugeri June 2012 (“Oil: The Next Revolution¶ THE UNPRECEDENTED UPSURGE OF OIL PRODUCTION ¶ CAPACITY AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE WORLD” The Geopolitics of Energy Project at The Harvard Kennedy Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Oil-%20The%20Next%20Revolution.pdf)

All of these elements point to a fundamental concept: knowledge of already discovered oil ¶ resources is not static, but increases over time through the expansion of scientific understanding ¶ of the fields. This explains why resources increase over time in tandem with increased ¶ knowledge, though a dynamic, ongoing process. In other words, estimates of reserves are not ¶ carved in stone. ¶ This is even truer for what we do not know, that is, the unexplored areas of the world. Only one ¶ third of the sedimentary basins of our planet (the geologic formations that may contain oil) have ¶ been thoroughly explored with modern technologies including advanced seismic prospecting and ¶ deep exploration drilling. For example, until a few years ago, it was impossible to look through ¶ pre-salt formations with traditional seismic technology, or tap hydrocarbons below more than ¶ 5,000 or 6,000 feet of water. Moreover, large parts of Africa and Asia and many deep and ultradeep offshore basins are still unexplored. ¶ Exploration wells (also known as wildcats in oil jargon) represent a good proxy of the real ¶ knowledge of our planet’s hidden secrets, because they follow careful geological and seismic ¶ evaluations of the subsoil. Only about 2,000 new wildcat fields have been drilled in the entire ¶ Persian Gulf region since the inception of its oil activity, compared to more than one million in ¶ the United States.¶ 10¶ Even today, more than 60 percent of drilling activity is concentrated in North ¶ America (United States and Canada), as reflected by the rig count numbers made available each ¶ month by Baker Hughes.

No peak oil – new tech, new massive deposits, their authors always shift the goalposts

Peter C. Glover 8/15/12 (Canada Free Press, “Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?” http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/48813)

Why are peak oil-ers like Jehovah’s Witnesses? Answer: When the definitive JW prediction of the ‘Day of Wrath’ failed in 1914, they did what false prophets have done in every generation: shifted the goalposts (to 1975 in the case of JW’s—and wrong again). It’s what false prophets do to save face, enabling them to keep fleecing the inherently gullible. Peak-oilers do likewise.¶ Having written their headline-grabbing, money-making blockbusters predicting the imminent collapse of an oil-driven industrial world, peak-oilers like to maintain a ‘fluid’ approach to their predictions. In the case of oil, however, that’s becoming a tougher proposition, as their ignorance of energy, economics and the sheer ingenuity of man is increasingly revealed in the looming global oil boom.¶ The ‘new Middle East’¶ When John Fogerty sang about coming home to Green River, the incentive was hardly a 200 year supply of oil. But that’s the reality of the world’s largest shale oil—more properly, deposit at the Green River Formation (GRF). The USGS estimates the GRF holds 3 trillion barrels of oil, around half of which is deemed recoverable. That’s equivalent to the total of the world’s proven oil reserves.¶ At current levels of US consumption—19.5 million barrels per day (bpd)—Green River on its own could supply domestic US needs for the next 200 years. Then there are the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale plays. The former alone is on a par with big Persian Gulf producing countries. Eagle Ford may even match the hydrocarbon endowment of the Bakken/Three Forks play in North Dakota and Montana. To date, shale or tight oil has added about 700,000 bpd to US oil production.¶ No wonder North America is being talked about in oil terms as ‘the new Middle East’. But the Bakken and Eagle Ford plays aside, there are a further 18 plays with plenty of energy potential across the United States. And I haven’t even touched on the granddaddy of North American oil plays: Canada’s huge Athabasca oil sands development. Just for good measure, a report by Citigroup analysts estimates that America’s “reindustrialization”, driven by its conventional energy (oil and gas) sector, could see the creation of a whopping 3.6 million new jobs and add a full 3 percent to national GDP. ¶ Deepwater and beyond¶ A USGS report of 171 global regions in 2012 further estimates that the world’s undiscovered conventional and technically recoverable oil resources, much of it in deepwater, stands at 565 billion barrels of oil (BBO). That’s a figure that only represents known conventional resources. But it pales in significance when unconventional resources, such as heavy oil, oil sands and shale oil, are taken into consideration. As the USGS reports, the mean estimate for recoverable heavy oil from the Orinoco Oil Belt in Venezuela alone stands at a mammoth 513 BBO. The shale oil potential of Russia’s Bazhenov Formation in Western Siberia may well prove to be 80 times larger than America’s Bakken Formation. At present six of the world’s largest oil fields in Ghana, Mexico, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Brazil and Venezuela (the Orinoco Field) all still await development—the last directly due directly to President Chavez’s anti-West politics.¶ A recent study by Leonardo Maugeri, a former senior executive with Italian giant ENI, confirms the global prognosis. Such is the positive nature of exploration, the impact of new technologies and the sheer weight of finds and prospective new resources, Maugeri states: “Contrary to what most people believe, oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption. This could lead to a glut of overproduction and a steep dip in oil prices.” Maugeri further suggests that “capacity exists to increase the world’s 2011 production of 93 million barrels a day by as much as half, hitting, by 2020, around 111 million barrels a day—and rising.¶ You might have thought: great news for those around the world being forced into increasingly fuel poverty through having to pay for national green taxes to subsidize expensive, poor-generation, renewable projects. Not so it seems for social engineers like leading eco-activist and erstwhile Brit columnist, George Monbiot or ‘Moonbat’ to his critics. Newly convinced by Maugeri’s study, and already having recanted his views on nuclear power, Monbiot has now recanted also his alarmist views on peak oil, claiming “the facts have changed”. (Actually George they haven’t, rather you’ve just become acquainted with them.)¶ For the naive Monbiot, as for all peak-oiler scaremongers, rising oil and energy prices provided proof positive that oil scarcity was just around the corner, a fact, they said, presaging the end of industrial civilization as we know it. This was supposed to be the key ‘frightner’ for our technology-loving society to agree to subsidize ridiculously expensive, poor-production, renewable energy. What the Guardian’s Moonbat and his colleagues failed to understand, however, is a basic economic fact of energy life: high prices are also the market’s way of incentivizing new investment and greater human ingenuity. Necessity being the mother of invention, industry entrepreneurs duly came up with the goods, including the energy game-changer of the hydraulic fracturing of shale deposits. Once again, the ‘end-is-nigh-ists’ like all false prophets, shifted the prophetic goalposts. Instead of peak oil presaging social “disaster”, now the lack of a prospective peak for oil production quickly became the disaster.¶

Their author’s don’t understand economics or energy production – err on our side, their authors are all biased

Peter C. Glover 8/15/12 (English writer & freelance journalist specializing in political, media and energy analysis (and is currently European Associate Editor for the US magazine Energy Tribune). He has been published extensively with columns at World Politics Review, TCS Daily and American Thinker, Canada Free Press, “Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?” http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/48813)

“Peak idiocy”¶ So where did it all go wrong for peak-oil alarmists? Interestingly, for better ‘experts’ than Monbiot, it was their abject failure to understand either energy or the economics of energy. A double failure that led inexorably into a state which economist Mike Munger rightly terms: “peak idiocy”. Munger’s thesis bears repeating:¶ “Of all the idiotic things people believe, the whole “peak oil” thing has to be right up there. It is literally impossible for us to run out of oil. We have never run out of anything. And we never will.¶ If we did start to use up the oil we have ... three things would happen.¶ 1. Prices would rise, causing people to cut back on use. More fuel efficient cars, better insulation on houses, etc. Quantity supplied goes up.¶ 2. Prices would rise, causing people to look for more. And they would find more oil, and more ways to get at it. Quantity demanded goes down.¶ 3. Prices of oil would rise, making the search for substitutes more profitable. At that point alternative fuels and energy sources would be economical, and would not require government subsidies, because they would pay for themselves. The supply curve for substitutes shifts downward and to the right.¶ Well put and accurate. And precisely the argument posited in Huber and Mill’s seminal book, The Bottomless Well, which states: “Energy supplies are—for all practical purposes—infinite”. So why don’t more allegedly informed pundits grasp the basic economics of energy? In a word: ideology. In this particular case, the ideology of the leftwing social engineer prepared to politicize any issue for their personal ‘higher’ purpose.¶ “The facts” were widely known well before the likes of George Monbiot and co were forced to admit the jig was up, with Moonbat lamenting, “We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all”. True—and on both counts. But a much more positive and factually-based perspective might conclude: “there’s more than enough oil, coming from much friendlier countries, that turbo-boost the economy and create millions of jobs for decades to come—and at a much cheaper rate, too.”¶ And which has the merit of more consistent “prophetic” insight? Depends on whether a vacillating Moonbat/Guardian-esque ideology trumps the intellect, I guess.

Be skeptical of their evidence – it refers to peak oil as running out of conventional oil, doesn’t assume new unconventional options

Doug Casey and Louis James 8/29/12 (Dough Casey: highly respected author, publisher and professional investor who graduated from Georgetown University in 1968, Louis James: editor of the international speculator, “Doug Casey on Peak Oil” http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doug-casey-peak-oil?quicktabs_casey_stock_simple_tabs=second)

Doug: In essence, that there is a finite amount of conventional light, sweet crude in the earth's crust. That statement may not seem like a cosmic breakthrough, on its face. After all, if you have a 42-gallon barrel of oil and you consume 21 gallons, it's simple arithmetic that 21 gallans remain. On the other hand, wealth is something men create, not something that they simply find. That philosophical fact, however, doesn't really have much to do with Peak Oil theory.¶ This theory is widely misunderstood, even by economically literate people, oddly enough. Such people rightly point out that the world will basically never run out of anything, as long as the market is free to set prices. Decreased supply increases prices, which simultaneously causes people to economize, and incentivizes new producers and new alternatives to enter the field. That's absolutely true, but irrelevant to Hubbert's point, which was strictly a geological one: The number of conventional deposits of light, sweet crude in the US are finite, and the search for them has been more thorough than anywhere else in the world, and a documented decline in discoveries had to lead to a documented decline in production – of this particular kind of oil.¶ Peak Oil is a major reason why, in spite of a rapidly cooling global economy, oil prices are still near historic highs, at over $95 a barrel. In part, this is due to so-called "quantitative easing" – i.e., money-printing – but it's also clearly evidence of the essential correctness of Hubbert's theory, which accurately predicted the peaking of light, sweet crude-oil production in the US circa 1970. It was not only technically daring, but occupationally and politically dangerous in the '50s for Hubbert to forecast that the US, and then world production, would go into decline. And he was right.¶ L: Oil sands were not part of his consideration.¶ Doug: Right. To my knowledge, he never said anything about oil sands, shale oil, oil from coal, heavy oil from Venezuela, or deep ocean drilling off the coast of Brazil or other places. He did not say, and Peak Oil does not mean, that the world is going to run out of oil. All he said was that the lowest-hanging fruit was picked – the production of that particular kind would go into permanent decline. Technology is constantly pushing both production costs lower and expanding economic supply. But the simple fact that the low-hanging fruit is being depleted at an accelerating rate worldwide is simultaneously pushing costs up. In fact, for many years – especially the '50s and '60s – people discovered a lot more oil than the world produced. But since 1980, the world has produced more oil than people discovered. Petroleum geos believe there are about two trillion barrels of recoverable conventional oil, and we now appear to have produced a bit over half of it.¶ Unconventional oil supplies of all types could easily be ten times as great as the light, sweet crude supplies we're depleting – but that's simply not relevant to Hubbert's theory, which was a geological statement, not an economic one.¶ L: There's no real argument on this point, right? US light, sweet crude production did peak, just as he foresaw.¶ Doug: That's correct. And he also predicted that in about 2005-2010, light, sweet crude production would peak globally – and it has.¶ A lot of people pooh-pooh Peak Oil saying, quite correctly, that we'll never run out of oil. That's true partly because of the huge amounts of unconventional oil available, partly because of constant improvements in technology, and because of the basic economic arguments I mentioned earlier. But again, these things are irrelevant to Hubbert's point and its documented correctness.¶ The take-away point from all this is that the cost of oil production has likely found a new floor. Peak Oil doesn't mean we run out of oil – only that the cost of production, which now often runs about $40 per conventional barrel and up to $80 per unconventional barrel, all-in, is never going back down to where it was. Prices can never go back to where they were either, because if they drop – or are forced by law – below the cost of production, there won't be any production.¶ Even considering the current economic downturn, which is in fact the Greater Depression beginning, the developing world, especially the Chinese and Indians, is going to be using a lot more oil. It's just going to have to come more and more from higher-cost, unconventional sources. It's worth noting that oil consumption in the developed world – North America, Europe, and Japan – is flat and has been for years. The growth in consumption – and there will be growth – is coming from China, India, and the rest of the world, where 80% of the people are.

No peak oil – tech means hydrocarbons can be synthesized

Doug Casey and Louis James 8/29/12 (Dough Casey: highly respected author, publisher and professional investor who graduated from Georgetown University in 1968, Louis James: editor of the international speculator, “Doug Casey on Peak Oil” http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doug-casey-peak-oil?quicktabs_casey_stock_simple_tabs=second)

L: Is there really no chance of ever running out? Even the unconventional stuff must be finite…¶ Doug: No – or rather, it's an academic point. As a matter of basic science, oil is really a simple chemical. It's just carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, all of which are common and abundant on our planet. We can make oil in the lab now; and at high-enough prices, it would be economic to make oil products in chemical plants, out of these three basic elements. If we're right about nanotechnology, the cost of synthesizing gasoline and almost any molecules you can think of will drop to trivial levels – with no waste or byproducts.¶ L: If we ever get cheap, programmable assemblers…¶ Doug: Even without that, they – in particular Craig Venter, who is also responsible for huge breakthroughs in sequencing the human genome – are already working on algae that make oil. There are lots of technological fixes for this. It simply makes no sense to worry about running out of oil in particular or fuel in general. It's not going to happen.