Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?

Source: NEO

December 31, 2018 • by F. William Engdahl

Back during the early days of the Bush-Cheney administration, countless articles and even official statements by the International Energy Agency and various governments proclaimed the onset of what was termed Peak Oil. This was a time when former Halliburton CEO, Vice President Dick Cheney, was named to head the White House Energy Task Force. In the run up to the March 2003 war on Iraq, peak oil or absolute decline in world oil reserves seemed a plausible explanation, if not justification, for the G.W. Bush invasion of Iraq. This author was also for a time persuaded that could explain the oil war. Yet, today we hear little about peak oil. Why, is interesting.

Peak Oil was and is an invention of certain financial circles along with Big Oil to justify among other things ultra-high prices for their oil. The peak oil theory they promoted to justify the high prices, hearkened back to the 1950’s and an eccentric oil geologist with Shell Oil in Houston named King Hubbard.

Bell Curves and such

While working for Shell Oil in Texas, Marion King Hubbert, or King, as he preferred to be known, was asked to deliver a paper to the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, an event that would become one of the most fateful examples of scientific fabrication in the modern era.

Hubbert posited all of his 1956 conclusions, including that the US would reach oil peak in 1970, on the unproven assumption that oil was a fossil fuel, a biological compound produced from dead dinosaur detritus, algae or other life forms originating some 500 million years back. Hubbert accepted the fossil theory without question, and made no evident attempts to scientifically validate such an essential and fundamental part of his argument. He merely asserted 'fossil origins of oil' as Gospel Truth and began to build a new ideology around it, a neo-Malthusian ideology of austerity in the face of looming oil scarcity. He claimed oil fields obeyed the Gaussian bell curve, itself an arbitrary heurism.

For the giant British and American oil companies and the major banks backing them, the myth of scarcity was necessary if they were to be able to control the availability and price of petroleum as the lifeline of the world economy. The scarcity myth was to be a key element of Anglo-American geopolitical power for more than a century.

King Hubbert admitted in a frank interview in 1989 shortly before his death that the method he used to calculate total recoverable US oil reserves was anything but scientific. It might be compared with wetting one’s finger and holding it up to see how strong the wind is blowing.

Hubbert told his interviewer,

What was required there was that I need to know or have an estimate of the ultimate amount that could be produced…I know the ultimate and I know, I can only tailor that curve within a very narrow range of uncertainty. So that's what was done. Those curves were drawn. I simply, by cut and dry, I mean, you drew the curve, calculated the squares, and if it was a little too much you trimmed it down or too little, you upped it a little. But there was no mathematics involved, other than the integral area under the curve, the integral pd dq by, at times, et, for accumulated production up to a given time…So with the best estimates I could get on the ultimate amount of oil in the United States, my own figure at the time was about 150 billion barrels.

If Hubbert's description of his methodology doesn't sound like rigorous scientific procedure, that's because it wasn't.

Please go to NEO to read the entire article.
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Related reading:

Rex Tillerson and the Myths, Lies and Oil Wars to Come

Etymology of Petroleum - 'Peak Oil' - Fake 'Scarcities' - 'Paradigm-Altering Subject' - Comments by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty - Abiotic vs Fossil