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We are still discovering exploitable petroleum faster than we are burning it. Peak oil is going to be peak demand for oil as solar wind and batteries continue their exponential price performance improvement curve.

Unsustainability is a terrible argument against oil. The problem is the pollution, not the fact that it's finite.




Incorrect.

Proven reserves are occasionally increased in known fields.

There are some additional discoveries. Most are small.

The total geological resource has been largely constant.

New discoveries peaked decades ago.

If you have any data to show otherwise, please present it.


"Proven" reserves are largely an accounting fiction in many foreign countries. In Saudi Arabia they change their reserve numbers to suit political purposes in ways that bear little relation to geology or extraction technology.

So have we reached peak oil yet? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure.


That's ... somewhat my point.

"Proven reserves" depend on both the actual physical resource and economically viable extraction. The latter depends on both price and technology.

Saudi Arabia's well-known manipulations are ... their own special twist, I'll admit.

There are several terms used to describe natural resources, and they're confusing to laypersons. (They're also confusing to policymakers, engineers, economists, and oil workers.)

The geological quantity itself is a resource.

The economic good is a reserve.

Resources, in order of decreasing confidence of quantity, are measured, indicated, or inferred.

Reserves, in order of decreasing confidence of quantity, are proven or proveable.

And whilst oil reserves have (generally) been increased over the past 4-6 decades, virtually all of that comes from upward adjustments of the proved reserves of existing, known, oil fields. Not from major new discoveries, which peaked in the 1950s and 1960s globally. In the 1930s for the US.

https://www.geologyforinvestors.com/classification-of-minera...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080527233829/http://www.spe.or...




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