This. The problem with fossil fuels right now is not that they are bounded, but that extracting them is polluting the atmosphere and driving climate change. While we've certainly exhausted some of the more easily accessible oil, coal, and natural gas deposits, we've gotten really good at finding more. Production is only scaling down because investment is, not because we've run out of oil to drill for.
Because, if my memory serves, that's the definition of peak oil.
Peak oil is the peak of the curve `energy extracted/energy expended to extract it`. Since 2017, this has been decreasing.
*edit* I realize that the definition of peak oil I've been using (which I believe I've found in the writings of Jancovici) is apparently not the standard definition. My bad.
I feel one thing that few bother to understand is that it would be extremely hard to arrive at "no more oil", even if humanity somehow made a good faith effort to get there. There is oil all over the place on earth. It's not necessarily oil that's economical to extract, even by today's XXX (pick your term) corporations. There is also energy all over the place (again that might not be economical or politically correct to extract right now.) The result of this is that if NNN years in the future you need oil for some worthy reason (say, you need more Legos :-), you can collect and spend the energy and get the oil. That's not an issue.
Because as oil reserves are depleted, oil is extracted from more and more difficult places. Deeper wells, less porous rock, etc. these new sources require more energy to extract the same amount of oil.
More ENERGY needed. Which doesn't have to be oil. Oil is extracted by businesses which pay attention to their bottom line - and so would not, could not, will not use significant amounts of oil to extract comparable oil. Even as you consider current truck mounted prospecting, gas or generator powered drilling, crew vehicles, refineries, all the way to supertankers - these exist BECAUSE the ratio of usage to production is extremely favorable - and not through some fatality. Causality goes the other way: a worsening ratio necessarily causes a switch to other methods.
That's just not true. If it were, oil production would decrease every year from the current year onward. It's actually been increasing, and given recent discoveries of large unconventional reserves in the US and elsewhere, we can keep on increasing oil production every year for a long time.
> extracting oil will consume more oil than it produces.
Huh?
1) EROEI is still strongly positive in fossil fuel extraction, and
2) even if it weren't, we'd still extract fossil fuels.
Given the utility of petroleum as a chemical feedstock and energy-dense fuel for aviation, we're going to keep extracting the stuff long after it becomes EROEI-negative. It makes perfect sense to spend 1.2 units of nuclear/solar/etc. energy to extract 1.0 units of oil energy if that oil energy meets a need that nuclear/solar/etc. can't satisfy.
Economists are calling for a carbon price because by the time we reach this threshold, it will be way too late for both climate and oil.