By John Tobey, June 18, 2005
This article gives my impressions of an article by Michael C. Lynch, an energy market analyst and Peak Oil skeptic.
While Lynch's piece did not make much of a dent in my pessimism, I found it well written, well argued, and worthy of note to anyone who takes Peak Oil seriously. To sum it up in one sentence: "The case for alarm fails because the pessimists' analyses underestimate the role of technological advance in reserve growth."
Sadly, most people deal with Peak Oil by ignoring it. Of the few optimists who write about it, most seriously misrepresent the pessimistic case as I understand it. This article is exceptional in that it shows a thorough understanding of the case and awareness of its weaknesses. Where the author's opinion seems to diverge from mine is in the balancing of weaknesses against strengths.
Over the past year and a half, I have read quite a lot by Deffeyes and Campbell, who are both pessimistic retired geologists and oil company employees. They are clearly persuaded of their pessimistic views and seem to be motivated by a concern for the public weal. (Of course, being human, they are probably subject to baser motives as well, such as publicity and profit.) Their writing contains many anecdotes and graphs plotting past and anticipated discovery and extraction, global and local, in various juxtapositions. These authors argue that a crisis looms. Unfortunately, they offer nothing approaching what I would call "proof." Instead, their arguments rest on a preponderance of evidence, much of which I must hold suspect, and it is not for me to say whether any reasonable person, cognizant of the same evidence, could reach the opposite conclusion.
As happens far too often in the popular presentation of technical material, these pessimists sometimes present data and graphs in ways that misleadingly inflate their claims. This phenomenon irks me, but it does not particularly surprise me or immediately turn me away, for the simple reason that it pervades economic and scientific reporting and books of practically every mainstream origin. There is a book (A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper) dedicated to the topic of innumeracy, but I have never bothered to read it, because the topic irks me so much that I am already acutely aware of it and constantly on the lookout for examples. Deffeyes' and Campbell's works contain some examples. Lynch identifies and deconstructs several. I don't think the level of innumeracy in Deffeyes' and Campbell's writing is high by news media standards, but I appreciate Lynch for pointing it out and debunking it.
Some of the strongest "geological" evidence for Peak Oil, meaning the type of evidence that geologists put forth, takes the form of graphs that suggest a trend leading to declining extraction. Most of these graphs are not individually very compelling when you understand them and think about them. Even collectively, most of them argue weakly at best. One of the problems with Deffeyes' and Campbell's writing is that it tends to gloss over issues about the graphs that weaken the argument. Another problem, which Lynch discusses, is that of graph selection. As always in the absence of controlled experiment, editorial bias threatens to censor unfavorable evidence. Apparently, Deffeyes and Campbell fail sometimes in this regard.
That said, one of the graphs that I do find significant is the one with discovery and production plotted by year from 1930 to the present and into future projections. Assuming the graphs present accurate data (a big assumption, as Lynch points out), then since about 1982 global extraction has consistently, and increasingly, exceeded discovery. Lynch points out that graphs like this one ignore possible future upward revisions to recent discoveries, but the large size and long duration of the gap leave me little comfort.
The case for crisis preparation in my mind would be considerably weaker if not for other, non-geological evidence, such as price trends and world events. By far the best collection of general news analysis as it relates to Peak Oil is at FromTheWilderness.com. Futures pricing history can be found at NYMEX.com. These are sites I visit often, along with Campbell's ASPO newsletters, and I consider them all complementary.
Beware the simplifiers, whichever side they're on.