WILD CARDS - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 181

would turn out to be correct, at least regarding the next half century of
U.S. production, but others would appropriate his analysis to make a
much bolder claim: not only was U.S. oil output facing an impending
peak but so was global output. By the early 1970s, armed with com-
plex models and impenetrable mathematics, the peak oil prophets were
predicting impending shortage of oil. Yet once again, when oil prices
crashed in the early 1980s, their arguments were crushed too.
Today, peak oil fears persist. Writing in the preeminent scientii c
journal Nature in early 2012, David King, previously the science advi-
sor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, marshaled a wealth of trends
and i gures to assert that “oil's tipping point has passed.” 5 Others sound
similar notes.
But the dei nitive-sounding arguments for impending peak oil are
invariably shaky. h e fact that conventional oil production largely l at-
lined over the i rst decade of the twenty-i rst century, a frequent talk-
ing point, does not necessarily say anything fundamental about how
much oil (or even how much cheap oil) is let in the ground. It is just
as likely that politically imposed constraints on production in places
such as Saudi Arabia and Russia are holding output back. Nor is there
any reason to draw a sharp line between “conventional” and “unconven-
tional” oil, as most peak oil theorists do, in order to focus on the fact
that conventional oil production is stagnant, despite rising unconven-
tional production. As the historian Daniel Yergin has observed, what is
unconventional today typically becomes conventional tomorrow, mak-
ing the distinction between the two categories far less meaningful than
many assume. 6
h e only thing one can really say with absolute coni dence about
Middle Eastern oil resources is that it's unclear exactly what is under-
ground within the region. Perhaps there is still a century of oil beneath
the desert sands; most informed bets certainly go that way. h ere is
lit le reason to believe we know they are running out. Given how opaque
the region is, though, there is also no foundation for complete coni -
dence that the resource is as big as most analysts suppose.
How would we reevaluate the consequences of the two unfolding
revolutions in American energy if it turned out that the world was
actually facing imminent peak oil? New limits to world oil supplies