Page - 75 - in Water, Energy, and Environment - A Primer

further pointed out that ‘peaking is the result of declining production rates, not declining reserves’, that many oil producingcountries are alreadypost-peak, and that conventional oil production has been flat since about the middle of the past decade. There has been growth in liquid supply since then, largely due to natural gas liquids and oil derived from oil sands.Reserves have alsobeengrowingdue to newdiscoveries, improved oil field extraction technology, and increasing reliance on unconventional resources such as shale oil. In fact, production of shale oil has allowed the US to become the world’s topoil producer. The debate about Peak Oil has been underway for quite a fewdecades, and, despiteASPO’s closing, PeakOil still has its adherents (40). It seems clear that the Peak Oil concept is not valid if you take into account the full liquid fuels situation. In 2009, Dr. Christoph Rühl, chief economist of BP, argued as follows against the Peak Oil hypothesis: ‘Physical Peak Oil, which I have no reason to accept as a valid statement either on theoretical, scientific or ideological grounds, would be insensitive to prices… In fact thewhole hypothesis of Peak Oil–which is that there is a certain amount of oil in theground, consumed at a certain rate, and then it’s finished – does not react to anything… Therefore there will never be a moment when the world runs out of oil because there will always be a price atwhich the last dropof oil can clear themarket.Andyou can turn anything into oil into if you are willing to pay the financial and environmental price…GlobalWarming is likely to be more of a natural limit than all these Peak Oil theories combined… Peak Oil has been predicted for 150 years. It has never happened, and itwill stay thisway.’ According toRühl, themain limitations foroil availability are ‘above ground’ and are to be found in the availability of staff, expertise, technology, investment security, money, and, last but not least, in globalwarming.Rühl’s views are shared byDaniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who added Fossil fuels 75