Page - 76 - in Water, Energy, and Environment - A Primer

that oil’s recent high-price phase might not add to complete exhaustion of resources, but the timely and smooth setup of alternatives. A further perspective was provided by George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian on 2 July 2012: ‘Wewere wrong on Peak Oil. There’s enough to fry us all…Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975MKHubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell, who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicistKenneth Deffeyes said he was “99% confident” that Peak Oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that “never again will we pump more than 82m barrels” per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply inMay 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that “Saudi Arabia…cannot materially grow its oil production” (since then its output has risen from9 M barrels per day to 10M, and it has another 1.5M in spare capacity).…Peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time.’ 6.3 NATURALGAS Natural gas (primarily CH4, but also containing small amounts of other gases, including helium), once burned off as a non-useful byproduct of petroleum production, is an abundant resource in many countries. New discoveries and extraction methods have led to a dramatic increase in its production from shale deposits by fracking, especially in the US, making the US the world’s leading producer of natural gas. Considerable research is also going into extraction of natural gas from methane hydrates (both fracking and methane hydrates are discussed below). CH4 is also released by the decomposition Water,Energy, andEnvironment–APrimer76