There's a good chance this is still a Chicken Little issue. An article in a journal does not make it true.

Nonetheless, it will eventually be true. What should be done about it? Obviously take the brakes off other forms of energy, such as coal seam gas and nuclear.

There should never be a shortage of energy, as long as the market is free to innovate.

DavidL:

Unfortunately it's not quite as simple as that, and that's because it's not just energy that we get from oil, it's...well...everything.

The entire global food network relies on it for the packaging, transport, and manufacture of the food we eat. Everything from the tyres on the trucks that deliver it, to the packaging that keeps it from spoiling, oil is deeply ingrained in our day to day lives, beyond mere energy and petrol.

I'm not as much of a pessimist as to say it's an intractable problem, but it's a very real one, and when the oil begins running out we are going to require a global cultural shift to find solutions.

Unfortunately first will come the shock, and how we respond to that will determine whether we're in any state conducive to developing those solutions.

Meanwhile, in the real world, new sources of natural gas and improvements in the technology of its extraction have added immensely to the world's energy resources, a fact conveniently ignored by alarmists.

Michael Lardelli

BBBBWWWWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!

Okay, so you've been peddling this line for some time now in defiance of self-evident reality. The article by those two deluded scientsts starts from the peak oil assumption. It is no way verifies that assumption. That Nature has chosen to print the item shows the influence of the two scientsts or the depths to which the journal has sunk.

Pound this into your head. The peak oil buisness only ever referred to easy lift oil - the stuff pumped out of onshore wells.. go back and look at the original thesis. Now we could argue whether the flattening in conventional production evident at this time is actually a peak, or OPEC deciding not to invest in new production facilities, for internal reasons.

But there are still vast reserves of unconventional oil and major new discoveries at great depths - notably off Brazil's coast - which have yet to come on stream. Oil prices will determine how fast production shifts away from OPEC.

Sorry, but your thesis has passed its use by date. The article in nature simply underlines how naive even senior, distinquished scientsts can be when they stray outside their own disciplines.

Curmudgeon,

Here's a vast reserve of unconventional oil.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text

and here's the latest round in the controversy accompanying it.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/president-obama-rejects-keystone-xl-pipeline/story?id=15387980

Even if there is oil still to be found, wouldn't it make sense to have a duel power system, and eventually get off oil and coal. Nuclear is still causing problems with its safety, once it has been disturbed. Nuclear plants have to be bomb proof or else they will fail. And has anyone made one bomb proof yet. Certainly not the one in Japan.
The whole trouble is nothing real will be done until no one can afford to put fuel in a car any more.
We should be pushing for alt; headway before this happens.