It is quite shocking how ill prepared Austraia is for coming oil decline. Our economy is so intrinsically tied to oil that you would think that someone in government or the bureaucracy cared enough to make sure our stockpiles were adequate. The interesting thing in this article is that the US situation cannot be replicated in Australia because of lack of pipe-lines, lack of water for fracking etc. It seems we have been lulled into a false sense of security wit news of huge deposits of shale in South Australia, for instance. But if it is not economic to extract them in a envionmentally sound way, then they're of no use. We really have to start preparing now for an oil-constraind world.

I have seen a few articles like this saying, hopefully, that the new fracking oil boom will be short lived as they have to keep on drilling wells to keep it up, so its much more expensive than easy-lift oil, so it will die of its own accord.

Quite so. But those are problems for the market to sort out. The immediate point is that there is a very large source of oil that no-one knew about a few years back.

If prices fall sufficiently to make this source of oil uneconomic, that just means the more conventional sources of oil have made a come back, or demand has moderated. No real source of concern.

Otherwise, the article's analysis was actually of use. Keep it up.

< The lesson for Australia is that we need to plan for this shrinking supply, and the related rising price of oil. >

Absolutely, Paul.

< Despite the essential role of oil throughout Australian society, there are no signs that our governments are planning for this in any way. >

So true!

This is of such enormous importance, and yet our current government has taken a backward step, from the already highly backward position of the previous government.

The preparation for a regime of much higher oil prices if not the problems with the very supply of oil, in the near future, is essential. It is just something that government should just automatically be doing.

Ah but….

The vested-interest profit-motive-driven big-donations enormously coercive big business sector rules our government, of either persuasion. They would not allow it. Even very small initial steps, such as the carbon tax and super profits tax, meet with huge opposition. And for as long as we have one political party that is willing to continue taking us down the antisustainability path, we won’t be able to instigate energy-regime reform or head towards a sustainable future… until we are forced into it.

The tiny steps towards a greener future that we have seen so far have been nothing more than token efforts, which have basically allowed business as usual to continue, with just a slight green tinge or a tiny feel-good aspect, or an attitude of being seen to be doing something while not doing anything of any significance.

So…. How do we do it? How do we do what most logically thinking people believe that we should be doing? How do we make government much more independent and get them into the position where they could actually, politically tenably, do the right thing?

Why are there no sources cited for the key point in this article?

"Unbiased observers of the US tight oil scene have therefore concluded that it is more a case of a brief boom followed by a dwindling away of a resource, than a large, long term contribution to oil supply."

How credible are these "unbiased observers"? Should we not be allowed to make our own judgments on their level of bias?

I have absolutely no quarrel with the re-statement here of the fundamental laws of supply and demand. When energy supply is short, the price will go up, whatever the source of energy. But the increased price that the article relies upon for its prediction, will bring into play a number of alternative sources that are presently unviable. Rendering conclusions such as this one totally meaningless:

"Such an ever-increasing oil price would at some point choke off demand, so that a price ceiling will likely operate eventually to limit the extent of tight oil".

An "ever-increasing" price will also serve to encourage new market entrants. Elementary economics, chapter one.

Why is there only one side of the discussion presented in articles like this? Polemic is not a replacement for argument, and can only just scrape through under the heading of "opinion". But when it contains such wildly biased conclusions as this one, it becomes an insult to the intelligence of the reader, and nothing more than a troll.

Talk about wishful thinking getting in the way of real thought, here it's pipe dreams.

Paul we have enough oil under the southern end of the reef to keep us going for years. Then we have all that oil sand around Gladstone, probably from the same source.

Then when the gas runs out, in a few hundred years, we've got all that coal to convert to liquid fuel.

Sorry mate, we won't see a lack of hydrocarbons in generations.

What we should be doing however, is demanding any company in the fuel retail industry refine 2/3rds of it in Oz. The most stupid thing we can do is let fuel companies leave us without the capacity to refine our own

Oh, must be getting old, I forgot to mention a few hundred years supply of methane clathrate, just lying around on the sea bed, waiting for us to go vacuum it up.

Then we can start mining the stuff in the tundra.

So sorry fellers, stop kidding yourselves, there is so much fuel available to us, you'd almost think it was by design, if your mind worked that way.