One element of the peak oil decline that's not mentioned is demand collapse when prices rise precipitously - as they did in 2008. It has made it difficult to determine whether post peak will result in rapid decline or a plateau filled with spikes - both up and down in both price and demand. As prices rose slowly post July 2008 (in part through restrictions on production from OPEC countries), demand rose again. Demand collapse obviously has its limits - which may be variable as we see alternative transport fuels reach commercial stages. I suspect that the pain of peak oil will initially come in pulses before the irrevocable declines begin. Those pulses will create some unexpected difficulties as businesses and economies try to figure out how to respond to such uncertainty.

Eclipse Now - peer reviewed papers! The finds have only just been made so its a bit early for peer reviewed stuff - although there is some work on very deep crust oil formation I'm not going to get into that debate - and, yes, its because they are simply too deep beneath the crust. Look up the theory. And two big fields (its not little by any stretch of the imagination)can completely upset geological theory, as it seems to have done. If there are those fields, then there must be others as big or bigger.. if so where.. how come the fields got there in the first place? How did the geologists know they were there? Until those questions are answered.. and they are questions at this point, any attempts at energy forecasts are pointless. Peak oil is out the window.

Eclipse now.. this is part of the debate going on now in an online newsletter .. the guy debunking is an well known peak oil guy Richard Wakefield... this argument has been going through several rounds now and Richard is in the minority - but whatever you may make of the arguments these are major fields discoverd decades after they have all supposed to have been discovered, and are very deep, so global oil projections have to be chucked away..

"Intriguingly, existing ultra deep wells in Texas and the recent finds off
Brazil demonstrate the presence of hydrocarbons at depths where according to
classical hydrocarbon geology the likelihood of finding deposits is slim to
none, and these must have migrated up from somewhere deeper."

No. The fields off Brazil appear to be a mixture of in situ and mobalized
oil. That is, the geological formation that the oil is found in is where
the life once existed before being covered up. The source rocks for the oil
at the Tupi oil field, for example, are Lower Cretaceous shales of the
Guaratiba Formation. It lies over sandstones, stromatolithes, and coquinas
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coquina). The salt formation above these oil
fields is from evaporites, and hence once exposed above the sea.

Sorry, electric vehicles are simply not an option due to the relatively large amounts of "rare earths" used in each electric vehicle. Demand would drive prices beyond those of oil very quickly. Besides, China now controls well over 90% of the world's rare earth supply and have already announced they will continue to reduce the amount allowed for export each year to preserve their own supply. I suggest you research the subject more thoroughly before recommending we head down the "dead end road" of electric vehicles.

Turtle