Remember my island metaphor? It's not very good - but it's the best I can come up with right now.
All the cows on the island were sadly rounded up and shot and put in deep freeze out the back. Or maybe we should call them 'elephants' (after the actual oil industry term for a mega-field like Ghawar in Saudia Arabia - the world's largest single oil field.)

Someone found all the 'elephants'. OK? That was in the 1960's and 1980's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#/media/File:World_crude_discovery_production_U-2200Gb_LaherrereMar2015.jpg

Sometimes someone will find new babies, but they're not big enough to replace even the food we're eating that year. (That's new discoveries of tiny fields we're finding today.)

But wait! Someone learned how to cook elephant bone-marrow soup and thin out the broth with some other ingredients (that's fracking and tar sands that we ALREADY KNEW ABOUT - but have new access to because of new tech and also, quite frankly, because the cheap oil is gone and the price seems to be permanently high now. Welcome to "INFLATION FOR-EVER!")
http://www.statista.com/statistics/236657/global-crude-oil-reserves-since-1990/

You keep emphasising the fact that someone is thinning out the elephant soup - and therefore we're going to have elephant soup forever! But you really hate it when I point out no one is discovering new elephants, and there's a whole lot more people on their way to our island wanting their turn eating elephant soup!

Elephant soup for-ever!

WAKANDA FOR-EVER!

"OK - now onto your "Reserve Growth FOR-EVER!""

Well, I never said that. The exact opposite in fact.

But why let the facts get in the way of your search to hide your errors?

Done!

Hi ALL,
just for the record - this is the moment when MHaze decided he could not be bothered to learn the geological difference between RESOURCE and RESERVES - and gave up trying to defend the notion that there was no oil crisis.

This is the moment when he hopefully realised that we're not finding enough oil, and the 'reserve growth' he's been relying on is barely keeping up with replacing the oil we're using.

This reserve growth is new ways of getting at oil fields WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT.

It also describes what happens when we get oil inflation - a bad thing. A BAD thing for us economically which also happens to be a good thing for oil reserves - the amount of ECONOMICALLY extractable oil goes up. But the fact that the global economy kind of tanks in the process so that no one wants to buy it seems irrelevant to Mhaze.

So let me predict the next decade or so regarding oil. The developing world wants more oil. Demand increases and prices rise.

BUT the prices get too high, which causes recession. Therefore, businesses and tourism decrease. Oil demand decreases. The oil prices lower. The "Reserves Growth" lowers because people don't want to buy that expensive stuff - or can't because of the recession.

But time passes. The inefficient businesses were weeded out by the recession. The economy grows again. People forget what's causing this, and think "Oh look - the oil price is lower again, let's start our tourism firm again..." and back we go again.

It's not so much a neat peak of production, but a BUMPY PLATEAU. The “solution” of trusting in reserves growth to solve the problem IS the problem.

This is all a theoretical future. It won't happen. Electric vehicles are coming.

However, sadly I see a long and consistent demand for oil for airlines and some mining equipment and plastics. There are other ways of doing these things, but it's going to take considerable R&D. We shall see.

No Max,

After you criticised me for saying something I'd never said having indeed said the exact opposite, it was the moment I recalled that I was dealing with someone of questionable ethics and therefore decided it wasn't worth it.

Mhaze,

you mentioned reserves growth and were quite rational about how the technology has increased what we can get at in fields we already know about. You mentioned economic incentives as the oil price rose, and how that increased what we can AFFORD to get at in fields we already know about. All good so far!

And I kind of went along with it and sort of agreed with you. But I didn't know that you didn't understand the difference between RESOURCE (the oil fields we know more or less are there) and RESERVES (the highly probably P95% reserves with the amount we can extract at xyz price.)

I basically agreed with you on RESERVE GROWTH. But then you broke the illusion of knowing anything basic about this industry when you said:

“…the fact remains, as you've already admitted, we are discovering more than we're using.” http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=9984#340823

I NEVER agreed with you on that - and the fact that to this day you still think I did shows you're just not getting this.

We HAVE NOT discovered a lot more oil - not since the 1980's elephants. But we HAVE discovered how to extract a fair bit more oil from the elephants we know about. And now even the reserves growth is tapering off.

America has 5% of the world's population yet uses 25% of it's oil.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/american-consumption-habits/
What happens when the rest of the world wants their turn?
Let's do that. 20 times 25% = 5.
I've only been saying world demand for oil will go up 4 times - that it will double and double again. And they say "At CURRENT RATES" we've got 50 years of oil left! That's just hilarious!

But hey - ignore these figures! Why don't you satisfy my narcissism and cry about how badly I've beaten you up and misrepresented YOU? Just ignore the oil. Do not speaketh it's name!

WAKANDA FOREVER!

Hi Max,

I thought a little more about your idea of using the excess renewable generation to power transport. While I would like your idea to work, I think it might have the same problem as it has with other power supply, namely the need to have multiples of supply (due to the low capacity factor) to ensure that supply can always meet demand. I suspect that renewable generation would need to be less than a tenth the cost of nuclear before it might start to be competitive for 24/7 supply. Complicated visions are very difficult to achieve and usually cost far more than planned.