Michael Medved, michaelmedved.com interviewed Peter Huber author of The Bottomless Well. Huber poopooed Hupert's Peak thesis. According to him, there are enough petroleum resources in this hemisphere to last the entire world for a century.
What hemisphere, exactly? If that include South America (Venezuela) it is probably true. There is also a lot of oil in Canada and Alaska. Of course it would cost a fortune to extract it. If he means oil at $500 per barrel, I am sure there is enough to last a century. At $2,000 per barrel it will last forever, because no one can afford to burn it.
These prices do not include the cost of war for oil, ill-health and early deaths from pollution, accidents in which gasoline powered vehicles explode, and other add-on costs. If you include this sort of thing, oil already costs roughly ~$200 per barrel, I think. If you include the cost of worst-case global warming I suppose each barrel will eventually cost us something like ~1,000 lives or maybe $20 million. From that point of view, the total remaining supply is the least of our problems. In a sense, it would be a blessing if we ran out quickly and we were forced to invent replacement sources. Unfortunately, people are likely to use coal instead, which is even worse by every measure.
If Huber is saying there is plenty of oil lying around at today's costs in the US, Canada and Mexico, he should tell you oil companies about it. They are paying a fortune to get oil from the North Sea, Russia, the Middle East and other places. They would be delighted to find it closer to the U.S., which is the world's largest market. I doubt he knows more than the oil company experts do.
- Jed
