Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

[globaleconomicollaps]

Not precisely news, but an interesting perspective:


http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6226

Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Posted by Gail the Actuary on February 18, 2010 - 9:56am
Topic: Economics/Finance

If I were to ask 10 random people what they would expect would be a sign of the arrival of “peak oil”, I would expect that all 10 would say “high oil prices”.

Let me tell you what I think the symptoms of the arrival of peak oil are

1. Higher default rates on loans
2. Recession

Furthermore, I expect that as the supply of oil declines over time, these symptoms will get worse and worse—even though people may call the cause of the decline in oil use “Peak Demand” rather than “Peak Supply”.


Let’s think about what happens when oil prices try to increase. From the perspective of a consumer who is already spending pretty much all of his income, it seems to me the result is something like this:



What happens is that many of the consumer’s most necessary purchases tend to be closely tied to the price of oil—things like food and gasoline, and home heating oil. If the price of these necessities goes up, the consumer is likely to cut back on something else. One possibility is to cut back on non-essential purchases—not go out to a restaurant, or not buy a new car or higher priced home. Another possibility, if the consumer is really pressed, is to default on some of the consumer’s promised debt repayments. (The increase in the cost of food and gasoline doesn’t have to be as exaggerated as shown in the diagram for this effect to take place.)

What effect would cutbacks in discretionary spending and loan defaults have? It seems to me that they would look a whole lot like the recession and debt defaults that we have been seeing recently.

It is possible to look at the debt repayment issue another way as well:

As long as resource extraction is growing rapidly, it is easy for economies to grow, because raw materials needed for growth are present in greater and greater quantities. But when oil—a necessity for nearly all resource extraction and for transportation—is present in lesser and lesser quantities, it is difficult for economies to grow. Without economic growth, it is much more difficult to repay debt with interest, because the interest payment must come from somewhere. Economic growth helps provide the necessary margin for these interest payments.

The period we have recently lived through—from1950 to 2005—was a period of growth in world oil supplies and in the availability of other types of resources using oil for extraction. Economies in general tended to grow, and economists came to believe that economic growth could continue forever.

But since 2005, oil production has been flat. In fact, oil production in 2009 was down over the 2005 to 2008 period. This lack of growth in oil supplies led to a run up of oil prices (from $42 in January 2005 to $147 in July 2008, before a drop in prices, and another run up in prices), and has made it more difficult for economies to grow. During the time prices were rising, we have seen increasing disruption of the types expected by higher oil prices—loan defaults and recessionary impacts.

The defaults on loans caused by the higher oil prices have had a feedback impact through the system. When there are loan defaults, banks and other institutions making loans find their balance sheets impaired. This tends to restrict their willingness to make new loans. Without ready access to credit, customers cannot make purchases such as new cars. (Of course, people who have lost their jobs because of recession cannot get credit either.) This lack of access to credit tends to hold down oil prices—through the mechanism we recognize as reduced demand.

One thing that people tend to overlook is the fact that the historic price of oil back when most of our infrastructure was built was quite low--$20 a barrel or less. So even the prices we are seeing now—in the $70 barrel range—are quite high by historical standards. Prices don’t have to be extremely high to have recessionary impacts and to cause debt defaults.

I expect that oil prices in the future will increase (to the extent they do) in a saw tooth fashion, with a rise to a peak, before additional credit restrictions cause a drop in demand, to a new lower level. Meanwhile, our leaders will trot around the world, to Davos and other places, looking vainly for the cause of our current financial problems. If peak oil problems don’t look like they expect, they must not be there!

[Aetius Romulous]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Here is some very fast figuring;

The US uses about 340,000,000 gallons of gasoline a day. The current average retail price in the US is $2.60 per gallon. It was last at $2.60 in January of 2006. From 2006 on gas climbed steadily, peaking at $4.12 in the spring of 2008, and then falling back towards $2.60 again.

Fast math: There has been a full dollar premium on average that American consumers have been carrying for about 5 years now. I make that to be a possible 340m gallons a day * 365 days * a buck = $124,100,000,000.00. Then you can multiply that by 5 years if you like.

So where did all this money - paid mostly at the pump by women in minivans and dudes with SUV's - come from? Well, it obviously displaced something else.

Damn...this was a very good article.

[Glenn Black]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

I agree with most of this, and have previously posted this same similar theory that it was $147/bbl oil that was the inflation fuse that killed the SUV commute from McMansions in the exaburbs to the downtown with their Option-A, ARM, NINJA, and similar mortgages.

However, I would like to add that lifestyle tends to be very comfortable and habit forming. It tends to become price inelastic. "We always go to Red Lobster on Friday night with the kids. It's a lot more expensive now, but...". Fortunately, the banks are more than willing to approve the credit card transaction. When that one is maxed out, roll it over to the other credit card because they give an introductory rate of just 0.9% on balance transfer for the first 6 months. Guess what, in another 6 months, the balance is double of what it was originally, but thank goodness they have another credit card that gives 1.25% on balance transfer for the first 3 month. And so on... Sooner that you can blink, they owe $50,000 in credit cards, plus their line of credit, plus taken out all their built up home equity. The bank calls, and they refuse the requested rollover on the balance transfer. They're toast, have lost their house, and declared bankruptcy. All from the $147/bbl oil, and the easy credit which allowed them to avoid making the necessary changes until it was too late.

[Rajiv]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

While I tend to agree with Gail Tverberg's analysis, particularly after I add in the aspects discussed in the "The Middle Class Two Income Trap," there was a counterpoint posted by Ilargi at the Automatic Earth yesterday, and it had some good points

Ilargi: There is a long-standing misunderstanding about the perceived influence of perceived limits to energy availability in our societies that leaves people from the energy field, or even those who have trouble understanding finance, convinced that what is known as peak oil is the driving force in our present financial collapse.

As crucial as energy is to our lives and lifestyles, such claims are simply wrong. People -except in exceptional cases- don't lose their homes because gas at the pump became more expensive, and banks wouldn’t have gone bankrupt -barring trillions in public bailouts- because their energy costs went up. I don't want to regurgitate the entire topic, but then there’s no need for that either; a brief glance at the numbers should say enough.

An example.

As you may remember, sometime in 2008, the price of gas temporarily went up by about $1 per gallon. This is when the first accounts began to appear of people linking the present financial crisis to the energy crisis, claiming that the latter caused the former. To me, this never made much sense. I do, however, have fond memories of very interesting discussions on the topic at the time with very smart oil man Jeffrey Brown.

Still, the numbers were what they were, even back then, and in the end, derivatives didn’t cause peak oil anymore than peak oil caused derivatives. Some phenomena simply need no help destroying themselves.

Say, to drive 25,000 miles (40.000 km) per year, the average American needs about 1000 gallons of gas. The price rise in 2008 then cost her an extra $1000 for the year. In that same year, her home lost about 20% of its value, or $40,000. Her pension went down an often reported 30%, which can, depending on her age, range anywhere from say, $100,000 to $1 million. In other words, the average American easily lost about 50 times as much in pure financial market terms as she did at the pump in 2008.

In 2009, gas prices came down considerably, but home prices kept on falling. Hence: while her financial losses on energy costs diminished, the home price losses continued.

Yes, home price losses lessened somewhat towards the end of the year, but Bob Shiller predicts a 28% additional loss for 2010. Yes, pension funds made good on some of their losses on rising stock markets, but that was achieved through what I like to call the $1 trillion-a-month government financial injection. Which means that while our protagonist may now thus have the fleeting promise of a tad more pension income when she passes the eligible age in the future (a receding horizon in and of itself), she also has additional "personalized federal" losses tacked onto her account that run in the tens if not hundreds of thousand dollars. And since the annual US federal deficit is acknowledged by all sides to remain at least in the multiple trillion dollar range for many years to come, she will be called on to pay goddess-only-knows how much going forward.

Where did the financial losses originate? In the energy field? Not even close. They stem instead from low post tech bubble interest rates which led to low mortgage costs which led to everyone wanting to buy a home which led to no-questions asked loans which led to high volumes of mortgage based securities which led to a zillion other forms and sorts of derivatives which led to untold trillions in lost wagers which led to a collapsing financial economic system, a process we find ourselves in the early stages of. We can argue about the sequence in which these things happened, but not about whether they did happen, or about the role of peak oil in their occurrence.

A derivative is a bet, pure and simple, and the time when more than 50% of all bets turn winners is of necessity limited by the same laws that limit the life expectancy of any ponzi scheme. They are self-destructive. Since energy prices have nothing to do with the collapse of the MBS ponzi tower, which doesn’t need any help breaking down, thank you very much, since its demise is firmly written into its own foundations, the idea that peak oil or any other form of energy crisis was the cause of the financial crisis, i.e. the cause of the collapse of the housing/securities/derivatives scheme(s), can be safely discarded and put out by the curb with the rest of our broken dreams. Once you understand what derivatives are, and why there were $1 quadrillion of them floating around at one point in time, maybe that's where you start to see why peak oil is not a factor in this crisis of ours.

That is not to say that energy issues could never be, or even never have been, the cause of financial problems. Just that they are not this time around. Nor were they, obviously, in the 1930's depression, not an insignificant point for those who are still confused. Neither does any of this take away from the importance of peak oil. That importance, however, will play out in the future, it does not do so now. For one thing, energy demand and usage have plunged in the past two years. For another, oil producing countries are pumping out fuel literally like there's no tomorrow, because the finance crisis hits their budgets like so many sledgehammers. Something, incidentally, that I've long predicted, not a hard call to make, since an organization such as OPEC, and the quota it boasts, have credence only in times of economic plenty. The financial losses on investments incurred by Middle East nations are surely staggering, though we have no concrete numbers other than Dubai's demise, and they were definitely not caused by oil running out, but by Saudi and Abu Dhabi investments in US securities.

Admittedly, there is a different aspect to this theme, though it's not a game- or evidence changer. On March 7, 1956, Shell geologist Marion King Hubbert spoke at a conference in Texas, where he launched his now famous notion of a peak in both US and world oil production. The pre-printed version of Hubbert's paper distributed at the meeting made the following statements:

"According to the best currently available information, the production of petroleum and natural gas on a world scale will probably pass its climax within the order of a half a century, while for both the United States and for Texas, the peaks of production may be expected to occur within the next 10 or 15 years."

In the official company version after the talk, Shell left out Hubbert’s world oil production prediction altogether and changed his words about the US to:

"[..] the culmination for petroleum and natural gas in both the United States and Texas should occur within the next few decades."

The truly powerful people on this planet, and they do exist, and no, you don’t know their names and faces, may of course have picked up on what Hubbert said, then and there or in subsequent years, devised strategies to hold on to what they had in the face of what he predicted, and decided to (pre-)crash the entire world economy in the face of the inevitable crash peak oil would bring about sometime down the line.

But that is all merely a guessing game, with anonymous potential actors toting potential ideas about potential outcomes playing out over many decades, during which many potential power players would have died. Nice theory, but not exactly something we can base any solid idea on about a connection between energy and the economy.

Peak oil will take its well-deserved center stage place when our debt drama has somehow been resolved, many years from now, and at the expense of the lives and health of many millions of our friends and family members. Could you survive losing your entire wealth and belongings after gambling them all away in Vegas? Yes, you could, and many have. Could you do so in the face of a mortal disease, let's call it peak oil, in your new found poverty? Yes, you could, many have, and for many years too. Peak oil is mortal, but not instantly. Peak oil isn't even an issue, is it, if demand collapses?

Maybe it's not the impact of peak oil on finance, but the impact of finance on peak oil that will be the biggest threat to our societies. As oil prices linger at record highs, albeit below the 2008 $147 a barrel, exploration budgets have been cut to the bone. And trust me, new-fangled notions of using spent nuclear rods to develop shale oil won’t change that. That, after all, is what I based my Law of Receding Horizons on, with kudo’s to Ken Deffeyes. Shale is dead, and it was never born other than in the minds of people with dollar signs in their eyes.


I tried to write the above as a train of thought piece, didn’t research my own words through the years on the topic, nor anyone else’s, apart from the exact date and words for Hubbert’s Texas speech. I see no need to do so. I could write ten times as much as I have here on this, but I hope that won't be necessary. I hope you better understand now what the links are between peak oil and you losing your homes and jobs, and that they are not what some well-meaning people would like you to believe.

[FRED]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Not precisely news, but an interesting perspective:


http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6226

Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Posted by Gail the Actuary on February 18, 2010 - 9:56am
Topic: Economics/Finance

If I were to ask 10 random people what they would expect would be a sign of the arrival of “peak oil”, I would expect that all 10 would say “high oil prices”.

Let me tell you what I think the symptoms of the arrival of peak oil are

1. Higher default rates on loans
2. Recession

Furthermore, I expect that as the supply of oil declines over time, these symptoms will get worse and worse—even though people may call the cause of the decline in oil use “Peak Demand” rather than “Peak Supply”.


Let’s think about what happens when oil prices try to increase. From the perspective of a consumer who is already spending pretty much all of his income, it seems to me the result is something like this:



What happens is that many of the consumer’s most necessary purchases tend to be closely tied to the price of oil—things like food and gasoline, and home heating oil. If the price of these necessities goes up, the consumer is likely to cut back on something else. One possibility is to cut back on non-essential purchases—not go out to a restaurant, or not buy a new car or higher priced home. Another possibility, if the consumer is really pressed, is to default on some of the consumer’s promised debt repayments. (The increase in the cost of food and gasoline doesn’t have to be as exaggerated as shown in the diagram for this effect to take place.)

What effect would cutbacks in discretionary spending and loan defaults have? It seems to me that they would look a whole lot like the recession and debt defaults that we have been seeing recently.

It is possible to look at the debt repayment issue another way as well:

As long as resource extraction is growing rapidly, it is easy for economies to grow, because raw materials needed for growth are present in greater and greater quantities. But when oil—a necessity for nearly all resource extraction and for transportation—is present in lesser and lesser quantities, it is difficult for economies to grow. Without economic growth, it is much more difficult to repay debt with interest, because the interest payment must come from somewhere. Economic growth helps provide the necessary margin for these interest payments.

The period we have recently lived through—from1950 to 2005—was a period of growth in world oil supplies and in the availability of other types of resources using oil for extraction. Economies in general tended to grow, and economists came to believe that economic growth could continue forever.

But since 2005, oil production has been flat. In fact, oil production in 2009 was down over the 2005 to 2008 period. This lack of growth in oil supplies led to a run up of oil prices (from $42 in January 2005 to $147 in July 2008, before a drop in prices, and another run up in prices), and has made it more difficult for economies to grow. During the time prices were rising, we have seen increasing disruption of the types expected by higher oil prices—loan defaults and recessionary impacts.

The defaults on loans caused by the higher oil prices have had a feedback impact through the system. When there are loan defaults, banks and other institutions making loans find their balance sheets impaired. This tends to restrict their willingness to make new loans. Without ready access to credit, customers cannot make purchases such as new cars. (Of course, people who have lost their jobs because of recession cannot get credit either.) This lack of access to credit tends to hold down oil prices—through the mechanism we recognize as reduced demand.

One thing that people tend to overlook is the fact that the historic price of oil back when most of our infrastructure was built was quite low--$20 a barrel or less. So even the prices we are seeing now—in the $70 barrel range—are quite high by historical standards. Prices don’t have to be extremely high to have recessionary impacts and to cause debt defaults.

I expect that oil prices in the future will increase (to the extent they do) in a saw tooth fashion, with a rise to a peak, before additional credit restrictions cause a drop in demand, to a new lower level. Meanwhile, our leaders will trot around the world, to Davos and other places, looking vainly for the cause of our current financial problems. If peak oil problems don’t look like they expect, they must not be there!

Anything new here not covered in Peak Cheap Oil Update - Part I: The glass is half empty?

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Anything new here not covered in Peak Cheap Oil Update - Part I: The glass is half empty?

Sorry it this is a bad repeat of your material. I'm kind of stupid and I generally need to have something said to me about two or three times to get it, but I read that whole thing, and I came away with the idea that peak oil means gas goes to the moon. Looking at it again I see that neither of these articles make any actual projections for gas prices at the pump.

[GRG55]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Sorry it this is a bad repeat of your material. I'm kind of stupid and I generally need to have something said to me about two or three times to get it, but I read that whole thing, and I came away with the idea that peak oil means gas goes to the moon. Looking at it again I see that neither of these articles make any actual projections for gas prices at the pump.

How would you propose to do that with any reasonable, and useful, accuracy?

The cost of crude oil is only one input into the cost of retail gasoline at the pump...and in many jurisdictions, such as the UK and parts of Europe, it's not even the dominant input cost any more.

[jk]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

How would you propose to do that [predict the price of gasoline] with any reasonable, and useful, accuracy?

The cost of crude oil is only one input into the cost of retail gasoline at the pump...and in many jurisdictions, such as the UK and parts of Europe, it's not even the dominant input cost any more.

whereas predicting the price of crude oil is easy!:rolleyes:

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

How would you propose to do that with any reasonable, and useful, accuracy?

The cost of crude oil is only one input into the cost of retail gasoline at the pump...and in many jurisdictions, such as the UK and parts of Europe, it's not even the dominant input cost any more.

Let me start by making an observation about predictions. A prediction is of value according to its specificity. For instance if I say that it will rain somewhere in the world tomorrow I can say this with 100% accuracy. It will always rain somewhere. This prediction has almost no value to me. If on the other hand I can say with 50% accuracy that it will rain at my house something between 7AM and noon tomorrow, then I can make a decision whether to bring an umbrella to work. This prediction has value.

For many people the price of gasoline is a major determinant of where they will live and what job they will take. One purpose of analyzing markets and geology reports etc is to help in making such life decisions. This article said in effect "Gas prices will represent a fixed fraction of the wage of an average working person". Obviously that is a situation that cannot continue for long in the face of $200/barrel oil, but the general sense is that gas, and by extension, food prices will be managed down by government and industry for as long as is reasonable. This is a general prediction that has value to me. Itulip and many other sites have predicted crude oil and natural gas prices. Crude oil doesn't have much impact on my life, but gasoline and natural gas for home heating do very much impact my life decisions.

Kunstler on the other hand is just one of many who is not shy about prediction $15/gallon gas or more. I suppose you might say that Kustler is just a grouchy old guy with a computer, but he has the benefit of making clear detailed predictions of what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years.

[jk]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Let me start by making an observation about predictions. A prediction is of value according to its specificity. For instance if I say that it will rain somewhere in the world tomorrow I can say this with 100% accuracy. It will always rain somewhere. This prediction has almost no value to me. If on the other hand I can say with 50% accuracy that it will rain at my house something between 7AM and noon tomorrow, then I can make a decision whether to bring an umbrella to work. This prediction has value.

For many people the price of gasoline is a major determinant of where they will live and what job they will take. One purpose of analyzing markets and geology reports etc is to help in making such life decisions. This article said in effect "Gas prices will represent a fixed fraction of the wage of an average working person". Obviously that is a situation that cannot continue for long in the face of $200/barrel oil, but the general sense is that gas, and by extension, food prices will be managed down by government and industry for as long as is reasonable. This is a general prediction that has value to me. Itulip and many other sites have predicted crude oil and natural gas prices. Crude oil doesn't have much impact on my life, but gasoline and natural gas for home heating do very much impact my life decisions.

Kunstler on the other hand is just one of many who is not shy about prediction $15/gallon gas or more. I suppose you might say that Kustler is just a grouchy old guy with a computer, but he has the benefit of making clear detailed predictions of what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years.

i don't think it said that. if it were a fixed fraction, that would leave just as much for "everything else." if the price of oil REMAINS at $80/barrel, and the result is unemployment, then total incomes have gone down, and energy represents an increased fraction of total income.

[friendly_jacek]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Anything new here not covered in Peak Cheap Oil Update - Part I: The glass is half empty?

LOL, this sounds very arrogant, especially considered that itulip argued very hard against the peak oil thesis till the July 2008 crash in oil prices.

[GRG55]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

Let me start by making an observation about predictions. A prediction is of value according to its specificity. For instance if I say that it will rain somewhere in the world tomorrow I can say this with 100% accuracy. It will always rain somewhere. This prediction has almost no value to me. If on the other hand I can say with 50% accuracy that it will rain at my house something between 7AM and noon tomorrow, then I can make a decision whether to bring an umbrella to work. This prediction has value.

For many people the price of gasoline is a major determinant of where they will live and what job they will take. One purpose of analyzing markets and geology reports etc is to help in making such life decisions. This article said in effect "Gas prices will represent a fixed fraction of the wage of an average working person". Obviously that is a situation that cannot continue for long in the face of $200/barrel oil, but the general sense is that gas, and by extension, food prices will be managed down by government and industry for as long as is reasonable. This is a general prediction that has value to me. Itulip and many other sites have predicted crude oil and natural gas prices. Crude oil doesn't have much impact on my life, but gasoline and natural gas for home heating do very much impact my life decisions.

Kunstler on the other hand is just one of many who is not shy about prediction $15/gallon gas or more. I suppose you might say that Kustler is just a grouchy old guy with a computer, but he has the benefit of making clear detailed predictions of what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years.

This is something that I posted last fall on a similar topic on this thread. The closing paragraph stands...and applies to Kunstler too...

There's a lot of moving parts in the chain, but it usually works reasonably logically.

It's a virtual certainty that the US domestic gas storage will be at capacity several weeks before the normal winter drawdown season starts. That means producers have to either shut in more production or find a home for the gas going into the pipeline network...hence the potential for pressure on the spot market price.

Part of the storage is in the vast continental pipeline network itself. "Packing" the pipelines means more gas going in than going out, which raises the system pressures towards the upper operating limits thus increasing the amount of gas in the network. "Drafting" is the opposite and occurs quite frequently with the arrival of a rapid Arctic front moving across the continent, until producers can respond.

A little story from my Big Oil days. As with most large oil companies the price forecasts used to run economics for capital projects were the jurisdiction of the Marketing Department. Marketing, of course, had no responsibility for actual supply...even though it had defacto control of the projects through the price forecasts. In the fall of 1993 the nat gas spot at the border export point had fallen to 80 cents per million Btu, and our Marketing Department forecast the long term price would be depressed for, oh, the next million years...and all through the patch not a drill rig was stirring. In the first week of November at a meeting with Production, Marketing smugly explained to us plebes how sophisticated their price forecasting methods were and all the good reasons why they were correct to restrain us from drilling anything. In the meantime every single one of my gas plants was at max call from the pipeline companies [contract + 10%, if we could do it]. We never saw 80 cents again...

The street is littered with the corpses of experts trying to forecast the short term movements in the price of crude oil [and natural gas]. Learn to be sceptical of all of them.

[friendly_jacek]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

While I tend to agree with Gail Tverberg's analysis, particularly after I add in the aspects discussed in the "The Middle Class Two Income Trap," there was a counterpoint posted by Ilargi at the Automatic Earth yesterday, and it had some good points

The counterpoint is a total hogwash. He calculated the increased cost of gasoline for individual consumers (small % of oil use in the USA) while the total cost of increased oil price was many fold higher and upset the delicate balance of the card house economy over-leveraged and highly dependent on cheap oil.

Using the same logic, there is no way increased oil prices caused problems in USA in 1970's, right?

BTW,
Oil tripled between Jan 2007 and July 2008.
Oil quadrupled between 1973 and 1974.
USA markerts crashed in 2008 and 1974. Coincidence?

It used to be a common knowledge that the economy cycles were self regulated by commodities and high commodity prices would slow economy and result in recession. Since the "economists" decided to regulate economy and prevent recessions, I guess the rule was forgotten and needs to be rediscovered.

[friendly_jacek]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

This is something that I posted last fall on a similar topic on this thread. The closing paragraph stands...and applies to Kunstler too...

You are comparing price forecasting to the expectation of decreased crude oil production based on a scientifically verified decrease in oil well yield theory. Apples to oranges.

[GRG55]

Re: Peak Oil: Looking for the Wrong Symptoms?

You are comparing price forecasting to the expectation of decreased crude oil production based on a scientifically verified decrease in oil well yield theory. Apples to oranges.

This is the item that started this sub-string. Where's the apples and oranges difference, pray tell?

...Looking at it again I see that neither of these articles make any actual projections for gas prices at the pump.