Do you think that the World has reached it?  If not, when?  (If ever?)

What kind of idiot believes oil is being continuously generated?

I suspect it' s not really a belief but a rumor spread by those heavily invested in petroleum futures...

The belief that oil is being continuously created is, in fact, a thing. It’s a bullshit hypothesis and most of its spread comes from oil industries (mainly Russian), but there are some useful idiots who fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

As for the OP, I can’t even pretend to know when peak oil comes to pass. At my most optimistic, it’s probably happening in my lifetime (assuming I live a normal lifespan). At my least, it’s already happened. I can’t pin it down any further because even experts can’t figure it out, so how do you expect me to do so?

The kind who understands what oil is and how it was produced in the first place? Yes, it's being produced, but that doesn't mean we'll have oil forever. I don't think we'll ever reach peak oil, but not for lack of trying, it's just that alternative energy like solar has become the cheapest source of energy in history to date.

We can and will continue extracting oil, we just won't keep doing the dumb thing and setting it all on fire.

According to what I have read from various scholarly experts:

We’ve been running out of fossil fuels for some time now, though we have extended what we can recover by new methods like fracking. While new reserves may be discovered, resources always go down. New discoveries would have to be big to maintain the rate of consumption. A part of the problem is our increasing rate of demand from the developing world, and especially from such countries as China and India. Demand is projected to grow 50% by 2050. Yet one estimate is that we will see oil production peak and then begin to slowly decline by 2030. Venezuela, Russia, and the U.S. have already peaked. Coal and natural gas will peak before 2040.

Fossil fuels become more expensive to extract over time. This is because we picked the low hanging fruit first, the best-quality and cheapest, leaving the more expensive to refine and the harder to access for later. And later is coming fast.

It requires energy to produce energy. The Energy Returned On Investment (EROI) number keeps getting lower and lower until, at last, more energy would have to be spent than the amount which could be recovered by spending it. Even before that point, the energy will no longer be economical to extract. This means that we will never burn all of our proven reserves. By one author’s estimate, it will be unlikely for supply problems to crop up until the second half of this century, though there may be price problems before then. However, the dropping costs of renewables like solar and wind power will likely spell the end for fossil fuels long before that happens.

By 2100, economical oil and gas will be gone. They will last us for 40 to 70 years, depending on our rate of consumption. Much of what will be left in our reserves, in oil shales, tar sands, and under the oceans, will be too costly to recover. They will become what are called stranded assets. Minable coal reserves have been substantially overestimated. U.S. coal production could peak in the next decade.

Today we are burning over 90 million barrels of oil a day. With a business-as-usual scenario, that number could increase significantly by 2100 – if we had it to burn. Because of accelerating demand, a business-as-usual scenario will likely cause us to run out of economic fossil fuels in this century. So we are headed toward renewables one way or another.

I can;t for the life of me figure out where the notion that the us hit peak comes from. Our latest record high point was in 2019, and we hope that we never blow past that again, but the dip since hasn't been created by supply constraints.

(I thought I was taking crazy pills so I looked it up..we're trending back up again, and projected to blow past that number)

(November 10, 2021 at 11:01 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I can;t for the life of me figure out where the notion that the us hit peak comes from. Our latest record high point was in 2019, and we hope that we never blow past that again, but the dip since hasn't been created by supply constraints.

(I thought I was taking crazy pills so I looked it up..we're trending back up again, and projected to blow past that number)

It is ironic that the original US peak was in 1971, but, new technologies reversed that decades downward spiral.

(November 10, 2021 at 10:49 am)Alan V Wrote: According to what I have read from various scholarly experts:

We’ve been running out of fossil fuels for some time now, though we have extended what we can recover by new methods like fracking. While new reserves may be discovered, resources always go down. New discoveries would have to be big to maintain the rate of consumption. A part of the problem is our increasing rate of demand from the developing world, and especially from such countries as China and India. Demand is projected to grow 50% by 2050. Yet one estimate is that we will see oil production peak and then begin to slowly decline by 2030. Venezuela, Russia, and the U.S. have already peaked. Coal and natural gas will peak before 2040.

Fossil fuels become more expensive to extract over time. This is because we picked the low hanging fruit first, the best-quality and cheapest, leaving the more expensive to refine and the harder to access for later. And later is coming fast.

It requires energy to produce energy. The Energy Returned On Investment (EROI) number keeps getting lower and lower until, at last, more energy would have to be spent than the amount which could be recovered by spending it. Even before that point, the energy will no longer be economical to extract. This means that we will never burn all of our proven reserves. By one author’s estimate, it will be unlikely for supply problems to crop up until the second half of this century, though there may be price problems before then. However, the dropping costs of renewables like solar and wind power will likely spell the end for fossil fuels long before that happens.

By 2100, economical oil and gas will be gone. They will last us for 40 to 70 years, depending on our rate of consumption. Much of what will be left in our reserves, in oil shales, tar sands, and under the oceans, will be too costly to recover. They will become what are called stranded assets. Minable coal reserves have been substantially overestimated. U.S. coal production could peak in the next decade.

Today we are burning over 90 million barrels of oil a day. With a business-as-usual scenario, that number could increase significantly by 2100 – if we had it to burn. Because of accelerating demand, a business-as-usual scenario will likely cause us to run out of economic fossil fuels in this century. So we are headed toward renewables one way or another.

Yea, we will never run out of oil. It will just become to expensive to use on the scales we use it today. Energy production isn't the only thing we oil for to sustain us though. Lubricants, plastics, and perhaps more importantly fertilizers are also made from petroleum products. Can we find alternatives to those things too fast enough to sustain our population? Perhaps The Grand Nudger can weigh in on the fertilizers. I know there are alternatives to petroleum based fertilizers, but can we produce enough food to feed the world growing potatoes in our our shit?

There's no alternative to petroleum based fertilizers under the current model, no. It's not physically possible to grow the amount of food we do the way we grow it without vast amounts of fossil fuels...the entire industry was based on it from seed to table.

And no, we also cant grow enough food from our own shit to keep humans shitting..it takes alot more shit - though that's the only way to make this work in perpetuity no matter what the population numbers are. I like fish. They're prodigious little shitters (but it's actually the amonia and not the shit per se that matters) - they can also be stacked vertically in ways that other livestock can't and as a consequence of living in water lend themselves extremely well to intensive crop production in deep water trough systems. All of which, by necessity, need to be in a controlled environment which handles variability in local weather..as well as being completely unsuitable for chemical pesticide introduction. Every bird, one delicious stone.

That's what we should be using our fossil fuel reserves for..building the materials and infrastructure required to step away from our wider oil addiction. You know, before we can't access enough of it to do that even if we all got together and realized we should. I think that in the longer view of history (assuming there is one) our flirtation with the current model will be seen as one of our biggest mistakes not for the environmental damage it wrought, but for the opportunity cost imposed on future generations as a consequence. If there isn't any future..well..we won't have been the first society to literally farm ourselves to death.

(November 10, 2021 at 11:01 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I can't for the life of me figure out where the notion that the us hit peak comes from.  Our latest record high point was in 2019, and we hope that we never blow past that again, but the dip since hasn't been created by supply constraints.

(I thought I was taking crazy pills so I looked it up..we're trending back up again, and projected to blow past that number)

It could very well be that the books I read were outdated by the time I read them.  All extrapolations from "present" information can become obsolete with changed circumstances and new information.

It could also be true that there isn't just one peak, and that several peaks will be averaged together later to make a more generalized peak.

Still, expert opinions are more likely to be roughly correct than any uninformed estimates I might make myself.