This terrific op-ed, which I almost missed a couple days ago, is a must read: 'Peak Oil' is a Waste of Energy

An excerpt:

REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone).

Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.

A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. And this has been demonstrated over and over again: the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil first claimed in 1989 that the peak had already been reached, and Mr. Schlesinger argued a decade earlier that production was unlikely to ever go much higher.

...read the rest of that article here.

The author is right: malthusians do advance this argument, which says the world is about to pass its peak production of crude oil and that our entire society will begin an irreversible decline as a result. But the argument has also been taken up in recent years by the most ardent gold bugs (always cheering on the decline of the U.S. dollar), America-hating statists like James Howard Kuntsler (perfect last name) and even investment bankers with a vested interest in any story which argues for the extreme urgency to drill-- now.

I detest policies which make it impossible to produce more crude, but that short remark highlights the reality that our challenge in producing more oil is consistently man-made by politicians.

And today, the peak oil case looks particularly silly. Land-based storage facilities are brimming and more than 50 million excess barrels remain stored at sea on tanker ships due to a commodity price situation called "cantango" which has been particularly strong for months and collapsed shipping rates brought on by the weak global economy. And this doesn't even speak to the huge supply of finished distillates being stored the same way, nor the recent production cuts by Saudi Arabia and others which could be brought back online in short order if necessary.

Yes, the price of oil has risen this year, but this has been chiefly a result of our declining currency, one which has allowed the peak oil theorists to re-surface.

Don't be alarmed or fooled by them. Their type has literally existed for a century, which some writer in a column such as this will almost certainly be pointing out a century from now.