Louisiana deep oil drilling disaster

[Peter Presland]

I've got a lot of time for Engdahl in much of his geo-politics stuff but, as Paul R opined in another thread recently "I take truth where I find it" - likewise blinkered folly - and I'm afraid 'Blinkered folly' applies to Engdahl so far as 'Peak Oil' is concerned - IMHO anyway - with his:

What the enormity of the oil spill does is to also further discredit clearly the oil companies’ myth of “peak oil” which claims that the world is at or near the “peak” of economical oil extraction. That myth, which has been propagated in recent years by circles close to former oilman and Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been effectively used by the giant oil majors to justify far higher oil prices than would be politically possible otherwise, by claiming a non-existent petroleum scarcity crisis.

I totally agree about the greedy duplicity of oilmen - the Bush/Cheyney/Haliburton axis being their exemplars. But Engdahl seems to simply ignore all the work of men like Colin Campbell and others who have made what are to date accurate predictions about discoveries and the production curves of individual countries and fields - the US being THE prime example

'Peak oil' is not 'the oil companies myth; it was being quietly and systematically documented in the teeth oil company denials, long before they finally began to acknowledge its approach about 3 years ago. The oilmen have in fact been all too well aware of it for decades but have kept mum until recently. Why is Cheyney's Oil task force report of the Late nineties still classified for example? Equally, they have been laying plans for decades which goes a long way to explaining just why it is the US military digs in everywhere where the easy-to-get-at stuff remains in any quantity.

Peak oil is NOT about running out of oil, it is about estimating just where the maximum possible global production rate lies - taking into account existing field declines, the rate of new discoveries and the costs of getting at it. All the evidence says we have already hit that production peak.

There may indeed be some some gynormous deep sea field out there - many of them even, but their production costs in dollar-terms - let alone the sort of catastrophic environmental costs unfolding in the GOM are just as gynormous.

IMHO, Engdahl's tunnel vision on the simple production mathematics of what is a finite resource, vitiates his analyses of the real drivers of US/UK/NATO geo-politics over the past 30 years or so.

One BIG caveat however: - IS ABIOTIC OIL A REALITY?

I have seen Engdahl argue that it is but, apart from some stuff out of Russia, I for one have seen precious little other evidence that it is a reality.

I really would love to be proven wrong.