decline at 85% -90% in the first three years.
Because of this masking, spare capacity will be gone by the time we see real production declines in the data . “Whoa, wait,” you might be saying. “This is sounding an awful lot like Peak Oil…”
And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
If you’ve followed the oil markets for at least the last few years, you’ve undoubtedly heard the term “Peak Oil.” It was an idea in the early 2000s that oil production was in permanent decline.
That popular theory was proven factually wrong.
My boss Porter Stansberry was among the first writers anywhere to report on the discovery of the huge Eagle Ford Shale in Texas. In 2010, he predicted it would become the largest oil field in U.S. history. He forecast record volumes of oil production years ago, when most pundits were still worried about Peak Oil. Since then, the Eagle Ford Shale, Bakken Shale, and Permian Basin have dominated the U.S. oil market. U.S. oil production is around 9.5 million barrels per day and estimated to exceed 10 million barrels per day in 2018. The Eagle Ford, Bakken, and Permian account for 4.88 million (about 50%) of that total. So yes, the Peak Oil theory was wrong. We weren’t running out of oil. (There was plenty more in rocks that were once thought to be non- productive.) And given the error, many folks believe that we should dismiss concerns about the depletion of concentrated fossil fuels.
But the fact is that the best estimates about Peak Oil were accurate .
In 1956, geologist M. King Hubbert stated the United States would reach its peak of petroleum in 1970 and the world would peak in the 1990s.
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