What Maugeri is claiming is that there is and will continue to be a boom in unconventional liquids — tight oil, synthetic oil from tar sands, synthetic oil from shale, coal to liquids (CTL), natural gas to liquids (GTL), and even ethanol from corn. The EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2012 does predict that production of these sources will increase from an aggregate 4.6 million barrels per day (mbpd) in 2010 to 17.1 mbpd by 2035, if prices stay high, which seems to support Maugeri's contention. If prices trend lower, EIA predicts that unconventional production will only increase to 13.0 mbpd.

So the boom will depend on the price of oil staying high enough to pay for unconventional extraction (horizontal or deepwater drilling), transport (Keystone XL) and refining (refitting for heavy sour oil). And as we saw in 2008, the price of oil depends on demand from a strong economy. By ravaging the US and Canadian environments, we will be able to offset the drop in conventional oil imports, but only if our economy, and the other economies we depend on remain strong enough to keep the price of oil high.

Meanwhile, world production of conventional oil is depleting 3-4 mbpd every year. From 2012 to 2035 depletion will be minus 69 to minus 92 mbpd. Does that bode well for a strong world economy?

Treehugger, Monbiot and Is Peak Oil Over?

I can’t really blame George Monbiot or anyone else for buying the narrative hype.  Right now the overwhelming narrative is that we have no energy constraints at all.  Folks wonder aloud whether the US should join OPEC.  Increasingly ridiculous projections are made about the potential of shale oil and new drilling techniques.  Slight upticks are assumed to be headed to their logical extremes, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government  issues a report saying we’ve got all the oil we could ever want.  So is it really surprising that Monbiot, who has been focused on climate change, not peak oil, is buying the story, asks Treehugger?  Treehugger also offers a great link to Heading Out’s Oil Drum Rebuttal to the Harvard Report, which notes that this is based on a whole lot of assumptions including capacity for production that Saudi Arabia has claimed but never demonstrated, a huge leap in Iraqi oil production, which everyone has said will happen any day now since 2003 and hasn’t, and a lot of overstatements of US shale production: