Saudi Oil Production Down 8%

Matt Simmons, peak oil guru is on record as saying "once Saudi peaks the world has peaked" (End of Suburbia). If he is right the the Reserve Bank won't have to worry too much about quelling the volatile housing market with interest rate hikes - hyperinflation will be the wolf at the door.

Yet breaking news that Saudi oil production figures are down 8% for 2006 has barely registered in the mainstream (braindead) media.

The other day I responded to an "associate professor" (Jason D Scorse) who with all the critical analysis skills of my first year computing students, claimed peak oil was debunked because he spotted this article in the New York Times. "Sure looks that way from the available evidence. it's comforting that, yet again, the doom and gloom crowd gets it wrong." Scorse declares. To be honest as is typical in this debate, it appears Scorse is expressing an emotional response, usually associated with those that wish (upon a star) that life will continue "business as usual" @ 3.5% growth per annum. Anything that doesn't fit within the happy go motoring/shopping future as imagined by people like Scorse is just ridiculed and dismissed with lashings of fuckwittery that all 1st year philosophy students would see through immediately.

It's lucky Associate Professor Scorse isn't one of those first year students - he'd fail his assignment.

Here is the guts.

To make the claim that peak oil is debunked you have to claim that oil production will continue to grow annually forever. In debunking peak oil one must necessarily assume that oil is an infinite resource. If Scorse believes that then not only is he a bloody idiot, but he probably shouldn't be an associate professor.

The debate isn’t about whether the peak oil observation is true or not. It is! As is evidenced time and time again with every oil feild, every country, every region on the planet that has already passed peak. Please check out the BP Annual figures for the empirical evidence supporting this claim. It isn’t up for debate. It is merely a fact.

The issue, as many of us have said time and again, is not if there will be a peak but when will the world peak?

And, it looks possible, if Matt Simmons is correct that that date has arrived. (Unless of course Saudi intentionally cut production)

If it is indeed so then the last pint in the pub has been consumed, and we are faced with scrounging around the cupboards for half empty bottles of sherry. And the drunks are brawling on the pavement outside.