Also see The world changed last week, with no headlines to mark the news

Via: RGE

Summary: Robert Hirsch describes another form of Peak Oil: political peaking. Perhaps the Middle Eastern nations can produce more oil to meet the world’s growing thirst — but will they? Is it in their interest to do so? Also, the focus of doomsters on shockwaves — instantaneous and large production cuts — ignores the more likely forms of slower political and geological peaking. Ending on a more optimistic note, history does give us some grounds for optimism.Robert Hirsch, one of the world’s top energy experts, has an important article in the February issue of Energy Policy magazine, “Mitigation of maximum world oil production: Shortage scenarios.” As usual with his work, it offers a mixture of new insights and careful analysis seldom found in Peak Oil research — on either side of the debate. I strongly recommend reading it. Unfortunately Energy Policy is subscription only. Here is a brief review of his analysis. Here are slides to an earlier presentation on this topic by Hirsch at the ASPO-USA conference in October 2007.

Political Peaking

Hirsch introduces an important concept which he (and many others) has long discussed, but only now is formally described: political peaking, an extreme form of resource nationalism.

A few nations have the bulk of the world’s remaining conventional oil reserves. There large sources of unconventional liquid fuels: heavy oil, deep-sea, polar, bitumen (oil sands), kerogen (oil shale), coal (for coal to liquids conversion). However, these have high extraction costs — both in terms of initial capital requirements and operating costs — which create operational limits on their production flows.

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