Nobody talks about a peak in natural gas? Yes they do, but not much, but if we do start using natural gas as a replacement for transport fuel on a gigantic scale, you just see how long it is before there is a supply crunch in natural gas. Just imagine adding a billion or so cars and trucks using natural gas to the current consumption. On top of that, gas is becoming more widespread in electricity generation. It's also being used in the processing of tar sands and shale oil.......so as those continue to expand.......more natural gas is consumed. This is why the human race will create a peak of any resource we use........because we are just like pigs that never think of tommorow.......just keep adding uses and consuming more until natural restraints stop us........we never volunteer to restrain our consumption. Sounds just like my kids actually.....if I don't restrain them.......I'll have $500 gas and electricity bills and need 100 gig download limit and second mortgages to pay their mobile phone bills.

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is this what passes for reporting @ Daily Finance?

Mr Lazzaro you need to start earning your wage

a good place to start would be the IEA's 2008 report

the Hirsch Report @ www.netl.doe.gov/publications/
others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

or at Cornell University : dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/
1813/692

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A headline from Chicagotribune.com states: "Jobless rate bolts to 8.1 percent, 651K jobs lost in February."

"The net loss of 651,000 jobs in February came after even deeper payroll reductions in the prior two months, according to revised figures. The economy lost 681,000 jobs in December and another 655,000 in January," based on U.S. Department of Labor statistics."

But the real unemployment rate is now more like 12 or 13 percent, according to analyst Lee Adler, writing in "The Wall Street Examiner." Adler concludes that, "today’s deterioration is at least as rapid, and probably more rapid, than the beginning of the Great Depression."

Dow Jones concludes that today's stock market decline mimics the Great Depression.

Thus, both increasing unemployment and declining stock values indicate that we are entering an economic depression similar to the Great Depression.

Although it is difficult to determine how much of this economic depression is caused by Peak Oil impacts and how much stems from mismanagement of the economy as well as from business and government corruption, ASPO-Ireland explains that Peak Oil plays a major role.

But the current economic depression is permanent, due to declining global oil production, according to a recent post on EnergyBulletin.net.

We are entering the "Greatest Depression."

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, government programs and the build up for World War II stimulated the economy. The East Texas oil boom powered the factories, highways, trucks, tractors, trains, transportation, and infrastructure to make it possible.

Now, the problem is declining oil production, and there is no energy boom to help us pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.

There is no plan for developing energy alternatives that will power trucks, trains, ships, tractors, and combines, nor is there time or capital to develop alternatives. Capital is scarce due to declining oil production. Chris Shaw explains that energy is the source of capital, and hence, capital declines as oil production drops.

A review of government and scientific studies indicates that regardless of the time or capital available, no alternatives will begin to make up for declining global oil production.

Whatever alternative energy we attempt to develop will consume valuable oil (mining, manufacturing, and transportation) and not deliver the liquid fuels that we need. Chris Shaw call this the "quicksand effect."

The Congress and president will be at a loss of how to manage this ever-worsening economic collapse. They would be wise to commission the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to provide the nation with advice. Chaos will result from the advice of contradictory interest groups, organizations, bloggers, and individuals. The NAS is the most credible source for such advice. The NAS and other scientific sources have already undertaken the basic research needed for a policy study to advise the nation. The NAS could provide an energy policy study within a year and could then provide advice on a continuing basis.

The best advice for individuals and organization is to prepare for Peak Oil impacts. No federal or state agencies are studying Peak Oil impacts and contingency planning. A few local governments and organizations are beginning to make plans.

This is what we must plan for. With increasing costs for gasoline and diesel, along with declining taxes and declining gasoline tax revenues, states and local governments will eventually have to cut staff and curtail highway maintenance. Eventually, gasoline stations will close, and state and local highway workers won’t be able to get to work. We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel and gasoline powered trucks for bridge maintenance, culvert cleaning to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, and roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, large transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables from great distances. With the highways out, there will be no food coming from far away, and without the power grid virtually nothing modern works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, water distribution systems, waster water treatment, and automated building systems.

http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/2009/03/peak-oil-economic-depression-has.html

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The peak of oil production is most likely past, and will seem like an economic event to most people. The reason is that as the net energy of production declines due to increasing energy intensity of production, the economy must be resized to fit the energy that is available. This resizing will seem to be an economic one, oil production will never recover, and most people will argue that we had "Peak demand due to severe depression". From the standpoint of physics, they are of course the same. People life to get confused by their unbacked fiat currency, which of course has nothing to do with this problem.

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"...no one ever talks about 'peak natural gas.'"

Wow, I really hope you meant this as a joke. So you think one finite natural resource will peak... but not another? This is ludicrous. Not only will nat gas peak, but it will peak faster than it would have otherwise once people start switching over to it for transportation (as they already are in China, Brazil, and India).

The promise of shale gas is WAY overblown - it is expensive and has steep well-depletion curves. It will not save us. It will help, but the effect will be highly temporary; it will mitigate the rate of decline.

Natural gas is set to peak a decade or two after oil, but this may be accelerated due to fuel switching. Coal will be next, but again, it will be accelerated by switching (and no, we don't have "hundreds of years" of coal supply - please don't break out that old chestnut, as it's based on strongly inflated estimates from the 1970s that assumed mining improvements that haven't materialized).

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Simmons needs an excuse to drive the price of oil higher for his investment bank.

Didn't BP and Shell just discover record breaking oil finds just this past month?

I remember when BP said that at $40 a barrel it would be profitable to build rigs on the floor of the ocean to drill for oil. That was when oil skyrocketed to $35 from under $20 a few years ago.

But all of a sudden after greedy stock manipulators drove the price of oil to $147 a barrel you can't drill oil for profit under $60.

The first decade of the 21st century will be known throughout the future as the decade that destroyed the United States of America. Thanks to a government and a few very well heeled people who manipulated the rules to profit immensely from corruption.

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America will NOT run out of GAS . The GAS BAGS in Washington are feeding the American Public the biggest BS story in modern history . The "Cap & Trade" deal is all about money and lots of it !

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We are out of gas , they are really selling us synthetic fuel .
We haven't had real gas for the last 3 years .
Funny just when the economy needs a boost by lower gas prices , some bozo runs a article about raising gas prices .

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think tesla and nearly free electricity!

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this is just another excusee to raise the coast of fuel so the rich get richer.

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HERE WE GO AGAIN... going around in circles. I mean seriously theyre making the electric cars... and DUH the earth is a finite mass of space... so obviously there isnt an ENDLESS supply of oil its like posting an article asking: "If I have 100 bucks, and my mom gives me 5 dollars a week but I spend 10 per week will I ever run out of money"?

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Blah blah blah, first of all, we can get most of our electricity from nuclear power plants. We should be building them right now, about 50 of them to start with. With electric cars, nuclear power and breeder reactors which actually make more fuel than they use, there will be no shortage of energy. The waste can easily be stored in some desert in Arizona or Nevada, capped with lead and concrete. When we start running low on fuel, or this greenhouse effect rises our oceans another 5 feet, people will be screaming for nuclear power. Start now and forget about all of these carbon fuels like gas and natural gas, won't need them with nuclear power. We are always laggers though, Europe is already powering more and more with nuclear energy, which we invented, but we keep on burning these fossil fuels, mostly coming from other countries. We need to get smart, quickly.

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"Simmons added that, "it would be comforting if some vast new oil frontier existed that would recreate the 20th century's oil miracle, but almost five decades have now elapsed since the last great super-giant oil fields were discovered and the last frontier basins were found."

Obviously Mr. Simmons hasn't heard ( or elects to ignore the news for personal reasons) of the recent discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico. For example, BP announced a " super-giant " discovery recently with billions of barrels of recoverable reserves ... so far!
Talk it back up experts! Maybe you can talk it back to $150 again on fears and pure speculation and milk the US consummer one more time ... until, of course, everyone gags again like last year and the pure speculators take their hyped profits.

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The new "Giant" oil find in the gulf of mexico is 3 billion barrels of oil. Gee......thats a whole 5 weeks of world supply. And all they have to do to get it is build a few dozen floating oil rigs at a few billion a pop.......and drill down 34 thousand feet to pump it out......and then either build a pipline or have a revolving door of tankers coming and going......and bingo.......easy as that. Someone work out the financial costs...and more importantly......the energy costs.......how much energy will go into getting that oil to your petrol tank. Just to mention......bringing up one barrel of oil from 34 thousand feet down uses nearly half a barrel of oil equiv in energy just to overcome gravity.......never mind all the other energy inputs.....oil at this depth this distance from shore is very likely an energy sink. Which means.......more total energy inputs extracting it then the energy benefit gotten from the oil. Technology can not rewrite the laws of physics or thermodynamics. Its like this.......you have a car.......the only petrol is 500klms away........your tank is full.....so you can drive to the 500klms away petrol station.......but by the time you fill up and drive back again....you only have enough petrol to get a quarter of the way back to the petrol station again.........so no matter how much petrol the station has........and no matter what the price is.........your out of gas....forever.......and there is nothing you can do about it........because it takes the whole tank of gas to get your petrol back to where you will use it........and by then.......there is not enough petrol left to get more petrol. If you spend nearly as much energy to obtain energy as what you obtain........your finished and there is no point anymore. So don't worry about how big of oil find someone says they have found.....(it's not big anyway) its how much "energy"........not money.........that it takes to extract it. The energy equation can not be altered by economics

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