Ghi,
Thanks for the article you posted a week ago in response to my
concerns. My main concern is to Get It Right and make it clear: what
does Peak Oil mean and what are its main implications.
This article, whose pertinent parts I've excepted below do not
disagree with my understanding of the problem: The obvious projected
problems of Peak Oil: as oil reserves dwindle everything gets more
expensive and our unhealthy dependence on this cheap slave is exposed.

My previous post said, yes, BUT, it will be a long slow downhill
slide, longer than many people thing because, at current prices,
Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan extra heavy are now counted as viable
reserves. All of a sudden, accepted known world reserves have DOUBLED.
The problem is that these new energy sources are very dirty and costly
to the environment; lots of water, lots of waste. [Remember-- costs of
pumping Saudi oil: $5; Gulf of Mexico: $15; Canada/Venezuela heavy:
$25. World mkt currently $75]
And of course at these prices, other alternative fuels become
"viable", even attractive, not mentioned by the writer below
So I think its a long whimper, punctuated by the occasional Bang.
I continue to think the real problem in front of us is the falsity of
the "market economy" based on the funny money "fiat dollar". This will
make for sharper declines and acute problems than actual peak oil.
The link is that in our world today, the primary item of value is OIL,
not diamonds, gold, even grain, and sure as hell not the dollar.

Below is the pertinent piece of Ghi's article.

Sandy
***************************
Yes, the world has more oil available at, say, $50 or $70 a barrel
than at $10 or $20. Everyone agrees; that’s a truism in the industry.
But there’s no simple mathematical relation between increasing the
price of oil and increasing the size of estimated reserves. Doubling
the price doesn’t double the reserves; it merely makes a few
out-of-the-way known reserves more attractive.

The all-important question is, how much oil can the industry pump
every day (that is, at what rate can that oil be produced)? That’s what
the debate over Peak Oil is all about—not reserves or amounts
ultimately recoverable, but flow rates. When will the flow rate that
the industry can possibly attain reach its maximum?

With prices high, you say, hundreds of billions of barrels of oil from
the tar sands of Canada and from the heavy-oil fields of Venezuela
become economical to produce. Right again, though this is not
conventional oil we’re talking about, but materials that have to be
transformed into synthetic petroleum using energy-intensive processes.
Again, the real question is, at what rates? Canada is currently
extracting a million barrels a day from the tar sands; Venezuela is
pulling a little over half that amount from the Orinoco belt. These
numbers are expected to climb—and then level off. Why? Because the
process of producing synthetic oil from these low-quality hydrocarbon
sources is constrained by physical factors that just do not respond
much to economic stimuli. Canada needs lots of fresh water and natural
gas to make oil from the tar sands, and both are in short supply. The
best published forecasts say that, regardless of the price of oil, flow
rates there will max out at about three to five million barrels per day
by 2025—a generous amount in terms of the benefit to Canada’s economy.
But this is not nearly enough fuel to satisfy the US habit of over 20
million barrels per day—and crucially, it’s not enough to make up for
expected declines from the world’s giant and supergiant conventional
oilfields once the latter begin their inevitable declines—as they are
doing now. There are only about a hundred of those big fields that,
collectively, yield roughly half the oil extracted today. Nearly all
are old (found in the 1940s through the 1970s), and we’re seeing that,
with the newer water-flooding recovery methods, when decline comes it
can hit unexpectedly and with catastrophic swiftness—as it did in the
Yibal field in Oman, which peaked at 250,000 barrels per day in 1997
and is already down to less than 80,000 b/d.

The situation in Venezuela is similar to that in Canada.