The Future Oil Price. By David Archibald.

A month ago a French oilman, Jean Laherrere, now on his 93rd solar orbit, produced this graph of 200 years of US oil production:

 

 

The X axis is annual production in exajoules. … World peak oil production occurred in 2018.

Laherrere’s forecast, consistent with experience of unconstrained extraction of a resource, has US oil production falling by half a million barrels per day each year between 2025 and 2040. The US will flip from being the only source of supply growth to the biggest source of decline. …

The significance of the tightening oil market that is upon us is that it will suck the life out of the rest of economy and lower our standard of living.

Renewables won’t save us because renewables are made from plastic derived from oil and energy from coal. The power actually produced by wind and solar is too expensive to make more solar panels and wind turbines.

The short term solution to this problem will be converting coal to liquid fuels using the Bergius process. The long term solution will be adoption of plutonium breeder reactor technology as our major power source, and using hydrogen from electrolysis to make synthetic diesel and petrol.

The economics of completely recycling electric vehicle batteries have yet to be determined. It is likely that synthetic diesel is the better medium for storing and utilising power from nuclear reactors.