I promise myself to take a break from the 4GW debates, only to have DNI bring up another issue that ignites my passions.

I swear folks, I read more than DNI. It just occupies a disproportionately large percentage of my posts…

So Robert Hirsch is worried about the risks of oil production peaking. Kenneth S. Deffeyes thinks it has already happened. John Robb uses the assumption of oil peaking as background in his system disruption studies.

First of all, since I haven’t written about this on the blog before, let me begin by apologizing in advance if I lose my temper over this subject. It gets my goat.

I take issue with the term “peak oil.” I understand that people use it as a general label for discussions of the challenges we face in meeting our worldwide energy needs, but it still irritates me.

Let’s begin with the unextraordinary nature of a “peak.” Anyone who has taken elementary Calculus has learned that any continuous function will have a maximum over a finite domain. So if we’re considering world oil production over 250 years, say, there will necessarily be a peak. This, as mathematicians say, is trivial.

But I ought to be fair. The peak oil volk don’t just claim that there is some maximum to world oil production, they claim that world oil production follows a bell curve, meaning that the peak corresponds to the point when half the globe’s oil being consumed. Furthermore, the bell curve tells us that production will drop at an increasing rate as we start to move past the peak.

All we have to do now is assume monotonically increasing global oil demand and we have everything we need to paint our doomsday scenarios. Thankfully Hirsch and Robb steer clear of the most dramatic of these. Deffeyes, however, cannot help himself. He claims that “By 2025, we’re going to be back in the Stone Age.”

So, by this line of reasoning, we’ve got lots of problems. And I don’t object to the assertion that we’ve got problems. I object to the line of reasoning used to justify why we have problems and describe the nature of those problems. Why? Because it all depends upon the assumption I placed in bold two paragraphs ago. Why do we believe that world oil production follows a bell curve?

Because a geologist named M. King Hubbert said so. He built himself a little model and produced the bell curve. And his bell curve accurately predicted the peaking of oil production in the lower 48 states. But that’s it.

One.

One example does not a proof make.

Especially when it comes to complex systems. And if the world oil market isn’t a complex system, then I don’t know what is. Take, for example, the oil shocks of the 1970s.

A few outliers like the 1970s oil shocks might not look like much of a difference when one compares it to an idealized bell curve (”hey, it still kinda looks like a bell curve”) but consider this: the experience of that oil shock changed the politics, economies and populations of the world, producing significant and long-term dynamics. Brazil committed to decreasing its oil production, which meant that 20 years later it became a net exporter of oil. The world economy staggered, leading oil consumption to fall (production took roughly a decade to reach pre-1980s levels). It ushered in smaller, fuel efficient cars to the American market. In short, we have multi-scale and mult-phase dynamics in the political, economic, social, geological and technological realms. Hubbert’s model is restricted to geologic considerations.

Proponents of peak oil thinking acknowledge that issues like politics, security and economics are external to the Hubbert model, yet they never seem to recognize the need to defend why they feel that the model is still relevent. Incidentally, these assumptions explain why Hubbert’s model worked so well for the lower 48 states - political, technology, security and economic issues were external between the late 1950s (when Hubbert did his work) and the early 1970s. The US economy was experiencing uninterrupted growth, the time horizon Hubbert faced was brief enough that long-term dynamics didn’t have time to get into play, security was more than sufficient to allow economically efficient extraction and the political climate was stable.

Now ask yourself, how many of these assumptions hold for the world oil market of the 21st Century?

I am not saying we don’t have a problem. I am concerned about our risk exposure to short-term supply disruptions caused by the low global surplus between production and demand. Consequently I think that there is a compelling moral and economic argument for corproations (especially those that operate large fleets of vehicles) to invest in alternative energy sources as a real option to mitigate their risk exposure to oil prices. I just wish people didn’t use the concept of “peak oil” to advocate that position!