Peak Oil is STILL for real
Interview with Richard Heinberg (mp3) From Radio Ecoshock Wednesday, April 08, 2015
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If one is born every minute... will they ever "peak"?
Let's review some of Heinberg's work from his books in 2003/2004
The nub of the issue is that North America has passed its peak in natural gas production. US production peaked in 1971, but the country managed to maintain a fairly flat production curve until the end of the 1990s by steeply increasing investment in exploration and recovery. By 2002, the US was importing 15% of its gas from Canada; meanwhile, Mexico- which had been exporting gas north of the border- had begun importing gas from the US. In 2003 it became clear that Canada’s production was also in decline.
There are disturbing signs that rates of natural gas extraction in North America will soon start on an inexorable downhill slope perhaps within a few months or at most a few years. When that happens we may well see a fairly rapid crash in production rather than the slow ramp-down anticipated for oil.
I did get a kick out of his attempt to spin the earlier works as essentially correct... in that they discussed higher prices bringing nontraditional sources into the market... by which he's trying to pretend that he actually expected the shale oil bonanza.
Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is true. In fact, he (in "the party's over"
tried to take on an Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist of a couple years earlier. Lomborg actually did predict that rising prices would result in shale oil becoming economical to produce and there was far too much of that for the peakist projections to come to pass. Heinberg then went on to inappropriately conflate shale oil with oil shale (explicitly calling them the same thing) and then critiques the wrong one.
He clearly did not understand the realities of shale oil that just a few years later changed the realities of US oil production (Heck... he doesn't appear to even know what it was... which makes the current book's focus on explaining why it's about to run out... somewhat entertaining). While we're on the subject, he's entirely wrong in the interview here to include shale oil in the "unconventional" category. That's needed in order to keep his current spin from drawing too much laughter, but it's nonsense. Oil shale and tar sands are unconventional... but shale oil is no more unconventional than offshore oil is.
So let's continue to evaluate.
We'll ignore the fact that the guy makes his living pumping these books out (and then hitting the lecture circuit for another round at the marks)... and that he obviously can't sell anything to his normal audience if he writes "well... so much for that peak oil stuff. Who wants to learn macramé?" - we'll just focus on the latest spin.
The audio clip (as well as the relevant chapter of the new book) doesn't actually spend much time on the title of the OP. It's mostly concerned with what he thinks happens after peak oil knocks us out (again, as is most of the book). But the relevant portion is very interesting. He tries to claim that he was really remarkably accurate in his predictions. Of course he entirely dodges any discussion of peak natural gas (there's just no spinning that any longer) and hopes that we just won't notice. Then he tries to boil down all of the conversation on peak oil to a few points:
1 - It wasn't really my prediction, I just repeated what Campbell and Laherrere were saying.
2 - Forget scores of pages on the subject (or especially peak natgas) , the only real prediction was on pages 118-120 when they really said that the peak would be between 2006-2015.
3 - They were right (or close enough) and that's the prediction that I endorsed
There are a few problems here:
* - The 2015 date is actually at the back end of the prediction spectrum from 2003 (not just for his work, but for scores of peakists). We can't ignore all the other predictions he attached himself to (there, in other books, on websites like TOD, etc.)
* - It's already ridiculous to pretend that 2015 is likely the peak. It's clear that producers are currently fighting each other to try to reduce production to pump up prices. It is unquestionably not the case that they just can't pump any more then they are currently. They're worried that there's far too much supply over the next few years unless they knock some of it out of the market.
* - We can't listen to "see... Campbell actually knew what he was talking about" without dealing with the fact that Campbell constantly changes his projection so that the peak is a few years into the future (more clever than the standard Malthusian failings... but no more accurate). Around 1990 he was predicting that the peak would come in a few years (at 60 mbpd) and then decline to 50mbpd by 2005 and we would be well below 40mbpd by now. By the late 90s he had revised it to a long plateau for a few years starting in 2000, but he still had world production down to about 50mbpd by today. In 2005 he changed the peak for all liquids to between 2007 and 2010 (contradicting Heinberg's spin on the audio file).
* - Laherrère now predicts a multi-year plateau starting around 2020 and 2050 production that's still above what they originally projected for a peak in 1995. This, again, is the M.O. - the prior predictions are never admitted to have been wrong and the peak is always just around the corner (at best).
They should really change the title from "Peak Oil is STILL For Real" to "Peak Oil is STILL five years away... and may be so for decades"
On edit - It turns out that he does address natural gas in the latest book. He actually has the guts to claim that "there's little cause for author embarrassment ten years on" and that the chapter just needs "a general updating". 
Seriously? New record production highs 45 years after his claimed peak - and only low prices (and the inability to export much of the stuff) holding production from going much higher - and he thinks he doesn't have any reason to be embarrassed?
