Plentiful Oil

UPDATE: below.

Daniel Yergin won a Pulitzer for his 1991 "The Prize," a "history" of oil that's on my top-20 non-fiction list. He's written an Op-Ed in today's WaPo about the widespread concern about a shortage:

[T]his fear is not borne out by the fundamentals of supply. Our new, field-by-field analysis of production capacity, led by my colleagues Peter Jackson and Robert Esser, is quite at odds with the current view and leads to a strikingly different conclusion: There will be a large, unprecedented buildup of oil supply in the next few years. Between 2004 and 2010, capacity to produce oil (not actual production) could grow by 16 million barrels a day -- from 85 million barrels per day to 101 million barrels a day -- a 20 percent increase. Such growth over the next few years would relieve the current pressure on supply and demand. . .

While questions can be raised about specific countries, this forecast is not speculative. It is based on what is already unfolding. The oil industry is governed by a "law of long lead times." Much of the new capacity that will become available between now and 2010 is under development. Many of the projects that embody this new capacity were approved in the 2001-03 period, based on price expectations much lower than current prices.

There are risks to any forecast. In this case, the risks are not the "below ground" ones of geology or lack of resources. Rather, they are "above ground" -- political instability, outright conflict, terrorism or slowdowns in decision making on the part of governments in oil-producing countries. Yet, even with the scaling back of the forecast, it would still constitute a big increase in output.

This is not the first time that the world has "run out of oil." It's more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry.

I've said the same. But Yergin has the better resume; read the whole thing.

More:

Another properly scorning the "we're running out" meme is Gary at RightPundit:

Back in the 1970s, the doomsayers at the Club of Rome . . . and other so-called "experts" were predicting that we would run out of oil by the end of the 20th Century. They were wrong. Very wrong.