Letter Re: The Bakken Oil Development has Ended the Peak Oil Debate

Dear JWR:
I’m sitting in Western North Dakota atop a sea of oil.  We are producing barrels of oil in numbers that could not be imagined less than six years ago.  Natural gas production is soaring.  Why?  Fracking.  Geologists have determined that world-wide natural gas production, with fracking could produce enough for hundreds of years usage.

When I was growing up here in the 1960s, after the boom of the 1950s, experts said we were never going to discover any more oil.  The boom of the 1970s proved that wrong.  Then in the 1980s, it was all over but the shouting.  Guess what?  Technology improved and now we have more oil and gas than we know what to do with.  Even now, older horizontal wells (five years old) are having new technologies applied to them, boosting their output.  Just go to the North Dakota Industrial Commission/Oil and Gas Division and look at the production numbers. Do a Google search on it!

Maybe we can now finally put the Peak Oil nonsense to rest.  Some of us are old enough to at least think and research issues – not to mention learn from life experiences.  There are enough other “end of the world” things to worry about.  Energy is not one of them — at least not in our lifetimes.

I’m a regular reader and have never felt the need to correspond about anything on your blog but this one just needs to be put to rest.  The Peak Oil concept is just as phony as man-made “global warming.