"Peak oil theories 'increasingly groundless', says BP chief"

A couple of years ago we saw this market tell: "Re-post: Peak Oil Stalwart to Shutter Forum/News Site, Persue Career as Astrologer".
And over the last 18 months the doomer sites have been a hotbed of "pique oil", increasingly screaming into an echo chamber of the like-minded.

Oil is a finite resource but the gloomsters were very wrong on their timing. I'm not trying to insinuate any great insight into the business even though, at one time, I could spot undervalued reserves with one whisk of my slide rule. It's just that human beings are creative enough that with one notable exception we have never exhausted the resource of even one mineral or hydrocarbon.

Folks who do this for a living will note the precise use of resource rather than reserve but will they know the commodity we exhausted?
We happen to have an odd fascination with it.

That's not to say the current boom in fracking was foreseen by me or anyone else. In the '80's George Mitchell made a commercial success of some technologies that had their roots in the '40's but which, as early as 1981 were still very speculative.
None of this was new, in fact the idea of fracturing the oil bearing strata goes back to the 1860's:

Back then they would fill the "torpedo" with black powder (later, nitroglycerin) and let 'er rip.

So, no one knew how it would play out, just that it probably would, or, as Warren Buffett said in his 1984 Letter to Shareholders:

...To earn even 15% annually over the next decade (assuming we continue to follow our present dividend 

policy, about which more will be said later in this letter) we would need profits aggregating about $3.9 

billion. 

Accomplishing this will require a few big ideas - small ones just won’t do. Charlie Munger, my partner 

in general management, and I do not have any such ideas at present, but our experience has 

been that they pop up occasionally. (How’s that for a strategic plan?)...

From the 1985 Letter:

To the Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.:

 ...You may remember the wildly upbeat message of last year’s report: nothing much was in the works 

but our experience had been that something big popped up occasionally.  This carefully-crafted 

corporate strategy paid off in 1985.  Later sections of  this report discuss (a) our purchase of a major 

position in Capital Cities/ABC, (b) our acquisition of Scott & Fetzer, (c)  our entry into a large, extended 

term participation in the  insurance business of Fireman’s Fund, and (d) our sale of our  stock in 

General Foods.

     Our gain in net worth during the year was $613.6 million, or  48.2%. It is fitting that the visit of

 Halley’s Comet coincided with this percentage gain: neither will be seen again in my lifetime..... 

From The Guardian:

The US will be self-sufficient in energy by 2030, with only 1% coming from imports, the company's analysts predict

Warnings that the world is headed for "peak oil" – when oil supplies decline after reaching the highest rates of extraction – appear "increasingly groundless", BP's chief executive said on Wednesday.

Bob Dudley's remarks came as the company published a study predicting oil production will increase substantially, and that unconventional and high-carbon oil will make up all of the increase in global oil supply to the end of this decade, with the explosive growth of shale oil in the US behind much of the growth.

As a result, the oil and gas company forecasts that carbon dioxide emissions will rise by more than a quarter by 2030 – a disaster, according to scientists, because if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change then studies suggest emissions must peak in the next three years or so....

...Dudley said the report showed that peak oil was not going to happen any time soon. "The outlook shows the degree to which once-accepted wisdom has been turned on its head. Fears over oil running out – to which BP has never subscribed – appear increasingly groundless.....

...MORE

Previously:

Citigroup: "Resurging North American Oil Production and the Death of the Peak Oil Hypothesis"
Re-post: Peak Oil Stalwart to Shutter Forum/News Site, Persue Career as Astrologer
Knocking peak oil
Worry About Bread Not Oil
Pique Oil
Tar sands and peak oil in 1930
Peak Oil? Not When You Have a Really Long Hose 

And from 2009's "Natural Gas: "The Hubbert's Peak theory of rock n' roll" and "Do these LNG export slowdowns change the balance?':

Peak music output, 1965. Peak oil production, in 1970. So there’s a five-year lag between good music/good production?

The folks at OverThinkingIt are being true to their name by overlaying Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the 500 greatest rock songs of all time with U.S. oil production history.
Their findings: our decline in oil resources matches the decline in good songs.

“Now, if only we could drill for some new reserves of pop music innovation. Perhaps there’s a new Motown hit machine waiting somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, waiting to be unleashed. Let’s get drilling.”

I wonder what music is driving the expansion of natural gas production from shales?