Did you even read your own list? That's just a list of activities some of which are gas and some of which are dry and at least one of which was plugging a dry hole.
Peak oil is about how much oil is in the earth and how we can (or can't) get at it. Since we know how oil is produced and how long it takes to produce, we know that it is a finite resource. T. Boone Pickens has bet 3/4's of a billion dollars on oil sands which depend on high oil prices to justify the cost. If there were lots of easy reserves available, do you think he would have done that?
======== There's also a great deal of lying going on since at least one OPEC country has been pumping steadily for decades and still claims the same level of oil reserves.
--------http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P87339.asp?GT1=4244
Is Saudi Arabia running out of oil?
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The Saudis claim to have plenty of reserves, but a top energy expert disputes that. Without any independent data, the world is dangerously in the dark, he says.
By Jon D. Markman
When oil prices have doubled to $80 and a second great depression threatens global political stability, the president of the United States will impanel a Sept. 11-style commission to explain the intelligence and policy failures that led to the crisis. The verdict will be familiar: The stunning blow to the world economy brought about by the sudden, unexpected depletion of fossil fuel should've been anticipated and prevented.
When that day comes -- in five years or perhaps 20, who knows -- many of the key exhibits will have been penned by Matthew Simmons, a Houston energy analyst and banker at Simmons & Co. International.
Simmons is now shouting from the rooftops -- writing think-tank white papers, giving speeches and finishing a book set for publication next year -- that the world is fast running out of affordable oil and gas, and that no amount of Middle Eastern pumping can bail us out.
While much of the so-called ?peak oil? story is well known, what's news is Simmons? startling claim, based on personal analysis, that Saudi Arabia?s pumping capacity is in decline.
Aramco, the company in charge of Saudi oil operations, disputes Simmons? assertion and has debated him in public policy forums. But Simmons isn't easily dismissed, as he's no anti-establishment crank. In addition to his role as chief executive of a major energy-focused investment bank, which counts Halliburton (HAL, news, msgs) and the World Bank among its clients, he?s a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was an advisor to President Bush?s election campaign and Vice President Dick Cheney?s infamous energy task force.
A pervasive, regressive tax
Simmons? point of view is especially relevant today because the price of oil appears persistently stuck at $35-plus despite Saudi officials? vows to help push it down by increasing supply. Higher energy prices act like a pervasive, regressive tax, robbing consumers of money that would otherwise go to buy discretionary goods such as cars, clothes and computers. The role of higher energy prices so far seems lost as a culprit in the failure of the stock market to advance this year, and yet it could be considered a root cause.
In a nutshell, peak-oil advocates note that U.S. oil production -- once the highest in the world -- topped out in 1970, while natural gas production topped in 1973. Both are now in decline. With world consumption of oil at about 1 billion barrels every 12 days, oil companies have pressed hard to find oil and gas in other parts of the globe. Indonesia?s fields are old and declining, as are Russia?s and Canada?s. Simmons and others say that most of the world?s easily obtained large oil reserves have already been located in remote areas such as Arctic Alaska, the deep-water Gulf of Mexico, deep-water West Africa and the North Sea, and that new reserves being brought on line offer only marginal amounts.
As an example, ExxonMobil (XOM, news, msgs), ChevronTexaco (CVX, news, msgs) and Petronas of Malaysia have teamed with the World Bank to develop the Doba oil fields in the landlocked northern African country of Chad at a cost of $1.5 billion, and to build a shipping facility on the coast of neighboring Cameroon at a cost of $2.2 billion. Yet Chad has only an estimated 900 million barrels of reserves, and the field will pump just 50,000 barrels a day, an amount that would boost the local economy tremendously but barely make a dent in world production.
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