So while reading the comments on one of the more creative online videos that talks about peak oil, I was struck by the preponderance of replies that seem to state absolutely magical beliefs in what science can do. Such as...

“There's enough oil under the north slope of alaska to supply the US for the next 200 years. Not only that, but old wells can be re-explored and often are found to have re-filled.” -deaglek

    Ok, so deaglek may not have even a simple grasp of mathematics but most people should be able to follow this simple number crunch. Here's the facts, the total proven crude oil reserves, in the ground, in the lower 48 states and Alaska are about 20 billion barrels of crude. The US consumes about 20 million barrels a day, multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you find that we consume about 7.3 billion barrels of crude a year. So, in less than 3 years we would consume all of the available oil in the US, that includes the Alaskan north slope.

    I really don't know why deaglek also thinks oil fields also refill themselves magically, you can just look at all the abandoned Texas and Pennsylvania oil fields to see that isn't true. But this view isn't even uncommon, just read some more comments and you'll see.

“... I guess you didn't sit in on energy investment conferences, major in Chemistry, or Economics.

There is no "set" amount of oil, we could extract petroleum from your clothes, desk, etc if we needed to. Also, oil companies are paying single digits per barrel to explore, and low double digits to extract TODAY.

The very chemical nature of petroleum ensures there is no peak.”-gfreeman556

    Yes, apparently someone who has implied majoring in chemistry has no idea about the laws of thermodynamics. Understanding EROEI, that the energy needed to transform plastics and like materials back to petroleum has a negative return is a concept absolutely terminally important to understanding the chemistry of energy production, to not understand it is to have no understanding of the science involved.

Or one of my favorites:

“A combination of electric vehicles, nuclear power plants and oil shale extraction will get us through this upcoming crisis with barely a bruise.” -soctennis8

    “Barely a bruise”?!? Anyone who thinks that oil shale extraction will cause barely a bruise has no grasp of money or the technology around retrieving and refining oil shale. It's not pools of semi-fluid liquid, it's rock, and it takes three tons heated to 700 degrees Fahrenheit combined with about three barrels of water to produce one barrel of crude which is marginally suitable for refining into other products. Not to mention the tons of hazardous(carcinogenic and poisonous) waste and greenhouse gas byproducts. Some oil companies have stated that this will translate into $60/barrel crude, but nobody else in the mining or chemistry industry seems to agree with these numbers. And more significantly, no oil company is actually producing anything beyond prototype levels of this product right now. And with oil costing over $100 dollars a barrel, you would think that market pressure would push this resource into immediate use, but somehow it's not. So the realistic oil shale price is probably closer to the median price of coal (between $14 & $105) which makes it about $60 a ton, so at the very least the oil shale petroleum would seem to start out at $180 just for the raw rock to make a barrel of crude. This is not counting the cost of heating, hydrolyzing and cleanup to make the product safe to refine into consumer products. The price of a barrel of oil will have to rise to well over $180 before oil shale will begin to be competitive, and I don't think any reasonable people would consider $180+ crude prices to be “barely a bruise” to anyone but the wealthy.

    And while I happen to agree that nuclear power plants provide an ever more plausible stop gap technology for some of our needs, if they ever have to fill in a considerable amount of the transportation industry energy needs we will quickly go through all known reserves on the planet which is approximately 35 million tons or the equivalent energy of 31,751,465,900,000 barrels of oil (31 trillion). And the same market curve that is responsible for the “peak oil” crisis effects uranium as well.  So long before the supplies run out the prices of nuclear energy will rise with the decreasing supply. Also our infrastructure would need to be dramatically altered to support things like all electric transportation which is a cost that has to be included. If you consider the $20-30,000 shop cost of converting a single vehicle to electric, the enormous cost of re-purposing so much infrastructure and personal property to run on all electric power, at least for the first generation that has to make the change, this is not at all a minor transition.

    There where many more comments like this, most of them dismissive and outright derisive, but being so very much based on a very, very flawed understanding of the science and economics behind “peak oil”. Any solution we create to “peak oil” needs to solve the problems associated with “peak oil”, such as being 100% renewable, so there is no future peak to burden our progeny with. But unless the general population is taught the concepts of basic science and economics needed to understand the problem, we go back to people latching on to mythical explanations and blindly shifting the blame around.

    This is really a fundamental problem of education, specifically public education, but also it should be something that the rising tide of home schooled kids need to understand too. Failure to understand these basic concepts will lead to bad public decisions that will lead to bleak future indeed.