Side note: peak oil is still very much a thing. Enhanced recovery and fracturing of source rocks bought us about another 15 years, but the Seneca cliff is still there.
It's also pretty much exactly as described. Light, sweet crude is gone and we can't sustain low oil prices (the current dip notwithstanding). Oil costs 5X what it did in the 90s. We are forced to use dirtier, more expensive types of oil. Economies suffer as a result. Peak oil happened as advertised.
Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil." The problem is that for as long as we have been using oil, we have been running out of easy-to-access oil. U.S. production started in Pennsylvania and moved to Ohio. That was the easy-to-access oil in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
After Ohio and Pennsylvania, oil production shifted to Texas and California and then, when people found it tougher to find oil onshore they tried offshore.
There is nothing different with newer technologies like hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling, and advanced imagine.
We aren't at peak oil because extracting oil always has been heavily dependent on technology.
> Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil."
Some people have misinterpreted that way, but they are people who didn't understand the basic underlying theory. Peak oil is a production peak driven by running out of cheap-to-extract reserves faster than technology reduces extraction costs, such that the amount of the resource that can be profitably extracted with available technology drops.
It is very different from resource depletion, e.g., running out of all of the underlying resource.
> Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil."
That's false. There may have been a few tin foilers who didn't read the source material and thus came away with the wrong scenario, but _peak_ oil by definition has always been about production peaking, based on the cost of extraction.
