‘Are We Running Out of Oil?’ (2004 essay revised)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- January 13, 2016

This essay, published twelve years ago in PERC Reports (“the magazine of free market environmentalism”), challenged the then-popular theory that oil production would inexorably reach a maximum and decline thereafter. What would become the U.S. and global shale oil and shale gas boom was just getting started.

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“This time it’s for real,” says the cover story of the June 2004 issue of National Geographic. “We’re at the beginning of the end of cheap oil.”

Books and articles written by geologists, environmentalists, and others regularly announce a new era of increasing oil scarcity. 1 Today’s resurrected hero of the depletionists is M. King Hubbert (1903-1989), a Shell Oil Company geologist who a half-century ago presented a bellshaped curve depicting oil production over time. But the theory of a little-known twentieth century economist, Erich Zimmermann, suggests this is unsound.…