Peak Oil In The Wall Street Journal  

Peak oil coverage in the WSJ has ranged from dismissive to completely ignoring the topic over the years, so I'm a little surprised to see a couple of articles there on the topic today.

The first is at their Energy Roundup blog, looking at the recent email from Shell CEO Jeroen Van Der Veer to his employees.

Has the peak oil crowd added a new member?

An email written by Royal Dutch Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer has sparked the latest round of debate over the state of oil supplies. ...

Other big energy companies, from France’s Total to Texas’s ConocoPhillips, have already painted a less-than-rosy outlook for world oil supplies. Even the National Petroleum Council, a proxy for the Big Oil fraternity, recently said that conventional oil and natural-gas supplies aren’t likely to keep pace with demand.

The crux of the debate: How fast are existing fields actually declining, and how fast and economically can oil companies get new finds to replace that output?

Shell outlined two main scenarios for the energy future: a free-for-all for energy resources around the world, or growing international cooperation to soothe energy friction. Shell leans toward the latter ...

Another interesting twist to the idea that oil and natural gas will become harder and more expensive to find and get out of the ground: It’s making coal pricier, because coal is still the go-to fuel source in the absence of a big nuclear build-out.

The other article was called "In a World Short Of Oil, Provisions Must Be Made", and has a very retro 2005 feel to it, outlining a typical grassroots peak oil story - man comes across "Life After The Oil Crash", freaks out, then decides to become self-sufficient.

It was around midnight one evening in November when Aaron Wissner shot up in bed, jolted awake by a fear: He wasn't fully ready for the day when the world starts running low on oil.

Yes, he had tripled the size of the garden in front of the tidy white-clapboard house he shares with his wife and infant son. He had stacked bags of rice in his new pantry, stashed gold valued at $8,000 in his safe-deposit box and doubled the size of the propane tank in his yard.

"But I felt panicky, like I needed more insurance," he says. So the 38-year-old middle-school computer teacher put on his jacket and drove to an all-night gas station, where he filled three, five-gallon jugs with gasoline.

"It was a feel-good moment," says his wife, Kimberly Sager. "But he slept better."
Aaron Wissner, a Grand Rapids, Mich., middle-school computer instructor, is part of a growing community of so-called peakniks, who are convinced that peak oil production is nigh and that there will be difficult consequences.

Mr. Wissner has had more than a few fretful nights since he became "peak-oil aware," as he calls it, about 30 months ago. In embracing the theory that the world's oil production is about to peak, Mr. Wissner has tossed himself into a movement that is gaining thousands of adherents, egged on by soaring oil prices, the rarity of big new oil finds and writings on the Internet.

There are now dozens of "relocalization" working groups scattered from Maine to Southern California pushing for people to spurn cars, buy local produce and work where they live. Mr. Wissner's own congressman, a Republican nuclear physicist named Vernon Ehlers, is part of the 13-member congressional Peak Oil Caucus formed in late 2005. City councils from Bloomington, Ind., to Portland, Ore., have passed peak-oil resolutions to gird for the looming crunch.

Many converts, like Houston oil banker Matthew Simmons, remain firm members of the suit-and-tie energy establishment. Others have gone "off-grid," cutting ties to the mainstream economy and growing yams in their garden as they wait for the coming chaos. Mr. Wissner and his wife fall somewhere in the middle -- alienated by a car-obsessed culture, but still part of it.

Ms. Sager remembers well her husband's conversion. She returned home one afternoon in August 2005, from her job as a software engineer for General Electric Aviation and found him at his computer, deep into a Web site he had found while researching gas prices called lifeaftertheoilcrash.net.

"He sat me down and said, 'Do you think this is a hoax?' " she recalls. "And there went the next two hours."

"Dear Reader," the Web site announced: "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end." Oil supplies are dwindling just as world demand soars. The result: oil prices "will skyrocket, oil dependent economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode." From there, Mr. Wissner plunged into a burgeoning literature arguing that soaring energy costs will put a halt to globalization and the American way of life. His forebodings -- of banks faltering, of food running out -- have turned him into a peak-oil proselytizer in this staid farm community just south of Grand Rapids....