The Oil Drum has finally bid its readers farewell with The Last Post.

The Oil Drum (TOD) was an internet energy phenomenon that ran for over eight years from April 2005 to September 2013. The site was founded by Prof. Goose (also known as Professor Kyle Saunders of Colorado State University) and Heading Out (also known as Professor Dave Summers formerly of the University of Missouri).

The site took off with the advent of Hurricane Rita in September 2005 and resulted in the first 200+ comment event, indicating that there was demand for a site where concerned citizens could gather round a camp fire to discuss events impacting their energy supplies and ultimately, their well being. In eight years, >960,000 comments have been posted. Two other energy linked disasters, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and the Fukushima Daiichi reactor melt downs would see readership soar to >75,000 unique visits per day.

These pages have hosted over 7,500 articles covering every aspect of the global energy system. It was not unusual for a post to attract over 600 comments, many of which were well informed and contained charts and links to other internet sources. The site would become known for a uniquely high level of discourse where armchair analysts of all stripes added their knowledge to threads in a courteous, and ultimately pro-social way that energy experts at hedge funds, corporations or universities might not have the freedom to do. It is this emergent property of smart people sharing knowledge on a critical topic to humanity's future that will be missed.

The Oil Drum has almost worked through the backlog of "farewell" posts - JoulesBurn chose somewhat surprisingly to give the IEA a pat on the back (which they were apparently delighted by) - IEA Sankey Diagrams.

Yay - Oil Drum blog describes new @IEA Sankey diagrams as an "invaluable resource" http://t.co/stq3xtshq8

— IEA (@IEA) September 10, 2013

The International Energy Agency has taken its share of abuse from The Oil Drum over the years for its rather optimistic forecasts. But it deserves a hearty shout-out for an invaluable resource it has on its web site: Interactive Sankey Diagrams for the World.

The Oil Drum hasn't quite kept to its deadline of closing on August 30 (with a few farewell posts from key contributors waiting to be published over the next week), however "Farmer" Leanan has dished up her Last Drumbeat for now.

I stopped actively reading Drumbeats many years ago but whenever I did come across when I always found myself thinking of JD's classic post "The Doomer Feedlot" - especially if I read through the comments.

Nevertheless it's a shame it is gone - the end of an era...

Ugo at Cassandra's Legacy has his farewell to The Oil Drum> up, declaring a victory of sorts for the "peakers" - Peak Oil: a fertile concept.

We live in a world where scientific evidence is trashed by ideological opinion, where people who learn from experience are accused of being flip-floppers, where changing one's mind on the basis of new data is seen as admitting one's lack of moral fiber. The debate on peak oil is no exception and the recent demise of "The Oil Drum" site has been often seen as an admission that the whole idea of peak oil was wrong from the beginning. But what is happening exactly with peak oil and why so much fuss about it? The problem may be simply that the idea had too much success. Let's go back to 1998, when Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere raised up again a problem that had been first noticed by Marion King Hubbert, in 1956. Oil depletion, Campbell and Laherrere surmised, will be gradual: production will go through a symmetric “bell shaped” curve that will show a peak when, approximately, half of the available resources will have been used up. According to this study, the peak, that Campbell later dubbed “peak oil,” would have occurred around 2005. The pioneering work by Cambell and Laherrere gave rise to a whole scientific field that used similar methods to study oil depletion. Most of these these studies arrived to the conclusion that troubles with oil would start within the first decade of the 21st century, or perhaps a little later. It was a view of the future in stark contrast with the generally optimistic attitude of the oil industry up to recent times. Just as an example, in 1999 "The Economist" published an article titled "Drowning in Oil" predicting oil at under 10 dollars per barrel. But the predictions based on the peak oil concept turned out to be spectacularly successful, at least within the unavoidable uncertainties involved. Oil production stopped its growth in 2004 and oil prices spiked up to almost 150 dollars per barrel in 2008; about a factor of 5 higher than the price that was considered normal in the early years of the decade (and more than 15 times higher than the 1999 predictions of “The Economist”). Today, oil prices remain high; in the range of 100 dollars per barrel. We aren't seeing a production decline, but certainly we are seeing evidence of serious problems for the oil industry to maintain production at constant levels. As things stand, it seems impossible that we could return to the stable growth trends and the relatively low prices that were the rule until about 10 years ago.

So, “peakers” won their bet with cornucopians. The predicted troubles have materialized and peakers were also able to approximately identify the timing of the crisis. But, not everything is well in the world of peak oil. The elegant and symmetric “bell shaped” curve at the basis of most peak oil models did not appear for the global production data. What we are seeing, instead, is a plateau or, at most, a slow increase, in large part generated by the use of the so-called “non-conventional resources”, from biofuels to shale oil. The expected decline is not appearing; at least for the time being. ...

So, is peak oil dead? Well, no. For one thing, peak oil never was just a doomer's game where players tried to guess the exact day for the end of the world. No; it was – and it still is - a fertile concept; a way of seeing the world. It taught us a lot, and it is still teaching us a lot.

Peaking in the exploitation of non renewable (or slowly renewable) resources is a necessary consequence of the way the human economy works in the real world. It occurs with all kinds of mineral resources and with biological ones as well, as in fisheries. It is also the essential feature of the “tragedy of the commons” proposed by Garrett Hardin in 1966. It is an integral part of the dynamic world models that generated the “The Limits to Growth” study that, in 1972, changed the way we see the world.

In the end, it turns out that our planet is not an abandoned coffer out of which we can plunder treasures at will. The mineral resources we found in it should rather be seen as a gift that we should have managed much more carefully. Now, we are facing a difficult situation, squeezed in between resource depletion and catastrophic climate change. But the concept of “peak” can still help us to be prepared for the future. Remember that those who don't understand the bell shaped curve are condemned to follow it.

I quite like this comment on Stuart Staniford's farewell to The Oil Drum as a quick summary of the current state of peak oil.

The one small disagreement I have is that things are boring at the moment. Although liquids are usually measured by volume, what really counts is the net energy which they yield to society. This is more nuanced and complicated than the original peak oil story based on conventional oil alone, but as such is rather more interesting.

The shallow upward gradient in C+C is entirely due to tar sands and tight oil, both marginal sources of supply at large environmental cost. Tar sands relies on cheap natural gas to be profitable. Tight oil is a classic bubble with misallocation of capital, woeful regulation and sharly diminishing returns. The situation with tight oil in particular seems to be quite dynamic, with significant yearly changes to flow rates, drilling and average returns.

An oft used metaphor is the cartoon coyote running off the edge of the cliff, legs pumping furiously. How long can the frantic motion delay the inevitable onset of gravity? We're seeing the dregs of liquid fuels being sucked out of the earth in a desperate attempt to keep our hydrocarbon addiction going. Each month sees a deterioration in EROI, so net energy is likely flat or at best rising very slowly.

Assuming 'peak oil' is defined as maximum rate of net energy flow, then I suspect we are not many years away. Tar sands can continue to expand slowly it seems, but tight oil will peak in volume terms this decade, and earlier in net energy terms.

I can understand that the original TOD cohort are feeling tired, after the peak oil debate has taken some unexpected twists and we're in an apparently stable phase. But dig down into the detail and IMO the key elements of peak oil are playing out in front of us, today, this year and for the next few years. In many ways it's a privilege to see and understand what's happening at such a critical inflexion point. In other ways is scary, because most of the world is still deep in denial and we'll have to adapt in uncomfortable ways once the net energy peak is passed (we ain't seen nothing yet).

All the main TOD contibutors should feel proud of providing such a valuable role in shaping awareness of peak oil and its likely remifications.

The FT's Alphaville blog has a nice farewell to The Oil Drum which is fair more balanced and nuanced in its appraisal of the site than the dross that appeared elsewhere in the financial press (Platts being the honourable exception) - The Oil Drum, peak oil and why some good blogs don’t last (free registration required). No quote as they don't like any reposting of their content (and as they ask you politely to refrain if you do so I'm happy to oblige them).

Stuart Staniford at Early Warning has a farewell to The Oil Drum, looking at the evolution of oil supply and price over the past decade - Stuart Staniford On What The Oil Drum Meant.

The popular peak oil blog The Oil Drum (TOD) began in early 2005. I joined as a contributor in mid 2005, later becoming an editor, and I left the site in early 2008. TOD continued in the meantime, at least up until now when the current editors have decided to transition to an archival format. They don't feel the quality and quantity of post submissions justify continuing. They asked a number of us old-timers to comment on the significance of TOD, and these are my reflections.

I start with the chart above. It shows, from 1950-2012, world oil production annually (red curve, left scale), and real oil prices annually (blue curve, right scale). I show in green boxes two regions of major disruption, and between them two regions of relatively calm behavior (in white).

The orderly region from 1950 to 1973 was characterized by very rapid growth in oil production that was achieved at very modest oil prices (around $20/barrel in 2011 dollars).

Then in 1973 came the Arab oil embargo, followed in 1979 by the Iranian revolution and then the Iraq-Iran war. These events caused a series of sharp but relatively short-lived contractions in the global oil supply. The result was huge price increases, and a permanent change in the way the world used oil.

After the dust settled in the mid eighties, oil production resumed growing fairly steadily, but never again at the frenetic pace of before the seventies - from now on society was more concerned with fuel efficiency and grew oil consumption more slowly. Prices fell into the $30 range, and remained there, give or take, for the next couple of decades. This was the second period of stability in the oil markets since WWII.

Then, in late 2004, global oil production largely stopped growing and entered a rough plateau. Prices began to shoot up, reaching well over $100/barrel within a few years, and largely staying there to this day (making allowance for a sharp downward fluctuation during the great recession).

There sprang up a large debate about the meaning of these events. The Oil Drum in particular I believe came to function as a central node in this debate, and one of the best places to hear a range of views that were based on a close analysis of the available data. The reason TOD is now coming to a close is that the need for this particular debate is over, at least for the time being. The data have spoken.

One extreme in this debate was what came to be known as cornucopians, epitomized by Daniel Yergin of the consultancy CERA. He made a long series of predictions that oil production would resume growing and prices would fall any day now. This was most famously satirized in a graph by Glenn Morton:

Obviously, this didn't happen. Oil production has not risen rapidly, and prices have not returned anywhere close to the pre-2004 idea of normal.

Another extreme in the debate were "doomers" who believed that global oil production would begin to fall very rapidly, very soon, because peak oil was upon us. "We're all gonna die" was the logical implication. One such forecaster was TOD contributor Ace who produced a series of forecasts like this one which showed oil production beginning a precipitous decline as of the date of the forecast:

The same piece forecast oil prices to rise rapidly and steadily and pass $200/barrel by the end of 2012. That didn't happen either.

I'm not sure anyone predicted the last eight years perfectly (including me). Still, on the whole, the various "moderates" in the debate came closest. What has actually occurred can best be seen in this graph which shows monthly oil production from a variety of data sources from 2002 onward.

The green curve is the EIA's estimate of the production of "crude and condensate" - C&C - which is a fairly narrow definition of oil that largely measures liquid hydrocarbons that flow out of the ground. The other curves show various estimates of "all liquids", which adds things like biofuels and "natural gas liquids" - compounds like propane and butane removed from natural gas production. These aren't really oil, but can substitute for it to varying degrees and so are often counted with it.

The crude-and-condensate curve is bumpy, but does slope upward slightly. The all liquids curve slopes up more, reflecting the fact that global natural gas production has increased steadily. High oil prices and government policies also induced a biofuel boom after 2005.

Thus we seem to live in a world in which, although traditional sources of oil are declining in many places, high oil prices (around $100-$120) are able to bring out enough low quality sources of hydrocarbon to offset this decline and just a bit more. Examples include oil fracced from very tight rocks in North Dakota, and tar sands production in Canada. These sources are difficult enough to bring on line that prices have not crashed, but are sufficient to prevent global oil production from actually declining. Clearly, we have not passed peak oil yet, and it's not at all clear when we will.

In the meantime, the situation has gotten quite dull. I compile graphs of oil production every month, and it's gotten somewhat akin to watching paint dry; every month, it's pretty much flat, and I tire of saying the same things over and over again.

On the other hand, we certainly don't live in the pre-2004 world any more. Oil prices are high, and there seems little prospect that they will ever fall below $100/barrel for any sustained period. If for no other reason, Saudi Arabia needs an oil price somewhere around there to balance its budget, and they are always in a position to force the price to stay above that threshold by modest decreases in their production.

Ambrose Evans Pritchard has his own farewell to The Oil Drum at The Daily Telegraph, remaining skeptical that we've got an endless supply of oil just waiting to flow out of the ground - Commodity supercycle in rude health despite shale.

The Oil Drum is closing down after eight years, giving up the long struggle to alert us all to "peak oil" and the dangers of an energy crunch. Readers have been drifting away. The theme has gone out of fashion, eclipsed by shale and fracking in the US. ...

But though fracking is a Godsend, let us not lose our heads. The US Energy Department expects shale oil to add 3.1m bpd to America's oil output by 2020, a remarkable feat but far less than the 5.4m estimates of a much-cited study by Leonardo Maugeri at Harvard.

The depletion rate on rigs at the Bakken field in North Dakota - the biggest US shale field - is precipitous. Output falls 30pc within two years, and a third is leaking into the air. Shale bears say average declines are nearer 70pc in the first year, and dismiss the whole craze as a bubble.

That is going too far. The technology is improving every week. The decline rate may flatten over time. Yet claims of a 100-year bonanza in the US are wishful thinking. "The upper limit of supply is likely closer to 23 years using present day rates of consumption," said the Eos report.

Kevin Norrish from Barclays said US drillers have already tapped the "best plays" for shale, with newer Utica ventures in the north east of the US and Canada coming up short. The biggest productivity leaps may already have happened. "We expect a steep slowdown in the rate of tight oil production growth from the middle of this decade onward," he said.

Barclays is defiantly holding to a Brent crude forecast of $184 in 2020, betting that spare capacity in global output will prove thinner than supposed, and that oil shocks will come back to haunt us.

We should think of shale as one-generation play for the US, enough to ensure American superpower primacy into the middle of the century. Whether the rest of the world can follow suit in any meaningful time-frame is an open question. Boston Consulting Group said there were 110,000 shale wells in the US and Canada by the end of last year, and just 200 in all other countries combined. Argentina, Poland and Ukraine may try to get going after 2015 but they have almost no service infrastructure, and all score badly on "ease of doing business". Australia may do better from 2017 onwards.

China has the world's biggest reserves on paper. It is itching to start but much of its shale is in the north-west desert where there is no water, and frackers have yet to find a viable extraction process without water. Not one of the 19 drilling awards issued by the Communist authorities in January went to companies with oil and gas experience. They were mostly power utilities or coal miners.

Even if China seizes the prize, it will first have to build a vast network of pipelines. That will take a great deal of energy, long before shale supply reaches the market. ...

We all love a fresh narrative but consensus has swung too fast from the 2008 oil panic to the energy complacency of 2013, and done so on slender evidence. As matters stand, peak cheap oil remains an incontrovertible fact. To Oil Drum, a fond farewell.

D Ray Long of ASPO USA has a post on one of the reactions to the impending demise of The Oil Drum - A Buzzfeed Attack On Peak Oil Deserves A Buzzfeed Response. He also has some follow up pieces - Crucial Differences Between "Peak Oil" & "Peak Oil Debate" - Part 1 and Crucial Differences Between "Peak Oil" & "Peak Oil Debate" - Part 2.

"Mentions of “peak oil” in news publications peaked between July 2007 and July 2008, according to Nexis" and "Web search interest in “peak oil” peaked in August 2005 and spiked again in May 2008."

I spoke on this a little before, but I continue to be amazed by how many very smart people just don't understand how silly they look when they use THIS as evidence of Peak Oil's demise.

If "internet popularity" was the true measure of importance, we'd have given the keys of the world to Justin Bieber a long time ago. And if you looked at how many people were talking and writing about terrorism in August of 2001, those guys would probably conclude that topic peaked forever in the early '90s.

I'm shocked I have to keep repeating this, but "We judge Peak Oil by oil production rates, if you're looking at anything else, you're doing it wrong."

"Oil prices also peaked around then, hitting $145 per barrel in July 2008."

It's like Zeitlin forgets to include the second half of that sentence. His own chart shows that oil hit $145, retreated, and then resumed its march back up. RIGHT NOW as people are falling over themselves proclaiming the death of Peak Oil, oil is back in the triple digits and at 15-month highs. Over the past decade-plus, the price of oil has more than tripled.

Peak Oil can never really die, because oil is a finite resource and any finite resource peaks in production. But you can kill it in the court of public opinion, and for that to happen you'd need two things:

1) You need daily production rates to continue to skyrocket, leaving far behind any peaks of the past. But you also need something more difficult.

2) You need what AEI's James Pethokoukis called the "wonder-working power of technological innovation" to actually reduce oil prices, much like Moore's Law for computers has made memory cheaper year after year. If you're in a production boom, but you then have to turn around and tell the people of the economy that they'll have to keep paying a larger share of their income for gasoline... is that really a net win?

In oil production, you access the easy and cheap oil first, then move on to the more difficult and more expensive oil later when prices allow. That's why conventional crude oil production has already peaked, and the only thing keeping total oil production from declining are gains from much more expensive unconventional sources.

Anyone seriously telling people that Peak Oil is dead, really needs to have a strong answer when regular people ask why prices are still so high.

The impending demise of The Oil Drum seems to have prompted something of a resurgence in interest in peak oil.

Matthew Yglesias has a post at Slate on the state of the peak oil debate - Has Peak Oil Been Vindicated Or Debunked ?. I love the way the oil price graph demonstrates the impact the supposed flood of shale oil (combined with the great recession) has (or more accurately, hasn't) had on oil prices - as we switch from depleting conventional oil to unconventional oil, the floor price for oil gets ever higher and the environmental damage per barrel gets bigger - just as peak oil theory predicts...

I will admit that I've always found the "Peak Oil" debate to be a little bit confusing, especially because both the words "peak" and "oil" turn out to have some ambiguity to them. But recently a couple of my favorite bloggers were debating the implications of the "unconventional oil" boom for the debate, with Karl Smith proclaiming peak oil dead while Noah Smith says it lives on. My approach would be to try to skip past some of these definitional issues and look at prices.

Above you see the nominal prices for Brent Crude Oil and West Texas Intermediate. As you can see, historically the prices are identical because oil is a globally traded commodity. You can also see that in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s the price was low—around 20 dollars a barrel. These were the happy days in which the oil crises of the 1970s had been put behind us, and everyone got to hail the economic genius of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. You can also see the supply disruption induced by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent geopolitical crisis that left George H.W. Bush without the reputation for economic mastery that Reagan and Clinton enjoy. Then you see a rise, then a fall, then a steady rise. Eventually the rise gets really crazy and people are in freak-out mode. Then comes a global recession and a huge collapse in prices. At this point we look around the wreckage and wonder wtf just happened. Was there an amazing oil bubble comparable to Irish real estate? Or has the recession just pushed prices down artificially?

Now with some subsequent years of data we can see that despite the slow growth in developed countries prices have very certainly not returned to the halcyon days of the Reagan-Clinton years. We can see that the Iraq/Kuwait price spike actually looks like a bit of a joke. We can see the impact of the unconventional oil, which has created this anomalous gap between the WTI price and the Brent price. It's a big gap. This is nothing to sneer at. Not only is it causing an economic boom in North Dakota and select portions of Texas, but it plausibly explains some of why America's overall economic performance has been so much better than Europe's. But even so, America's oil boom hasn't pushed U.S. oil prices back down to mid-aughts levels and it certainly hasn't pushed U.S. oil prices back down to 1990s levels. The good old days of genuinely abundant liquid fuel really do appear to be behind us.

It's probably worth noting the WTI - Brent spread mentioned above has disappeared now - you have to keep on drilling pretty fast if you want to maintain production from fast depleting shale oil wells - and the previously exponential rate of growth in drilling has now stopped as Stuart Staniford shows in the chart below - US Oil Rig Count and Oil Production.

The Slate article above references this blog post from Noahpinion - Peak Oil is dead! Long live Peak Oil!.

One of my favorite websites, The Oil Drum, is shutting down, and I am mad! Everyone is attributing the shutdown to the death of the "Peak Oil" meme, which in turn is attributed to fracking. The first is probably true; Peak Oil mania is over. But the second is false. Fracking has not killed Peak Oil. It just hasn't fit the narratives that many of the Peak Oilers spun.

The thesis of Peak Oil is simple: Global oil production will soon peak and begin to decline. But there were two possible stories that the Peak Oilers told about how this would happen:

"Good Peak Oil": In this case, we find something that's better than oil, and switch to that, just like we once transitioned away from whale oil. In this case, oil prices and production would both fall.

"Bad Peak Oil": In this case, we don't find something better than oil, and as oil becomes more scarce, the price would go up, while oil production and overall economic activity both contracted.

What we got was neither of these. Or more accurately, we got a little bit of both, coupled with something else that doesn't fit with either story. What happened was this:

1. Global demand for oil increased, due to growth in emerging markets, pushing up oil prices in the 2000s - from around $20 to over $100, a five-fold increase.

2. At the new higher price, it became economical to tap expensive oil sources like tight oil (fracking), deepwater oil, and oil sands.

3. Even at the new higher prices, it has not been economical to increase "conventional" oil production. Instead, all net production increases have come from "unconventional" sources. And most of that "unconventional" production is not actually "oil" at all, but "liquids", which includes things like natural gas liquids.

4. There was a several-year lag in the mid-2000s where global oil production plateaued even as prices increased. This culminated in a dramatic spike in oil prices in 2007-8 which then subsided due to the global recession and the dramatic increase in unconventional oil production.

5. Oil prices are still over $100, even as global growth has been slow. Meanwhile, oil usage in rich countries has declined significantly.

This story does not easily fit with either of the Peak Oil scenarios. But it has important elements of both.

First of all, the peak in conventional oil, coupled with a dramatic surge in unconventional oil, looks a lot like the "Good Peak Oil" scenario, in which technology produces a new alternative energy source, and we switch to the new thing.

But the seemingly permanent increase in oil prices, and the fall in oil demand in rich countries, fit the "Bad Peak Oil" story. It indicates that the world is hitting oil supply constraints.

(And of course what the Peak Oilers missed was unconventional oil itself. Some of them missed the technology entirely, while others merely failed to anticipate that the industry's terminology would switch from "oil" to the more weaselly "liquids".)

So what happened was NOT that we switched to something better than oil. We switched to something worse than conventional oil: unconventional oil, which is more expensive to extract and/or to refine into usable products. This has left us permanently poorer than we would be if conventional oil hadn't hit global supply constraints. Filling up your gas tank is twice as expensive now, in real terms, as it was two decades ago. And that looks unlikely to change. In the wider economy, increased transportation fuel costs may be a main driver of the Great Stagnation, which manifests most clearly in the stagnation of transportation technology since the 1970s.

Basically, what happened is this: Scarcity attacked humanity, and Human Ingenuity battled back. Through heroic efforts, doomsday was averted. But Ingenuity did not win a smashing victory, as it did when we switched from wood to coal, or from whale oil to oil. Instead, humanity was forced into a fighting retreat, with Ingenuity executing a brilliant rear-guard action and forcing Scarcity to call off its pursuit...for now. But humanity has lost ground.

And Scarcity may not wait very long before launching another attack. Future increases in shale oil production (including tight oil and oil shale) is likely to be a lot more expensive than the low-hanging fruit we have picked thus far. Coupled with continued rises in developing-country oil demand and continued decline in conventional oil fields, this could cause another rise in oil prices. That will bring back the "Peak Oil" meme, which only seems to interest most people as an investment story. But sadly, The Oil Drum will not be around to chronicle the return of Peak Oil.

Platts has a nice article noting the end of The Oil Drum - A place where the peak oil crowd gathered is no more.

There used to be a website driven by a completely non-transparent metric that would rank the “importance” of various Twitter feeds similar in their areas of interest. It’s defunct now, and the name of it is forgotten.

It would look not only at the number of followers, but other things like how many followers your Twitter feed’s followers had, how often your Tweets were re-Tweeted, and so on.

The @PlattsOil feed consistently ranked second in the oil category, for whatever that was worth. It was always a harmless time-waster to check and see how we were doing. And how we were doing was that from our #2 perch we were always looking up at the Twitter feed of The Oil Drum, which was the primary website for a dialogue on Peak Oil.

And now The Oil Drum is closing up shop.

Those people in the industry who have long believed that the devotees of the peak oil movement were completely wrong have been rejoicing the last few years as North America’s output keeps rising. They see the Peak Oil movement as another bunch of failed neo-Malthusians. The demise of The Oil Drum is sure to add to that feeling of glee.

In the announcement that the site was shutting to new content, to be kept online only as an archive of old posts, The Oil Drum’s owners said nothing about any shift in beliefs regarding the world’s ability to produce more oil. The possibility of shutting the site was “a discussion we have had several times in the last year, due to scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors. Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles.” The monetary requirements of maintaining the site also were cited.

The mission statement of The Oil Drum said it “seeks to facilitate civil, evidence-based discussions about energy and its impacts on the future of humanity, as well as serve as a leading online knowledge-base for energy-related topics.” Despite that lofty inclusive language, it still was pretty much an intellectual hangout for the Peak Oil crowd.

Andrew Leonard at Salon also notes TOD's passing - Peak oil’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

Sad news from the world of Peak Oil-awareness. On July 3, the Oil Drum, a fabulous one-stop-shop for news, analysis and discussion of energy issues, announced it was shutting down after an informative eight-year run. As of July 31, there will be no more new content published at the Oil Drum.

Back when I was covering environmental issues more regularly, the Oil Drum was one of the first places I’d go to get context on breaking news related to energy issues. The Oil Drum was also one of the best places to get educated about the threat of peak oil: the argument that the world was rapidly reaching the point — or had already reached it — of global maximum production of oil.

We don’t hear so much about peak oil these days. The most obvious reason: the deployment of technological advances that have increased production from old wells or made possible the extraction of fossil fuels from previously uneconomic sources, i.e., fracking. One commenter on the Oil Drum’s announcement went so far as to claim that “fracking had killed The Oil Drum.” Another posted a Google Trends documenting the sharp decline in searches for the phrase “peak oil” as contrasted to the sharp rise in searches for the word “fracking.”

I asked the Oil Drum whether the fracking-killed-the-Oil-Drum theory had any merit. Here is what “Joules Burn” told me (emphasis mine):

I think it is more the case that the majority of contributors (and editors and tech staff) are just burned out (sorry for that pun…). It takes a lot of effort to research and write quality articles, have reviewers whack at them for awhile, and then deal with the comments that come in (some useful, some not). I can think of many examples where folks just ran out of things they were passionate to write about. Even a regular (until recently) guest contributor stopped publishing on his own blog for this reason. Some have been pulled in different directions (including myself) with jobs and family and such. In short, there is probably no single reason. But as this is a collaborative effort of many individuals (and indeed with some differences of opinion on some issues), we just decided we no longer had critical mass and wanted to end at this still somewhat high point rather than let it morph into something unrecognizable.

I think TOD slowly died for a variety of reasons and editor and contributor burnout (or simply moving on to other things) was a major one.

Writing about the same topic (or set of topics) for free year after year (and having to deal with the local community while doing so, many of whom could be incredibly abrasive) can't be sustained forever - especially as people find new interests or have career and family demands take more of their time.

TOD also suffered from editorial divisions on topics such as global warming which resulted in some contributors moving on (in my view this was a prime reason for Stuart Staniford moving on, which was a major blow to the quality of the site) or taking a lower profile. This was always an annoyance to me - how we could (as a group) discuss peak oil as an example of "The Limits to Growth" while studiously ignoring (after a year of debate) or occasionally deriding another limit never made any sense to me.

The often heated division between traditional peak oil doomers and more rational peak oil observers was another large fault line that could never be adequately addressed. Abuse from the doomer community resulted in other contributors (Robert Rapier being the best example of this in my view) either moving on or taking a much lower profile. In retrospect, this was one of a number of reasons I drifted away - endlessly debating people who will illogically declare that civilisation will end soon as a result of peak oil or that nuclear power will solve all our problems or that global warming is a left wing conspiracy becomes incredibly tiresome after a while and you find yourself having to choose between letting people use your articles as a soapbox for their nutty views or wasting vast amounts of time debating the same topics endlessly with them.

I think the straw that broke the camel's back though was the ill-fated "Moving Forward - Towards A Kinder Gentler (Smaller) Oil Drum" declaration, which sapped energy from the site and demotivated contributors such as myself who wanted to look at a wider range of topics than simple oil depletion. Admittedly this was always going to be something of a turning point - Gail's editorial decisions were often baffling to me (as were her endless series of postings warning of financial doom), the Campfire posts, though wildly popular, simply fed the prevailing doomer mentality, and leading figures such as Prof Goose and Nate Hagens had drifted away from making regular contributions. The choice to downsize and become more tightly focused on a limited group of topics was the catalyst for things ending where they did in my view.