Peak conventional oil was reached in 2005. World production of liquid oil is already steadily falling and will never again reach its peak. Synthetic and deep water and rock and tar to oil conversion processes have kept total world production steady since then and refinery efficiencies have been stepped up to produce more motor fuel, but increasingly expensive and heroic extraction is necessary to keep all that up. Prices have been rising and will continue to rise. The lower prices this year are unsustainable as they are now below marginal cost of production.

And peak helium is linked tightly to peak natural gas, because that's how helium is obtained. It's a byproduct of natural gas. When natural gas production falls in the next few decades, He will do the same.

Of course, we can always extract He from the atmosphere. Unlike oil, it renews itself -- contrary to op's implication -- from underground radiation and solar wind. it won't ever get much more expensive than neon.

The relentless fall in U.S. labor force participation will continue to cause reduced economy activity, which can explain why the price of oil was quite constant from 2010-2014:

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

I'm completely unconvinced that peak oil is a false idea. We're down to extracting fossil fuels our of sand and rocks, this is crazy. We obviously passed peak in terms of the liquid crude that bubbles out of the ground.

Why is it crazy? We extract our iron, copper, gold, and silver from sand and rocks. Is that crazy too?

Because it's so inefficient relative to just pumping it out of oilfields, that it only makes sense when the price is quite high (hence the huge production pullback in response to recent price drops). Now I don't think we can just move off fossil fuels tomorrow, but we're clearly into an era of diminishing returns.

Extracting gold from rock is inefficient compared to panning for it in a river. That doesn't mean we are running out of gold.

IT doesn't but it does mean the days of anybody being able to prospect for gold are long gone. you'll always be able to get more of almost any physical resource, but the notion of Peak ____ is economic rather than purely physical.

Actually, total available gold is quite finite, as are resources of other minerals. I looked into this a few weeks ago.

All the gold mined in all human history amounts to about 175,000 metric tons, or 386 million pounds. And there's 7.3 billion of us humans.

That works out to about 24 grams of gold per person, or 0.84 standard ounces (0.77 troy ounces). At present rates of about $1,200 per ounce ($1,187.47 as I write this), it'd be worth slightly less than $1,000.

For copper, it's a kilo or two.

For numerous minerals and natural resources, remaining supplies range from a few years (antimony, 8), to a few decades (aluminium, 80 years).

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120618-global-resources-st...

Listed: antimony, indium, silver, copper, titanium, tantalum, phosphorus, aluminium, gas, oil, coal, agricultural land, coral reefs, rainforests.

Abundance!of!elements!in!Earth's!crust!is!pretty!interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Humans (and other life forms) use free energy to redistribute mineral resources. We're frightfully good at it.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/5l_8MqtVwLLvX_DabPjY-g

We store huge lumps of gold in secure storage. We turn oil into dirty air. Gold doesn't get consumed when we use it.

As other said, it's crazy because we don't mine fossil fuels and then have them to use and keep and recycle. We go through this intense stuff just to burn it up and it's gone. Not so with those minerals and such you're talking about.

Fracking is fairly efficient at extraction from shale.

In the short-term, yes. But those wells decline in production drastically faster than traditional drilling.

I think a lot of the discussion reads as more like "We have set ourselves up for a very rude awakening" rather than "we are about to run out of helium forever".

The rare earths comparison is probably more apt than the peak-oil one, but yeah. 100 years reserves is more than we have of all sorts of things and represents a non-scarce resource.

There is a long and storied line of "We're running out of X! Oh my God!"

We have yet to run out of X.

Part of the problem is that when you extrapolate any sort of growth, you naturally run out of what's considered available resources. That's because nobody is looking for any more resources right now. Once the price goes up, folks start looking harder. As one wag put it: nothing you dig out of the ground has ever gone up in price consistently. Just the opposite.

I'm not saying we're never going to run out of $PRECIOUSTHING, just that "We're losing all the helium" is just another entry on a very long list of things. None of which worked out that way.

Fundamentally there is no chemical on Earth we could ever truly run out of, we could always endothermically synthesize anything in the worst case scenario.

Problem is that is insanely expensive. The more expensive resources are, the lower their utility to the market. We use helium and oil now to enable a lot of essential and hard to replace technologies, but if the price starts spiraling out of control due to diminishing availability (and it has / will in both cases) the increasing price limits your ability to use the resource for useful purposes.

Its not really about conservationism at all. Its long term strategic economic thinking. Doing stuff with non-renewable resources that is barely useful (fuel inefficient cars or party balloons) means when we want to do more useful things with these resources later, diminished availability might make it much more expensive later on.

I imagine to most people having plastics, MRI machines, and modern agriculture is more important than having to recharge an electric car or put an alternative heavier gas in their party balloons. If the price of these resources starts spiraling as the cheap supply runs out, the costs of the former skyrocket, and we do not have easy alternatives for them yet like we do a lot of modern oil and helium habits.

Off the top of my head, a few resources which have been exhausted:

⚫ Guano (fertilizer)

⚫ Forests, generally, in Lebanon ("the cedars of Lebanon"), Greece, Italy, Europe, England.

⚫ Whale oil.

⚫ Bison.

⚫ Passenger pigeons.

⚫ Dodo.

⚫ Arable land through the Middle East and Fertile Crescent.

⚫ Cod.

⚫ Water from the Aral Sea.

⚫ Cryolite (used in aluminium smelting).

The fact that several of these are species or ecosystem resources strikes me as significant.

Thank you.

I was referring specifically to elements found naturally on the Earth, but my wording was unclear. By pointing out a bunch of other things that I was not referring to, you have helped clarify the issue.

Don't really want to do a rebuttal. I did learn some things about cryolite this morning. Here's a good article for those looking to dig deeper. (apologies for the pun)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...

To date, relatively few actual _mineral_ resources have been exhaustd. Cryolite was also a bit of a surprise for me, though I think I've run across mention of it before.

The more general trend, that it's been ecosystem resources, especially animal and plant extinctions, sometimes localized, which are more comonly encountered, suggests the risks we're facing are more likely systemic than strictly one of stocks.

I disagree with the general suggestion of your Slate reference that resource consumption is no longer a concern. Though economists specifically are rather divorced from reality.

Are you sure about forests in Europe?

Yes, in the sense that prior to the use of coal, forests were being used unsustainably and, frequently, exhausted.

At the time of the American Revolution, England relied on its American colonies for lumber, fuelwood, turpentine (derived from pine pitch), and other forestry products. It wasn't able to provision its own ships let alone fuel supplies, absent these.

Forests have recovered in Europe over the past 100-150 years, but that's almost entirely due to offloading fuel supplies to coal, oil, and gas.

Among the problems prompted by Greece's credit crisis is a renewal of woodburning, creating both air quality problems and deforestation:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/greece-financial-crisis-high-fue...

In the US, quality lumber is becoming difficult to find:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/comments/389q25/lumber...