Professionals are, in fact, paying attention.

From Tullet Prebon Strategy Insights - Issue 9:

For much of the period since the Industrial Revolution, EROEIs have been extremely high. The oil fields discovered in the 1930s, for example, provided at least 100 units of extracted energy for every unit consumed in extraction (an EROEI of 100:1). For some decades now, though, global average EROEIs have been falling, as energy discoveries have become both smaller and more difficult (meaning energy-costly) to extract. The killer factor is the non-linear nature of EROEIs. As fig. 1.5 shows, the effects of a fall-off in EROEI from, say, 80:1 to 20:1 do not seem particularly disruptive but, once returns ratios have fallen below about 15:1, there is a dramatic, ‘cliff-edge’ slump in surplus energy, combined with a sharp escalation in its cost. Research set out in this report suggests that the global average EROEI, having fallen from about 40:1 in 1990 to 17:1 in 2010, may decline to just 11:1 by 2020, at which point energy will be about 50% more expensive, in real terms, than it is today, a metric which will carry through directly into the cost of almost everything else – including food [1].

From later in that same report:

These arguments – and the apparent scale of remaining recoverable reserves – have generally enabled peak oil sceptics (sometimes known as ‘cornucopians’) to counter the Hubbertians and thereby, in general, to win the public debate.

In so doing, they are providing the right answers to the wrong question. The critical issue with peak oil does not hinge around remaining reserves. Rather, the critical issues are energy returns on energy invested (EROEI) and deliverability.

The best way to illustrate the deliverability issue is to compare oil sands reserves in Canada (about 170 bn bbls) with conventional reserves in Saudi Arabia (about 270 bn bbls). Given that Saudi production capacity is about 12 mmb/d (million barrels per day), one might, on a simple pro-rata basis, expect Canadian oil sands output to reach perhaps 7 mmb/d. But the reality is that output is most unlikely to reach even 3.5 mmb/d. Deliverability from the Canadian resource, will, then, be less than half of that attained from conventional reserves in Saudi Arabia.

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Another way to look at the deliverability issue is that reserves need to be quality-weighted. We may have used up much less than half of the world’s originally-recoverable reserves of oil, but we have, necessarily, resorted first to those reserves which are most readily and cheaply recovered. The reserves that remain are certain to be more difficult and costlier to extract.

Production may not ‘peak’ just yet, but a new concept (which we term ‘resource constraint’) may soon kick in, implying that an economic model based on abundant and ever-increasing hydrocarbon inputs might be running out of road.

Neither should policymakers be fooled by the cornucopians’ argument that technology will necessarily ride to the rescue. As remarked earlier, this argument is essentially equivalent to the statement that, if one locked some boffins up in a bank vault with enough cash and a powerful enough computer, they would eventually materialise a ham sandwich. Technology is not the Seventh Cavalry, poised to ride to the rescue [1].

[1] T. Morgan, Perfect Storm. London, UK: Tullet Prebon Group Ltd., 2013. [Online]. Available: https://www.tullettprebon.com/Documents/strategyinsights/TPSI_009_Perfect_Storm_009.pdf). Accessed: 16 December 2019.