Why Post-Peak will be steeper than pre-peak oil

I came across this excellent article on the Culture Change website. The author explains 5 reasons why the downward slope of Hubbert's Curve will be steeper than the upward slope.

On first thinking about it, I wondered how this could be true because of how fast oil gushed into our industrial/consumer society in the first place. Now oil is becoming harder to bring online because it lies miles under oceans and in politically volatile countries.

Quotes from the article Forecasts for Future Oil Supplies Are Unrealistic:

In spite of a dramatic run up in prices culminating with the price of $147 per barrel in July 2008, producers were unable to bring more oil to market. This fact defies a widely-held but erroneous belief advanced by traditional economists, that producers will bring more oil to market as the price goes up.

The social and economic upheaval that worldwide peak oil will bring about will be marked by hoarding, stockpiling, speculators cornering the market, long-term contracts pushing spot market buyers out of the market, government corruption, widespread rationing, and a host of other problems. These maneuvers will rapidly remove oil from the marketplace, and the intensifying competition for the remaining supplies will cause the price to rapidly go up.

Check out the full article here.