T. Boone Pickens, a controversial but successful oil investor, recently talked about the reality of peak oil:

Global oil [production] is 84 million barrels (a day). I don’t believe you can get it any more than 84 million barrels. I don’t care what [Saudi Crown Prince] Abdullah, [Russian Premier Vladimir] Putin or anybody else says about oil reserves or production. I think they are on decline in the biggest oil fields in the world today and I know what’s it like once you turn the corner and start declining, it’s a tread mill that you just can’t keep up with…So, when you start adding the reserves in these countries, you’re not even replacing what you’re taking out…

The majors, they talk about plenty of oil and that they can produce more, but if you look at ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, BP (British Petroleum), all the production [is] going down every year. They don’t replace and they don’t add to production, but they say there’s plenty of oil around.

Now why would they say that? One of the chief economists with one of the major oil companies… I was at a conference where he was… we were talking and I asked, why do they say that? And he said, can you imagine what would happen if one of these major oil company’s CEO’s got up and made a speech and he said, ‘We’re running out of oil’? I said there’d be panic and he said, ‘That’s right. They’re not going to make the statement. They’re going to say there’s plenty of oil around.’

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