http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=1570
Some more analysis here:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/07/24/1094111/is-peak-oil-dead/
One thing about Monbiot, who seems to be the gateway for this, is that he has a longstanding QC problem and a journalistic love of man-bites-dog, and you gotta gotta check his work. A peak somehow preventing further emissions is a pure red herring. The whole point about the peak is that there's plenty to burn, it's just gets harder and more expensive to extract. If we fill in a conventional oil deficit even at constant hydrocarbon production with unconventional and coal we will cook ourselves right and proper. It has to stay in the ground. The peak has nothing to do with it, other than making other energy sources an easier sell.
[...]
Even if we were to accept the 6-10% range [in production decline], Maugeri has got his sums horribly wrong. In the second paragraph, he claims even the lower end of the range “would involve the almost complete loss of the world’s “old” production in 10 years”. This is just not true. A 6% annual decline over 10 years leaves you with 54% of your original production, because each year’s 6% decline is smaller volumetrically than the previous one. So over a decade the decline is 46% – and very far from an “almost complete loss”.
When I put this to him, Mr Maugeri seemed genuinely confused, and tried briefly to persuade me the loss was much larger. “If you have a 6% decline each year over a 10 year period, the loss of production is close to 80%”, he said, but then the penny dropped. It looks to me as if he compounded 6% in the wrong direction – for growth, not decline. “Maybe on this you are right”, he conceded. So even in his own terms, Mr Maugeri has overestimated the alleged overestimation of production decline by almost three-quarters.
[...]
-- Andy