Short clip to share
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-08-28/dont-worry-theres-plenty-oil
some of the script
"Our civilization runs on oil.
It’s the cheapest, most energy-dense and portable fuel we've ever found. Nature required tens of millions of years to make petroleum, and we've used up the best of it in less than two hundred.......
The oil industry is now staging another PR counter-offensive. They're telling us that applying "new" technologies like hydrofracking to low-porosity rocks makes lots of lower quality, unconventional oil available. They argue we just need to drill more to produce more. Problem solved!

But wait. What's actually new here? Most of this technology has been around since the 1980s. The unconventional resources have been known to geologists for decades. What's new is high oil prices.
It’s high oil prices that make unconventional oil worth producing in the first place. It takes lots of money and energy, not to mention water, to frack low-porosity rocks. And the environmental risks are staggering.
How does the economy handle high oil prices? Well, it turns out the economy hates high oil prices and responds by going into recession. Which makes energy prices volatile, rendering the industry subject to booms and busts

So, what’s the bottom line here?
Yes, there's still oil in the ground. We just can't afford it. In broad terms, the peak oil analysts were right. But the fossil fuel industry is winning the PR battle.
What really matters, though, is not who wins the debate, but how we prepare for the inevitable. We’ve got to wean ourselves off our high-energy lifestyle.
We'd be foolish to wait for events to settle the debate once and for all. Let's say goodbye to oil. It's saying goodbye to us."

feel free to comment , cheers Jim

When the price of one resource goes up we substitute it with another when the price matches. This sets a new lower bound for the resource. We may never get oil at $20 a barrel again, that will be 20 bucks for 1700 kWh, but I doubt if we will be buy PV in at £5000 for a kWp installed (that will be, over 25 years, 5 grand for 3000 kWh).
Today (07-09-2012) WTI is at $94.72 and Brent is at $113.49) and PV is about £1200/kWp, so that will be about 4p/kWh for oil and (assuming 25 year life of system) 40p/kWh for PV (a quarter if what it was a few years back).
Now that is a ten to one ratio at present, but the present time does not last long. In 2008, some people where saying that oil would hit $250/barrel, about double what it is today, so 8p/kWh (PV then was not far off £4000/kWp), if that had happened, and it was well documented that it was never going to, all that would have happened is that we, in the UK, would have driven less, heated our houses less with oil and world trade would have slowed. What actually happened because of the price spike to £150/barrel (caused by refining problems rather than oil in the ground), was that the price dropped to $50/barrel, and PV was then comparatively about 20 times more expensive.
Now I have just picked oil and PV as two examples of supply side pricing, but you can pick any fossil fuel and compare it to any 'renewable' technology and I doubt that you will find price parity when comparing cost per kWh. So we may or may not have reached peak oil, but it is an irrelevance when comparing costs.
If the world, or the UK, or even an individual, really wants to make a difference, then reduction in energy use is the way to go.

I may have made a mistake, I worked on 10% my solar resource (1200 kWh/year) but just realised that is for a square metre.
EST estimate that a 1 kW system at my location would yield just under 1 MWh/year

So that would be 25,000 kWh over 25 years and cost about £1200 quid, so about 5p/kWh

Oil, in its refined form is about 6p/kWh

Grid electricity is about 15p/kWh day and 6p night (what I pay)

So if that is the case, and I apologise for my early morning mistake, if you are converting to heat, water or air, does not matter, though water does allow for storage, oil and PV are pretty much on price parity at the moment.
I shall have to look into getting a kW fitted as if you ignore the whole FITs business, PV modules are about 55p/Watt, a small inverter will be about £700, kit and caboodle say another £500, could get 1 kW fitted (about as much as my roof will take) for around £1750, so that would work out at 7p/kWh (though ST may be a better bet at the same price).

Posted By: fostertomand that kind of hardline economics is a bedrock of your unsentimental view of how the world works, innit ST?

I would swap hardline for mainstream.

OK, mainstream, not hardline - same thing.

EROEI - Energy return on energy invested. I invented a companion one - MROMI - Money returm on money invested.

MROMI is what's happening at present, and that mainstream economics can handle nicely. But what happens when the MROMI-virtuous economic activity in question is damaging in effect, and an absurdity even in its own terms?

Tho its MROMI may be heathy, what if the EROEI of an energy-generating technology is low or even less-than-unity? What if, on a full accounting, the energy input required for production approaches or even exceeds the energy generated?

That is the case with e.g, making gasoline from corn. Modern fracking etc technologies aren't much better. Long gone are the days when an 'easy' oil well had an EROEI of 1000 - that's down to 30 or 40 nowadays, and the new techniques are in single figures.

Posted By: SteamyTeaEconomics does not have emotion attached to it

If this is classified as mere 'emotion' by economists, well that says it all.

" A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year. "