Anatole Kaletsky writes,

For Western oil companies,the rational strategy will be to stop oil exploration and seek profits by providing equipment, geological knowhow, and new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to oil-producing countries. But their ultimate goal should be to sell their existing oil reserves as quickly as possible and distribute the resulting tsunami of cash to their shareholders until all of their low-cost oilfields run dry.

His claim is that there is no need to discover more oil. There is plenty of cheap oil available, albeit in countries that are not our favorites. But if you can pump oil for a few dollars a barrel in Iran or Russia, it is wasteful to search for oil that costs over $30 a barrel to extract elsewhere.

My main reaction is that we sure have come a long way from “peak oil” theory.