Oil Drum, a site that says it "give[s] the public an unbiased view of the energy landscape," announced this month that it will cease publication. The site was devoted to promoting a theory known as "Peak Oil," which posits that a global shortage of fossil fuels spell disaster for America’s carbon-intensive energy sector.
As the United States experiences a massive spike in available oil reserves, audiences have become less interested in the site's content.
U.S. oil production is currently projected to skyrocket. Experts predict the country will overtake OPEC giant Saudi Arabia in crude production by the end of the decade.
Oil Drum cofounder Rembrandt Koppelaar attributed the site’s failure to a "scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors."
"Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles," Koppelaar wrote.
BuzzFeed’s Matthew Zeitlin notes that the Peak Oil theory has received less attention in recent years, especially as U.S. oil production has increased since 2008.
