[quote]The Mage wrote:
By the way it should be mentioned that the Mid-East is having problems selling all the oil they have. They have contracts that are not being picked up by the market. One reason OPEC is so reluctant to raise production.[/quote]
I also hear prostitutes are having a hard time selling sex in ports.
Get a clue!
[quote]lixy wrote:
The Mage wrote:
By the way it should be mentioned that the Mid-East is having problems selling all the oil they have. They have contracts that are not being picked up by the market. One reason OPEC is so reluctant to raise production.
I also hear prostitutes are having a hard time selling sex in ports.
[/quote]
Peak sex-prices?
[quote]orion wrote:
Gael wrote:
And also:
Rainjack wrote:
When oil was produced by process - the myth was dispelled.
I hope you aren’t talking about the crackpot abiotic oil genesis myth, of which there is absolutely zero evidence.
If you would be so kind as to provide evidence for the fossil fuel theory.
[/quote]
It seems like this is a moot point. If oil wells refuel themselves, why aren’t they doing so in the United states? What difference does the origin of the oil make? Fossil fuel or abiotic, either oil wells do not refuel themselves, or they do so at a rate that is too slow to have any significance. There are 40,000 major oil fields on the planet. Most are in decline. Where is this unlimited oil?
[quote]lixy wrote:
I also hear prostitutes are having a hard time selling sex in ports.
Get a clue![/quote]
Yeah man, when I was stationed in Korea a buddy and me went to downtown Suwon. I’ll tell you man, the whores there just throw themselves at you. I had a hard time just getting down the “hooker highway” without being solicited for “numbah won sex, bookoo bookoo”. Let me tell you man, those girls in Korea have the most amazing mouths… Oh wait…
[quote]Gael wrote:
It seems like this is a moot point. If oil wells refuel themselves, why aren’t they doing so in the United states? What difference does the origin of the oil make? Fossil fuel or abiotic, either oil wells do not refuel themselves, or they do so at a rate that is too slow to have any significance. There are 40,000 major oil fields on the planet. Most are in decline. Where is this unlimited oil?[/quote]
Actually many oil fields are “refilling” believe it or not:
http://www.rense.com/general63/refil.htm
I don’t think this article even mentions abiotic oil. Here is a more recent article from the NY times:
As I said before, oil fields consistently produce 3 times as much oil as predicted, and still run strong. (Although part of the reason is that “proved” reserves are very conservative estimates.)
I think it’s funny that in the first article is this quote:
[i]"It has long been known by geologists and oil industry workers that seeps exist. In Southern California, for example, there are seeps near Santa Barbara, at a geologic feature called Coal Oil Point. And, Roberts said, it’s clear that ‘the Gulf of Mexico leaks like a sieve. You can’t take a submarine dive without running into an oil or gas seep. And on a calm day, you can’t take a boat ride without seeing gigantic oil slicks’ on the sea surface.
“Roberts added that natural seepage in places like the Gulf of Mexico ‘far exceeds anything that gets spilled’ by oil tankers and other sources.”
[quote]Gael wrote:
It seems like this is a moot point. If oil wells refuel themselves, why aren’t they doing so in the United states? What difference does the origin of the oil make? Fossil fuel or abiotic, either oil wells do not refuel themselves, or they do so at a rate that is too slow to have any significance. There are 40,000 major oil fields on the planet. Most are in decline. Where is this unlimited oil?[/quote]
The point is not that we won’t ever run out. The point is that “experts” been predicting shortages since we first starting pulling it out of the ground. They have never been right. They can’t even get correct estimates on the known reserves. Any predictions for unknown reserves are a complete shot in the dark.
Dhickey, I thought I made my point very clear, but I will try again.
If we expand domestic production and accomplish our intended goal of decreasing oil prices, consumption will increase, and the life expectancy of our domestic fields will decrease.
When they decline in production, as ever field in history ever has, we are left in a similar situation to the one we are in now, but it will be worse because we will be entirely dependent on middle eastern oil, and our demand will be higher than it is today because the marketplace has adapted to higher consumption needs. We will have no alternative, and OPEC can bleed us by the balls because there is shit we can do about it.
If, on the other hand, we decide to stick it out and suffer through high ME petroleum prices, and wait for Saudi Arabia and Iraq to peak, it puts us in a position of power. We will have the capacity to increase production while they do not. We will have a valuable resource everyone else would love to have.
We should use there oil before we use our own. Why is this such a strange and disagreeable concept?
There are many many benefits to waiting. For one, technological improvements will make the oil easier/cheaper to extract in the future. And without high petroleum prices, there is no incentive to invest in alternatives. There is no less pressure on the marketplace to become more efficient. And with lower consumption levels, it will be easier to scale development of alternatives to the levels necessary to sustain our economy.
I can think of so many reasons why it is good to wait.
Finally, I will respond to this:
Actually, they have been right most the time. Hubbert successfully predicted that US production would peak in 1970, and it did. And in 1972, the “experts” at the USGS predicted that US production wouldn’t peak until well into the 21st century, possibly the 22nd. The reality is that it had peaked 2 years ago.
Global discovery of new fields peaked in 1962 and has declined to virtually nothing in the last few years. Finds are so scarce these days that it is a searching for new fields is a losing investment. The current consumption to discovery ratio is 6:1, and this will only decline.
[quote]The Mage wrote:
The date for peak oil keeps getting pushed out. It was in the 90’s.[/quote]
And it would have peaked in the 90’s were it not for the oil shocks in the 70s and the drop in demand. Hubbert successfully predicted the US peak in 1970. Other experts successfully predicted other countries in the list (see second post). Peak oil has been extremely successful in it’s predictions.
When the “experts” at the USGS analyzed the data in 1972, they decided that US production would not peak for another 100 years or so. The fact is, it had already peaked 2 years ago. How can you be this wrong and still be an expert?
Incorrect in too many ways to address. THe USGS, with its extremely overly optimistic track record, issued a report on ANWR which stated it would peak in 12 years, and would not come online for 10, and would only produce roughly 700,000 million barrels per day.
Correct. And some fields have failed to produce their original estimates. Exceptions don’t really mean anything.
Source? You are saying that one little field in Dakota contains more oil than all of Saudi Arabia and the United States and half the world combined. Of course, this is false. The Dakota Bakken shale only contains 3 to 4.3 Billion barrels, USGS numbers.
Every statistic that I have cited comes from government documents, not peak oil “conspiracy” websites, whatever you mean by that. (What conspiracy?) And I can cite any statistic if asked. But when you say stuff like “800 billion barrels” and “over 1 million barrels” and “29 years of production” I have no idea where you get your numbers, but they are obviously wrong.
[quote]The Mage wrote:
Gael wrote:
It seems like this is a moot point. If oil wells refuel themselves, why aren’t they doing so in the United states? What difference does the origin of the oil make? Fossil fuel or abiotic, either oil wells do not refuel themselves, or they do so at a rate that is too slow to have any significance. There are 40,000 major oil fields on the planet. Most are in decline. Where is this unlimited oil?
Actually many oil fields are “refilling” believe it or not:
http://www.rense.com/general63/refil.htm
I don’t think this article even mentions abiotic oil. Here is a more recent article from the NY times:
As I said before, oil fields consistently produce 3 times as much oil as predicted, and still run strong. (Although part of the reason is that “proved” reserves are very conservative estimates.)
I think it’s funny that in the first article is this quote:
[i]"It has long been known by geologists and oil industry workers that seeps exist. In Southern California, for example, there are seeps near Santa Barbara, at a geologic feature called Coal Oil Point. And, Roberts said, it’s clear that ‘the Gulf of Mexico leaks like a sieve. You can’t take a submarine dive without running into an oil or gas seep. And on a calm day, you can’t take a boat ride without seeing gigantic oil slicks’ on the sea surface.
“Roberts added that natural seepage in places like the Gulf of Mexico ‘far exceeds anything that gets spilled’ by oil tankers and other sources.”[/quote]
Your 1995 NYtimes article misspells “Hubbert” and misquotes/misstates his ideas and predictions. The author obviously doesn’t know much about the topic.
And the only evidence the article has for fields refilling themselves is Eugene island. Eugene island is currently producing only a fraction of what it used to produce. Yes, it spiked a bit, unexpectedly, but among global oil reserves, this is an anomaly that can be explained by a myriad of theories, several of which were posited in the article, but none as fanciful as abiotic oil.
If oil is abiotic in any way that matters, we would be seeing phenomenon like that everywhere, all the time.
Yes, Eugene island was somewhat of a big deal in the news back in 1995, when your article was printed, but similar behavior has failed to be replicated in fields since then.
As your rense article explains, no one in the oil industry takes the idea of abiotic oil very seriously, and the failure of other fields to reproduce the behavior of Eugene island has left it an anomaly that, while interesting, is really only talked about by abiotic oil writers who champion it as the evidence that their theory has some substance. It’s really grasping at straws.
[quote]Gael wrote:
Every statistic that I have cited comes from government documents, not peak oil “conspiracy” websites, whatever you mean by that. (What conspiracy?) And I can cite any statistic if asked. But when you say stuff like “800 billion barrels” and “over 1 million barrels” and “29 years of production” I have no idea where you get your numbers, but they are obviously wrong. [/quote]
Bullshit. It is straight out of the conspiracy theorist websites.
Hubbert’s theories have been taken by them, and they are running with them like crazy.
And yes there are 800 billion barrels of oil available from shale. And no it is not the Bakken reserve. It is an area covering Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. There is an estimated 1.4 trillion barrels there, and we know we can get 800 million of them at current technology. The technology is called in situ, and was developed by Royal Dutch Shell.
It is mentioned here:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/06/news/economy/birger_shale.fortune/?postversion=2008060617
It even makes a quick mention of the technological breakthrough.
Anyway the other numbers are called math. I assume you can do math.
10.8 billion barrels of available oil in ANWAR, (and an outdated very conservative estimate at that,) will last 10,800 days at 1 million barrels of extraction a day. That’s over 29 and a half years worth of extraction.
Hubbert was only partly correct. Politics have made him more correct then he actually was. Currently his ideas are outdated. Would you go back to the 50’s and use the predictions of the computer experts from then to decide what will happen with the Internet? Did they even conceive of the Internet then?
Did Hubbert take into account slant drilling? In situ extraction? How about the fact that if technology increases enough to extract another 5% of the oil out of wells (very possible) then world oil supplies will jump effectively by an amount equal to what Saudi Arabia has.
Also right now production in America could actually exceed the previous peak if only our government would get out of the fucking way and allow drilling to occur.
And no I am not saying there will never be a peak. That there is an unlimited supply of oil in the Earth. I am saying that currently it is a completely overblown conspiracy theory that is doing nothing but causing panic and selling books. And now for political reasons.
As this oil bubble became bigger and bigger, I knew that more and more people would fall for the belief in peak oil. (Some investors are hoping for it.)
What is really sad is how hard it is to find real information on Peak Oil, and any form of production. In my recent search, I found peak oil connected to the channeling of spirits.
Anyway I keep finding the same faults with the peak oil crowd.:
A) They only acknowledge one type and source of oil.
D) They tend to ignore the effects of technology and politics on crude oil.
Interestingly even if you were right, it would not change my opinion on what we should be doing. Drilling for as much oil as we can get, and build more New-Q-Ler power plants.
Oh and thanks for telling us how smart you are.
See you in another month.
[quote]Gael wrote:
Dhickey, I thought I made my point very clear, but I will try again.
If we expand domestic production and accomplish our intended goal of decreasing oil prices, consumption will increase, and the life expectancy of our domestic fields will decrease.
[/quote]
Yeah. So? We will eventually run out of oil. Nobody knows when. We will eventually find alteratives to oil.
[quote]
When they decline in production, as ever field in history ever has, we are left in a similar situation to the one we are in now, but it will be worse because we will be entirely dependent on middle eastern oil, and our demand will be higher than it is today because the marketplace has adapted to higher consumption needs. We will have no alternative, and OPEC can bleed us by the balls because there is shit we can do about it.
[/quote] Do you think all feilds will dry up on some magical date on the calader. I think it’s reasonable to expect a drawn out process of where oil production gradually declines, prices increase, and demand falls. I am 33 now and I don’t see this happening in my grandchilderen’s lifetime.
Alteranitives will be much more viable when oil is actually in short supply. Why would I invest tremendous amounts of money in creating alternatives if there is still incredable amounts of oil in the ground? Because congress won’t let the oil companies drill? What if they change their minds? They need to quit distorting market signals. I may reply with the needs for insentives for alternatives. Ridiculous. Tax credits…please. What’s needed for this type of innovation is billions of dollars of investment that will not happen as long as we drag this out.
This is foolish. We have no idea when they will peak, what other discoveries will be made, and when alternatives will be viable. See response above.
[quote]
We should use there oil before we use our own. Why is this such a strange and disagreeable concept?
[/quote] If we put ours on the market it effects world price and they will make less money selling thiers. Doesn’t this accomplish what you were after above?
Companies are only going to extract the oil that cheap and easy to extract. Why put up artificial barriers.
Becuase oil dried up or because of artificial restrictions?
[quote]
We keep on finding more
Global discovery of new fields peaked in 1962 and has declined to virtually nothing in the last few years. Finds are so scarce these days that it is a searching for new fields is a losing investment. The current consumption to discovery ratio is 6:1, and this will only decline.[/quote]
My head hurts. Bottom line. When you mess with natural market signals you make things worse. Large investments need clear market signals. Until there are large investments on a global scale in alternatives, we will not see them. This is why facism and central planning will never and has never worked. A little facism is only slightly better than a lot of facism.
The Mage, why are you referring to peak oil as “conspiracy theorist?”
[quote]dhickey wrote:
…
Global discovery of new fields peaked in 1962 and has declined to virtually nothing in the last few years. Finds are so scarce these days that it is a searching for new fields is a losing investment. The current consumption to discovery ratio is 6:1, and this will only decline…
[/quote]
Oh please. We have so many restrictions on where we can look it is silly.
[quote]Gael wrote:
The Mage, why are you referring to peak oil as “conspiracy theorist?”[/quote]
Because of how people are treating the issue. You did read my points A, 2, and D didn’t you?
Yes there will be a peak in light sweet crude someday. But it is not today. This is a bubble pure and simple.
There is heavy oil, oil sands, and oil shale. Yes it costs more to extract this stuff, and sometimes to process it too. But that cost difference is less then the drop over the previous 2 weeks.
There are multiple reasons for the jump in prices. The drop in the dollar, (leads to another conspiracy theory,) the sudden rise of India and China’s economies that caught the producers unprepared, and the cheap oil of the 90’s that caused the oil giants to quit looking for the stuff, and even cap off producing wells. This last one caused the car companies to focus on developing cars that squeezed more power out of a gallon of gas, for power and not efficiency.
Now they are not only looking, they are finding oil. Bakken itself has jumped from 25 million barrels to over 4 billion, just because of technology. If the technology keeps improving, and it usually does, that reserve could climb to over 100 billion barrels. How does this oil suddenly appear out of nowhere? Because they only count the oil they can extract.
I am not worried about running out because by the time we do, we will be using something else.
Here is what we really need to do, build more nuke plants. The plug in hybrids are coming, and local driving is not going to use much gas any more. (It’s taking so long because of the obvious challenges of adding a plug to an electric engine.) But that will start to tax our electricity production.
But this is just a step toward full electric cars. The switch has already started. But it is not going to happen overnight, and we will need the oil to get us through the change, so congress should be pushing to drill. The switch to all electric will really happen when they figure out how to rapidly charge a car off the grid. (Right now the Tesla takes 3 hours.)
Ok, I have gone off on a tangent, but this is what I see coming down the line.
Increase domestic oil? Here’s one reason:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g2bWhAvZxrryiRX8QnFU57pz3ctAD928R9S00
[quote]Ren wrote:
Increase domestic oil? Here’s one reason:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g2bWhAvZxrryiRX8QnFU57pz3ctAD928R9S00
[/quote]
Good news if we keep that money in the US instead of Iran, Saudi Arabia etc.
The single biggest shareholder in Exxon? A teachers union retirement fund.
This is interesting - Lehman Bros. chief energy economist is predicting a nice fall in oil prices:
[quote]The Mage wrote:
The single biggest shareholder in Exxon? A teachers union retirement fund.
[/quote]
Over 50% of their share holders are pension funds and mutual funds. Greedy bastards, increasing our 401Ks. Let’s give it to the gov’t instead.
On a side note, I think the DMC may be in a bit of trouble with the latest stunt they pulled. The American people know, or will know that they purposely blocked a vote that would have passed and been a step towards engery independance. I guess their vacations were more important. Anyone know were Pelosi and Reid live?
as long as dinosaurs keep dying and burying themselves in the ground we’ll have all the oil we need.
Wasn’t that cute when they used to call it fossil fuels?