RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon

BooRadley said:

[h=2]RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon[/h]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/23/peak_oil_is_dead_citigroup/




[RIP is in the title of the article. One rule says use the title, one says RIP is reserved for dead people. Went with rule 1, hope that's right].

Anyway, I wouldn't say it's time to drop all sustainability planning just yet, but it is good to hear that we're not on the verge of collapse. Until synthetic hydrocarbons or some other form of safe, renewable energy is developed, this is a nice buffer on available oil supplies. Plus, it takes the heat off of drilling in places like ANWAR, where the value of maintaining some of the last few pristine pieces of land is a high price to pay to get another few years of leaving the lights on without caring about it.

Not that I don't like the idea of energy efficient hybrids, efficiently designed buildings, and well planned public transport -- all great ideas -- just that I like my fast v8 and I'm not ready to give it up to live in a tree just yet.

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Hey Boo, your link just goes to a subscription page.

I think I'll hold off on cheering until we see our energy imports drop after recovery from the recession, and how many groundwater sources are contaminated in the process.

apdst said:

The planet is producing new oil everyday. I disagree that it's a finite resource.

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Good to know that if we stopped using oil today, that in a 100 million years there will be as much as we have used in the last hundred years.

sharon said:

Oil exploration is still in its infancy.. Look at off shore Algeria, Shaybah, Sudan, Darfur, Yemen, Brazil, Cuba.........

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So is the world population growth unfortunately, even with all the new finds and and new drilling methods we are still getting closer to demand exceeding supply. The recession helped reduce demand, sure, but the world is not going to be in recession forever.

Catawba said:

The recession helped reduce demand, sure, but the world is not going to be in recession forever.

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Whenever it is that global oil production has clearly and certainly begun its decline, then it may indeed seem as though the world has entered an endless recession. When every year you have less energy (read: insanely more expensive energy) with which to do your business, it will be bad. So bad, in fact, that we will probably just have a global war about it. That's the equivalent of "ripping the bandaid off," as human population is concerned. Whether we have currency and global financial collapses or energy decline that breaks apart the system, the manifestation of that will be war and/or anarchy. It won't just be protests for better paying jobs. It'll be ape**** craziness.

Neomalthusian said:

Whenever it is that global oil production has clearly and certainly begun its decline, then it may indeed seem as though the world has entered an endless recession. When every year you have less energy (read: insanely more expensive energy) with which to do your business, it will be bad. So bad, in fact, that we will probably just have a global war about it. That's the equivalent of "ripping the bandaid off," as human population is concerned. Whether we have currency and global financial collapses or energy decline that breaks apart the system, the manifestation of that will be war and/or anarchy. It won't just be protests for better paying jobs. It'll be ape**** craziness.

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Good point!

I think it would be EXTREMELY interesting if there were private oil forecasts that predict that ME oil domination is rapidly coming to a close, and the U.S. and Canada will become the new primary exporters of oil and natural gas in the world. Many people speculate that Saudi oil fields are drying up after all, and U.S. policy makers seem strangely unconcerned about our insane national debt. Might they know something we don't? :think::idea::hitsfan:

ChuckBerry said:

I think it would be EXTREMELY interesting if there were private oil forecasts that predict that ME oil domination is rapidly coming to a close, and the U.S. and Canada will become the new primary exporters of oil and natural gas in the world. Many people speculate that Saudi oil fields are drying up after all, and U.S. policy makers seem strangely unconcerned about our insane national debt. Might they know something we don't? :think::idea::hitsfan:

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Both the US and Canada consume more oil than they produce.

Catawba said:

Hey Boo, your link just goes to a subscription page.

I think I'll hold off on cheering until we see our energy imports drop after recovery from the recession, and how many groundwater sources are contaminated in the process.

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I just tried the link again, and it worked again. RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon ? The Register (and whoever called it a liberal rag: It's not, it's a technology rag, and one of pretty high repute The Register: Sci/Tech News for the World )

I'm not personally sold on the near and impending dooms day. In college, in like 1987 or 88, I did a paper on this, and all the research I did convinced me that the doomsayers were right: Oil would be gone by 1997. One of my mentors told me that was BS, that they were saying the same thing when he was in college ten years prior. Well, 1997 came and went. Every 10 years there's undeniable proof that we only have 10 years worth left, and ever ten years, new deposits are discovered, along with new processes to improve extraction, processing, and efficiency in use. Of course, the whole time there has been irrefutable proof that we only have 10 years of production left.

That's not to say that it isn't a near-term concern, now is the time to be researching alternatives and design improvements, but I don't think the cow is already out of the gate. As the cost of extraction increases, there will be massive economic pressure driving research into discovery, alternatives, and more efficient designs for use . . . which we see happening now.

I do think that we'll have to reorganize some things over the next several decades: Improve city planning to promote density, improve public transport and drive it by electricity, possibly cut back to more localized farming, demote globalization, promote electric transportation, and switch electric stations to less fossil-dependent production.

I don't think there will be a complete global collapse back to cave man days in our lifetime, though. Just some reorganization and some technology upgrades. Fuel is still cheap enough that you can sit there reading this on your own private node in a global network of electricity routing communication toys, after all.

BooRadley said:

I just tried the link again, and it worked again. RIP: Peak Oil - we won't be running out any time soon ? The Register (and whoever called it a liberal rag: It's not, it's a technology rag, and one of pretty high repute The Register: Sci/Tech News for the World )

I'm not personally sold on the near and impending dooms day. In college, in like 1987 or 88, I did a paper on this, and all the research I did convinced me that the doomsayers were right: Oil would be gone by 1997. One of my mentors told me that was BS, that they were saying the same thing when he was in college ten years prior. Well, 1997 came and went. Every 10 years there's undeniable proof that we only have 10 years worth left, and ever ten years, new deposits are discovered, along with new processes to improve extraction, processing, and efficiency in use. Of course, the whole time there has been irrefutable proof that we only have 10 years of production left.

That's not to say that it isn't a near-term concern, now is the time to be researching alternatives and design improvements, but I don't think the cow is already out of the gate. As the cost of extraction increases, there will be massive economic pressure driving research into discovery, alternatives, and more efficient designs for use . . . which we see happening now.

I do think that we'll have to reorganize some things over the next several decades: Improve city planning to promote density, improve public transport and drive it by electricity, possibly cut back to more localized farming, demote globalization, promote electric transportation, and switch electric stations to less fossil-dependent production.

I don't think there will be a complete global collapse back to cave man days in our lifetime, though. Just some reorganization and some technology upgrades. Fuel is still cheap enough that you can sit there reading this on your own private node in a global network of electricity routing communication toys, after all.

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The link worked that time, thanks!

That still doesn't change the fact that there has not been a single year since 1971 that we have produced as much oil as we consume. Or, that we are approaching that same supply/demand point on the world oil market.

Oil prices are already affecting the economy here, and around the world.

"The economy in the United States today is greatly affected by oil and gas. When there are large reserves and an increase of active drills in respect to oil, the economy seems to receive a boost. This is because prices for such things like gas and oil fall and people are able to consume more gas at a lower price. There is more supply and prices fall, therefore people save money on gas and can consume other items in the economy. People working in these industries have more job openings and more jobs filled, therefore creating a lower unemployment rate and a higher national per capita income. The need for substitutes are not there so, consumers will consume oil and gas at a growing rate. Since, people use oil and gas for so many different things like heating there homes, driving their cars, and a variety of other sources, the overall GNP for the consumer will rise. Economic growth is affected through significant fluctuations in inflation of oil and gas. If you look throughout history when there have been fluctuations in gas and oil prices you have vast fluctuations in the economy of our country. The instability of this factor has cause government regulation to come into play in times of crisis. For example during the mid-seventies we had the oil and gas shortage due to the Middle East cutting off supply to Importers of their oil. By doing this, they caused a shortage in a lot of countries creating rising oil prices and high demand. Consumers could not rely on the oil prices to be stable, therefore they consumed less of other products due to the inflation of gas prices and more of their dollar began to be spent on gas."
Oil And Gas: How Both Affect The Economy

And the US military, the largest single user of oil on the planet, has warned it may get much worse, soon:

"The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact."
US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015 | Business | The Guardian

apdst said:

The planet is producing new oil everyday. I disagree that it's a finite resource.

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That is not true, the oil we use was made millions of years ago from organic deposits that took 100's of thousands of years to accumulate. We will run out...eventually.

ChuckBerry said:

I think it would be EXTREMELY interesting if there were private oil forecasts that predict that ME oil domination is rapidly coming to a close, and the U.S. and Canada will become the new primary exporters of oil and natural gas in the world. Many people speculate that Saudi oil fields are drying up after all, and U.S. policy makers seem strangely unconcerned about our insane national debt. Might they know something we don't? :think::idea::hitsfan:

Click to expand...

"By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need an additional 50 million barrels per day." - Vice President Dick Cheney

"In my humble opinion, we should now have reached peak oil. So it is high time to close this critical chapter in the history of international oil industry and bid the mighty peak farewell." - Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, Vice President of the National Iranian Oil Company

"We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil." — Mike Bowlin, Chairman, Atlantic Richfield Company

"At the moment the world is consuming 30-plus billion barrels a year of oil and is finding seven or eight billion barrels a year, and this state of affairs has been going on now for 20 or more years. It's obviously unsustainable and the world is increasingly drawing on the bigger, older fields. You couple that notion with the irreversibility of decline and you've got a very alarming picture." - James W. Buckee -Retired President and CEO of Talisman Energy Inc.

"Technology is great, but it can't find what's not there. In the last five years, we consumed 27 billion barrels of oil a year, but the oil industry discovered only three billion barrels a year. So only one barrel was replaced for every nine we used." - Magoon Report for U.S. Geological Survey

"According to our projections in the World Energy Outlook, even if we were to assume, and this is very important, even if we were to assume the next 20 years global oil demand growth was flat, no growth at all, in order to compensate the decline in the existing fields we have to increase the production about 45m bpd just to stay where we are in 20 years, which means to find and develop 4 new Saudi Arabias, and this is a major challenge." - Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency

“This is our view – capacity has pretty much peaked in the sense that declines equal new resources,” -Iain Reid, Head of European Oil and Gas research at Macquarie Bank

“If production does not increase in Iraq in an exponential way between now and 2015, we have a very big problem, even if Saudi Arabia meets its obligations. The figures are very simple, you do not need to be an expert. It is enough to know how to do a subtraction. China will grow very quickly, India also, and even Saudi Arabia projections of the 3 Mb/day will not be enough to meet the rise of Chinese demand.” - Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency