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Sir Richard Branson: "Looming global oil crunch wil prove worse than credit crunch."
- Thread starter Plot Device
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A problem cannot be solved until someone recognizes it as a problem and works on a solution. To sit there and say, "Yeah, we'll address that problem when it happens" is a ridiculously irresponsible attitude.
Today, in Alberta, they are extracting oil from the tar sands. But it is expensive and much more difficult than the standard methods. And the only reason it is worth doing is because the price of oil has risen. There was a time when people in the oil business said it just wasn't cost effective and the price of oil will never rise high enough to make it worth while. Well, guess what...
The best, quickest and easiest method of slowing this growing problem and buying more time is to pass regulations setting goals to demand that cars and trucks attain certain gas mileage efficiencies. It was done in the '70's over objections from the car companies that such goals were unobtainable. Exempt from those regulations were trucks. Well, it's time to demand that requirements for mileage efficiencies also includes trucks.
Tax deductions and tax incentives to promote people driving around in great big SUV should also be done away with. And SUV's, being trucks, should no longer be exempt from the demands for mileage efficiencies.
For anyone who has faith in technology to solve these problems, the technological advances for improving gas mileage on trucks and SUV's are quickly available and easily adaptable and much of it already exists. All that is really needed for these changes to occur immediately is the political will.
Today, in Alberta, they are extracting oil from the tar sands. But it is expensive and much more difficult than the standard methods. And the only reason it is worth doing is because the price of oil has risen. There was a time when people in the oil business said it just wasn't cost effective and the price of oil will never rise high enough to make it worth while. Well, guess what...
The best, quickest and easiest method of slowing this growing problem and buying more time is to pass regulations setting goals to demand that cars and trucks attain certain gas mileage efficiencies. It was done in the '70's over objections from the car companies that such goals were unobtainable. Exempt from those regulations were trucks. Well, it's time to demand that requirements for mileage efficiencies also includes trucks.
Tax deductions and tax incentives to promote people driving around in great big SUV should also be done away with. And SUV's, being trucks, should no longer be exempt from the demands for mileage efficiencies.
For anyone who has faith in technology to solve these problems, the technological advances for improving gas mileage on trucks and SUV's are quickly available and easily adaptable and much of it already exists. All that is really needed for these changes to occur immediately is the political will.
Yes. See the documentary "Who Killed The Electric Car". It might turn you into a bit of a conspiracy theorist.
There are people in the industry who are smarter than SPMiller who agree with him. THOSE people know. They just plain know. And that's the whole point I am trying to make here.
There's a small army of geologists -- several of whom worked for the oil companies and who deliberately kept their mouths shut for years and waited until AFTER they had retired and got their hands on their pensions-- who swear by the numbers in their calculators that we are hitting peak right now. And they also know that we have no alernatives, and there's no alternatives on the horizon that'll come on line in a reasonable number of years (like maybe 5 years). We're 30 years away from a reasonable alternaive, and 30 years will be too late to salvage our current lifestyle.
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I find that hard to believe.
Maybe they're right. Maybe they're not.
Once upon a time, there was NO WAY many things could ever be done. No way. It just wasn't possible.
Now, this is not to say that everything is possible. Certainly, that's not the case. But finding a way to make shale oil commercially viable doesn't strike me as totally impossible, as amatter of course. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it will never happen. Or maybe it won't matter, because a substitute source of energy will become a better alternative.
Regardless, you and I are likely to be dead and buried before the question is fully resolved, imo. And--again imo--we'll still have no problem relying on gasoline, 'til our final days.
Of course it can become commercially viable. The way that is most likely to happen, by far, is that an increasing scarcity of "conventional" petroleum drives the market price to the point where shale oil becomes economically competitive. But the obvious tradeoff then is that everybody will be paying a lot more for that barrel of oil, regardless of its origin. Right now, the major oil producing companies aren't exactly falling all over themselves to push shale oil recovery technologies; they are dabbling with it, but not committing big resources in that direction.
caw
Seen it, I already am one.
I think we're a lot closer than 30 years, but it would take a lot of effort and pain to do it. If we started today using the patents and technologies and such that have already been discovered, I think they could give us enough cushion to make a new system. Problem is they won't be pulling out the cushion until we need the big fix.
I honestly believe the oil companies and politicians patsying for them would rather see our society go to the edge of collapse before they'd do anything. And I mean the edge, if not too late that we're already sliding down.
All that being said if we do collapse I could hope that within 50 years we could pull ourselves back out of the trenches and end up better for it. I don't believe we'll go back to wearing leather loin cloths and hunting with spears and stay there. But at the same time we wouldn't be the first ones to collapse.
I don't know about your final days, but as for my own final days, I'm in my early 40's. Gasoline will likely become an impossible luxury within the next 12 years (when I hit my 50's) likely sooner.
Will I die in my 50's?? Considering that the current MO for entire medical industry and its close cousin the pharmaceutical industry are both desperately reliant upon plentiful petroleum, I'd say I probably will die before my 50's are anywhere near being over.
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Not only that but air travel will become the exclusive domain of the military and the very very rich -- right up there with booking a seat on the space shuttle. And I kinda doubt the space program will be able to hang on for very long either. Our species may never get back into space again after the year 2030 (aside from extra-terrestrial assistance).
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Branson is no geologist or petroleum or reservoir engineer. He's a salesman (a very good one) and that's all he is.
The Saudis still have several million barrels of oil per day capacity sitting idle and waiting for demand to increase (or waiting for the Ghawar Field to start puttering out). Matt Simmons would suggest that the Saudis built all this extra capacity to drum up the idea that they won't run out of oil, but the Saudis aren't stupid and would invest billions of dollars in a giant ruse. They hire the best and the brightest in the world to go work for them in exploiting their oil and pay them obscene amounts of money to do so.
Further, Iraq is about to get back into the oil producing game in a big way, with the same low-cost, highly prolific fields found elsewhere in the Middle East.
Companies are still making big finds in deepwater Gulf of Mexico, offshore Brazil, and offshore eastern Africa.
Then there are the tar sands of Canada and even more tar sands to be found in Venezuela.
Liquids production from natural gas production is at record high levels and not showing any signs of slowing.
EOG is now even trying to get light oil out of shale in the Barnett like what they're doing with shale gas.
There is alot of oil in this world.
Now, I'm not saying that we're not going to peak at some point. Many of these new deepwater fields companies are finding take considerable time to come onstream just because they're so difficult to develop. Also, politics and energy nationalism can interfere in development. But this "our doom is imminent!" reads like panicky fear mongering. There's plenty of capacity probably for the next ten years and maybe even for more years beyond that. After that, expect a plateau and not a peak because of those long timelines.
The other side of the equation, of course, is demand outstripping supply growth. Well, there's been much talk about peak demand having been reached in the western world. The oil shock and high energy prices drove people to change their consumption. Further, in a world where carbon emissions will likely be regulated to some degree, expect less oil to get burned. The problem will likely fall into the laps of China and India and other developing nations if they can't kick the oil habit.
Finally, I've never bought this return-on-energy (ROE) stuff. Sure, the tar sands take a lot of energy to turn into oil. It may be wasteful but is that going to stop development? No. Because they use an inexpensive fuel (natural gas) to make tar into oil -- hypothetically, if you use a very cheap fuel to make an expensive fuel, you can still make a big profit even if you expend far more energy in the process than what is in the end product. Oil is currently trading at about 4 times the energy equivalent price of natural gas in North America. Take a wild stab at what they're going to do.
What matters is return on investment and energy in is only a part of the cost. When it's too expensive to develop something, they'll stop, not when energy in surpasses energy out.
The Saudis still have several million barrels of oil per day capacity sitting idle and waiting for demand to increase (or waiting for the Ghawar Field to start puttering out). Matt Simmons would suggest that the Saudis built all this extra capacity to drum up the idea that they won't run out of oil, but the Saudis aren't stupid and would invest billions of dollars in a giant ruse. They hire the best and the brightest in the world to go work for them in exploiting their oil and pay them obscene amounts of money to do so.
Further, Iraq is about to get back into the oil producing game in a big way, with the same low-cost, highly prolific fields found elsewhere in the Middle East.
Companies are still making big finds in deepwater Gulf of Mexico, offshore Brazil, and offshore eastern Africa.
Then there are the tar sands of Canada and even more tar sands to be found in Venezuela.
Liquids production from natural gas production is at record high levels and not showing any signs of slowing.
EOG is now even trying to get light oil out of shale in the Barnett like what they're doing with shale gas.
There is alot of oil in this world.
Now, I'm not saying that we're not going to peak at some point. Many of these new deepwater fields companies are finding take considerable time to come onstream just because they're so difficult to develop. Also, politics and energy nationalism can interfere in development. But this "our doom is imminent!" reads like panicky fear mongering. There's plenty of capacity probably for the next ten years and maybe even for more years beyond that. After that, expect a plateau and not a peak because of those long timelines.
The other side of the equation, of course, is demand outstripping supply growth. Well, there's been much talk about peak demand having been reached in the western world. The oil shock and high energy prices drove people to change their consumption. Further, in a world where carbon emissions will likely be regulated to some degree, expect less oil to get burned. The problem will likely fall into the laps of China and India and other developing nations if they can't kick the oil habit.
Finally, I've never bought this return-on-energy (ROE) stuff. Sure, the tar sands take a lot of energy to turn into oil. It may be wasteful but is that going to stop development? No. Because they use an inexpensive fuel (natural gas) to make tar into oil -- hypothetically, if you use a very cheap fuel to make an expensive fuel, you can still make a big profit even if you expend far more energy in the process than what is in the end product. Oil is currently trading at about 4 times the energy equivalent price of natural gas in North America. Take a wild stab at what they're going to do.
What matters is return on investment and energy in is only a part of the cost. When it's too expensive to develop something, they'll stop, not when energy in surpasses energy out.
But, see, it sells more books and newspapers and movies when you loudly announce the world comes to an end.
The world coming to an end is like the ultimate combination of free publicity AND free political power COMBINED!
Just look what it did for Al Gore!
The world coming to an end is like the ultimate combination of free publicity AND free political power COMBINED!
Just look what it did for Al Gore!
Well, I pride myself on being a cynic, but even I can't buy into the gloom and doom of Plot Device's posts. Greed, the very thing that has held alternative energy technology back, will make it a reality when cheap oil begins to run out. It will reach a point where alternative energy will make short term economic sense (because none of these people think in long terms). Then we'll see an explosion of technology, on par with the Space Race of the 1960s or the massive leaps in computer and related technologies in the 1990s and 2000s. I'm in my early 20s and kind of hope it happens in my lifetime, because it will be exciting to watch (though I'm sure there will be some painful bumps along the way).
When my mother was a child, many people believed the world would be destroyed by a nuclear war before 1980. This was a perfectly reasonable thought at that time, and shared by millions of well-informed and intelligent people. But the war never happened. Now I'm communicating this little parable through a technology that hadn't even been imagined in 1960, let alone invented. There will always be some 'doomsday' scenario hanging over modern civilization. The intelligence that enabled us to build all our modern wonders also enables us to imagine scenarios in which it will be destroyed. But it's not in human nature to sit back and let our civilization be destroyed. Running out of oil is something we can easily overcome by tapping into the abundant alternatives all around us, and when the time is right that's exactly what we will do.
If civilization as we do know it really does end in my lifetime, my money is on plague as the culprit. Or super-volcanoes. *eyes Yellowstone nervously*
When my mother was a child, many people believed the world would be destroyed by a nuclear war before 1980. This was a perfectly reasonable thought at that time, and shared by millions of well-informed and intelligent people. But the war never happened. Now I'm communicating this little parable through a technology that hadn't even been imagined in 1960, let alone invented. There will always be some 'doomsday' scenario hanging over modern civilization. The intelligence that enabled us to build all our modern wonders also enables us to imagine scenarios in which it will be destroyed. But it's not in human nature to sit back and let our civilization be destroyed. Running out of oil is something we can easily overcome by tapping into the abundant alternatives all around us, and when the time is right that's exactly what we will do.
If civilization as we do know it really does end in my lifetime, my money is on plague as the culprit. Or super-volcanoes. *eyes Yellowstone nervously*
Nope, not waiting to be found. We know exactly where those tar sands in Venezuela are. I worked a project in industrial oil geology on those Venezuela tar sands twenty years ago (Hablo y leo español). The problem purely is one of economically viable production.
But, before you exult, what that means is, the price of oil has to rise to the point where the economics work. And that means, rise a hell of a lot from the current price of oil. Which will most definitely affect global economics, big time.
caw
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And I need to restate that we have this gigantic ball of nuclear plasma burning overhead nigh on constantly.
Tapping even a small percentage of the sun's energy would power every thing we ever built for millions of years.
Right now, oil is better than solar power in term of 'bang for your buck'. But that's already starting to change.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/tobacco-plants-solar-cells.html
I linked that story just cause I thought it was really neat.
Tapping even a small percentage of the sun's energy would power every thing we ever built for millions of years.
Right now, oil is better than solar power in term of 'bang for your buck'. But that's already starting to change.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/tobacco-plants-solar-cells.html
I linked that story just cause I thought it was really neat.
No. You said "half." And my answer was a resounding "yes" to your assessment of "half."
Peak Oil: The point in time where the planet's remaining oil reserves get depleted to roughly half their original level.
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I don't disagree.
But it also hindered development during the National Energy Program.
It's a sword that can cut both ways.
And I'll agree with this too. But there's a flip side to that coin: there's the price of oil and then's there's the supply cost. The former rises to drive development. The latter falls to drive development.
The tar sands of Alberta were, for a long time by many people, considered too expensive to exploit, but costs came down to reasonable levels where many projects are viable from $35 to 65/barrel.
Now there's an even greater resource: the Grosmont bitumen play, which is the bitumen stuck in the carbonates under the oil sands (they're separated by an unconformity). People thought that it would be too expensive too, but costs have been coming down there as well, although it is not yet economic.
The problem/boon is that engineers tend to be quite bright folks who know how to turn the unprofitable into profitable ventures.