Perhaps all these high-powered scientists could try speaking to those who actually extract the oil? My brother’s in the oil industry and it’s his job to determine how much oil is in a field. He has stated many times that there is plenty of oil. Further, there are still many unexplored areas. Where there is a problem is in the extraction technology: for instance, he says that some of the Saudis have been concentrating on short term gain and this is leading to increased extraction of water rather than oil in some wells, whereas a different approach would have resulted in a lesser flow but for longer. At some point we may have to leave the Saudi fields for a decade or four before returning.
Did you look at any of those links? One professor of physics does not consitute the entire complement of expertise on the subject. Deffeyes is a geologist, so are Colin Campbell, Walter Youngquist; others at that site (www.hubbertpeak.com) seem to have reliable credentials in the field, not least M. King Hubbert, the geophysicist who first predicted that US oil production would peak in the 1970s, which it did. And that’s just one site. Also, pardon my parochialism (I’m not being sarcastic, I realize it’s a personal thing), but my husband is a marine geophysicist and I have some respect for his opinion on the subject.
I’m not trying to be Chicken Little. The point isn’t OMG, the END OF THE WERLD!!! Just that people have an expectation that things are going to continue as they have. They aren’t. We in America are going to feel it more than the rest of the world, because we count on lots of cheap oil as a matter of course. I believe we’re going to have to make some drastic adjustments, and sooner than we may imagine. Windpower’s lovely, I’m sure, but it takes a lot of land to produce comparatively little energy, and it’s unreliable. That doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t use it when we can. But we need to be aware it’s not going to be anything like a replacement for what we’ve got. And neither are any of the other alternatives. Energy sources decreasing. Demand for energy increasing.
It seems to me that you’re saying that coal will be used to supplant oil for electrical generation in the US when the price of oil gets too high, right? Otherwise your statement does not quite scan for me.
OK, just so I don’t cherry-pick here, and because I do have time this morning to participate.
Well, I’m not excited, at all. Every 6 months like clockwork a new “huge advance in PV cell efficiency” is announced, and yet nothing ever seems to happen - mainly because the economic and economies of scale do not exist.
Because the average, and even the above-average American, is an idiot who votes based on who can get their gas prices down.
Of what?
See GD or the Pit. This does not have a factual answer IMO.
That’s true of any mineral resource to the point of being pedantic.
Nearly ALL energy companies have since about 2001. There is not a causal link here.
I don’t believe in the “hydrogen economy”.
More interesting statements along the lines of your oil and coal one. You maybe should search for me screaming at people over the last 5 years on here, in threads too numerous to link, that oil makes up only a very, very tiny portion of total US electrical generation. And even that 1-3% which is provided is often “optional” generation anyhow. When you talk about the US, and many Western countries, do not mix the problem of oil with electrical generation.
You’re asking do I know? Yes, I’d say I have a teensy amount of professional experience in that area, yes.
They may be right, but then again claims of the “end of oil is now” have been made since 1973, by lots of people with alphabet soups after their names.
You see, you said this earlier, and I disagree. They’re in the business of making money, and you don’t make money by overestimating your resources. You may if you’re trying to inflate your stock price short or medium term, perhaps, but other than that, no, and the truth always comes out. The companies I deal with know pretty much what is out there, and every one of them knows that everything is going one way - resources are getting more expensive every week, prospects fewer, and alternatives more attractive.
One thing I get hired to do is to research alternatives for dwindling resources, and I have more work than I know what to do with lately. Whether it’s looking at poorer coal now that the low-hanging fruit is taken, or looking at biomass/opportunity fuels, efficiency improvements, etc - everyone I work with, big name energy companies - and my peers, where I find them - are busy working on this problem. I don’t know exactly what you’re seeing for rosy optimism, but the people I work with and for don’t have their fingers in their ears.
I see our situation as being one that is right near the point of no return, actually, and advocate many things which people don’t agree with to change the energy picture. I don’t think this is the forum for discussing that, however.
From my non-physical sciences point of view, I’m trying to think about this:
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Since you can not make more oil after a certain point (even including oil that is harder to get), how does that affect the market for it? In other words, does supply and demand for a limited supply function any differently than traditional markets for “makeable” goods, say, chairs or apples, etc.? (Ok, makeable isn’t a word, but I’m waiting for breakfast.)
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Are alternatives expensive because of the current lack of research into making them cheaper, or is there some law or theory about their limits? E.g., why don’t we (or some other nation) all have solar panels for near-free power?
Hamster fail? What’s that?
Supply and demand acts pretty much the same for everything.
The answer is both. To take your example of solar power, solar cells don’t yield much energy, so there’s not a lot of interest in using them, thus the price of them is fairly high, since economies of scale haven’t fully kicked in as of yet. The output of solar cells is limited by our current technology and the development of them is held back because there isn’t a great demand for them at the moment.
yes
yes. And btw, how do you quote back for a response to the response? I’d like to respond to each of the items you’ve picked out, but don’t know how.
So once the price of brontosaurus meat gets high enough it’ll start appearing on the market?
How much ya need? I know a guy that knows a guy…
My point was that supply and demand do not affect all economic situations the same. It’s possible to have a situation where the supply doesn’t exist in which case it doesn’t matter how much the demand for it is.
A search.
True, but how common is that? To use your example, how many people out there want bronto burgers? And how many of them would be willing and/or able to pony up the necessary millions (or billions) to even have a chance of making it happen?
Tuckerfan,
I’m trying to understand you position here, with evidence. So far you have simply pooh poohed (sp?) the idea of peak oil and of our running out. Your reply to there being 40 years left, “they’ve said that before” in the 50s (btw, I’d like to know who said that and how pervasive the idea was and/or how flawed the logic or methodology was. Was it Bay of Pigs type logic or real well thought out). Your reply to future technology is based on optimism of the market and areas that are not even close to (which is the very position of peak oil proponents–we need to place more emphasis and build the infrastructure today) being any sort of replacement. It seems as if you do not take into consideration the projected demand in 2025 over over 50%. Do you honestly believe we can match that?
Do you not believe there are two countervailing trends at work here, decreasing supply and increasing demand, that MUST, by the very nature of our system, cause severe economic shocks?
Do you believe we will just happen to find more and more oil?
What about the ERI ratio of ALL other energy forms that do not come close to oil if indeed we have 40 years left and, at best, 10 years of cheap oil?
Have you look at all at the alternatives on a large scale and the indemic problems associated with scale–time, materials, poltical willpower.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. Frankly, I think we could do just fine on 20-30% of our present energy usage in the U.S. I’m not saying that wouldn’t be a drastic cut with infrastructural societal changes, but I can easily see that. In other words, I do see solutions. One of them is NOT the perpetual material and financial growth mantra.
I don’t think you meant to say “yes”. I think you meant that coal will be used to create oil when the price of oil gets too high, because there are some applications for which coal can’t be used directly as a power source (e.g. internal combustion engines.) I don’t think that has anything to do with power generation.
In fact, you’ve committed a classic blunder in the direct gaze of the Coal Goddess (Una). Oil is simply not used to generate electricity in any great quantity in the U.S. The exception being Hawaii, where it is easier to transport oil in. Other than Hawaii, power is generated by coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear, and then piddly amounts of wind and stuff. Una may be along shortly to give exact numbers.
Tuckerfan, what we’re really talking about is oil not brontosaurus burgers. But what I was using my metaphor for was to demonstrate that just because there is a high demand for a product there is no guarantee that that product will be supplied. Just because we have built our entire economy around the premise that there will continue to be a steady supply of oil doesn’t mean it’s true. Nobody, not even the most optimistic of forecasters, denies the obvious fact that there is only a finite amount of oil in the world. So the first questions we need to ask is “how much is there?” and “how long will that amount last us?” But regardless of what the answers are, we also need to ask “what will we do when we’ve run out of oil?” because nobody is denying that we will run out of oil someday. Some people are saying it’ll happen in ten years; others are saying it won’t happen for another century or more. Both extremes are probably wrong. But, one more time, nobody is saying it won’t happen.
In the article I read, the idea that the world would be completely out of oil was taken seriously by the folks at Texaco. And had our technological development remained at those levels, it might very well have been true. However, technology didn’t remain static. Not only did we find more efficient ways of using oil, but we developed technologies to discover and extract oil that would have been impossible to do in the 1950s.
But they don’t have to cause severe economic shocks. Even with oil prices over two dollars a gallon in the US (which is double the price of gas ten years ago), our economy hasn’t collapsed. Admittedly it is not as energetic as it once was, but that can’t be blamed on the price of gasolene alone. If the price of oil continues to increase relatively slowly, then it is entirely possible for the economy to adapt. The danger to the economy comes when, as happened in the 1970s, the price of oil shoots up dramatically in a period of days or weeks.
Possibly. Discovering new finds is still more than an art than a science. According to everything I’ve read, most finds are made not the big oil companies who are unwilling to risk the money, but by wildcatters (i.e. small independant companies). One of the most profitable wildcatters according the Forbes article I read has had great success in discovering new finds of oil by reading historical accounts of ancient societies who found oil bubbling out of the ground, and drilling in those areas. According to him, there’s vast stretches of India that haven’t been explored for oil. I’d WAG that there’s probably similar spots in China, since they were doing the same thing.
What about it? If it is foolish to assume that oil will be produced at the same rate as it is now, isn’t equally foolish to assume that the ERI for all other energy forms will remain the same? Twenty years ago, how many people could have predicted the impact that computers would have on our daily lives? How many of them predicted things like the internet?
And it is, indeed, political will that determines much of this. At least one expert (and I posted a thread about her in MPSIMS about a year or so ago, if you care to search for it) has laid out a plan whereby we could convert to alternative fueled vehicles in a decade, using current technologies. However, political will is not static. Large numbers of the US population were opposed to the idea of the US doing anything to stop the Taliban, but that all changed after the events of one day. Gas prices continue to rise, and the population will begin to scream quite loudly that the government do something about it.
That doesn’t sound very idiotic to me. It sounds like common sense. People may be idiots but the market doesn’t care about people. It just cares about supply and demand. You speak as if there were actually someone who could make gas prices go down. As the costs of extraction goes up and supplies dwindle, prices WILL go up and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it. It will force people away from big gas guzzlers into more fuel efficent cars. If people don’t want to conserve, high prices will force them to conserve since they simply won’t be able to afford anything. Of course, it could just as easily force people to conserve in the same way that the poverty-striken conserve.
It seems to me though that in some amount of time, whether its 5 years or 5000 years, we will run out of non-renewable resources. So basically all this conservation and whatnot is simply delaying the enevitable. The question is if there is even a way to create a system that is self sustaining.
Which makes it a flawed metaphor, since the demand for bronto burgers is nowhere near the demand for oil.
Correct, but to assume that we will blithely continue down the same path as we have been in regards to oil consumption until one day nothing comes out of the pumps is equally false. Indeed, steps have been taken since the 1970s and earlier to reduce the consumption of oil. Given the unreliablity of finding unbiased numbers on the matter, I’d say that the subject of how effective those steps have been is fodder for GD and not GQ.
I agree, but just because it is a finite resource doesn’t mean that the loss of oil will be an unmitigated disaster. It’s not like the US economy collapsed when whale oil stopped being sold. If you study the US’s transition from whale oil to crude oil, you’ll see a number of parallels to our current situation. Whale oil was incredibly expensive (10 a gallon in *then* dollars), while petroleum, when it was discovered, wasn't considered a valuable substance. Eventually, Edwin Drake and others figured out that crude could make a pretty good fuel for lamps and other things. Once the oil boom began, the price of crude and it's derivatives quickly dropped. When kerosene first became available to the general public, it was selling for something like .05/a gallon in then dollars. Compare that to whale oil, selling at 200 hundred times the price (and Og knows what those figures would be like in today’s dollars).