Just to let you know, crazy predictions aren’t limited only to the Peak Oilers side. 
$10/barrel? I want what he’s smoking…
At the risk of awakening a zombie that should stay as dead as the idea of peak oil , there has been some discussion of how much oil cost to produce. The link attached has some cool graphs on breakeven price for some of the world big oil production projects
Some good info there .
What does this mean? Surely you don’t dispute that the all-time oil production graph has to have a peak? The stuff isn’t infinite.
Agree it is limited , however we do keep finding new new resources and the world continues to improve in usage efficiency and alternate (additional?) energy sources. I tend to equate " peak oil" with " omg to world is about to end". So may I adjust my somewhat flippant comment to be " as dead as the idea that changes in oil production rates and costs will lead to the end of civilization "?
Let’s assume that oil has run out and solar, nuclear etc hasn’t had time to catch up to fill the gap. How difficult would it be to return to a world like in 1700 or 1800? Those guys were used to living like that, but what would the learning curve be like for modern-day man?
It’s not that there is a peak to the production curve… most graphs have a “peak” - peak population, peak movie grosses, peak uranium production, that night that I was drunker than any time in my life, etc. So, “peak oil” (small letters) is something that will inevitably occur or may have occurred or will occur 40 years in the future or whatever, is inherent within the fact that production occurs over time and is dependent upon variables other than mere supply.
What precambrianmollusc is referencing is “Peak Oil” (cap letters), the belief that civilization will collapse without ever-increasing amounts of oil being produced, that there are no substitutions (either technological or economic or resource), that the decline of oil production (both in toto and per capita) will inevitably cause a lowering standard of living, leading to civil unrest, leading to an even lower standard of living, leading to more civil unrest, etc etc to the point of the collapse of modern industrial civilization.
Point out that this thesis isn’t proven in real world examples and this is ignored. For example, the US consumed18.8 million barrels of oil daily in 1978 (click on the Excel chart to the right of the page), a figure it didn’t exceed until 1998 and matches the 2013 figures. Has the US been collapsing since 1978? Not in the world I live in.
Mention alternatives or substitutions and they are ignored or worse, argued using 10+ year old data (Ralfy’s insistence on using Spain’s decade+ old experiment in solar power being a prime example.)
Mention basic economics (for example, the higher the price of oil the more oil there is to be extracted) and it is ignored or completely misunderstood.
Mention technological advances such as hybrid vehicles, improved mileage rates, non-petroleum based lubricants, etc, and these are denied as pipe dreams, incapable of solving the problem. Hell, even computer-driven cars will cut down on oil use as you won’t have impatient assholes revving their engines at stop lights and then tearing out of the lane like a bat out of hell.
This is what he meant by “Peak Oil”, not production peaks.
Energy information Administration Official Energy Statistics from the US government
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/forecasting.html
The above report indicates that the US will be using primarily oil as our main energy source through 2030.
The world’s total declared reserves are 1,317,400,000,000 barrels (January 2007).
World oil consumption 2005 is 80,290,000 barrels per day or 29,305,850,000 per year
https://www.cia.gov/library/publication … 4rank.html
Dividing annual consumption into total reserves gives us ??? years of oil supply at the current consumption rate.
That was twelve (12) years ago, we are not changing our habits and this spells doom for us all.
Do you have any suggestions–?
Your grandchildren will see this end
And Then Again we could put our heads together and come up with a solution.
One suggestion could be; If we combined all the known atomic stuff to power electric generators wouldn’t that be the final solution for our energy needs> ?
Just asking
I think batteries is another way to store and use the energy we need
what say you-?
One more question:
Did it take more energy to refine the uranium used for atomic bombs than the energy released by the atomic bomb-?
Just asking
The EIA forecasts 2015 WTI crude prices to be $94.56. You’re gonna need a new cite.
The irony is that what you presented supports peak oil. That is, higher production costs and resorting to shale oil.
Meanwhile,
The problem isn’t finding new resources but the cost of getting them. The irony is that the article you shared actually proves peak oil and shows that there is no improvement in efficiency at all. The fact that we are now resorting to shale oil, and can only do at higher prices, is the most significant proof of that.
Too late. Conventional production peaked back in 2005. Per capita global production peaked in 1979. Total oil and gas production will not peak only given conditions explained in my previous posts. That is highly unlikely.
This might help, and it brings in more than just oil production:
Of course, and that’s because of
As shown in my previous posts, the results presented are not ten years old. And Spain is a very good example, unless one assumes that much of the global economy, which consists of many countries much poorer than Spain, can come up with more advanced systems. So much for that fantasy.
Except that even with a tripling of oil prices conventional production barely rose, and the world resorted to shale oil. So much for basic economics.
Except that in global capitalist systems, efficiency leads to more consumption. So much for that theory.
Peak oil refers to production peaking:
It’s best to look at the cost of extracting oil instead of looking at reserves. That’s based on the assumption that not all oil can be extracted at the same energy cost (which means prices have to go up) but the global economy has a threshold for oil price (which means prices have to go down), while the same global economy can only be sustained through increasing amounts of cheap energy and material resources. Otherwise, limits to growth take place:
Given such, using various energy sources is inevitable. Maintaining the same industrialized civilization is highly unlikely.
Ralfy, falling rig counts for shale drilling are a direct result of increases in conventional production in OPEC countries. It isn’t as if the oil beneath those idled rigs will never be drilled. On the contrary, they represent a huge amount of oil that can be pumped on short notice should prices rebound, see here.
There isn’t a supply crunch. These rigs are being idled because of a glut.
Ralfy, it is slightly ridiculous to revive a zombie thread and base your claims on “my previous posts”. Why don’t you provide some fresh data to show that your Spain solar data is NOT 10 years old? Because I say it is (BP Solar, headquartered in Madrid and who installed much of Spain’s capacity, existed from 1981-2011, see below where solar prices have gone since the end of BP solar). Put that in the context of Top Chinese Manufacturers Will Produce Solar Panels for 42 Cents per Watt in 2015
For your convenience, here is a chart summarizing the data. These are the all-in per-watt costs of installed solar systems over time:
2009…$1.29
2010…$1.08
2011…$0.90
2012…$0.59
2013…$0.48
2014…$0.47
2015…$0.42
Prices circa 2003, when Spain was installing the bulk of their systems, were still higher than 2009 prices; prices in the future are projected to fall still further. Can’t you see that the system costs for Spain 10+ years ago simply don’t belong in the same conversation as the cost of systems today? It isn’t clear how I could walk you through it any more carefully, but look at one more chart, projected savings for switching to solar systems in the United States.
The obvious conclusion is that solar is set to crowd out other forms of power generation because of its current and growing cost advantage. ‘Poor countries’ don’t develop their own systems from scratch, but rather buy them from international suppliers in China, the US, and elsewhere, for these prices.
Note : those costs are the costs of the raw panels. Inverters are about $0.50/watt as of 5/31/2015 (I just checked 10 minutes ago on certain sites). Installation hardware also costs you, per panel. And, realistically, labor also adds a significant chunk of the cost. For rural locations where very large solar arrays can be constructed, the labor and mounting hardware can be a lot cheaper.
So, installed cost is still at least 2 bucks a watt. Allegedly, if the actual installed costs (including everything) were less than 1 buck a watt, solar would beat everything else, at least for daytime power generation.
Ok. Still, my point stands- one can’t compare Spain’s experience with today’s solar market. Costs have dropped dramatically, not to mention that much of Spain’s solar capacity takes the form of large-scale concentrated solar, which hasn’t kept up with photovoltaics on price.
I think if fossil fuels’ externalized costs were factored in, solar would be the leader today.
Possibly, yes. Wind might do better because wind has the advantage of blowing at night and so you need less storage if you do massive scale wind deployments, with turbines spread over a large geographic area to minimize the chance of the wind not blowing everywhere.
Still beating that Peak Oil drum, ehe? 
Meanwhile, looking at your link it once again doesn’t say what you seem to think it does. As other posters noted, the reason rigs in west Texas have been idled was do to a glut of oil on the market by OPEC. I see you got back into the thread before the end of the world though, so keep us abreast of our imminent doom as we move towards the end of 2015 and into 2016…I’m sure it’s right around the corner…any time now…
Did you notice on the second graph that all the high priced projects are not shale oil but fall into your bizarre definition of ’ conventional’ oil.