MrQwertyasd, the hostility you displayed in your first few posts has done nothing to promote a serious discussion, here.
EVERYONE ELSE, the hostile responses to MrQwertyasd are also not conducive to a decent discussion.
EVERYONE will now back off, ignore any perceived slights that they feel that have suffered, and proceed with a genuine discussion of the topic.
[ /Moderating ]
The price of oil will continue to rise, as will the price of refined fuels. This will continue to put pressure on industry to enhance efficiency, as well as pressure to find new sources AND open up sources that were not viable economically at a lower price point. In addition, it will spur development of alternatives, which also will eventually open up and become viable economically when oil reaches a certain price point.
Eventually the price of oil will get to a level where those alternatives are viable and will compete with it and eventually supplant it, and then the price of oil as well as oil production will decline steadily as the new technology becomes wide spread.
Since you blew off the the explanations given you for this up thread, I have to ask…do you understand that the value of a dollar is different today than it was in the 80’s (i.e. do you understand what inflation is)? Serious question, no insult intended. I ask because in adjusted dollars the price of a barrel of oil hasn’t actually gone up nearly as much as you seem to think it has. It HAS gone up, obviously, and will continue to go up, especially if oil production ever does peak (before some new technology comes along to supplant oil for personal transport, which obviously would cause a peak right there since we won’t need as much oil anymore), but you need to factor in things like inflation and short term spikes due to various factors in the price of oil.
No. Eventually the price of oil will drop fairly dramatically, as the demand for it will mostly go away (I assume that the petrochemical and plastics industry will continue to need oil even after the main consumer demand for oil and refined fuels taper off). So, it will rise fairly steadily until it reaches a certain price point, then there will be a transition and we will be using something else (electric, fuel cells, Mr. Fusion, whatever). What that price point will be is certainly open to debate, but I’d guess it will be when Americans have to pay what Europeans do for gas and actually have something substantial to whine about wrt the price of gas at the pump.
But economically viable for who ? High prices may, in theory, spur investment, but who’s wages are going to keep up with those prices ?
Mine aren’t.
That’s OK, but I pointed out that those 80’s figures were during a price shock due to revolution etc - I did take the time to look it up. I didn’t use the example of prices from the 80’s because it skews things.
Look here, you can see a chart for inflation adjusted price of oil
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_Chart.asp
It does indeed show high price in the eighties - due to energy crisis. I want to see the trend due to increased cost of production underlying the price fluctuations - not because Carter fell out with OPEC, or the Iran/Iraq war
The 80’s peak for nominal monthly average price is much smaller.
The trend is also generally a steady rise over time - it looks like an exponential with a big glitch in the middle.
So I don’t think there was much of a point in bringing up the 80’s price, except as a lazy way to score a point by - knowingly - I suspect a regular tactic - throwing in a brief spike.
I don’t think summer is over just because I have one rainy day - long term trends have spikes and glitches. People hostile to a trend like to throw in a glitch - but it’s just trolling.
If wars and revolutions caused the 80’s high price, what is causing it now ?
I know it isn’t all due to increased production cost.
Hmmm, I can see the reason for a price drop, but not a dramatic one - depending on how dramatic you have in mind I guess. Then the price drop reduces the viabilty of extraction so the price goes up a bit again, then etc.
http://www.iol.co.za/business/international/global-oil-firms-face-extraction-dilemma-1.1557387
It is hard to say. It may be the case that we peaked back then- the charts suggest that may be the case. But then again, maybe the oil industry needed to re-orient itself before production can continue to increase.
It does seem to be the case that the large quantities of oil that can be had for $20 a barrel (in yesterday’s dollars) are mostly gone. Since until recently it was not profitable to drill for the expensive oil that is only profitable at $100, or $130 or what have you, the infrastructure simply was not in place to go and get that oil. It is entirely possible that, as long as oil stays above, say, $130 a barrel, supplies can grow for years to come. It might also be the case that people won’t want to keep paying that price and will be motivated to switch to alternatives, and the switch will kind of phase in during a period of generally high transportation costs.
The other possible case is that oil is simply becoming too hard to get out of the ground. We may be at a plateau from which we will start to slide down from in terms of global production. It won’t be a turning off of the tap- production will probably slide to 85 million barrels, then 84 a few years later, and so on. Even so, this would cause a massive spike in prices at a time when the alternatives are still relatively expensive. That would inaugurate the ‘mucho sucko’ era- poor (and many not-so-poor) people would be forced out of driving, prices for everything would go up, standards of living would go down, people in really poor countries would probably start to starve more than they do already. This would last until alternatives became cheap enough to pick up the slack, possibly decades or longer.
It is hard to say which situation we’re in, though high fuel prices certainly inspire a lot of interest in alternatives already. I don’t think there is an end-of-the-world scenario tied to peak oil though, unless you are very poor or live in a 3rd world country. Mostly it will be a matter of higher prices, lower standards of living, and probably increased instability in some places.
I can’t afford a bus any more, in this country 500,000 people go to food banks for handouts, 7,000 people died from cold last year, and debt is increasing for everyone. Energy price is already a big problem here and pushing standards of living down. I don’t see how the financial crisis of 2008 can be rectified on stagnant wages and energy inflation.
Rich countries like Germany that are more intelligent than the UK are probably coping much better, but sadly there is not enough maturity in the system here to cope. There’s a fight going on right now over fracking in the UK - the UK doesn’t have vast acres like the US, anyone stuck next to a fracking site is going to have problems - because North Sea peaked and is in decline.
For other places in Europe it’s much worse - you can’t pin it all on oil but it has to be a factor.
Further afield it’s got the potential for real disaster. The stress of becoming an importer country can’t be doing Egypt any good. It’s being bailed out by gulf states now but the bail outs will only get bigger as Egypt’s oil declines further, and Egypt won’t be the last country for that. It seems to me like the system is failing now, not some time in the future.
Heh, I always said the UK should be smarter. But seriously
You might want to check out Gasland 2, and share it with your friends. There is a lot of money and oil to be had from fracking, but it is increasingly looking like a one-way street to environmental disaster. If you think you have problems with expensive fuel now, wait until you don’t have any (any) water. The UK, and everybody, ought to tread carefully here. It is one thing to frack North Dakota- fracking a crowded island is a whole other thing :eek:
Indeed. Peak oil comes to UK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQkU7eM2bo0
Yeah, I thought of that, but left it out because I doubt that oil will remain the principle energy storage/transfer medium, so there’d still be a “peak oil”. That (along other cases I mentioned above) isn’t pparticularly interesting here in any case. As I see it, the possibilities range in a spectrum between two extremes:
Most discussions of peak oil focus on the first possibility. Fracking has given us a big break time-wise, to come up with alternatives. If we waste the opportunity, we could still face the first option, but more likely it pushes us considerably towards the second.
Unless, of course, it causes climactic disaster, so that peak oil is caused by “peak civilization” instead. 
I’d seen predictions from mid 2000’s for some time between 2010 and 2015, which seems to be correct, for conventional oil. Fracking has given the oil economy a shot in the arm, and pushed peak oil into the future – how far we don’t know because we don’t have a good enough track record with the new technology to predict.
That’s my second case, above. I think it’s a distinct possibility, and the most likely one. But it is possible that the demand will outstrip the supply as the supply runs out, with no new technology to replace it. More like trees and Easter Island.
“The End of Oil”, which I mentioned above, maintains that solar and wind won’t ever be sufficient, due to geographic distribution, power density, and lack of storage. If there’s a good way to store surplus energy that would help dramatically, but IIRC it still wouldn’t be sufficient. I don’t remember the specific arguments, but I found the arguments compelling when I read them. (He didn’t consider solar-from-space, that I recall: that would avoid the density problem, and part of the storage issue.)
Won’t ever be sufficient for what?