"Oil is NOT a fossil fuel"

[Gary Allan]

Quote:
It does now, why wouldn't it in the future? The free market has lead to the exponential growth in human well being in the last 225 years, I see no reason for it to do any different in the future...if allowed to operate.


That exponential growth was facilitated by vast untapped natural resources by a relatively low population in its infancy. Natural resets have occurred such as plagues, endless wars, and famines. Many of these things have been eliminated or radically reduced in impact. Infectious diseases have had a hard time culling the herd and, as you pointed out, the food supply has swelled populations.

For the past 150 years most of the exponential growth has been facilitated by the highly compressed energy content of fossil fuels. There you get the utility of millions of years of energy formation and expend it in an incredibly compressed manner.

Can you think of anything that can replace millions of years of "free work" in alternatives?

Do you believe in magic? Name me ONE magic process?

Are you suggesting that we should have faith in ingenuity creating something as foolish as "perpetual motion"?

What's going to be pulled out of our collective behinds to "replace" fossil fuels?

Yes, there will be alternatives developed as their costs comes into line with market conditions, but this still has some "assumption" (in your tone) that it will maintain the status quo ..which is more or less "wishful thinking".

 

[Whitewolf]

Having had some conversations with Dr Kenney I already believed this to be correct several years ago and have posted to that effect in the past.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: Tempest
Quote:
"The market" will provide for all of your needs.

It does now, why wouldn't it in the future? The free market has lead to the exponential growth in human well being in the last 225 years, I see no reason for it to do any different in the future...if allowed to operate.

The market is the reason we have this website, isles of different types of oil to talk about, and so much food that child "obesity" is the problem of the day rather than kids starving to death as is common in other parts of the world.
None of this should be the case with your logic.

Do you think we should be using less oil than we are currently using in order to put off this doomsday scenario that you profess?


Tempest, the market will always balance itself, it is the producers and the consumers that have to change accordingly. You are a consumer, and don't be surprised that one day you are priced out of the market.

Regarding to things will always be growing in the positive direction, just look at stock market crash and all the obsoleted technologies, civilization lost (Mayan), abandoned cities, ruins, etc. Yeah, that's also market economy.

Not really my concern, because like I say the world always correct itself, it is the people that have to worry for themselves by migrating somewhere, abandon inefficient locations/technologies/people, etc. Don't be surprised that if high density cities will revive because of transportation cost increase and extreme climate like desert and arctic becomes where they used to be thousands of years ago (that include Las Vegas) due to heating/cooling cost.

 

[Shannow]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Don't be surprised that if high density cities will revive because of transportation cost increase and extreme climate like desert and arctic becomes where they used to be thousands of years ago (that include Las Vegas) due to heating/cooling cost.


Panda, with 5 times as many calories being used in fossil fuels than make it to an american table, hyper dense cities aren't sustainable.

 

[Gary Allan]

Where's Oil Pants? He may suggest migration back to the Amish community.

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: Shannow
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Don't be surprised that if high density cities will revive because of transportation cost increase and extreme climate like desert and arctic becomes where they used to be thousands of years ago (that include Las Vegas) due to heating/cooling cost.


Panda, with 5 times as many calories being used in fossil fuels than make it to an american table, hyper dense cities aren't sustainable.


Everyone move to New Zealand!

 

[Whitewolf]

Originally Posted By: mechanicx
I'm not sold on the idea that petroleum is a fossil fuel either. I think it is possible the earth is replacing it constantly. But I think it is possible to deplete the oil fields quicker than they are being refilled. There probably is unlimited oil but it is inacessible or at least inacessible at low cost. There's plenty of oil offshore but finding and getting it may not be cost effective.


I agree with that. It is and has been for some time in the interests of oil companies and others to perpetuate the belief that oil is running out when according to many well qualified people it is not.

 

[MarkC]

Originally Posted By: Whitewolf
Originally Posted By: mechanicx
I'm not sold on the idea that petroleum is a fossil fuel either. I think it is possible the earth is replacing it constantly. But I think it is possible to deplete the oil fields quicker than they are being refilled. There probably is unlimited oil but it is inacessible or at least inacessible at low cost. There's plenty of oil offshore but finding and getting it may not be cost effective.


I agree with that. It is and has been for some time in the interests of oil companies and others to perpetuate the belief that oil is running out when according to many well qualified people it is not.

If so, we have to ask ourselves the question: Where is it all?

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: MarkC
Originally Posted By: Whitewolf


I agree with that. It is and has been for some time in the interests of oil companies and others to perpetuate the belief that oil is running out when according to many well qualified people it is not.

If so, we have to ask ourselves the question: Where is it all?


Somewhere that cost $70 / barrel to discover and drill.

 

[Gary Allan]

Originally Posted By: Whitewolf
Originally Posted By: mechanicx
I'm not sold on the idea that petroleum is a fossil fuel either. I think it is possible the earth is replacing it constantly. But I think it is possible to deplete the oil fields quicker than they are being refilled. There probably is unlimited oil but it is inacessible or at least inacessible at low cost. There's plenty of oil offshore but finding and getting it may not be cost effective.


I agree with that. It is and has been for some time in the interests of oil companies and others to perpetuate the belief that oil is running out when according to many well qualified people it is not.


"Cheap oil" is quickly coming to an end. This is widely accepted. The problem arises when no one realizes the tremendous dependency our complex and diversified civilization has upon the "cheap" part of it.

..but there is absolutely no expectancy of "expensive oil" having any more longevity in availability in the discovery. There are also the liabilities of anything that puts an artificial phase shift into "book to bill" on any advantage:liability scenario.

 

[Augustus]

Quote:

"Cheap oil" is quickly coming to an end. This is widely accepted. The problem arises when no one realizes the tremendous dependency our complex and diversified civilization has upon the "cheap" part of it.

There is also another entity that has "tremendous dependency" on oil, expensive oil.

Ever heard of Lindsey Williams? Here's his book The Energy Non Crisis on line, with a link to YouTube. He explains how domestic pipelines were shut down during the 70's oil crisis, the restrictions placed on Oil Companies during the initial development of the North Slope, in the 70's - basically why U.S. Domestic Production has waned.

(Hopefully, not being political here.)

Take it or leave it. I think it's interesting.
Free Speech in a Free Market.

 

[Gary Allan]

Again, the difference between hording and conserving is just a few years of population growth and expanding economies where EVER increasing consumption is mandated to pay the bills.

That is, even if true (some people must have forgotten the period where gas was under $1/gallon in the 90's) it's not like you're not just prolonging the inevitable.

No one here REALLY thinks that the stuff just oozes out of the ground as fast as you want ..as much as you want ..for as long as you want, do they?

 

[Tempest]

Originally Posted By: MarkC

If so, we have to ask ourselves the question: Where is it all?

Haven't reserves gone up by 31% in the last few years?

 

[mechtech2]

If reserves went up about 30%, what does that really mean?
We have another month or two?

 

[PandaBear]

Originally Posted By: mechtech2
If reserves went up about 30%, what does that really mean?
We have another month or two?


It means we overpaid to buy more reserves during the expensive time, and the oil companies made out like a bandit.

 

[MarkC]

You can't really think you can throw out a number without a link to some data, can you?

"Turning to oil, the report shows that discoveries -- while increasing for the third consecutive year -- failed to outpace production. Proved oil reserves at the end of 2008 were 19.1 billion barrels, compared to 21.3 billion barrels at the end of 2007, a 10 percent drop. Production was 1.7 billion barrels, and total discoveries were 1.1 billion barrels."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=natural-gas-reserves-go-u

I believe what was up were US oil exports.
But even if what you refer to as "reserves" were up, it merely means that "they" are aware of more oil than "they" previously were, not that more oil is being mysteriously produced by the Earth.
You tend to make some pretty illogical leaps sometimes, don't you?
Figure out that dinosaur fossil thing yet?

 

[Tempest]

Quote:
Figure out that dinosaur fossil thing yet?

Have you figured out how organic hydrocarbons, include a direct oil precursor, exist in space? And how they are pumping oil out of granite in Vietnam and the hydrocarbons at the Lost City? You keep ignoring this.

The article I cited about proven oil reserves clearly states:
Quote:
New estimates of world’s oil reserves total 1.34 trillion barrels, up 10.5 billion barrels from a year ago, according to the December 22 edition of the Oil & Gas Journal. The latest estimates of gas reserves total 6.254 quadrillion cubic feet, up 68.67 trillion cubic feet from 2007.

From the article that YOU posted:
Quote:
Proved natural gas reserves at the end of last year were 244.7 trillion cubic feet (tcf), the highest level since EIA began reporting them in 1977. New discoveries outpaced production to provide a nearly 3 percent overall increase in reserves over the previous year.

AND that article is ONLY for US reserves, NOT global reserves. What was that you were saying about illogical leaps??

In any case, I've never stated that oil will last forever. In fact, I've stated otherwise.

 

[severach]

It doesn't matter where it comes from. Jupiter has a good supply for plenty of exponential growth. If we can't get it, it isn't there.

Gary and mechtech2 know their math. It's remedial time for the rest of you.

Chris Martenson: The Crash Course.

Lindsey may not understand how valuable it is to be the last kid on the block with oil.

 

[Tempest]

Quote:
Apocalypse Yesterday

Predictions of imminent catastrophic depletion are almost as old as the oil industry. An 1855 advertisement for Kier’s Rock Oil, a patent medicine whose key ingredient was petroleum bubbling up from salt wells near Pittsburgh, urged customers to buy soon before “this wonderful product is depleted from Nature’s laboratory.” The ad appeared four years before Pennsylvania’s first oil well was drilled. In 1919 David White of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicted that world oil production would peak in nine years. And in 1943 the Standard Oil geologist Wallace Pratt calculated that the world would ultimately produce 600 billion barrels of oil. (In fact, more than 1 trillion barrels of oil had been pumped by 2006.)

During the 1970s, the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth projected that, assuming consumption remained flat, all known oil reserves would be entirely consumed in just 31 years. With exponential growth in consumption, it added, all the known oil reserves would be consumed in 20 years. These dour predictions gained credibility when the Arab oil crisis of 1973 quadrupled prices from $3 to $12 per barrel (from $16 to $48 in 2006 dollars) and when the Iranian oil crisis more than doubled oil prices from $14 per barrel in 1978 to $35 per barrel by 1981 (from $45 to $98 in 2006 dollars).

In response, the federal government imposed price controls on oil and gas in the 1970s and established fuel economy standards to encourage the sale of more efficient automobiles. The sense of doom did not dissolve. In 1979 Energy Secretary Schlesinger proclaimed, “The energy future is bleak and is likely to grow bleaker in the decade ahead.” The Global 2000 Report to President Carter, issued in 1980, predicted that the price of oil would rise by 50 percent, reaching $100 per barrel by 2000.

http://reason.com/archives/2006/05/05/peak-oil-panic/
Been predicted by "experts" many times in the past.

And it would help if your link went to something regarding oil.

 

[crinkles]

well its in their interest to make us think that higher prices are justified.

the truth is, none of us will ever truly know and none of us really have the means to change it.

it sucks.