Peak oil, truth or fiction

by diamondiiz 12 Replies latest social current

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  diamondiiz

  This speaker did a great job presenting the arguement of Peak energy and the near future. Reality of fiction, you be the judge.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8WBiTnBwSWc#!
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  leavingwt

  I've listened to about half of it. Very interesting, so far.

  He says we don't currently have an 'energy crisis', but we're facing a 'liquid fuels' crisis.
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  leavingwt

  I learned that China is planning 36 new nuclear power plants. Also, there is a uranium shortage.
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  botchtowersociety

  Recovering peak oiler here. Have a few books on the subject by Roberts, Ruppert, and Simmons.

  Undoubtedly we will eventually reach a point where we physically cannot extract any more and will have real world production decreases...but I suspect it won't be any time soon.
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  Qcmbr

  Very unlikely, there are reserves of oil that are worth recovering when the price rises. Long before we deplete the hundreds of years of tar shale oil and harvested the frozen methane on the ocean bed we'll have got space tugs pulling methane from the moons in our solar system. Renewable power sources are going to be huge in the next few decades and places blessed with waves and wind ( like the UK ) should be able to produce a large % from that. There are vast swathes of desert on the equator that can be converted to solar farms. On top of all that technology is reducing the energy costs of many processes from car engines through to pc power demands.

  And maybe ( not likely ) oil is abiotic.
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  botchtowersociety

  I learned that China is planning 36 new nuclear power plants. Also, there is a uranium shortage.

  There is plenty of thorium, plus, it isn't weaponizable and you can embed existing nuclear waste into it and "burn it up".
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  Caedes

  I haven't seen the video, but I do work in the gas and oil industry.

  I would say that the rising price of oil means that many areas that were previously uneconomical will become more and more attractive. It is unlikely that we will ever run out of oil since we can't ever get to more than 50% of the oil in a reserve. As our well technology becomes more sophisticated that figure will increase but it will only give us more expensive oil. We may be able to increase production to keep pace with consumption over the coming years but only by drilling more complicated and expensive wells.

  So if anyone is hoping that the days of cheap petrol are coming back they are sadly mistaken.
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  botchtowersociety

  What Caedes said. The days of new finds of cheap conventional oil that can be extracted for a few dollars a barrel are gone--and the fields producing it are in a production decline.
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  Caedes

  And maybe ( not likely ) oil is abiotic.

  I think "not likely" is undeplaying it slightly! I think we would have come across empirical evidence by now if it were true.
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  Qcmbr

  I won't chase the abiotic oil argument too far because I have no experience of oil geology or even how it occurs but we know hydrocarbons exist without the need for biological input deep in the earth , in space and in the laboratory. I've always thought the amount of oil was too great to be purely a biological process and I wouldn't be surprised if hydrocarbons are a largely deep earth process and that biological oil is a very small part of a very slow process.