If I may, I would like to rebut or add a little objectivity to the flood of "Peak Oil" articles circulating around. When I see another crisis looming in the balance, and dramatized articles that warn of the "Dangers of Peak Oil," I must question the validity or how this will effect the world, the USA, and you and I personally, and if indeed a crisis is at hand.
As for world oil, if you ask the right questions, there are several new technologies/methods/alternatives and new finds that can easily supply enough hydrocarbon fuel for the next century or more. The latest new find in the news today, a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=PETR4:BZ">Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, said its Tupi field may contain as much as 8 billion barrels of oil and natural gas, an amount that could boost the country's reserves by 62 percent.
But you ask, how can one or two new oil fields make a difference? Wrong question, because the finding of new oil is continuous.
Over the past 33 years mankind has consumed more than three times the world's known oil reserves in 1976 - and today proven oil reserves are nearly double what they were before we started. The story with natural gas is even better - here and around the world enormous amounts of natural gas have been found. More will be found. But if you had asked in 1976 what the supply of oil would be like given the demand of 2010, you would have come up with the "Peak Oil" theory then, and we would have supposedly run out of oil decades ago; an ongoing impending crisis.
I think the key to the argument of Peak Oil, is that it not only ignores the huge amounts of oil yet to be found, but other hydrocarbon fuels as well. Even if the "theory" holds water, which I argue on its face (or in your face, as some so delightedly pointed out), we will not be out of hydrocarbons and our cars stranded on the side of the road during this century. This is the perceived "crisis" of Peak Oil that tells us that declining production and increasing demand will cause a disruption in supply.
But if we are to be limited in our driving, because of gasoline shortages, we can simply switch over to other alternatives and install a methane tank to convert over to natural gas, right now, today. Or switch to electric. How about fuel cells? Carry a kite or put up a sail. Limited driving due to shortages is the same as higher prices, and are not a crisis, unless the majority can no longer afford it.
There will never be "no oil" in your lifetime, so relax, and discern the truth for yourself when you get the facts. If you are old enough to read this, your shiny car will have plenty of gasoline for your lifetime. You may not be able to afford it, but the world cannot possibly run out. Allow me to explain.
Whenever there is GREAT change, there is also GREAT opportunity. It is impossible to be otherwise. Instead of worrying about the black hole right now, look for new opportunities... it won't take long, they're EVERYWHERE.
Now that oil is $80/bbl, it opens the door to production of different grades of oil and different kinds of oil, and new places that oil was never thought to exist.
America has developed new technologies to develop oil production from the many known shale oil fields containing a trillion barrels of oil, that has never been tapped until two years ago, because it was too expensive to extract, and the technology has not yet been improved enough to tackle it before then. But money solves a lot of problems, and $100/bbl oil would certainly do it. You will have to be surprised how fast the technology will ramp up when there's a profit to be made. Just type in "shale oil reserves" into your little Search Bar, and you'll come up with hundreds of new projects that have never before been thought possible. And these are primarily domestic, where the oil in America was thought to be depleted!
Ever heard of the Bakken Formation? No? Why not? GOOGLE it, or follow this link. It will blow your mind. a href="http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911">http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
At first the Bakken field was thought to be the largest domestic oil discovery in the USA since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, but has since been downsized, then increased 25 fold by the USGS when shale production is taken into account. There's enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 40 years straight. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL! Well, except we know those damn oil barrons are going to gouge us, but cheap oil nonetheless.
Another example of huge unexpected and unknown reserves are the "Coal Oil" sands in Canada that they are already extracting by truck and converting to usable oil. It's slower to extract and convert than to simply produce liquid oil, but the one field they are producing from today is bigger than the Saudi field, which is the biggest in the world. And that isn't the only "Coal Oil" field in Canada, and certainly not the only one in the world. These Coal Oil fields contain almost as much oil as the Saudi Arabian oil fields.
Most people don't realize that we only produce about 20% of the oil from a producing oil sand (conventional production), and leave the rest of it there because it was too expensive to produce by secondary or tertiary recovery methods. That is no longer true, so the natural oil reserves just doubled, when the price of oil doubled.
One more real obvious report is the the Stansberry Report from 2006. Hidden only 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies several more billion barrels (again, this report was an overestimation in the beginning, but still a huge find).
Governments don't care about the truth or the facts and are good at creating crisis after crisis, so that they can be your friend and be the only one to solve the problem, that is, by taking control, taking your rights, enacting more laws, forming more committees out of their cousins, and generally living like Kings off of years of perceived crisis. Oh yeah, and they can take over whole countries if they need to and the gullible public is behind them on an invasion, and they can get enough young people to fight their special-interest wars for them.
No sir, the only real perceived crisis here is that the great masses of people will figure out that there is not a shortage, but rather an EXCESS of oil, for centuries to come, and that the price of oil should be back down around $20/bbl. Whatta ya' know, we've been lied to again.
When I was in college in the 1970's, the known problem of that time was that temperatures were getting "colder." By the year 2030, it would be so cold that plants could not live and man would face extinction without drastically changing things. That was to be in my lifetime.
But now the "experts" claim "Global Warming." It's all just a theory, like Evolution, but after so many "experts" parrot the "truth" in the media, and even colleges and universities begin teaching it as truth, then it becomes "truth,' even when at best it's a 50-50 shot. I've read that 63% of those surveyed were "concerned" about Global Warming. Geez, don't people even know how to ask the right questions anymore?
Why make a crisis out of something? There's money to be made, control to be taken, and new gov't offices to fill. And of course, the 30-year cooling trend that prompted the global cooling scare in the mid-70s abruptly ended in the late 70s, replaced by with a 20-year warming trend that peaked in 1998.
Watch this short video from the founder of the Weather Channel how he blows Al Gore's climate change scam out the window showing the fallacy of the concept of "global warming".
a href="http://www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a">www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a
What I'm really arguing is not only is there enough oil, but really an excess, but that the new discoveries and technologies and alternatives will buy us enough time for the whole Peak Oil thing to be prolonged into the next century, which means there is no crisis. At least, there is nothing yet to have a war over. No, natural gas cannot replace oil, but all of the alternatives together with new technologies and hydrocarbon finds shows me there is no crisis or emergency of shortage during this century. I would think that within this century, some yet undiscovered energy source or method of extracting energy from hydrogen or even something as crazy as a water fuel cell will be discovered. Biofuels look promising as a cheap growable and rampable alternative to diesel fuel, already field testing. Just convert all the trucks on the road away from oil dependency, and you've made a huge impact.
Part 2 of this article can be found at: a href="/admin/articles/edit/article-debunking-the-myth-of-peak-oil-why-the-age-of-cheap-oil-is-far-from-over-part-2.html">Peak Oil debunked - Part 2
By. Dennis Eidson for OilPrice.com the no.1 source for oil prices and crude oil information
Dennis is a contributor to Oilprice.com More
Comments
I would invite interested readers to review, not the claims of the "oil industry" or the prognostications of "experts", but the historical data on production and consumption to see if you can spot any "peaks".
The British Petroleum Statistical Review is hardly a left-wing, enviro-kook publication. Rather, it is a careful compilation of oil industry statistics put together by one of the largest companies in the business.
These data can be reviewed in a series of interactive data graphics at the Energy Export Databrowser:
http://mazamascience.com/OilExport
Even a quick review of nations like Indonesa, Egypt, the UK, Norway, Mexico, Argentina, ... will demonstrate that peaks are a phenomenon, not a theory.
What about the US and the nations we import from? Poke around the databrowser and answer these questions for yourself.
This cornucopian 'thinking' is the main reason why we are entering the greatest crisis the human species has ever encountered. Watch Chris Martenson's "Crash Course" on the web for a very detailed analysis of our predicament.
The stale old Peak Oil arguments go all the way back to the early 1900s. He is correct that we have burned far more than total reserves were believed to be -- over and over.
There is indeed a crisis that we are facing, but it has nothing to do with global warming doom or peak oil doom. It is something much more dangerous.
So you are a denialist of the Theory Evolution, Anthropogenic Climate change and Peak oil. Nuff said! BTW, "Theory", in science, doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
The 8 billion barrels in the much touted Tupi fields will not make a dent in the 30 billion bbl/year global oil demand.
The article author is long on wishes (or agenda), but comes us short on analysis, at least for this article.
Good luck Mr. editor. You will need it
And evolution is just a theory? We need to send you back to high school ...
2: Shale oil, is NOT light sweet crude, by any stretch of thee imagination. It is difficult and energy intensive to extract, and will not bring you $16/barrel oil. More like $216 !
3: All the major oil fields in the world, including Gawar in Saudi Arabia, are in decline.
4: Remember the October stock market crash of '08? It directly followed $120 a barrel oil. Why was there $120 a barrel oil? Because demand was outstripping supply. You can expect a series of oil shocks over the next few years, assuming the economy can even survive it a second time!
5: Yes, the government is probably shall we say being "economical with the truth". The government doesn't yet openly admit or discuss peak oil. Why is this? Because, there is no real solution to peak oil, unless you plan to exterminate around 6 billion people.
6: I see little math in this article to back up your centuries of oil production claim.
7: If the world is "awash with oil", why has Russia already staked a claim on the Arctic, because there MIGHT be oil there. Why does the US want to drill in ANWAR. And why is the possibility that Iran (a major oil producer, near other oil producers, i.e Saudi Arabia) might be building Nuclear weapons such a problem?
Because, we are ALREADY running seriously short on oil.
Les
There's no doubt that we are approaching a Peak Oil problem that cannot be allayed without more vigorous alternatives, but the point of the article: Is it a "crisis?" One commenter blows things out of proportion by stating we need to find a Saudi Arabia oil field every two years, why? Do we use that much? Another commenter says "Once you spend a kiloJoule of energy to extract a kiloJoule, it's no longer a resource." Really, unless you double your money on it, and what is it I'm burning in my car? Another says I haven't debunked anything because I talked about running out of oil instead of Peak Oil specifically. Where do you get your numbers from?
Other commenters like Will are reading into the article what they wish, like "the Bakken Fields as proof that peak oil will not be a near term problem." No, there is no one thing that will do that, as the article states. But that's why the article is so lengthy, to give a sampling of the dozens of finds and technologies and new methods that reduce a "crisis" to a phenomenon. No, the Tupi field will not make a dent in world demand, but will five Tupi fields? Any assertion that Tupi will not be enough is no less likely than finding 20 or 50 more Tupi fields.
Several commenters get upset when you pick on their favorite Theory and suggest it may not be fact, then dismiss the entire article because it too is suggested to be a theory rather than a crisis. A little short on logic aren't we? If you can't rebut, just label them to dismiss them, right? Do you just post to show your frustration? Might it be that Global Warming is just another phenomenon that happens every 50 or 100 years or 200 year cycles? All the supercomputers in the world can't count all of the presumptions they made for input into the fastest supercomputer to compute an answer within 300 years for the Global Warming Theory. And you view this answer as fact?
We know intuitively that Darwinism can accomplish some things, but not others. I have no problems with the evolution Darwin originally proscribed in biological science, e.g., bacterial resistance to antibiotics, but when the ape came out of the swamp, and they started teaching this to my children as fact in science, that became an attack by Humanist ignorance (or design) against me. Elephants do not evolve from rabbits. As an extension of the Big Bang theory, and Old Earth of 4.5 billion years, also purported by the Evolutionists, unsupportable; completely outside the field of biology. The evolution of man, Old Earth, zero evidence from the Evolutionists, all a myth, easily refutable from the geologic record or fossil record. Then they go on to say that Noah’s Flood is a fable or myth, which tries to make the Bible false, and becomes an attack on foundational and religious beliefs with a theory that is more myth than science.
While the original biological evolution by Darwin has its uses, I'm surprised the Evolution of Man is still debated; call any scientist at any of the top 100 universities in the world and ask them. Use your cell; I'll wait.
I don't think that we will be able to meet the resource demands of growing world populations and the inevitable increased standards of living which the developing world is striving to achieve.
I do think that people like ther person who wrote the above article who attempt to assure others that there is "no crisis" are exacerbating the problem. The longer we put off dealing with the consequences of oil demand outstripping supply, the worse off we will be as a species.
"at current consumption rates, data suggests that the world has 54 years’ worth of proven oil reserves and 64 years worth of proven gas reserves, adding, “more will be found.”
So, we won't hit Empty on the oil gage for a full 54 years! Sure, oil consumption grows every year, but "more will be found" - if they find 20% more that would give us a full extra decade (neglecting demand growth)!
Dude, 54 years... that's like FOREVER.
There would be a huge group of chemists that would support exposing the myth, deeply studied and proven to be a myth in the bad old anti-wealthy Soviet Union decades ago, if they could just get some big money from somewhere.
Coal IS biological in origin worked upon by heat and pressure. Oil certainly has no initial biological component. Dinosaurs as a source of oil myth was developed in the mid 1950's, to create higher profit margins for BP, etc. No other reason. Any chemists out there, take a look at the oil molecule, directly and with spectroscopy, before you open your mouth, please.