Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave's Civic Duty
Some of the experts a few years back were saying that 2010 was going to be the peak of production, stating that oil is getting more difficult to find, if there is anymore. Who knows for sure?
Dave
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Interesting to read (if you haven't yet) :
Predicting the timing of peak oil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peak oil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Even if peak oil hasn't been reached yet for a few years , which I personally don't think to be so, the remaining oil out there is much harder to get to and more costly to extract/refine which will still drive the costs up.
As the wikipedia article mentions, especially for countries like US, Canada, Australia, with most people living mostly in communities (suburbs) spread in patterns which are not easily accessible by public transport something's gotta give....Most people in the US rely on their private transport to get to work, get their kids to/from school , etc. and it will obviously continue like this until a point at which the fuel spending will be so high that alternatives will have to be found, such as pooling, public transport, ultimately redesigning the way North America's communities are located/spread.
When I was living/working in the States (FL) for a short while (less than a year) some of my colleagues from work used to commute to work up to 100-150 miles per day (back and forth) some of them owning cars such as Toyota Tundra and the like , this was back in 2004-2005, I remember gas prices were hovering around 2$/gal.
Now Imagine driving something like that in Netherlands where gas is about 8 USD/gallon, let's say that person was hypermiling with the Tundra
, and managing to get 18 MPG combined, for the 150 miles commute, they would have to fork out 60-70 USD (EUR equivalent) every day to get to work and back....Unless they were some CEO's or the like, not many could afford or would think to spend that.
That's why you hardly see anybody commuting long distances in most European countries and if they do, they will probably drive some turbo-diesel smallish car that gets 4.5 liter/100 km (50+ mpg)