There less oil than we think - Wikileaks
 

Just saw this in the morning news.
wikileaks: Saudi Arabia drastically overstated oil reserves.

Older post on this:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...oil-16060.html

Thanks for the link back

Leaked Cables Reveal U.S. Concerns over Saudi 'Peak Oil' - NYTimes.com

The thing that caught my eye about this is that Saudi peak oil isn't in the past, in the future. In fact, it's about 17 years from now, and that just means that 2028 will have just as much Saudi oil as 2027. The tap isn't going to snap shut next year (as the doomers have been saying since the 80's); supply will slowly decline year over year, and that's just the cheap, conventionally extractable stuff. Though the rest of the world's supply doesn't look as good as the Saudi's.

I'm ready for the end of cheap energy. I hope the rest of you are either where you want to be, or at least getting close.

Are you really? Better have a passport and a good spot in Brazil or the Northwest territories where they won't find you :)

My guess is when energy starts becoming expensive in the true sense you will see jobs dissappear, wages drop massively, prices skyrocket and property taxes become impossibly high. Around here they want to increase property taxes because of foreclosures, makes good sense eh?

So even if you can live off the land as it were you probably will loose your property if it gets that bad.

If the fire is burning the house down, add more gas.

Moving from the US to Japan is basically a microcosm of what it would be like in the US if energy stopped being cheap.

I pay 3x what you people pay for electricity, which is pro-rated to charge more if I use lots, 2x for gas, 2x for natural gas, have to buy trashbags to throw out my trash, etc etc on and on. No big deal though.

When people get used to having 90% of their money to spends on things they don't need, that's where problems arise, in my opinion.

SVOboy hit it on the head. People will end up paying more directly, and probably the same overall, for energy, so they'll use it more efficiently. Jobs and taxes are something else entirely. We could have 10x the oil we have now and still see counties charging more in taxes, and we could have an extremely low energy economy and still have good employment. For all I know, most of the doom and gloom is propagated by fossil fuel companies.

I saw this two days ago on Fox News and it scares the hell out of me. I don't have a decent career and depend on pizza delivery for my sole source of income. The end of reasonably priced energy will mean desperate poverty for me with no way out. I am already having a difficult time affording food, fuel, insurance, taxes, etc. When people in my situation suddenly can't eat, well then you can expect mass civil unrest as we will have nothing to lose. Now I am not one for violence and likely would not participate in any lawlessness but you can be damn sure that I am in the minority. If it happens suddenly then you had better be living far away from civilization and be well armed to protect yourself from all of the working class people who will suddenly be very poor, very hungry and very desperate.

It's also very important to realize just how dependent on petroleum-derived hydrocarbons our culture is. Do we need to migrate to something else? Sure we do. However, taking them away quickly will absolutely destroy our lives as we know them. It's not just vehicle fuels as that accounts for only bout 50% of our oil consumption. It's things like food packaging, medical supplies, computers and roofing too. What we need then is an orderly, gradual shift in our technologies and the time to do so. Rapid loss of oil will lead to chaos and anarchy. Do I think people should buy gigantic, inefficient land tanks like the Toyota Highlander or Cadillac Escalade in huge numbers? No. It's irresponsible for that to continue because those people are only expediting the loss of oil and reducing the time we have to replace it.

Above all though it is the poor and working class that will suffer most. The poor typically rely on older technologies and used cars for transportation. They can't afford to own and service a new car and in many cases have poor credit. These lower income people rely on picking the bones of the middle class by going to junkyards for used parts to keep these cars going. A sudden loss of fuel would not be a mere inconvenience to them that forces them to buy a new car. That is what the middle and upper classes will do. No, it will pretty much wipe out their lives. Remember, the US does not have good public transportation outside of the big cities. So, lets work to find a good alternative for the future but let's hope and pray that it happens slowly rather than rapidly.

I was reading my popular science magazine and they say that we have the technology to take co2 out of the air and make fuel from it through some chemical processes, but they say the cost would be about 4 dollars per gallon so it's not reasonable. I was thinking they need to get the technology going so they can better the process you know like have it to where 20 percent of our fuel is produced from co2 in the next 10 years because if they add it to gas instead of ethonal then it would be more reasonable to do. If 20 percent of our fuel was made from co2 and the price is 4 dollars per gallon, and the price of fuel where i'm at is 3.14 dollars per gallon a 20 percent mix would be 3.51 dollars a gallon. Also the crap where the government stoped all nuclear power plant production was completly stupid cause the chinese are opening a power plant thats 100 times more effiecent then anything we have and there's no nuclear waste cause the plant burns the rods afterwards, so no radioactive waste to deal with.

sorry jim-bob i was in a hurry last night

Your post is very difficult to read due to your lack of proper punctuation and capitalization. I'm not trying to be the forum's grammarian but your posts would have far more credibility were you to clean them up a bit before posting. The lack of ANY periods makes it seem as though it is a paragraph-length run-on sentence. Remember that this is not a text message. It is a forum post where you have time to write in a cogent and concise manner.

Squeezing Oil Out of Stones in the Rocky Mountains : NPR

this would be a good idea if the tree huggers would stop freaking out.

Well, economists too. Getting oil out of rock isn't exactly cheap or efficient. The owner of the process can go on about $20-$30 per barrel oil till he's blue in the face, but if it was really that cheap companies would be all over it.

Not necessarily.

Companies like to own the rights to the technology, and not have to pay royalties.

Case in point. A couple of independent engineers developed a led that put out warm light several years ago. However the independent engineers wanted $.01-$.015 cents royality per led. SYLVANIA and other large companies balked because they said they would develope their own warm light technology. Besides that, they are presently heavily invested and producing other means of lighting that would then become more or less meaningless.

As far as independent oil companies go,not many are that brave or stupid. All it takes is for the big boys to reduce the price enough to squeeze them out of existance. Then buy them out for pennies on the dollar and shelf it till they are forced to use it, if ever.

All this talk about peak oil is bull$hit.

The truth is...

It's all about control.

>

I do believe oil, for our purposes, is a finite resource and therefore subject to exhaustion. It won't be (as alluded to on pg 1) cut off suddenly like someone threw a switch; it'll be a "slowly boil the frog" thing, with prices rising as it becomes necessary to spend more to extract/refine it.

True in some sense but Japan is so totally different than here you won't see a move to Japanese life in the US even if energy becomes impossibly high, instead you will see systematic failure. We won't prepare our society, instead it will fail and then we will change but probably for the worse.

Japan started way ahead of us in every way, they were already used to small spaces, communal living and extreme obligations to the state, in fact its their heritage more or less. If I may, its not even too tough to walk across Japan in the right season with the right path.

Here in the US we are so BIG and have such poorly setup societies that we simply cannot operate like Japan without tearing down everything and starting over, we are just that far behind.

Also our mentality here is not compatible with how Japan lives.

I might and others here might not be too affected by massive shifts in energy costs (and we likely wouldn't mind the changes) but other people will likely be starving on the streets until the 30 years or so pass that it takes for society to restructure. (and I mean that, our society will not restructure safely overnight) Regardless of how prepared personally we are, that doesn't mean our society will be compatible with us for a long time and we might get displaced as special interests are grappling for their lost money/power/influence.

A cold dose of reality, we can be idealistic but lets face it, like Dodge we will keep doing the same thing until it kills us.

Cheers
Ryan

I agree.

Predicting peak oil, is almost like predicting peak technology. Neither can be done.


>

So true. This is not about oil reserves being depleted or squeezing oil out of shale. It's about monopolizing markets and squeezing money out of consumers. It's also about worldwide demand for oil. And SHHH! Let's not mention that the market supply is largely controlled by OPEC, an international cartel.

People will pay whatever they're charged for something they want or need. It's like when people said, "I'll quit smoking if a pack of cigarettes costs $5!" You hear the same thing from people regarding fuel.
VT247

Do you have a link to your story? I think a cent or two per bulb is a far cry from ~$60+ less per bbl, but as with most things I'll believe it when I see it.

I think biofuel from algae is waiting in the wings. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see the beauty in that stuff. I think like many others have said here, it is just a matter of maintaining the status quo, everything is in place to pump petroleum outta the ground, process it, distribute it, and burn it up in our cars. Until that runs out, I don't think competing technologies will be allowed to emerge.

I like the comment on Nuclear Power, it is obscene that we do not reprocess the nuclear fuel from our plants in order to use it all up. The fact that we don't reprocess and that all the spent fuel from all the nuclear reactors remains on the site of the nuclear plant from which it was pulled, leads me to believe some truly moronic people are behind these policies. America is mega ignorant about what is reality in the nuclear industry. If the public to know more, and understood it, we'd have nuke plants providing all our electric needs, and reprocessing would require the disposal of only a small amount of high level waste with a few hundred year half life instead of the few hundred thousand year half life of the current "spent fuel" waste.

Ya had to get me started didn't cha???

No, I don't have a link. I think I read it in Scientific American. Could be wrong though, it was several years ago.

To clarify, the .01-.015 cents per LED was not the cost of the LED itself. It was for the royality that was to be paid on each LED produced using their technological process.

>

on the nuclear power, the government placed a ban on producing nuclear power plants when there was the melt down of though's plant's back in the 60's or 70's (i think i don't remember the dates right now). It's idiotic for the government to ban a technology just because something bad happened once you know, i mean we have a problem with a nuclear power plant or 2 and the government bans the production of anymore nuclear power plants. We have a problem with 1 oil rig in the golf and they shut down drilling for almost a year it really makes no sense if you ask me!!(i understand having a freeze on drilling in the golf to double check the rigs for anything wrong but there's no reason to have it as long as they have)

You're kidding right?

The answer is for us all to move to a windy area (for windpower), next to a river or stream (for hydro). Make our own electricity to power our cars and homes. Then we can thumb our noses at the Middle East Oil barons.

You're kidding right? About what rofl? Unlike the other thread in ecomodder on HHO, Stovie & I are in agreement here. It is stupid to abandon the Gulf of Mexico as a potential source of oil because of one accident. We still drive cars when 115 people DIE every day, we fly in airplanes, we dig coal out of the ground, and we sleep in houses that catch fire and kill 8 people per day. So besides a few unlucky fish, birds & oysters, show me the huge Eco disaster that happened as a result of the gulf oil spill? It has healed itself, just like every day that thousands of barrels oil seep naturally into the Gulf. There are bacteria that thrive on this stuff, it has been occurring for billions of years. It is like worrying about a cup of milk spilled in a room filled with 20 cats. Go figure.

Since when did we abandon drilling in the Gulf?

The problem with accidents/spills is that they get people killed and destroy more business in the region (tourism, fishing, and so on) than the oil provides. It's not like running a safer drilling operation is that hard. I have family that have worked on rigs for decades and they said straight up that the accident was caused by cutting corners. It's not too much to expect companies to fly right and not kill people/cause billions in economic damages.

If i lived anywhere near the gulf i would be fighting drilling as much as possible like ^^ just said there is more to the gulf than oil. Just because we are able to pull the oil out and make money doesn't mean it outweighs the cost on every other industry in the region if something goes wrong. Its like hanging a bucket of acid over someones head and assuring them its a durable bucket, accidents do happen.

Oil is not just used for transportation fuel, it is far more important than that and will be drilled out or extracted no matter where it is. We can reduce the amount we use for transport but the rest is needed for all sorts of other things.

There is nothing we do from being born to when we die that does not involve oil.

Good point. Thousands of dollars of oil are used in the design and manufacture just one new car. Both in materials and in energy used to make it.

I look around my office and house and it is a base ingredient.

you'll notice i didn't say abandoned i said ban, but yeah i meant the 6 month moratorium but it's actually gone for i think over 8 months now. what i'm worried about is if you look at( i think) minesotta had a 6 - 12 month moratorium on drilling for natural gas like 10 - 15 years ago and now they don't have enough to heat all the houses, there having to burn more coal for electricity and also they had a contract with texas to supply like 1200 megawatts of electricity and they had to cancel the contract cause they need it to heat houses now

That post was directed at Chaz.