This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
US Military Warns Of Oil Shortages By 2015 With Significant Economic And Political Impact, Especially On Weak Countries, India And China
A report issued by the US Joint Forces Command has a rather bleak view on US oil production, and on peak oil in general. In a foreword to the report issued by General James Mattis, he warns that "By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day." Does this mean that oil, just like in the Bush administration, is about to become a "strategic interest", which coupled with the upcoming discoveries of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, would result in some additional geopoltical tensions particularly in the middle east? With nuclear tensions between Iran and Israel already at boiling hot levels, will Uncle Sam decide to make landfall in the Persian Gulg once again? More from the General: "While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India." Well, Mr. Chanos, there's your catalyst. We just hope that the negative carry of a five year short position is palatable to your LPs.
Some additional perspectives from The Guardian:
Lionel Badal, a post-graduate student at Kings College, London, who has been researching peak oil theories, said the review by the American military moves the debate on.
"It's surprising to see that the US Army, unlike the US Department of Energy, publicly warns of major oil shortages in the near-term. Now it could be interesting to know on which study the information is based on," he said.
"The Energy Information Administration (of the department of energy) has been saying for years that Peak Oil was "decades away". In light of the report from the US Joint Forces Command, is the EIA still confident of its previous highly optimistic conclusions?"
The Joint Operating Environment report paints a bleak picture of what can happen on occasions when there is serious economic upheaval. "One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest," it points out.
Full report by the Joint Operating Environment
h/t Mike
»
- 15277 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
Well, that ought to be good for 1000 points (on the spx)
Well blow me over with a feather!
They forgot the G.I. before the JOE. but whatever.
Whoever has the gold gets the oil... it also helps to have military supremacy.
More realistically, whoever has the oil gets the gold. Though military might is quite a wildcard.
Chicken and egg thing?
No, the purchasing power of gold is determined by the supply/price of surplus energy within an economy, just like every all tradable currencys or goods, whether it's dollar bills or a kilo of rice... Money is and always has been a representation of an individuals claim on surplus energy available within an economy, energy always comes first...
Whoever has the lead (or depleted uranium) gets the oil and the gold.
He who has enriched uranium can get more than he who has only depleted uranium.
Hah!, beat u too it, posted this last night at 3am on ZH as a comment, saw it in the UK Guardian btw...major ramifications, no surprise that Sinopec inked a deal for Canadian tar sands 12hrs earlier? I believe US Army thought it was their strategic reserve...
Fuck yeah. Alberta gets to be Canada's goose that lays the Golden Egg!
Fischer–Tropsch
You just made Al Gore cry.
Better than nothing, but not a solution. "Peak Oil" doesn't mean we actually ran out, it means we can't pump enough to meet demand at current prices. Enormous difference.
Dude Fischer-Tropsch has got nothing to to with extraction of oil or availability of oil.
It is a chemical process. It helped Germany during the Hitler years to become THE strongest military power the world has ever seen[courtesy of Standard Oil] . Well, at least until the Allies joined forces. Read more about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process
I'm very familiar with F-T. It was also used by South Africa for a while. You need lots of coal and you waste half of it turning the other half into oil. The resulting oil is high quality and pretty much substitutes for ordinary oil, but costs a lot to create. If it's so wonderful why did the Nazis start running out of oil and why did they extend their forces 1000's of miles to try and obtain and control Mideast oil?
That isn't what Peak Oil means either
Peak means end of cheap oil, not end of all oil.
That is not what Peak Oil means, either.
Are you one of those guys who say's F=ma isn't correct because it fails to consider quantum effects? Thanks for telling us what we know.
Well put.
No, I'm not one of those guys at all.
I'm telling you that price does not matter.
If people decided tomorrow that we did not want to consume oil ever again, because we had magic cricket power or pixiedust and we wanted to pump it all above-ground to shoot into the sun, Peak Oil would STILL EXIST.
The rate at which we could extract oil would peak and then decline IRRESPECTIVE of the "price" we assign to it.
Are we clear now?
Peak "cheap" oil in terms of EROI was over 50 years ago. Or maybe in the 1960s when discoveries peaked.
I think it's important to understand what Peak Oil is and means and this whole notion of "cheap" is foolish.
Oil will be LESS available no matter the price. Those who think, oh, well, I'll pay more for it but it'll still be there because only "cheap" oil has peaked are WRONG.
ALL oil has peaked, cheap, expensive, in between.
Peak oil is as outdated as global warming...look at the Bakkan find in North Dakota and the huge new reservoir of oil discovered off Louisiana. The US is swimming in the black crude....We can tell the towel heads to go pound sand....but....whether we drill and refine, THAT is the question....
I wish you were correct, but I believe that the "huge new reservoir of oil discovered off Louisiana" is little more than a month or two of US demand, and 6.6 miles down. Going to need a long straw.
http://www.doomers.us/forum2/index.php/topic,52164.0.html
Matt, do you want to address this, as I know you are lurking around here somewhere?
To place quantitive perspective on these "new finds"
the world consumes a billion barrels of oil every 11.7 days...
I see a few of you guys understand Peak.
In the future, please do not talk about reserves or URR, as it confuses the rubes. Don't talk about "cheap oil" or other irrelevancies, because the rubes have trouble understanding 2nd order problems.
The issue is not about how much oil is in the ground, it's about the rate at which we can produce it.
Given your statement about the world consuming 1Bbbl in 11.7 days, some rube might say, "oh Brazil just found 8-10Bbbl in Tupi so that's 117 days' worth of new supply and we just keep finding billions and billions more."
The problem is that Tupi cannot and will not produce 1bbpd. In fact, it will top out around 500kbpd.
I have tried mostly in vain to get people to accept that you cannot divide the P10 or P90 or URR or "inplace" reserves figures by desired demand to get production rate. Wells just don't work that way.
Even if Tupi does contain 10 Bbbl...we cannot mobilize them to the surface at any old arbitrary rate. We can only bring them up at max, 500,000 per day, and this is the peak rate, which is only sustainable for a few years in the production lifecycle. Just because the world needs 1Bbbl every 11.7 days does not mean we can decide to suck oil out of a well at this rate.
Rubes continue to think we found another years' worth of supply each and every time some headline says we found possibly 30Bbbl somewhere 20 miles down. When in reality, a field such as that may at MOST supply 1/80th of the current consumption. Rather than say it gives us "another year," what it does is give us 18 minutes *per day* worth of oil.
Spot on Trav7777, I have relegated myself to only attempting to convey the most basic of info, out of frustration...
Yeah...I know that you know what the issue is. Don't take my comment as a correction...I know you have this shit locked down.
It's a challenge, man...I've struggled with it. Look at my other replies on this thread.
People hear that "cheap" oil has peaked and they assume, ok, well production will continue to increase, just at a higher price...that's deadassed categorically WRONG.
They hear that the US consumes 18mbpd and we just found 18Bbbl and so we've kicked the can 1000 days into the future. And all this does is muddy the issue when Cantarell shed 2% of daily production just in the last few years. And price goes up and people think we can just motor along except paying more at the pump.
The price is an artifact of supply and demand...people who think it's about "cheap" or whatever.
Gosh, look at Helium or Gold. They peaked in 2002 and 2000, respectively. Did "cheap" have anything to do with the Helium peak??? There is no such thing as "cheap" Helium because it's an artifact of alpha decay of radioactive elements (mostly U238), and is found with NG deposits. Nobody drills Helium wells or does Helium exploration, yet it PEAKED and production has declined YoY since 2002. Despite being primarily used for kids' balloons (though it is one of the more critically important elements because of cryogenic uses and superconducting research; MRIs need this as well as the semi industry. PBMRs would ideally use He as a moderator and energy transfer material), it still peaked price be damned.
No problem with corrections trav7777. Only a fool holds onto incorrect knowledge.
It was my reading of Deffeyes, 4 years ago, that has me and my extended family on the (mostly) self sufficient farm track.Thank god for that slightly above dirt poor Appalachian upbringing,college math degree and Marine Corp experience. All are coming together nicely at this juncture....
As noted, the issue is Peak Production. Unfortunately, as seen all too often, people then place the blame on environmentalists for not allowing more drilling rigs etc. Never mind that the oil companies really don't want to invest in more equipment because they know that we've really already reached Peak Demand.
Ah, "Peak Demand," now THAT'S the issue! With the world's growth stalling and now contracting there just won't be all that need for more oil production: just look at how production numbers dropped off at the height of finanancial storm.
This is world-wide stuff. For the local levels, States/nations, one can refer to "Peak Oil Imports." The US is almost assuredly past this point, the point at which its oil imports decrease (mostly due to financial reasons), even though there may be sufficient supply on the world markets.
A month or two?
ROTFL.
Again, we CANNOT suck out the oil from this field at whatever rate we want to. We consume 18mbpd in this country. Assume that the find is 1Bbbl. Does ANYONE here actually believe that we could produce 1Bbbl from this field over the span of 60 days? That would be 16 Mbpd. Or 3x the maximum production rate of the world's largest oilfield, Ghawar.
To even phrase this find in terms of a month or two of US demand is asinine and it understates the problem, which we *desperately* need rubes to grasp and get their heads around.
As long as they continue to believe that we just kicked the can down the road another month or two they will believe with strenuous wishin that we can find another billion barrels here another Bbbl there and we'll extend this into the foreseeable future.
The REALITY is that such a find in deepwater will probably produce *maybe* 200kbpd. (bpd=barrels per day, k=kilo).
200kbpd is not 2 months' worth of needs, it's less than 20 minutes per day worth at current consumption. The US consumes 750Kbbl per hour. To bring another HOUR per day of production online to replace that lost elsewhere, we have to find a field or collection thereof that will produce THAT amount of oil.
When you look at the fields all over the earth, you see that a field of this size hasn't been found in over a decade. A 750kbpd producing field is actually a relatively RARE thing. And that's just ONE HOUR per day of our needs.
To illustrate the problem, Cantarell used to produce over 2mbpd, now it produces .5. That means 1.5Mbpd of production was lost just in the past few years from this one field ALONE. 2 hours per day of US consumption, gone. And we found a field in the deep Gulf that will give us back 20 minutes of that.
ALL that matters is rate of production.
While most of your posts are intelligible and useful, you might get your point across better (especially to the "rubes") if you were less condescending and didn't intentionally misinterpret casual statements of others.
Can't tell if you're a geologist/geoscientist, but even if you are, you're not the only one here.
You might be right...or you might not be.
I tried the easy way so many times, man, it's laughable.
People have very strong internal unwillingness to accept PO.
A case in point is Douchinger...he'll ban people for it despite implicitly knowing that it's true. It has to be true. After I got banned the 2nd time from TF for PO arguments in which I told him to google Cantarell, references to that field started showing up in his tickers. And yet, he still bans again for discussions about it and calls it a religion. Why is that? He has to know that it's true; it can't not be. To claim that you can exponentially grow forever is ab initio illogical and apodictically false. But the consequences of the oil peak are too scary for anyone who knows they live in a growth system, so you get the ostrich syndrome and people latching onto things like "cheap" oil peaking and somehow these new reserves figures "meet" the world's oil needs for X number of days, months, or years, when the reality is that they don't.
So, in the absence of that, sometimes I just go for the bludgeon and patronize people. Better to get the truth out. What's worse, my bedside manner or the fallout from mass delusions regarding energy availability if we fall off a Cantarell-esque production cliff?
The data I see on wells is frightening, man. My personal forecast is for world war; I am planning to leave for S. America or something to get away from this shitstorm. I just can't see a way so many fat self-entitled people will be able to coherently agree when there is going to be nothing but demagoguing of "speculators," "big oil," or OPEC. There are few who are capable of understanding the problem and among those, most refuse to accept it.
Burgan is declining higher than projections. Prudhoe did the same thing; I got out of BPT over the discrepancy between its production on 10ks and the projections they put out. Projections were those nice, singledigit declines, and reality was 15% YoY. Cantarell absolutely crashed. Newer wells peak sooner and crash harder than older wells.
What that means is that all of the reserves we found in the past 10, 20 years are going to hit peak quicker than our initial models suggested and then crash production harder and faster than the models did.
So even the PO-aware models forecasting a 3-4% YoY production decline may very well be VAST underestimates of what we're staring in the face. If Ghawar goes Cantarell or Burgan does, we're straight up finished. I mean the lights go out, cars stop driving type finished. WW2 rationing style finished.
When the fat people can't gas up the SUV, they're gonna be angry and our leadership is right there to blame boogeymen.
It was the Cantarell fall off that cemented my beliefs. Injected wells are really setting us up for a disaster. Well stated trav7777
can i go with you¿ on your jet plane 7777?
I wish you were correct. You are not. Peak oil is very real, unlike "global warming".
Oh, if only you were right. But all facts point to you being wrong.
C'mon, people, understand something before you deny it. "Peak Oil" doesn't mean that we've used up the last drop on earth, it simply means that production rates cannot keep up with current and anticipated consumption rates. No amount of oil that is 4 miles deep, 2% of the content of a hard rock, or priced at $400/bbl is going to solve this.
It doesn't matter what oil is priced at.
This is why economists struggle to grasp peak oil.
I had to try to phrase PO in a variety of ways to get my economist friend to get it. He *assumed* that a higher price would cause more supply; that is an economics axiom.
I said that you cannot get more NET oil out of a well past-peak no matter what the price is. No matter how cheap the credit, no matter how much dollars you print or gold you trade, it *cannot* be done.
The reason why is in order to get more nominal barrels out, you have to spend more energy to do it. Your NET goes down at the well's peak. You invest more input energy to maintain output. Trading one form of energy for another. The NET reaches a peak then declines. Irrespective of human constructs like "price."
This sort of stuff, physical laws and physics and engineering, is apocryphal to economists. It spits in the face of their dogma, which is that the whims of man bend reality, when every engineer knows that it doesn't matter how much the marketing department wants it, you *cannot* build the infeasible, perpetual motion, antigravity, etc., things which violate the laws of thermodynamics or other physical laws. People can want and wish as strenuously as they desire, but it won't make the impossible possible. Even if you have 1000 Jiminy Crickets wishing with you.
Economists, deep down, believe that if you offered cheap enough credit or money, that someone could and would invent a perpetual motion machine. Or a way to make water yield more energy flowing downhill than it took to pump it uphill. In fact, a lot of gov't programs are subsidies intended to make it look precisely like this is what is happening and "demonstrate" the viability of things which are fundamentally infeasible.
Economics *should* have been the study of usage of energy, but it became about money and interest and credit because the "study" was taken over by largely ignorant but heavily arrogant bankers. And when the "great" economics treatises were hashed out, there was no reason to expect that oil production would ever peak; it had always grown. Only one madman, Hubbert, was out there in the 50s, during the monetarist heyday, sounding an alarm.
+1000
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus1&f=a
The bakken isn't going to get us back to the peak. There is a lot of oil down there but current estimates say only 2-4% is recoverable. A well in the Bakken might make 5,000 bbls in one month. We used to bring on wells that would make double that in a day, in fields with reservoirs with 30-50% recoverable. Horizontal drilling and advances in well stimulation created the recent boom in the Bakken which accounted for ~ 70 MM bbls in 7 years. That is roughly 4 days of supply for the US. The Bakken physically cannot make a difference with current extraction technology.
@ augmister,
LMAO, the Bakkan oil field, it's shale oil, and it's very deep, problem is, can't extract it faster than slow drip. Not feasible to extract. EROEI.
Peak Oil is in your face, global warming will be soon forgotten
"There will be blood." - There Will Be Blood (the movie)
Can we really trust any news, statistics or estimates that come out of industry, government or the news media?
The bottom line is this there is either 1.) more oil than we think or 2.) less oil than we think: No one knows anything. Plan accordingly. (a.k.a. plan on oil running out so the surprise is positive not negative.)
Historically, reserves have been greatly overstated as it makes the country or company look better economically. Shell oil had to pay a huge fine many years back for overstating reserves. Collapses currently in mexico and venezuela tend to confirm this
There was a huge restatement of reserves by the OPEC countries in the early 80s. It is suspected that this was done in order to allow them to export more oil- output quotas are based on reserve sizes (larger reserves mean your export quota is larger).
Even if that is the case, ask yourself this. Why is oil priced in dollars, the petrodollar? Is it because we want a good price on oil, OR is it that since we went off the gold standard back in 1971 we needed our currency to be out their in the market. So we made a deal with the Saudi's to price their oil in greenbacks making it that other countries have to buy greenbacks in order to buy oil. And in so doing we where able to have large deficits and print money because we essentially exported inflation to other countries. FOREIGN oil is being used to prop up the dollar and our economy. If it wasn't so, we couldn't have build our military as big as it is or have a debt economy last as long as it has. The rest of the world subsidized us for decades. Also they had to recycle those petrodollars into our dollar denominated assets (treasuries and such).
So lets say we have more than enough oil in those areas to supply our entire population and homes, we will essentially be like the oil states of the middle east in regard to gasoline and oil prices for the people (minus us being horribly wealthy) where gas costs 15 cents or more a gallon since their is so much of it. How will this help maintain our economy, it won't. And why should the rest of the oil producing countries price oil to other countries that need it in dollars if we have so much. Lets think about it, we will have to compete with Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC and non-OPEC countries to sell oil. We may say buy our oil at 80 dollars a barrel, but the countries buying it might say we will buy it for 53.33 Euros a barrel or less at 1.5 euros a dollar. This makes us have to sell it for euros and then we have to recycle the Euros we got into the EU. You see where I'm going, the benefit we got from having them use our currency is gone and know they (either the EU, or Russia or China or the combination of all three currencies) will benefit by having their currency become the reserve.
Interesting presentations...
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/NMS%20Investment%20Mgmt%20Forum.pdf
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Marsh.pdf
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Mardi%20Gras%20Economic%20Lunch.pdf
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/AON%20Annual%20Energy%20Insurance%20...
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/ASPO%202009%20Final.pdf
Twilight in the desert??
MS Ghawar water pumping.....
Still adiabatic geopol???
Silence is golden!
I like the adiabatic origin thesis...always have.
Don't make a damn bit of difference to peak.
Reserves are X, production is the derivative. The two are unrelated.
I enter these PO arguments and at the outset, I say, assume reserves are infinite. Peak still exists. Peak is only the maximum extraction rate.
The trend Hubbert noticed was that Peak tended to be concomitant with the depletion of 50%. People assume that ties reserves to peak somehow, but it was merely a correlation he saw when he developed his models (based upon that era's oil production profiles and distinct primary, 2ndary, tert extraction phases).
But dead dinos or trapped methane, what's the difference?
Matt Simmons was appointed by Dick Cheney to head the White House's Energy comittee before Bush stepped into office. Simmons knows whats up. Serial junkers on the loose!
You're an idiot.
What you're saying is categorically incorrect.
"One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest"
I presume he is referring to the future the United States under dear leader?
That's a rather interesting one:
Need to go through this in more details, seems like a much more interesting than the one coming out of the Fed Reserve.
Talk about propaganda, this will simply be used by our government as an excuse to use military force and then will be found to be entirely untrue, there is a shitload of oil and the technology is getting better to extract it, this is bullshit.
Yes, there is a "shitload" of oil.
EROEI. Google it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My finger got tired.
Oh, but with some other magical source of cheap energy, EROEI doesn't matter!
(wait, what's that? If we had that other magical source of cheap energy we wouldn't care about oil?!? Oh, darn, shucks... I knew I shoulda studied math)
I was just gonna mention something to this effect.... Maybe peak oil will finally push us away from carbon fuels. But the way politics works makes me think we'll fight over it for a bit first.
[ we'll fight over it for a bit first.]
Oh surely not! Why, large-scale mechanized warfare like that would burn through remaining reserves at three times the rate and boost oil company profits 1000% post-peak!
I cannot imagine who would favor such an outlandish outcome. No sir I simply cannot.
/sarc
Folks should start asking what the DOE has been doing for the last 30 years. Failure of mandate???
Presidential candidate Barack Obama. University in Lansing, Michigan on August 4, 2008.
"It's also a threat that goes to the very heart of who we are as a nation, and who we will be. Will we be the generation that leaves our children a planet in decline, or a world that is clean, and safe, and thriving? Will we allow ourselves to be held hostage to the whims of tyrants and dictators who control the world's oil wells? Or will we control our own energy and our own destiny? Will America watch as the clean energy jobs and industries of the future flourish in countries like Spain, Japan, or Germany? Or will we create them here, in the greatest country on Earth, with the most talented, productive workers in the world?"
"George Bush's own Energy Department has said that if we opened up new areas to drilling today, we wouldn't see a single drop of oil for seven years. Seven years. And Senator McCain knows that, which is why he admitted that his plan would only provide "psychological" relief to consumers. He also knows that if we opened up and drilled on every single square inch of our land and our shores, we would still find only three percent of the world's oil reserves. Three percent for a country that uses 25% of the world's oil. Even Texas oilman Boone Pickens, who's calling for major new investments in alternative energy, has said, "this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of."
Make no mistake, energy decline is not being overlooked, it is priority number one and has been the driving force behind every major foreign and domestic policy for more than a decade. Check out the rest of this speech at the council on foreign relations web page and I urge every ZH reader to comb through the this site, you will not be dissapointed...
http://www.cfr.org/publication/16897/obamas_speech_on_the_energy_crisis.html?breadcrumb=%2Fissue%2Fpublication_list%3Fid%3D18%26page%3D3
I agree with you about new technologies, but you forget about corruption in the oil industry. Say your state owned oil company ABC and you've been doing business with oil service company XYZ for decades using out of date conventional drilling techniques. Now a smaller oil servicing company TUV comes along with a new tool or process that can improve production or cuts the cost of drilling by half and starts to bid on the gov't contracts. Oil servicing company XYZ will simply bribe the necessary people in state owned oil company ABC to bar TUV from landing any lucrative contracts even though it would be beneficial to the country's production that owns ABC. SEE MEXICO
Technological improvements to oil extraction DON'T MAKE MORE OIL. Refer to Jevons Paradox. Just check out the North Sea oil field: state of the art equipment meant that we were able to suck this baby down real quick!
Also, I'd hope that people get it that by extracting something faster it only means that it will be used up quicker! To promote this as some salvation is silly, it's strength through exhaustion!
Peak or No Peak Oil, I am still long Chinese solars!
I always figured that is WHY you were long Chinese solars.
No amount of real time solar will solve even 10 percent of our energy problems..
Again, where has the DOE been up to for 30 years???
10% solar will provide all your little needs once your capacity to consume energy has been reduced by 90%.
And you are right now 1 year into the 10 year "Patriotic Energy Reduction Program for Great Justice" AKA jobless recovery into Hell.
So see, they have a plan.
I know, but solar is worth a "shot in the dark". Oh!
DOE is just another worthless gov't agency. I think they've been focused on playing with nuclear weapons
They have been focused on delusional, carbon neutral energy sources... Its fun shit to play with in the lab, but as for solving real world energy needs....
wink, wink, nod, nod!
Actually, one day it will. And even later on it'll "solve" closer to 90%. Of course, our "needs" will have been reduced substantially.
DOE? Look what happened to Jimmy Carter when he told eveyone the truth. Look what happened to Dr. M.L. King Hubbard. People don't want to know the truth, and those in power want to cook up another scheme to keep themselves propped on top of humanity (whether through honest promotions or, as is more historically the norm, through deception).
Unfortunately, our needs will be reduced because of a massive reduction in population.
People have no idea on the degree of their dependence on oil.....soon to find out though
We are in the perfect storm. financial and energy catastrophes on the horizon
boiler-room much Leo ?
shit like this can get you into a heap of trouble my friend.
if i were you i would tone it down a bit.
there is a fine line between recommending a stock or a sector and pump and dump scheme.
thread carefully.
I do not agree with all your predictions Leo but when it comes to your chinese solar stocks, you are right on the money... China will survive and flourish after the inevitable meltdown of the global infinite consumption economy and its clean tech industry will become the backbone of the new global carbon economy, at least in the asiatic geographic region... Their tech industry is fully backed by the state and their currency, machine tools, labor force and resource acquisitions are fully positioned and ready to take advantage of the developed nations economic decline and the world wide introduction of cap and trade markets...
resource acquisitions are fully positioned and ready to take advantage of the developed nations economic decline and the world wide introduction of cap and trade markets...
Huh? China is a huge energy importer, and coal isn't exactly a positive in the cap and trade scheme.
I'm always long good riding stock, all trained not to buck at the sound of gunfire. Keep my contact info handy.
In the meantime, where is my Chevy Volt, damn it?
You must live in a city powered by Hydroelectricity.....
Why in the name of the Internet, Fed-Ex, and clean living would I ever live in a city? Where would I hide my still?
I am pretty certain about the fundamentals of peak oil (if), it is the technical analysis (when) that is the sticky wicket. So until I am forced to saddle up each morning, or my Chevy Volt arrives, then I will go with Porsche, there is no substitute.
Fair enough friend. If you are seriously considering an electric car, just remember what it takes to power them.
I figure I own enough GM via my pro-rata "investment" through the .gov that I should get two Volts for free. I would never buy a GM.
Take a bow, but remember, we yell, "encore!"
Hey! And where's MY pony?
Brilliance! Seriously. Sounds like a one-man secession.
And I gather you are producing bootleg whiskey (via the the hidden still), promoting and taking orders through the Internet and shipping via Fed-Ex?
Of course the paradox is that we rarely crash 'non-renewable' resources, just 'renewable' ones like fisheries and forests etc. Usually the increasing prices elicit more supply and the question is just one of who the marginal producer is. Given the fall in the US dollar it's not even clear that oil is costly now (although it sure feels like it to us here in Fiatland). OPEC had a price band target of $22-25 not too long ago, but we've devalued. Blame the deficit if you want to know why it's priced higher in Greenspanbux...
I don't think the provocative nature of this report should be taken as a firm prediction, more like an outlying risk...but the worst sin is to have no plan at all for this kind of risk (cf Katrina, global financial crisis, California power market meltdown, etc ad nauseum). Very rational and organized on the military's part. They have done similar work on the security threats posed by climate change (hey, no fair being rational about that too!).
Robert Kaplan just had a whole article called 'Man Versus Afghanistan' in The Atlantic last month and didn't mention oil once. What a maroon. More like 'we have an empire to project our noble values and remake tiny defenseless nation states for their own good' or something idiotic like that.
"With nuclear tensions between Iran and Israel already at boiling hot levels, will Uncle Sam decide to make landfall in the Persian Gulg once again?"
I know that you meant Gulf, but I preferred to read it as Gulag. FWIW
How many ways is the current paradigm screwed? Let me count the ways.
The thing that chart monkeys and skies the limit idiots don't understand is that we are standing dead in the middle of a confluence of events that will culminate the in evolution or extermination of our species.
I read "Persian Glug" as in "glug, glug, glug."
So how many people bothered to watch Boone Pickens ask for your support pushing H.R. 1835 and companion Senate Bill 1408? It was advertized on CNBC for 5 AM PDT/8AM EDT. He was beutiful and stood down Joker Kernanan's big hair party of nihilism on real change. Standalone Energy Bill featuring Energy tax credits with clear metrics to get US using 50% less foreign crude in 7 years. Get 8 million 18-wheelers on domestic CNG and give the owners a 65K tax credit to buy new trucks built here which makes jobs locally and no continuing OPEC donations. As of now , we are bidding against China for new crude reserves and they've got our cash and credit. Get over the Fear and get on the March with the PickensPlan. McLuhan said it best, "We look at the Present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the Future." Stand up and fight, or give up and whine.
BTW, crap and fake trade is not in either of these Bills.
But that's rational thought! Reason is from the devil!
Is the energy density of CNG great enough to give an OTR truck a range of more than, say, 100 miles without a tank the size of Las Vegas? Just sayin'. . . . . .
Yes. same for cars too. range is less, but not by much...
Also, for those of us with NG in our houses, compressor units can be installed so that we can fill up in our garages. NG distribution infrastructure already in place a HUGE bonus
duplication removed..comment below
See the PickenPlan site. No magic, just logistics and torque, not talk.The crude oil paymasters of 100s of billions to the arab world do not want you to know. They get huge vig on the rebound. 20 million vehicles running CNG worldwide, in US only hundreds of thousands. CNG pumps at truck stops is not so hard to make happen for a ready to work solution.
I've written all my representatives about the gas bills. Marcellus Shale would be great economically for rust belt portions of NY,PA,WV. But alas, there is no money to be made by the military industrial complex getting domestic energy.
For people who like to have drinking water that doesn't poison them to death, Marcellus Shale and most other gas developments are highly problematic.
The cynical part of me says that the oil companies don't care because they will start selling purified water to all the people who would otherwise drink poisoned groundwater after the fracking goes awry.
frigging fracking
Oh schist, it's Mr. Gneiss. Shale we tanzanite?
thank you mad max. indeed fracking shale oil uses up to 900 different chemicals. this is injected into the earth down hundreds of feet. the extraction process pulls up this water that they used along with the gas. it's complicated, may brain is challenged, but i have seen them do it in western colorado. cheney (the devil) got shale oil industry exempted from the clean water act. no regulations, no ones knows what the chemicals are. it's very dangerous to the rivers, wildlife and humans. especially they are doing it right on the banks of the colorado and green river. oh i can't talk about, nothing is good about it for sure†
True. Google Craig Burbage + Shell Oil. Western Colorado water formerly used for ag has been purchased for use in shale oil and gas extraction.
crude oil drilling and similar practices seem to have no talking points...guess who is manufacturing fear here? At least domestic drillers can be watched and managed for compliance. We are lucky this is the only issue to beat for survival.
If there is no money to be made by the Military-Industrial Cabal, who will pay for re-election campaigns? That's like expecting the earth, water, and air to pay for re-election campaigns if non-synthetic and targeted nutrition became the rule rather than the exception. If the standard of care is approved synthethics; a practitioner gets sued if you don't prescribe, stand against the tide on your own little perch against pharma legal and insurance against you. When they say it's not about the money, it's about the money. Deep Throat (A/K/A W. Mark Felt) said it for all time.
Picken's plan is about the most sensible. However, it is, as even he notes, only a stop-gap measure.
All that stated, there's still the issue of creating yet more make-work ("stimulus") when the country is hemorrhaging in debt, foreign debt. Are we going to tell our creditors "we're going to hold off paying our existing debts so that we can remodel our kitchen"?
True, oil imports make up about 40% of our trade deficit, but it would be a long time before this amount could be scrubbed. There's also the issue of negatively impacting exports (diverting to internal consumption).
Nowhere do we hear doing what is necessary- conservation! And even then, conservation just means slowing down the inevitable.
A stop-gap is the most sensible thing to do fiirst since, number one, it works right now. Secondly, until you start you can't see how much everything else starts changing as in recovery from illness when you first apply a working medicine or protocol to your dynamiic system.
Scientists like Hubbert knew about peak oil in the 1950s. The math was further revised in the 1990s, and better models were done.
Today, now, in 2010, politicians and businessmen are starting to realize "hey, wait a minute, maybe the fact that our planet is finite in size means that there isn't an infinite sea of hydrocarbon under its surface?!?"
I'm starting to think that only scientists and engineers know that their ass is not a hole in the ground.
You sayin' that engineers believe in "peak oil"? It's the engineers who keep finding more and more oil, and better and better ways of extracting it. If we engineers (and I are one) were that convinced that there were limits to anything, we'd still be crossing the oceans in sailing ships. Far too many scientists on the other hand are mostly concerned with the approval of their peers, and the money that peer approval brings to the table, whether or not their theories actually hold any water. Witness the great Global Warming Debacle.
by Merlin12
It isn't about finding more oil, it is all about cheap oil, and that isn't being found. Without cheap oil, people are going to start getting thrown off the lifeboat.
No, it is NOT.
Peak Oil is simply a PRODUCTION RATE MAXIMUM.
It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with PRICE.
Price is fixed by supply and demand.
Are you reading your own posts? After saying "No, it is NOT" you then go on to completely confirm what the prior poster had said. At least, assuming you're capable of basic deductive logic. Hmmm, fixed or increasing demand, with a limited production rate. I'll bet that hits effective supply! I wonder if a supply crunch in the face of constant demand could cause an increase in price?!?!
Peak oil has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH PRICE.
Suppose oil demand DECLINED because people decided to stop consuming as much you know to save the whales or polar bears or something.
Peak would STILL BE THERE even if oil were $20/bbl.
Peak is NOTHING other than a maximum rate at which oil can be extracted from a well, field, nation, earth, or other arbitrary reserve.
Peak is not the end of cheap oil, it is the end of increasing production.
Which, in the world that most of us inhabit (though perhaps not you), automatically translates into the end of cheap oil, and that in turn has severe economic effects.
It's like someone is saying "and if a hydrogen bomb goes off above your city, you will be vaporized and die" and your response is to say "no, the only direct effect of the hydrogen bomb would be to heat your body to 10 million degrees. Anything else is not a direct effect nor inherent in the concept."
Naw man.
Peak "cheap" oil creates the expectation of still-growing production, except at a higher price.
That is why I object to the term. That, somehow, only the Cheap oil has peaked, but the expensive oil, yeah, we still got much more of that.
We don't. Oil past-peak will be less available no matter the price. Even if we tomorrow converted all of our energy demand over to nukes and just kept pumping the oil to make more plastics and fertilizer, we'd have production declines YoY. The oil price would obviously collapse.
You sir must not be a very good engineer to say all that. And your assessment of scientists is drivel. Back to your Facebook.
How can you know how to add and not understand peak oil? No, I'm an engineer, actually I teach it, and I don't go around saying only wimps are scared by the second law of thermodynamics dude. Are you a drilling tech who calls himself an engineer, or a guy who hasn't picked up a calculator in 10 years except to do the vacation schedule for his line crew?
Engineers are finding oil at a slowing rate. Fact.
Engineers' discoveries of oil are outstripped by demand growth by 4, 8, 12, 14:1, at an accelerating rate. Fact.
The rate at which we can extract crude & condensate achieved a peak in 2005. Fact.
Peak oil is about rates. Not "more" not "cheap" not none of this confused shit that people on this thread keep babbling about because they read a yahoo article trying to explain peak oil to idiots who thought it was "running out of oil" and now these idiots think it's running out of "cheap" oil.
It's merely about a maximum rate of production and an inability to grow it past that point. And, it has happened.
The vast majority of oil-producing nations have already peaked and are in terminal supply decline. The time-to-peak of newer wells is *lower* than older discoveries. IOW, the "quality" of the reserves found today is lower. They peak sooner, and production declines faster than the old finds like Ghawar or Burgan.
Nevermind that discoveries of oil peaked in 1964. Wells simply aren't found anymore that will produce significantly more than 500kbpd. Peak oil is a reality and it's a painful one.
I never did acquire an engineering degree, but I DID learn that there's the finite and the infinite. Infinite is in the mind, and, to some degree, out in the universe.
I believe that it's a pretty commonly accepted view that the earth is finite. As such, there HAS to be a finite amount of everything on it*, including oil. And, the accessibility of oil has a point at which it is only feasible (physically and economically) to extract so much of it. And that this total, being finite and measurable, HAS a mid point of extraction. Denying "Peak Oil," therefore, goes against all logic. We may quibble over when, over what affect, but anything that is measurable DOES have a mid point.
* Yes, there's incoming stuff from outerspace, but crude oil is not any of it.
And could we please drop the attempts to equate this with global warming (which is really about climate change- screw a label up and thence on everything is deemed wrong), it's a total non-sequitur.
More pluses for you!
+++++++++++++
Silver tracks oil.
It is not propaganda.
China is locking up Saudi oil. Get ready, oil or Jews, you can't have both.
Sometime when you get a chance, look at how much oil it takes to make 90 days of fertilizer and deliver it to your little world. If you are hording seeds for the big event, you might as well pack them up your ass. Think about this, a bag of 6-6-6 $ 110, 10-10-10 $ 185, 35-0-0 not available.
Don't like wet backs? Then plan to move up North in 2014.
Like that stupid old man keeps writing about, buy gold, silver and oil.
Which old man?
Mogambo Guru
Agriculture is just the act of converting oil into food. Making and using your own compost is a great way around the high cost of fertilizer
Make sure you have worms working in your garden too, as that also helps
Let's call it "modern mechanized agriculture" so as not to eliminate the possibility of ever feeding our children again post-peak.
Though yeah, I don't remember too much about how we did it in 1820.
Agreed. I have the advantage in that I was raised in a subsistence farming family, where the methods hadn't changed in....ever!
Compared to modern living (if it can be called living) the subsistence farmer has a much higher quality of life. The only change I would make is to place a woodstove outdoors during the very hot canning season. Will try my sun stove first though....
Yes, there's a "future"in subsistance farming: anything else is not sustainable- duh!
I vote YOU the most informed then :-) Someone with this background has my respect.
Wouldn't it be nice if canning season was during late fall and early winter? Well, for some things yes (squash, though one can store these many months w/o canning).
I want to try drying too. My family never did dry. The canning was done in August and September Wood stove a blazing in the kitchen, don't know how my mom and grandma did it .
It was very efficient living, our water glasses were actual jelly jars, which I used to hate drinking from due to the glass thread at the top!
Once we moved to the city, I remember thinking as a fourteen year old about how wasteful city people were. It was actually quite stunning...
waterdog, just found these cats for fertilizer:
http://www.convertedorganics.com/
look ma, no chemicals! and again, a pot of coffee in the morning will get you a large bottle of 35-0-0 urine by sundown.
with that said, your basic premise is right on. there is a good reason ol georgie soros is loaded up with Potash, Inc. but think of it of this way, an oil spike causes the production costs of corn and hi-fructose corn syrup to also spike faster than you can say toots sweet.
Put this in the FWIW column, but there is a certain place in the fields where we all go to take a piss. Guess which grass the chickens like to eat???
pastured eggs anyone???
China will bid the Saudis and other Arab OPEC'ers with Palestinan aid kicker and Israeli boycott. Lots of chessmen to play with between USTs and Gaza, East Jerusalem, apartheid.... nice kettle of fish there , hey Ollie?
two trucks to fill a military hummer , a ford pickup
bet who gets first dibs
the military will grab the oil long before any attempt is made to grab the gold
Hey, you can't scare me. I'll be able to get all the gas I want for $15/gal, and I'll pay it Sparky because I'm patriotic.
Why do I feel like a cartoon penguin is looking over my shoulder?
Oh, oh! Quick! Turn around and look and tell us what you find! :-)
- very bleak outlook, shortages of oil, water and food...coupled with overpopulation, a disaster in the making.
What the hell is the deal with China attempting to "blind" our satellites with lasers in 2006? Is this not an act of war?
No more an act of war than the Jap.coms selling hundreds of billions of dollars of our Treasury debt via Swiss banks instead of rolling it.
Maybe we were being nosy
don't know who JOE is but he must be selling oil at these levels
Earth, the long way to hell
God made Heaven; Man-made Hell.
Just read Professor Kenneth S. Deffeyes book "Beyond Oil", he's a long time geophysicist for many of the major oil companies, student of Hubbert, he predicts a 90% drop in oil production by 2020, we're about to run off a cliff.
- get ready http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQCKHEmIDYM&NR=1
bahaha! That horse looked pissed!
- hold the horses, think I found the answer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJJrjDI5xSQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZjNbjhxgt4
Red Green Show, one of my favorites (when I used to watch TV)!
Sure illustrates the thinking of many (and many who are actually in leadership positions!).
Hey look everyone, an optimist!
It isn't the "90% reduction by 2020" that kills you. It's the "20% reduction by 2014" that does it. And a lot sooner
Because without "15% increase in production every year" we go into a tailspin. And by some accounts we hit 0% new net production 3 years ago.
Yes, unfortunately. You obviously "get it."
And yet, threshing with a horse-powered machine is like 10,000 times easier than threshing by hand.
And I'll bet 90% of the readers can't explain what threshing is without looking it up, and probably half don't get it even after looking it up.
I know what threshing is. And what a scythe is. And I could perform the entire harvest operation myself and grind the flour on a stone by hand and make a loaf of bread from scratch, using natural yeast.
So, that's two of us.
Now what the fuck are you and I going to do to feed all these other Nancy boys?
I used a scythe last summer to clear weeds, used to use one quite a bit on tall red clover to feed the workhorse. Now I know what stomach muscles are needed for!
Yup, that's two of us, and it sounds like hulk might make it too.
What am I going to do? Hide like a hibernating chipmunk in wolf-town while the rest of the people starve, and emerge from my cave in a couple years to try and find the other productive types. I'll have some nice forged steel in case some non-productive types made it through as well.
Only speaking metaphorically, of course.
BTW, grain grinders are affordable and durable and a lot nicer than trying to grind by hand.
A scythe can kill, too. Just saying.
And the "grind on a rock" thing was making a point, that's all. In a pinch those as can make due, do.
Who would have ever imagined that being raised in poor Appalachia would someday, perhaps, have its advantages???
Go straight home and sit down at the feet of your grand-sires and take notes as he/she/they tell you everything they know about life before oil. Every detail, down to how much chicken shit you can add to the garden without burning the soil.
Then write a book, as best you can.
I'm good for 20 copies.