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Guest Post: Dangerous Ideas
Submitted by Chris Martenson
Dangerous Ideas
We are at a key turning moment in history. The actions that we will soon decide to take will be determined by the beliefs we hold. At a time like this, holding the wrong set of beliefs can destroy your wealth, sap your joy, and even prove to be life-shortening.
Knowing the 'right' sets of beliefs to hold is never easy, but it is especially difficult at large turning points because, by definition, most people are holding onto old beliefs. Running against the crowd is difficult for everyone and impossible for many.
“If you think you can or think you cannot, you are correct.”
~ Henry Ford
Beliefs matter. A lot.
One’s experiences in life and one’s beliefs are closely connected, an idea that we explore in depth in our seminars. (The next ones are coming up in March and June). For instance, simply believing in the likelihood of success vastly improves the chances of good things happening to us and our accomplishing difficult tasks.
Whether it is the case that our beliefs help to shape reality, or merely how we experience it, is a distinction without a difference.
The tricky part is that our beliefs are usually hidden from us. Without conscious examination, they escape notice: lurking, shaping, and coloring our daily lives. Worse, beliefs quite often are not ‘ours’ in the sense that we create them by our individual thoughts and experiences. Instead, they are gifted to us by our society, culture, and media. Of course, when such beliefs are cynically shaped by those wishing to influence us (advertisers and big media come to mind), ‘gifted’ might not be the appropriate word.
Two very obvious efforts at shaping beliefs are currently being run in the US by various parties wishing to shape our collective beliefs to their liking. One is around the ‘necessity’ and desirability of going to war with Iran. The second, which we will examine closely in this report, concerns Peak Oil.
Whether or not Peak Oil is true cannot possibly be in doubt. Within anything other than a geological frame of time, oil is a finite substance. When it is burned, it is gone. Without stretching our brains very far, it is easy to conclude that anything that is finite and consumed will someday be gone.
Peak Oil, then, is really an observation, not a theory.
It draws upon and has at its disposal decades of experience with individual oil fields, producing basins, and entire countries all repetitively experiencing the exact same behavior: Oil production increases up to a point, and then it decreases afterwards. This is not theory; it is a related set of facts and careful observations.
It's odd that so many people will trust a psychiatrist to administer psychoactive drugs, about which so little is actually known, yet distrust Peak Oil, an idea about which so much is definitively known. As you can see, I am of the opinion that for some people, information (or data) and beliefs have an awkward relationship at best, and a non-existent one at worst.
The only aspect of Peak Oil that is theory is the precise moment at which the world will experience its final peak in flow rates. When the peak will happen is a theory; Peak Oil itself is not. Because of this, it is flow rates that we care most about, which constitute a description of quantity. But we need to also concern ourselves with the net energy returned from the oil we expend effort to obtain, which is a matter of the quality of the oil.
Those are the two "Q's" that matter. Quantity and quality.
Given all this, note the headlines of the next two linked articles that recently appeared in the news media. Ask yourself, What sorts of beliefs are they reinforcing? And which ones they are minimizing, if not attacking?
The End of the Peak Oil Theory
Feb 16, 2012
If you haven't noticed, the oil apocalypse has been delayed -- again -- and the doomsday predictors are undoubtedly eating crow while they concoct another mega disaster. "Peak oil," the theory that oil production will soon hit a peak and begin declining, sending the world into an economic disaster, failed to live up to its hype again.
It's amazing how fast perceptions of our energy future can change. One day prevailing wisdom tells us that energy costs are going to rise uncontrollably as oil production declines and new energy sources fail to live up to their promise. The next, our problems are solved, and our reliance on foreign oil appears to be evaporating before our eyes.
(Source)
Citigroup Says Peak Oil Is Dead
Feb 17, 2012
Citigroup announced to the world Thursday that peak oil is dead. The controversial idea that world crude oil production is almost at its peak and will soon begin an irrevocable long-term decline has been laid to rest in the highly productive shale oil formations of North Dakota, with potentially big consequences for oil prices, the bank said.
“The belief that global oil production has peaked, or is on the cusp of doing so, has helped to fuel oil’s more than decade-long rally,” Citigroup said in a note to clients. “This is now all changing because of what is happening in North Dakota,” where new technology has led to a large and unexpected surge in oil production from shale rock.
After decades of decline, “U.S. oil production is now on the rise, entirely because of shale oil production,” said Citigroup. Shale oil could add almost 3.5 million barrels a day to US oil production between 2010 and 2022 and has already slashed 1 million barrels a day from U.S. oil imports. One day it may allow the U.S. and Canada to be self-sufficient in oil, it said.
(Source)
Obviously the idea of Peak Oil as a concept is directly under attack in these articles, but there are a host of underlying beliefs in play as well. One concerns the ability of the US (once again) to become self-sufficient in oil by applying a bit of good old-fashioned ingenuity and a healthy slathering of high technology.
Another seems to be the belief that we might not have to change our ways after all; that the energy will be there in sufficient quantity (and quality!) to support an indefinite continuation of past consumption and growth far into the future. Don't worry, be happy is the message.
Avoiding Propaganda
The definition of propaganda is "a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community towards some cause or position." It usually involves the selective use of facts or the avoidance of appropriate context, coupled with loaded messages and words, in order to elicit an emotional rather than rational response.
Whether the goal is to lead an otherwise unwilling populace towards war or to drive the purchase of a new car, propaganda is not only alive and well, but getting steadily better. Consider it a technology; like any technology, it is constantly being refined using the latest and greatest research, studies, and testing.
If you'd like to parse the articles further, go back and re-read them, looking for 'shaping' words that create impressions and are designed to elicit confidence, exude authority, or in other ways bypass the reader's own critical thought processes. Examples of such words and phrases would be 'controversial,' 'concoct,' and 'laid to rest.' These are not neutral words, but heavily biased ones, and we are so surrounded by them in what otherwise appear to be (and should be, ideally) informational articles that they often escape notice.
The emotions being evoked possibly include: feeling silly for holding the wrong ideas (a form of social shame), anger (at being grievously misled by those nasty "Peak Oilers"), and elation ("Yay! No changes necessary!").
These same sorts of emotional devices are constantly at work in the fields of finance, politics, investing, and advertising. Propaganda is a means to an end, and some argue that it can be beneficial if it moves us towards a better future and/or outcome.
But the risk here is that we are faced with propaganda that is sending the exact wrong messages at a very critical time.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
For a moment, let's accept the emotional premise of the above articles and shape our decisions around the idea that Peak Oil has been debunked and is a failed concept. What would change?
For starters, we can drop our concerns about the implications of steadily rising energy prices. Instead of buying smaller cars, more efficient homes, and placing our investments in those sectors that will prove resilient to higher energy costs, we can just go back to ignoring energy costs as a factor, content with knowing that they will be going down, not up.
Next, we can dispense with any concerns we might have had about how we will grow the economy going forward. Because you need energy -- especially oil -- to grow an economy, we can wholeheartedly invest in the stock market, confident that growth will once again emerge as it always has, unchanged and unfettered. 10% real, annualized returns are coming back!
The relief at being able to count on the future resembling the past, only bigger and presumably better, is palpable and seductive.
The only problem here is, what if that view of the future is wrong? Then what?
Everything.
All your plans for happiness, safety, wealth, and comfort go right out the window.
And the odd part is that adjusting to the idea of Peak Oil when it can nudge you towards using less energy more efficiently is just good business and good wealth preservation practice under any circumstances, with high oil prices or low. It really makes no sense to internalize any messages that seek to belittle Peak Oil. In fact, it makes sense to spot them and reject them as rapidly as possible. The risks are just too asymmetrical
Is Peak Oil Really Dead?
Okay, now it's time for a little data to put the above claims of Peak Oil being dead into proper context. In Part II of this report we'll examine the data more closely, but for now this chart from the US Department of Energy should suffice to show where we are in terms of the US oil production story.
Yes, the Bakken could produce as much as 2 million barrels per day (bpd) up from roughly 500 thousand bpd, maybe as much as 3 million bpd, but the US imports roughly 8 million bpd today under even severe economic conditions, and as much as 10 million bpd under happier economic conditions.
The Bakken and other shale plays are simply not going to replace all of that -- ever. Note, too, the slope of the line before the 'Bakken bump,' and observe that whatever gains are realized from shale oil will be fighting depletion losses from the rest of the tired fields under production.
And the Bakken will someday peak, too, and then where will we be? In the same place as before, wondering where we are going to get our next fix.
A Better Narrative
I would not mind the excitement over the Bakken as much as I do if it came along with a suitable narrative that made sense. Something along the lines of, "The Bakken is very exciting because it offers us the chance to use domestic supply to begin to move away from our national oil dependence and towards a more sustainable energy future, one where we are not shackled to the need for endless production increases to fuel exponential economic growth. This transition will even make our monetary system much more healthy and robust."
But it is never packaged that way. Instead the message is always something like, "Don't worry, be happy (and just get back to whatever it is you do, and be sure to shop a lot)!"
At the very least, the Bakken should be telling the authors of the above articles and positions something quite different than what they are relating. For one thing, the amount of technology and constant expertise involved in squeezing the oil out of the formation clearly tells us that the easy, cheap oil is gone.
The complexity is on display if one just bothers to look. Here's a prime example relating to new attempts to squeeze more oil out of the tight shale formation:
While PetroBakken is bullish on dry natural gas injection, the company isn't ruling out the possibility of injecting water-or other fluids-for future projects in other areas of the Bakken.
PetroBakken is using the pilots to test different concepts or well configurations. For example, in the second pilot-which will inject natural gas at a rate of about two million cubic feet per day-gas will be injected along the entire horizontal section of the injection well, so the flood front will hit the toe of each of four perpendicular producing wells.
"As gas breaks through at the toe of each well, we have the ability to simply plug off the toe area of the producing horizontal well and mitigate the cycling of the gas at that port," LaPrade explains.
"The front would continue to move along the horizontal producing leg to the next port, where we would again plug that port off as the gas breaks through."
Typical wells in the Bakken come in at an average 200 barrels of oil per day and decline about 70-75 per cent in the first year before flattening out at 30-40 barrels per day.
(Source)
I think this is incredible ingenuity, and I admire the creativity and engineering on display. But all of this effort to fight the natural tendency of a Bakken well to produce at 30-40 bpd clearly is not the same thing as chunking a vertical well a thousand feet down and getting 1,000 to 10,000 bpd flow rates. The cost to produce a unit of energy is much higher in the Bakken case than in traditional, historical oil plays.
That is, net energy is lower than in the past, which cycles us back to the quality argument. The difference between cheap and expensive oil is important and clearly on display here, but that subtlety has somehow eluded the authors of the above articles.
Conclusion
Efforts are underway to convince the general populace that our energy concerns are a thing of the past and that the new energy discoveries in the Bakken and other shale formations have proven Peak Oil to be a mistaken idea. Some efforts go even further and flatly state that energy independence is right around the corner.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is a very clear relationship between economic growth and sufficient quantities of high quality energy. A crude measure of energy quality is its price. The lower the price for a unit of energy, the higher its quality (or net energy), but this is a very crude measure that can and often is heavily distorted by subsidies, market pressures, and other factors. As we squint at the world price for oil and note that Brent today is trading at $120 per barrel, it is clear that this high price is signaling that energy is now more expensive than it used to be.
By adopting the belief that Peak Oil has been debunked, one runs the risk of missing the larger story that our current economic model is unsustainable. And that stocks and bonds and other traditional investments that derive a large portion of their current value from expectations of future growth simply may not perform anything like they have in the past. And worse, that recent and continuing efforts to revive the old economy by printing money risk the destruction of the money system itself.
Given this all-too-human tendency to attempt to preserve the status quo, in this case by printing money, I must reiterate my advice to be sure that gold forms a significant portion of your core portfolio.
In Part II: Preparing for a Future Defined by Peak Oil, we do the math to show that even using the rosiest estimates, there is no way for the Bakken field to get the US anywhere close to "energy independence" nor stave off the arriving society-changing impact of Peak Oil.
If that's the case, then what's to be done?
Now, more than ever, is the time to develop a full understanding of what the arrival of Peak Oil will do to world economies, financial investments like stocks and bonds, and our energy-indulgent way of living. As I have been writing for some time now, the next twenty years are certain to be quite different from the past twenty. Use the time you have now to invest in the pursuits -- and there are many -- that will reduce your vulnerability to the effects of rising energy costs, and learn that prosperity in such a future is possible if we lay the groundwork for it now.
Click here to access Part II of this report (free executive summary; enrollment required for full access).
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Did you read it??? It concludes that hybrids etc... have a smaller carbon footprint...
Get rid of 6 billion people, and this becomes a non-issue.
They're working on that...
I just need a few measly volts to run my aquaponics pumps... Unless I can find a Greek to PAY ME to ride a stationary bike & run a generator...
BULL SHIT
There is enough natural gas on the North Slope to power North America for two hundred years, and that's a tiny fraction of what is available.
Buggy whips peaked. Does that mean the sky fell?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, where, pray tell, is yours???
I get my ideas from those who do not hide in Mom's basement all day, or suck the government tit.
Oil Beneath Our Feet - David E Robinson
As we speak, there are hundreds of engines pumping natural gas back into the North Slope Fields.
Lay off the ad homs.. it makes you look like a loser...
Are you away of gas reinjection to maintain pressure?? Have you ever talked to a reservoir engineer?
Could you provide an extract from what is clearly a pivotal document???
It's a book, Dude. This is very old news, but you have to be willing to look at things that don't fit your prejudice.
I would think that if it was true, then the information would be found in something other than an out of print piece of fiction....
I mean, like, there are large companies that would love to get a piece of that action... Hell, even if only to boost the reserves on their balance sheet (and pocket the corresponding rise in share price)...
Shit, these must the most disciplined greedy sons-of-whores that the world has ever seen...
Have you ever heard of Amazon.com? It's too early to be blind drunk and stupid.
Hey, you are one saying that every thing is ok... The onus is on you.
Why don;t you write a guest post for the Hedge outlining the real truth...
Let me guess, you also believe what Lindsey Williams tells you?
That may be the case... but its a lower quality fuel... as is coal... and wood... The point of this article is understanding what 'peak' anything means...
Once you peak with light sweet, you move to heavier oils (such as opening the oldest well in Saudi again - which was closed because the heavy oils were worth jack all in the 30's but now are profitable due to shortages of good oil)...
I agree the human race will move to natural gas... then that will peak... and we'll go back to coal.... then back to wood.... We're like fucking heroin addicts... heroin is running short, so lets take Crack!... oh shit, we're out of Crack.... lets do Meth!
Its no better for us, but it gives us a Fix... but fixes nothing!
Maulthusian idiots, all of 'em! Funny how the desperation level is probably also close to peaking:
http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-photos-show-alleged-iran-bombs-hidden-27...
Not being a smartass, but natural gas is not crude oil. It is methane.
Not sure why I bother, but compressed natural gas or methanol are fine substitutes for gasoline or diesel, less poluting, excellent starts, and engines last forever.
If not for the HNIC and his all tree hugger band, we'd be half way there already.
Pop Quiz:
1) Is the US currently a net importer or exporter of Natural Gas?
2) Converting US NG produciton into an equivalent amount of oil gives how many bbl per day production?? How does this compare to current oil imports??
Fun fact: Lima (Peru) has almost 50% of their taxi fleet (mostly small cars) running on NatGas. Peru is poor! If they can do that, then the USA should be able to pluck some low-hanging fruit (municipal vehicles, taxis, maybe even trucks on the Interstates) to run part of OUR fleets on NatGas...
Taxis almost exclusively drive in a defined radius. Thus there is scale economies with the infrastructure requirements (filling stations). It doesn't work so well if you need to travel long distances between metro areas. So the main impediment has nothing to do with the technology related to the vehicles...it has to do with the infrastructure.
BTW, there are tons of bus and light-duty vehicle fleets across the U.S. that are natural gas.
Not sure why I bother, but compressed natural gas or methanol are fine substitutes for gasoline or diesel, less poluting, excellent starts, and engines last forever.
No argument here. BUT...you're forgetting the most important impediment to wide-scale natgas cars - retail infrastructure. Supplanting the gasoline station infrastructure with a network of retail natgas stations is prohibitively expensive, particularly since you can't site a natgas station "off-grid" like you can with gasoline (storage tanks can be located anywhere, pipes not so much - at least not economically).
The same scale diseconomies barrier applies to keyboards. There might be better keyboard configurations than QWERTY, also, but they'll never see the light of day because the whole world is built around QWERTY.
If Peru can do it, the U.S. should be able to. High pressure gas mains are common in American cities where a large amount of motor fuel is consumed. There is no need for storage. Conversion of internal combustion engines from gasoline to natgas is potentially trivial. Maybe Peru can teach the Americans how to do it.
1) Does the US import or export NG on a net basis?
2) What is BOE equivalent of daily US NG production??
The difference in the price per BTU will vanish very quickly if NG demand increases....
Flaky - I hate to do this, but you are dead on in this case and I can't let a spoiler's down-arrow go without response. And since I didn't see the answer elsewhere...
The US is a net importer of natural gas - mostly from Canada, but also from Trinidad, Algeria and a host of other places friendly and unfriendly.
If my math is right, the U.S. produces about 40-45 Bcf/day of natural gas, which translates to around 7.5 - 8.2 million bbl oil equivalent. Last I saw, the U.S. was importing about 9.2 million bpd.
So if I've got that right, the punch line is that the oil equivalent of U.S. natgas production is less than what is imported in oil.
Correct re: imports from Canada (though those have dropped drastically in recent year, google "TransCanada Pipeline")
I'm coming up with ~7mbpd on a direct conversion basis. So, if we stopped heating a lot of our homes, heating a lot of our water, cooking a lot of our food, and running a decent portion of our electrical grid, we could, for a limited amount of time, come up ~2mbpd short of what we import. Doesn't seem like such a bargain to me.
For some reason I got ~12 mmbpd BOE last time I calculated it...
18 Tcf/year produced in U.S....but with imports consumption is likely >25 Tcf, which is closer to 12 mmbpd. In any case, point made.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong....
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9010us2a.htm
High pressure gas mains are not common in American cities. Low pressure gas mains are. Most major cities in the U.S. are still bound to ancient, mostly steel pipes that were relics of former coal gasification plants from the early 1900s. It's generally too expensive to dig up the ground to upgrade all of the infrastructure to high-pressure/plastic mains, but they're getting there.
That said, even if it can be done in the cities, how do you drive from Chicago to Denver unless there are a couple of stops along the way? Apart from tapping into major, interstate pipelines, there ain't much high pressure stuff around in the remote sections of the country. And no one's going to construct a regulator station to step down a 36-inch, 1,400 psi pipe for a filling station.
As to 'storage,' the reference was the fact that it is much, much less costly to bury a few 5,000 gallon gasoline storage tanks in order to build a gasoline station.
Do a little homework before you jump to grand conclusions.
<<Do a little homework before you jump to grand conclusions.>
Fukyou.
I spent years working as an underground utilities engineer (PE) in a city. The gas mains were actually commonly "semi-high pressure", but I assumed you wouldn't know anything about that. They are very common underground utilities in cities as the main suppliers of natgas.
I'm a 20+ year veteran of the natgas industry, and I can likely tell you as much about gas mains as anyone on ZH. I've been in front of the cameras with a 100% gas concentration event caused by a service line separation caused by 4' of frost, and I've overseen three city upgrades from low to medium and/or high pressure.
I'll take you at your word that you were a utilities engineer in A CITY. Which city was it? Are you sure all the rest of the cities are the same as the ONE you worked in? Are you familiar with the coal gasification plants in New England and the iron cast pipes running through Boston, Lowell and St. Albans, VT? Have you worked in Chicago, where the old Peoples Gas Light upgraded half the city to 70 psi, but not the other for political reasons (and never removed the corroded, "coated steel" pipes in and around historic Wrigley Field)? How 'bout San Antonio, where most of the system is plastic except for a few isolated sections around the Riverwalk? Or how about Los Angeles, where LADWP's ordinances interfere with the ability to uproot the 1950s steel mains? Or maybe Rochester, NY where upgrading the mains would force the retirement of a propane-air plant that is the main source of property tax revenue for one of the outlying suburbs?
Tell us what you know. Please.
Let me guess, your major in college was NOT Geology.
Maybe Finance or sales or plumbing?
(let alone Physic and the 1st three laws of Thermodynamics)
Check on the overpopulatoin, the real problem we can't discuss becasue it's too politically incorrect.
Wow, 200 years of gas! And then what? CAre about the future much? Or like my Dad, you you only care if say, SS can live only about as long as he did, and screw your kids -and vehemntly deny there's a problem? Fuck you.
We've been lucky that science, tech, and frankly new finds have saved us so far. Every sane person who checks the history will realize that can't go on forever in a world already explored and exploited to the tits. There's not a lot missing in the theory of everything anymore, nothing unexplained we could suddently reap a bunch of near free high quality energy from without serious other issues.
You know that 96% of the densely-populated U.S.'s land area is uninhabited, right?
You understand that you need "uninhabited land" to do things like grow food, right? You understand some areas are mountains or swamps or deserts or are otherwise not well suited to being a place for humans to live, right?
There's a pretty big chasm between being "not well suited" and imposing population controls. That said, spare me the soliloquy on how little space there is for more people. It's a ruse.
How many more people do you think can be "FIT" into where exactly? counting food, water, electricity, heating or cooling or both as needed, and what standard of living you expect them to have.
I could "FIT," comfortably, at least 100 families on my land alone, and my parcel is relatively small compared to some of my "neighbors". Plenty of soil to till, forest to hunt, streams to fish, and wood to burn.
Let me know if you want to rent a space. :D
IIRC, the original resource for Prudhoe Bay was around 40TCF with a little over half of that recoverable. Prudhoe Bay's OOIP was ~25bbls. North Slope is ~1.2bbls OOIP however the formation was buried deeper so most of what was once oil is now gas. Perhaps the North Slope has an additonal 60TCF if you DON'T COUNT NATURAL GAS HYDRATES (which you shouldn't). Annual demand is 24TCF so Prudhoe Bay and the North Slope, combined, could provide the U.S. with gas for a little over four years if we were to extract every cubic foot of it (impossible) and have zero transmission losses (which would probably be ~25% over that distance).
Pardon my ignorance, but is this really peak oil/less supply or another symptom of money printing? (probably both, but it seems like money printing coincides more with our current problems)
As I said above.... peak oil occurs when no amount of fiat printing (aka ZIRP) will increase the supply.... i.e. the multinational oil companies cannot increase their production even with the cost of funds being zero...
Well Peak Oil absolutely does coincide with printing, but not just in the way that is visible.
Peak oil is a huge problem due to the fact that in order for our debt based monetary system to function you need constant YOY growth.
The flaw in our system is merely being shown by peak oil extraction. In and of itself, peak oil is a problem. Couple it with the fact that we need growth at all costs due to our debt based money system and the real problem becomes visible.
Exponents.
Same with social security and people. Need the base to keep expanding to pay for increases in costs due to expanding debt supply inflating the costs.
pods
Well if CitiGroup said it it must be true lol It is nice to see the 'theory' is dead because its now a straight up reality... those who choose the ostrich route will live in blissful ignorance until it inevitably bites them in the ass... The rest of us who see whats going on will adapt, and as evolution is based off the most adaptable of a species, not the richest, biggest or strongest, i'll look forward to a future adaptation of less ignorant humans ;-)
By adopting the belief that Peak Oil has been debunked, one runs the risk of missing the larger story that our current economic model is unsustainable. ...And worse, that recent and continuing efforts to revive the old economy by printing money risk the destruction of the money system itself.
Why can't this guy connect the dots between money printing and rising oil prices?
Jeepers Creepers can we please examine the case for Peak Government.
So the abiotic wing nuts who tell us that we just have to drill down to 42,000 ft for unlimited oil should be calling these Bakken guys... I mean why would you go to such pains for ~100 bpd when such an alternative exists... The Bakken guys must be morons...
And the reason can't be the cost... these hz multi-fracked wells ain't cheap...
BP's Deepwater Horizon Macondo well produced a lot more than 100 bpd.
And it sure as fuck was not abiotic..... unless you think there are vast pools of abiotic oil 16,000 ft below the surface
How csn you be so sure it wasn't abiotic? Not everyone appears to agree with you. It was much deeper than "16,000 ft below the surface" (and more than 100bpd -- maybe 100,000 bpd), BTW.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article20845.html
http://moralphilosophyofcurrentevents.blogspot.com/2010/06/abiotic-oil-g...
How deep was it??? BTW, water don't count....
If water doesn't count then why would dirt, mud or any other part of the earth's surface count?
You said below the surface. Sea level is the surface, fuckwit.
As far as oil goes... water don't really count... Nice try though...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyaXvZpwPY
two of my more favorite people to listen too.
it may be a bit much for some of weaker minded.
becuase I enjoy them does not mean I agree with everything that falls from thier lips, so save you childish shit for someone stupid like you!
The argument is moot. There are alternative free energy devices that have been confiscated by intelligence agencies for 50+ years already. Theres no business in free energy so we're sucked into this oil game into they've squeezed every last dollar from it.
Better loosen the chin strap on the collander, its cutting off the oxygen flow...
Peak Oil is real just like war is real and this financial collapse is real. All real and all choriographed for one purpose. Money, power and control. Wait. That's three.
Oil is being consumed faster than its being abiotically created deep in the earth. There is much more oil in the ground than claimed. Alternative energy devices have been systematically suppressed since Tesla. Peak oil has been pulled in a hundred years or so to fit into the timed financial collapse by capping large wells and not building any new refineries.
It's called the "theater" of war for a reason. Maybe we should call it the "theater" of Peak Oil.
Oh. And Malthus was wrong. Just more green brainwashing, guilt inducing bullshit.
I read all this too, on the internet.
ESV, SDRL and RIG
In 500 years, we will be heating our homes with wood. Wars will be fought over wood.
Who is we? You think 7 billion people can be fed from a society that extracts BTUs from wood? Do you know the energy conversion efficiency of chlorophyl moving sunshine into wood?
It ain't high.
It ain't enough to power the 400 horsepower John Deere tractors that plow 10,000 acre farms before planting season expires. It ain't enough to feed 7 billion people.
Right you are, sir. Behold, the great thinning is at hand.
Probably correct, but forests worldwide will be denuded first. We will take out every tree as surely as the Easter Islanders did when the oil runs out.
I would not mind having a few well heads producing 40 bpd. That would help my bottom line :-)
Maybe I'll take a trip to ND to have a look around.
Is this the youtube you were looking for?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_TBWRgjnBk
So after first year output flattens out at 40 bbl/day, no problem they have to drill only 50k wells to get that 2 mln barrels per day.
That's assuming that there are 50k places to drill in Bakken and that the wells don't cannibalize each other (which they will, last I checked there are three distinct shales within Bakken and they're in communication with each other).
Finite means Finate. Citigroup or any other corporation can not change the physical universe in a sound bite.
Expect many more Bakken bumps along the road but if no one has noticed, just because you can drill 5 miles below a stormy sea, through corrosive salt, crushing pressures and bad weather doesn't make it cost effective enough to continue our way of life as we have enjoyed it. We can muddle on for a while with the Bakken bumps and the Petrobas reservoirs and hope to sell more Prius to extend what we have but that is a game that only goes so far. Every decade will see a doubling of oil costs which will create inflation in all other forms of energy as well. This will have profound impacts on the whole "organic" food market, retail shops, travel for work or pleasure, costs of hotels and goods in general. Without a transformative energy breakthrough like nuclear fusion, the world's best days in general are behind it..
You have a general understanding of reality.
Now adjust your perspective to one several hundred times worse than you think.
That's the future, near, intermediate and . . . well, there won't be a long term.
<<Every decade will see a doubling of oil costs which will create inflation in all other forms of energy as well.>>
Absolute fucking nonsense! When is this "doubling" going to start? The real inflation adjusted price of oil hasn't increased yet. And oil costs will not and do not create inflation. The Fed's money printing activities creates inflation.
Peak Oil
On the quality part, We are almost completely tapped out of the Champagne, and now it's mostly low grade Port or Cooking Sherry(ie sour and sulphur crude) or worse (ie Tar Sands are the Sterno).
The anti-Peak Oil nuts by and large haven't read a single thing by Laherre're, Campbell, Heinberg, Simmons, Deffeyes, Hubbert, et al
If these names are not very familar to you, then don't embarress yourself by posting negative comments on Peak Oil cuze you don't know squat.
Maybe read for about a month starting maybe here.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7191
or
http://www.amazon.com/PEAK-OIL-BOOKS/lm/26CCG716IZ4VC
You forgot to take into account that the Peak Oil "deniers" here are poster children for the DK effect....
"The only aspect of Peak Oil that is theory is the precise moment at which the world will experience its final peak in flow rates. When the peak will happen is a theory; Peak Oil itself is not."
Yeah there's only so much oil in the ground, unless the super hot center of the planet continues to make more, but still there is a limit. After all the sun will burn out one day. But many felt peak oil happened 35 years ago. And they were wrong. Completely wrong. If the "precise moment" of peak oil is 100 years from now, STFU and sit down until 2087.
Why don't you spend ten minutes and show us a calculation of what the rate of production might be...
It can be somewhat heuristic....
I bet if they stopped the speculation circle jerk on oil that price would come down.
If speculators cause the price of oil to be higher than it would otherwise, this in turn leads to greater investment in the production of oil, which paradoxically causes the oil price to be lower than it would be if there had been less investment in producing more oil.
When prices go down, the speculators who are on the short side of the trade have to buy to cover themselves, so prices do not decline as sharply as they otherwise would.
Speculation over the longer term smoothes out the volitility in prices. Sometimes, this speculation leads to excess capacity; however, I doubt "too much energy for too low of a price" is ever going to be a real problem for any length of time.
These are the types of observations that would tend to validate peak oil concerns and to refute the recent articles trying to minimize and dismiss them.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/10515764/idaho-us-rails-clogged-with-cars...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-gho...
Plus, military opinions would seem more credible than Bloomberg, etc. I doubt that the militaries will change their stance on the recognized risks due to energy availability concerns that they may have to react to in the near term just because of some rosy articles in the news that don's pass the gut check and don't ring true with what we see going on in the local and world economies. Who are you going to believe, them, or your lying eyes?
The militaries of the world are showing concerns about the systemic nature of the economic crises that are currently being experienced. Several credible military organizations have recently written reports documenting how there may be a need to react to civil unrest in other countries as well as their own in the near years due to oil production decreasing worldwide. Here is a link to various military reports. I would expect that the more recent reports are finally "getting it" and most credible. http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-28/energy-security-annotat...
The above para is from this link : Observations from an engineer | ZeroHedge
Tyler, any chance you can let the materials from the Observations from an engineer link elevate to a guest post so that more of the readers can review it and provide commentary? That could be interesting. It's logic and conclusions are very similar to this article by Chris Martenson. You could just cut and paste the current contents at that link into a guest post and run it up the flagpole. Or maybe you could do that and list it as one of the three articles that show up at the top of your website, instead of on the center thread of main articles. If you do that, please embed the Hubbert Curve graph right into the article instead of relying on the link to The Oil Drum | Highlights from Seventh Advances in Energy Studies Conference in Barcelona so the readers can see at first glance the thought provoking comments regarding economic theories on the upslope of the Hubbert Curve and on the downslope of the curve.The cheapest source of energy today is solar. Probably thanks to Chinese subsidies. Wind and solar installations are starting to eclipse fossil and nuclear generation installations. Oil is dirty and unreliable. It should be kept as a feedstock for plastics and as transportation fuel for aircraft. Solar panel efficiencies are starting to ride a "Moores Law" of improvement. Look for 20% panels in a year. Look for 50% panels in five years. At the same time a $60M diesel/methanol sun to micro-algae converson plant is going up in Arizona. Early tests show 5,000 - 15,000 gallons of diesel per year per acre.
No. We're not all going to be driving muscle cars soon. But the sky is not falling, either.
Using 15,000 gallons per acre per year.... how much land and water do you need to get 1,000,000 barrels a day?
The big issue is migrating from a society that REQUIRES perpetual growth, to one that can exist with no growth, or even periods of deflation.
That's where the molotov-wielding unions and sign-wielding pensioners and wealth-redistribution seeking OWSers meet reality.
Instead of saying "can exist" you might say that it will be structurally forced to exist with no overall growth and periods of deflation and contraction.
LENR
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/03/21/cold.fusion.moves.closer.mai...
It will move a lot closer when it can be demonstrated to occur at a meaningful rate...
Just in case you don't know my background, I worked with this guy when I was younger.....
Mizuno has demonstrated that LENR does occur at a meaningful rate already -- actually ten years ago. He doesn't have much of a PR staff though. But he has written a book. http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Transmutation-Reality-Cold-Fusion/dp/18929...
Unlike most, I wouldn't rule out LENR. I've read some of Tadahiko Mizuno's work and it seems like something IS there. The idea needs to be de-stigmatized and opened up for investigation by the scientific community. Our current forays into hot D-T fusion are pointless. We can achieve fusion, sure, even at a surplus, but when it comes to extracting the energy we need some serious innovations in material science (materials that can reliably handle that sort of neutron flux, temperature, pressure, etc, basically miracle materials).
The only hot fusion idea I've ever seen that seemed reasonable was PACER project conducted by LLNL. Basically, the idea was to detonate specially engineered H bombs in a reinforced underground cavity filled with salt. Detonate the bomb, liquify the salt, extract the heat with heat exchangers, wash, rinse repeat. Totally feasible but it might be a tough sell to the public.
If only there were an inexpensive way of making muons we'd be set....
I don't think there's any doubt anymore in the scientific community that has actually studied the phenomena that something IS there. There's just not enough work being done to understand it yet, and I think there's some very powerful industry people that don't want work to be done on it either.
The He4 sticking fraction is the no-go for mu-catalysis...
That being said, you can breed Pu from Uranium from the resulting neutron flux from muon catylyzed D-D fusion....
There's a shitload of oil in the US. More than in Canada and Saudi Arabia... it's not being developped because the scum running Washington DC want total austerity and agenda 21.
It's called the Green River Shale. It's not technically oil. It's kerogen. It has the energy density of a baked potatoe. Good luck getting a meaningful flow out of it.... you'd have to double U.S. electrical generating capacity to power the ground heaters necessary to extract enough kerogen to meet U.S. oil import demands (I've done the math).
97% of the Green River and related bitumen deposits are *not* on Federal lands... The reason they are not developed is that oil cos. like to make money, and not piss it away chasing bad ideas...
Yup. Shell dumped... what, $200million into trying to figure out how to get oil out of the green river shale and then gave up after producing something like 50 barrels from half a dozen wells?
Thorium.
Would sure be nice if Citigroup would put their money where their mouth is instead of trying to put everyone elses' money where their mouth is. Secondly, charts of historical oil production per day only tell half the story if they don't show the amount of energy consumed to obtain that production. What's the net energy production? That would be far more meaningful. When EROEI = 1, it won't matter how much is being produced.
What was that saying about "getting a man to believe..."