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Peak Silver Revisited: Impacts Of A Global Depression, Declining Ore Grades & A Falling EROI
Submitted by SRSrocco
The world is about to peak in global silver production. This will not occur due to a lack of silver to mine, but rather as a result of the peaking of world energy resources, declining ore grades, and a falling Energy Returned On Invested – EROI. The information below will describe a future world that very few have forecasted and even less are prepared. This is an update to my previous article Peak Silver and Mining by a Falling EROI. In my first article I stated that global silver production may peak in 2009 if we were to enter a worldwide depression. We did not have the global depression as massive central bank printing and bailouts have thus far postponed the inevitable.
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US citizens are such creatures of comfort. Laughable.
Funny how this peak something is much easily accepted when US citizens are heavily invested in this something, with the opportunity of speculating about that something.
Not many who stand up against the possibility that silver extraction has peaked for the matter of peaking. Most US citizens in here are heavily invested in silver/gold.
Change the world silver for oil and a river of denial is cried.
US citizenism has killed truth.
You no hang alound heah.
Someday silver will be so very rare that it may surpass the dollar price of gold. It is impossible to economically recover the traces from electronic products, filthy burn bandages, chemical processing plants and so on. The silver is being depleted, I read somewhere it is the first element on the table likely to go extinct. Maybe as soon as 2025. There is puhlenty of gold out there, stored away.
Believest thou this?
Never, ever sell your bullion unless you have no choice, and buy on the dips.
I think I just reached my peak erection.
occupy the rothchilds gold room and platinum pool.
Is this the Mike Maloney Moment ?
Silver means money in over 55 languages including Chinese and maintains a deep significance in many cultures. If the US FED thinks it can eradicate thousands years of history with its worthless fiat currency then I believe the Minsky Moment maybe soon upon us.
Argentum et aurum comparenda sunt
Peak oil is pretty scary thing. So if peak oil is true, then the world will go to war because of it. People who running this world need to control population, so that we don't become cannibals.
as for silver, i would rather own silver and gold then paper apple stock.
I always taught we have shit load of oil in florida. We save that for the last resort.
Peak silver!
WTF - I have now heard it all. I seem to recall there was a tulip bulb shortage a few hundred years ago. Every 25 years some whackjob comes out with this crap and you dopes gobble it up like Obama toe jam.
The gall of the pumpers to go so low. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Production is slowing because 20 years ago 1000's of projects were mothballed due to low prices and they are now coming back on stream as well as drilling as pricing improves.
Get your goddamned facts straight. You spend 80% of the time talking like the US is the centre of the universe when it is in fact a pimple on the arse of humanity. In Canada we have trillions of tons of it. It comes out of the ground like Jed Clampett's Texas tea.
If you were a mining guy you would know this. In Mexico, they take dumps with more silver than you portray. Go to Guanajuato district. the stuff is sitting on the side of mountains in 1 ton blocks......
Man, the pumpers have no morality anymore.
Of course you can provide evidence of these one ton blocks, right..
Found this one: http://www.rense.com/general75/zoil.htm
also google.com
No Idea about the reliability of the source. But how to know anything for sure anyways unless I'm myself on the place noticing the facts rather than listening someones perspective (lies or true) about it.
200 Tons of silver, big deal - JPM trade that amount in less than a second. Lol.
There is an interesting geologist postulation that has been out for a few years now that essentially states that when the earth was formed, silver, of all the metals, was among the lightest and rose higher up in the crust's strata. Thus, the low hanging fruit has already been discovered and that's why the mining grades have deteriorated so badly. The scarcity of bonanza opportunities is quite palpable; there are really only a few operations that can make a living mining just silver, and when these have played out, then what? The USGS estimates 500,000 Mt left on the planet and we are using approx. 25,000 Mt/year. Do the math.
Notice that the depletion rates do not include Russia. Russia moved into deep oil before anyone else and has continuously increased production since then. The BP well should have been enough to convince anyone that deep oil reserves are immense. Likely, mankind will choke on all the fumes before deep oil is exhausted.
This opinion piece does indeed raise some very interesting questions. I'd like to address the following paragraph:
"Before we get into the silver part of the article, there is one more topic on energy that needs tobe discussed. There is continued debate about the Abiotic Theory of Oil as well as the blockingof oil drilling in certain areas of the United States by environmentalists. The Abiotic Oil Theorystates that oil fields are continuously being refilled, so there will be no peak oil. Even thoughthis might be true in some small cases as it pertains to methane, the amount is infinitesimal."
In June of 2003, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) [1] scheduled an event (which was cancelled) titled: "Origin of Petroleum -- Biogenic and/or Abiogenic and Its Significance in Hydrocarbon Exploration and Production" [2], here is an excerpt from the invitation:
"For half a century, scientists from the former Soviet Union (FSU) have recognized that the petroleum produced from fields in the FSU have been generated by abiogenic processes. This is not a new concept being reported in 1951. The Russians have used this concept as an exploration strategy and have successfully discovered petroleum fields of which a number of these fields produce either partly or entirely from crystalline basement. Is this exploration strategy limited to the petroleum provinces in Russia or does such a strategy have application to other petroleum provinces like the Gulf of Mexico or the Middle East? Some believe this is a possibility for fields in the Gulf of Mexico, and others argue for application to fields in the Middle East." [3]
An event did take place in June of 2005 titled "Origin of Petroleum", here is a list of abstracts that were considered during the conference [4]:
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/documents/abstracts/2005research_calga...
My intention is not to the challenge the author, rather to keep all options open. Research into the origins of petroleum is still very active [5-9] (too many to reference). The natural sciences have thrown a few surprises in the last 30 years, it would be a great shame to dismiss some truly credible ideas before they have been properly scrutinized.
Peak oil may be a credible hypotheis, however further research is required to determine the origins of petroleum and consequently the validity of peak oil theory.
"Lastly, for those of you who believe the information above is controlled by the Illuminati, Bilderbergs or whomever and there is still plenty of oil in wells capped all over the country, there is nothing that can be written or said to change your mind. As illustrated by the data, peak oil ishere whether you believe it or not."
The first part of this argument is a typical strawman so will not be addressed [10]. I'd like to point out that nothing of any particular significance has been demonstrated by the data shown, hence, nothing has been settled.
I would like to emphasize that I am not interested in the "politics" behind the origins of petroleum. The ramifications of either theory is left to those who are able to do something about it.
The peak silver hypothesis is certainly worth considering.
--
[1] AAPG: http://www.aapg.org/index.cfm
[2] See: http://www.mail-archive.com/fogri@iagi.or.id/msg00802.html
[3] See: Seabed Fluid Flow: The Impact on Geology, Biology and the Marine Environment by Alan Judd and Martin Hovland (Page: 157, Section 5.4.4 Hydrothermal and abiogenic petroleum). Google Books: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RhFfigXasLQC
[4] Complete list of past AAPG conferences: http://www.aapg.org/education/hedberg/past/index.cfm
[5] https://dco.gl.ciw.edu/january2011southafrica
"The setting was appropriate given the discovery of abiogenic hydrocarbons and radiolytic H2 in the deep fractures of the Witwatersrand Basin"
[6] http://www.springerlink.com/content/y62605127g688133/
[7] http://revistes.iec.cat/revistes/index.php/IM/article/viewArticle/6199
[8] http://spiedigitallibrary.org/proceedings/resource/2/psisdg/7819/1/78190...
[9] http://www.pnas.org/content/89/13/6045.abstract
[10] Note to Zerohedge: I'm quite startled that a statement like this got through your rigorous screening process.