Peak Oil? Nonsense. Sure, conserve energy and go green and all that, but let's stick to the facts about oil reserves.
Otherwise, I’ve just about had it with this dramatized rant and whoop and holler by certain a certain poster here and other alarmists about the “Dangers of Peak Oil.” He goes around on the net finding other soothsayers that supports his theory to get more hype for his website, and cries “fire” to get people to stampede his website for more information on how to head off another “crisis.”
Slope is too sacred of a temple of truth to allow this crap to splash the walls and not get cleaned off.
I'm just a Petroleum Engineer, not a scientist or a Doctorate PS Bullshitist, but about the closest thing you'll know to an expert on the subject of oil reserves, other than "THE Expert," whomever the media says that is next.
Over the past 33 years mankind has consumed more than three times the world’s known oil reserves in 1976 – and today proven oil reserves are nearly double what they were before we started. The story with natural gas is even better – here and around the world enormous amounts of natural gas have been found. More will be found.
There will never be "no oil" in your lifetime, so relax, and discern the truth for yourself when you get the facts. If you are old enough to read this, your shiny car will have plenty of gasoline for your lifetime. You may not be able to afford it, but they cannot possibly run out. So all you have to do is make some money with us here on Slope, and you’re set, just like the politicians. Whenever there is GREAT change, there is also GREAT opportunity. It is impossible to be otherwise. Instead of worrying about the black hole right now, look for new opportunities… it won't take long, they're EVERYWHERE.
Now that oil is $80/bbl, it opens the door to production of different grades of oil and different kinds of oil, and new places that oil was never thought to exist.
America has the biggest "Shale Oil" field in the world, at over a trillion barrels, that has never been tapped until two years ago, because it will be expensive to extract, and the technology has not yet been improved enough to tackle it before then. But money solves a lot of problems, and $100/bbl oil would certainly do it. You will have to be surprised how fast the technology will ramp up when there's a profit to be made. Just type in “shale oil reserves” into your little Search Bar, and you’ll come up with hundreds of new projects that have never before been thought possible. And these are primarily domestic, lower 48 States, where the oil in America was thought to be depleted!
Ever heard of the Bakken Formation? No? Why not? GOOGLE it, Mr. OilPrice, or follow this link. It will blow your mind. http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911
The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. There’s enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 40 years straight. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL! Well, except we know those damn oil barrons are going to gouge us, but cheap oil nonetheless.
Another example of huge unexpected and unknown reserves are the "Coal Oil" sands in Canada that they are already extracting by truck and converting to usable oil. It's slower to extract and convert than to simply produce liquid oil, but the one field they are producing from today is bigger than the Saudi field, which is the biggest in the world. And that isn't the only "Coal Oil" field in Canada, and certainly not the only one in the world. These Coal Oil fields contain almost as much oil as the Saudi Arabian oil fields.
Most people don't realize that we only produce about 20% of the oil from a producing oil sand (conventional production), and leave the rest of it there because it was too expensive to produce by secondary or tertiary recovery methods. That is no longer true, so the natural oil reserves just doubled when the price of oil doubled.
One more real obvious report that you should have caught up on, is the the Stansberry Report from 2006. Hidden only 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. Who gives a blinking crap about “Peak Oil?” It’s just more jargon that we don’t understand to create a crisis from (sorry about the hanging past participle).
Governments and alarmists that don’t care about the truth or the facts are good at creating crisis after crisis, so that they can be your friend and be the only one to solve the problem, that is, by taking control, taking your rights, enacting more laws, forming more committees out of their cousins, and generally living like Kings off of years of perceived crisis. Oh yeah, and they can take over whole countries if they need to and the gullible public is behind them on an invasion, and they can get enough young people to fight their special-interest wars for them.
No sir, the only real perceived crisis here is that the great masses of people will figure out that there is not a shortage, but rather an EXCESS of oil, for centuries to come, and that the price of oil should be back down around $20/bbl. Whatta ya’ know, we’ve been lied to again.
When I was in college in the 1970's, the known problem of that time was that temperatures were getting "colder." By the year 2030, it would be so cold that plants could not live and man would face extinction without drastically changing things. That was to be in my lifetime.
But now the "experts" claim "Global Warming." It's all just a theory, like Evolution, but after so many "experts" parrot the "truth" in the media, and even colleges and universities begin teaching it as truth, then it becomes "truth,' even when at best it's a 50-50 shot. I’ve read that 63% of those surveyed were “concerned” about Global Warming. Geez, don’t people even know how to ask the right questions anymore?
Why make a crisis out of something? There's money to be made, control to be taken, and new gov't offices to fill. And of course, the 30-year cooling trend that prompted the global cooling scare in the mid-70s abruptly ended in the late 70s, replaced by with a 20-year warming trend that peaked in 1998.
Watch this short video from the founder of the Weather Channel how he blows Al Gore's climate change scam out the window. Finally, a REAL EXPERT showing the fallacy of the concept of "global warming". www.kusi.com/home/78477082.html?video=pop&t=a
Philosophy Section
If you don’t mind, I would like to delve a little bit into what you might think you “know.” Tim likes philosophical stuff, so maybe he will let me rant on the rant, of why I’m having to waste my time keeping others from wasting your time with more worthless and time-consuming “information” that doesn’t hold a candle to truth.
How can a “Theory” of Evolution be taken as fact so easily, when this treatise involved in biology asserts no proof, or even a well-defined premise, that man evolved from apes? Even if the truth we are seeking were revealed, people believe that because they comprehend, they conclude that they have successfully taken in the material and reached a proper conclusion. Permanent incorporation requires repeated exposures and answering difficult questions. We can eliminate this major misconception or false expectation with the evidence of psychological research and the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting. Recall deteriorates rapidly unless refreshed; a known fact, proven.
Well, getting too long-winded. I’ve written a whole Essay on truth and how we “know” things, another four pages. It even answers the question “What is truth?” Not even Plato could answer that question.
If anybody’s interested, let me know, and I’ll post it. Oh, and as an aside, it even answers the question of “Why did God create man?” with a darn good “theory.” I challenge you to come up with a better one.