If hydrocarbons are renewable - then is "Peak Oil" a fraud?

[Cort Haus]

It seems that Thomas Gold has popularised the theory, but also taken the liberty of passing it off as his own. It's best to ignore Gold and head straight for the ex-USSR stuff.

[Cort Haus]

You also have little understanding of Maoism.

Fair dinkum on that, I retract the comment about Mao.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
I have plenty of confidence in humanity, but there are limits to what we can do. We will never be able to flap our arms and fly, for example. We are finite creatures. Finite means limited. Just because we havne't gone up against our limits yet doesn't mean they aren't out there.

Of course there are limits, but we can choose to focus on the limits or the opportunities. Yes, we will run into those limits at some point, but we shouldn't pre-define those borders too close to where we are.

[CerberusIV]

OK, I went back and read the scientific paper linked above.

Rough translation:-

We found this place where no-one thought there was oil because there aren't any 'conventional' source rocks we can identify.

We drilled a lot of boreholes and found loads of oil and gas.

Since we can't identify any source rocks we think the oil could have come from it 'must' have come from a deep source thereby proving the deep abiotic source theory.


If the oil is from an abiotic source why is it full of marine microfossils?

I wasn't sure before but now I'll say it. This is a load of rubbish.

[Provost Harrison]

It is fairly good evidence that this oil was not of biological origin, but it would be nice to see more information regarding mechanisms for it's alternative means of formation. I am not convinced in many ways - that coal was once a 'thin liquid'. So perhaps it was pressurised methane or ethene that polymerised? Why would this have not polymerised at much lower depths where the pressure was far more significant There is very little information on this and hence why I can't extract anything of use from the first article. The geological paper gives me some information but I haven't seen too much of interest regarding the formation of oil/gas/coal by this alternative mechanism.

[Az]

I have plenty of confidence in humanity, but there are limits to what we can do. We will never be able to flap our arms and fly, for example. We are finite creatures. Finite means limited. Just because we havne't gone up against our limits yet doesn't mean they aren't out there.

Oh man, now I know you're a pessimist. We'll be able to flap our arms and fly in about 500 to 1000 years, maybe much earlier.


On topic: The fact that it's abiotic has nothing to do with whether it's renewable or not - in both theories, the oil is is used much faster than it's created. Actually, in the case of the biotic source, one could claim that new resources are created naturally.

The problem isn't simply "oil", either. It's the defficiency of exploitable concentrated energy. It's either non-exploitable ( fusion - we don't know what to do with it, at this point ) or it's not concentrated, which makes the cost of harvesting it high ( "renewable energy" )

[Odin]

What a load of horsesh*t. Oil comes from dead algae. I highly doubt that most of the worlds oil just happed to be found in areas that were part of the Tethys Seaway in the Jurassic and Cretaceous on dumb chance.

[Az]

What a load of horsesh*t. Oil comes from dead algae. I highly doubt that most of the worlds oil just happed to be found in areas that were part of the Tethys Seaway in the Jurassic and Cretaceous on dumb chance.

Not a scientific attitude

[Cort Haus]

http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm

This site contains links to scientific papers. It's worth noting that terms such as "horse****", "rubbish" and "pseudoscience" are best applied to theories lacking basis in physics and mathematics, which is not the case with the theory in question.

Is the "squashed detritus" theory grounded in thermodynamics & mathematics, or on geology?

[Dr Strangelove]

IIRC I read an article about the formation of methane in the Earth's crust a few years ago. There is evicence that the process does indeed exist. The question is the rate of formation and how much collects in tappable deposits.

One thing is certain. Many of the deposits found in the past are already played out. Witness the fact that the US became an oil importer more than 30 years ago.

[VetLegion]

Wikipedia has info, as well as links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

Cort Haus, as for being able to relax, you can do that without knowing what oil is made from

[VetLegion]

This is from Usenet newsgroup sci.econ, by Grinch, Jun 12 2004, 6:50 am (http://groups.google.com/group/sci.e...a490ca9?hl=en&). I did some formatting for this post:

On Thu, 20 May 2004 14:01:39 -0700, "Darren" wrote:

The amount of oil that is ultimately recoverable is definitely finite, but also very much larger than the amount that can be produced at $40/bbl.

And in the future, the amount that will be able to produced at *under* $40 (or $30, $20, etc.)/b will be very much more than can be produced at corresponding and even higher prices today, obviously.

What is going to happen is that the price of oil will continue to rise.

For exactly the same reason that increasing scarcity has steadily
driven up the cost of all other finite resources that have been
steadily consumed by humanity at an ever increasing rate.


As clear examples that we all know about there's coal, used in huge amounts since well before oil ... well, um, no, forget that ... but there's, um ... no ... um... something, right? Gotta be.


I mean, it's *extremely powerful logic*: A natural resource that is finite in amount is consumed at an ever-increasing rate by humanity, with the lowest cost supplies consumed first -- that commodity *must* become more scarce and rise in price. QED. Res ipsa loquitur. Who could argue?


The logic is every bit as compelling as that of the geocentric solar system and flat earth.

Although admittedly the geocentric solar system agreed much better with empirical observations of reality.

And for that matter the flat earth did too. After all, to the
ancients the earth looked flat as an empirical matter, and if a ship sailed off and sank down below the horizon they might take that a empirical support of the idea of falling off the edge.


Meanwhile, we're all still waiting for our first observation of a
mineral resource rising in price perpetually (much less running out) due to scarcity as a result of humanity's consumption of it.


But as long as one ignores the total lack of all empirical evidence
needed to confirm it, the theory looks great!

When its price exceeds the price of equivalent energy produced by other means, it will no longer pay to just burn it for its energy content, and oil consumption will stop growing and perhaps decline.

Indeed. Exactly as happened with whale oil in the 1850s and coal in Britain at the turn of the last two centuries, **as experts had predicted**!


Of course, what was wrong with those predictions was that the experts had predicted it all was going to happen because of the whales being killed off and Britain running out of coal bringing the Industrial Revolution to a grinding halt. Coal was a finite resource being consumed at an ever increasing rate with the cheapest supplies consumed first, which irrefutably = ever-rising prices, you know.


Res ipsa loquitur. Who could argue?


(As long as one didn't look at facts.)

Yep, I think that's pretty unarguable,

QED! And data free!!

..... The interesting questions concern the details:

What?? Somebody wants to get empirical?

- *how high* will the price of oil go, and when?
- what do the cost curves of other sources of energy look like? (ie, how expensive does oil have to get before nuclear/solar/wind/coal/etc power plants, electric cars, and bicycles start looking good?)
- what happens to global energy use long term?
- What does our society look like in the future as a result? How do 6b
people keep running their tractors and eating?

Well, how about going about it by first putting together a bit of a
logical framework to be able to ask a question we really *can* answer, instead of musing and pulling our chins and fantasizing.


Like:


Can we maintain supplies of oil at quantities we want at economically healthy prices?


Clarification: How long does it matter? Well, 100 years was from
whale oil to nuclear power and jet planes, 120 years to a man on the
moon and SSTs.
100 to 120 years from now we could have fusion powering hydrogen
separation plants for clean CO2-free vehicles, photovoltaic houses,
power plants pulling energy out of the quantum foam ... that tall
alien might show up with gift e=mc2 matter-energy conversion kits for
every household and that book of his "How to Serve Man" .. who the
heck knows?


But if we can avoid problems for over 100 years that will be plenty of time to adjust. If our descendants are too dim to take care of themselves with that kind of lead time too bad for them. So let's say 100-120 years as a time frame.


Clarification: What are economically healthy prices? Well, we're
doing all right today. So let's say no higher than in our actual
experience.
Now, in our experience oil topped at $70/b in today's money in 1981. Since then the intensity of oil use per dollar of GDP has
dropped steadily.
After the 1981 peak came the "seven fat years" of the Reagan boom, GDP growth averaged > 4% and oil averaged $55/b in today's money also adjusting for its higher weight in GDP.
So we *know* we can have an extended boom with >4% growth at $55/b because we've already had one.
Let's say healthy prices are no more than $55 to $70/b, tops (the latter price considering how intensity of oil use is projected to continue to decline in GDP in the future). Off the actual record, that should be fine.


Clarification: How much oil do we want? Today the world is consuming 80m b/day. For ease of computation let's up it to 100m barrels.


Now we can restate the question with some specificity:


Can the world produce an average 100m barrels of oil a day for the next 100 to 120 years at a price of no more than $55 to $70/b tops?


Now *this* is a question to which we might be able to give a
meaningful answer, by looking at facts.


Some facts to consider:


* By "oil" we mean "oil products", gasoline, etc, not goo pumped up out of the ground -- just like in the 1840s "oil" meant lighting and cooking fuel and lubricants, not dead whales.


* The full range of oil products can be, have been, and are now
produced from all the wide variety of hydrocarbons that exist in
*vast* amount on this planet -- sweet oil (Texas Tea and Saudi Light), oil sands, tar sands, coal, natural gas, etc and so on.
Germany and South Africa have already run their economies on oil-from-coal, and you probably are putting gasoline from oil sands in your car right now. Have you noticed?


* The cost of producing oil products from these various sources
varies, but is profitable right now from the various sources with
their current market prices as inputs using today's technology at
final prices well below the $55 to $70 top we have set for ourselves.
Oil from oil sands is economic today at $15/b, from natural gas at $20/b, from coal at $30/b, etc.
Production of oil from oil sands is very profitably commercial
now, e.g. 700k barrels a day in Alberta, and increasing.
Production of oil from natural gas, coal, etc, has been kept off
the market to date due to the Saudis' huge reserves of $2/b oil that they can use to drive higher price sources off the market, and by the OPEC cartel's overt policy of keeping oil under $30/b to prevent such sources from being developed.
However, should the oil price ever *really* go up over $30 on a sustained basis due to an actual growing supply shortage, there is nothing at all preventing them from coming on line on really big scale -- as the historical examples of Germany and South Africa attest.


* Normal advances in technology will of course lower the cost of producing oil from these non-"sweet oil" alternative sources over time. This is exactly how 177 billion barrels of proven reserves -- the largest in the world outside of Saudi Arabia -- just magically appeared in Alberta, Canada.
Assume conservatively a 2% annual increase in production
productivity -- much less than the industry historical average --
and in 100 years cost drops by 87%. So today's $15 oil-sand oil drops to a cost of $2/b, and the hard to get stuff in Alberta that would cost $115/b today becomes available at $15/b. There's the same effect with oil from natural gas, oil from coal, etc. E.g. today's $30 oil-from-coal drops to around $4/b, and oil-from-really-bad-last-dug coal that would cost >$200/b today costs $30/b.


Productivity gains of 2% annually over 50 years drops cost by
two-thirds -- so we can estimate the average cost of today's $15/b oil from oil sands at $5/b, and today's $30/b cost of oil from coal at $10/b over our 100-year period..


OK, *now* we are ready to plug in some actual real-world numbers for hydrocarbon supplies and see what we get.


For our favorite conventional old-fashioned sweet oil, the US
Geological Survey says there are 3 trillion barrels left and
available. At 100m/b a day that's 82 years.


As to oil sands, in just the one field in Alberta there's 1.6 trillion
barrels (six times the reserves in Saudi Arabia). If only half of it
gets produced that's another 22 years. Hey -- we're over 100 years already! That's 104 years so far.


Let's be real conservative and forget all the other big oil sands
fields in the world. Let's forget natural gas, tar sands and most of the rest of them too --- I like coal!


Coal has already been done by modern industrial economies twice. Coal is used today mostly for electric power generation, which could easily be switched to nuclear over the next 100 years if we had an incentive to do so, like using coal for oil. There's *lots* of coal without even looking for it. And the USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal.


Today, without even hardly looking for it, there's 210 years supply of coal, 1.1 trillion tons. (How silly were those Brits to think the Industrial Revolution was going to come to an end for lack of it, just due to pure logic, eh?)


Let's subtract 120 years supply of coal to cover coal needs over that time. That gives about 470 billion tons of extra coal, which produces oil at 7b a ton or gasoline at 10b a ton. Let's use 7 barrels. OK, that's another 3.3 trillion barrels of oil = another 90 years. We're up to 194 years.


That's assuming we don't want any more coal via the nuclear option. But heck, for fun let's do say we convert some of that coal to gasoline directly to get 10b a ton, so we can get over 200 years!


Hey, we've made our 100-to-120 year target with 80-to-100 years to spare as margin!


And we haven't even considered our second oil sands field yet -- we know of other damn big ones out there, and we haven't even looked for them yet. And we haven't considered any of the other hydrocarbon sources.


So, *can* the world economy produce oil at 100m a barrel a day for the next 100 to 120 years at a price not exceeding $55 to $70 a barrel in today's money??


Damn right it can.


Will the oil price go up over $55 to $70 a barrel in that period?


I have no idea -- but if it does it sure won't be due to any scarcity of oil stocks or of the technology to produce oil products from them at that price level and much lower.


In economics the word "substitute" is quite significant.


But who knows, maybe Canada will join OPEC.

Enjoy your SUVs and jets while ya got 'em, folks.

Few SUVs here in NYC and the Jets are looking like another losing season. So no enjoyment in either case,


But if I was in Green Bay I'd enjoy both my SUV and football team guilt-free.


*Here's* what I'm worried about:


One thing that's *really* going to expand exponentially way into the future is computing. More and more silicon chips being produced and put into everything, toasters, *everything*, as far as we can see.


But silicon exists in finite quantity. As consumption of it ever
expands and the cheapest stocks are used first, perpetually increasing scarcity *must* result and drive its price *up* indefinitely.


The logic is irrefutable. QED. Res ipsa loquitur. Who could possibly
argue?


Sand, people, *sand*! We are going to be priced off the beaches!


The computing revolution will be brought to a grinding halt!


You've been warned!!!

[Geronimo]

I wonder if the author regards diamonds as "renewable". If the abiotic hydrocarbon theory is correct it in no way suggests that oil is "renewable" on the contrary it suggests that it is far less "renewable" than the fossil fuel theory would have it. On the other hand this abiotic theory would certainly suggest that oil would be far far far more plentiful than the fossil fuel theory would suggest it could be.

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
I am not convinced in many ways - that coal was once a 'thin liquid'.

I think that's just Gold's idea. IIRC one of the source theorists was suggesting that coal could come from peat. I might be wrong (I'll try and find it) but we can be sure the original researchers are not pleased with Gold for nicking and misinterpreting their work.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara

Originally posted by Cort Haus
Such defeatism is surprising for a Marxist!

Don't you have the confidence in humanity's ability to seek out and find new resources, and to develop technologies to replace old resources?

Marxism is a materialist philosophy. As such, we are aware that there are limits to what human beings can accomplish. At a certain point, things will be beyond our reach, possibly forever.

What if human beings were to simply work around those limitations by not requiring human beings to do the accomplishing? What about development of powerful AI systems or even augmentation of human intellignece?