Apparently Oil Peaked on December 16th 2005

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by MOBIUS
Indeed, but it is laughable everyone holding up sugar cane, palm oil etc as green alternatives to powering cars considering the footprint required to harvest all those crops - just ask Indonesia about its National Parks...

Apparently, you need alot less area if you use what they here call "energy forest" (low-grade forests harvested early, pretty much) instead of sugarecane.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Kataphraktoi


the market always comes up with a alternative when forced to, out of neccesity.

disaster scenarios

The market doesn't do anything. Society finds solutions to problems. The question is how will we solve this problem. If all we do is make stupid statements like "the market will take care of it," we'll likely fail because we've stopped thinking.

You can depend on people (the market) to produce something if you pay them enough, but don't think you can just pay someone $1 what it takes $2 to produce. It won't work. If there are no solutions to produce the thing at $1, it won't be produced. There's no sense in blind faith in the market. You'll have to accept the fact that the thing can't be produced for $1. That's the situation that we have now. There's no way, presently to produce energy as cheaply as we have been. The market isn't going to come up with alternatives that aren't there. Eventually "people" will work things out, but that's not right now.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


Yeah, that's kind of wierd to me as well. Why would people suddenly stop pumping oil because we've gone past some 'halfway' point (though you have to be specific... there is a halfway point of easily obtained oil, and then there is a halfway point of oil which are more difficult to extract.. and with technology advances, who knows what that is)? Who really knows how much oil is under the permafrost of Siberia, or in oil shales around the world, or still in wells thought to be dry?

And of course the idea of a catastrophe is kind of ridiculous.

It's got nothing to do with how much oil there is left. It's about how much is will cost to produce it.

[Flubber]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


or in oil shales around the world, or still in wells thought to be dry?

Unless you strip mine the oil bearing zone, you never quite seem to get all the oil. Usually you just get less and less oil per volume of water produced such that it gets uneconomic.

In some cases this is because the reservoir is truly pretty depeleted and in other cases mistakes/ surprises in production can lead to "fingering" or "water breakthrough" such that there can be a fair bit of oil pushed to other parts of the reservoir but the production well is mainly getting water. Often a second well or a recompletion can get this oil.

I just wanted it to be clear that abandoned wells almost always have some more producable oil in them but its not a lot and is usually very expensive to produce.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
If a companies production costs were increasing at the same time, you wouldnt see such huge profits. (new revenues wiped out by increased costs)

It's statements like this that show how little you understand. Oil is produces are various costs, sold at the same price depending on quality. The producers with the lower costs just make more profit while producing more oil at more expensive costs. How you can expect profits to remain the same is amazing.