Price of oil drops 24% in 2 months

[GePap]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
So is everything else.

NOt that much higher. I doubt that the economists in those countries made their budget projections based on $80 barrels. Even at $50 they will be making a fair amount of money.

The last few months have been a great windfall, but its kind of silly to predict some ecoomic collapse when oil remains more expensive than say 2 years ago.

[pchang]

Bio Diesel

from soybeans turns out to be much more energy efficient and environmentally friendly than ethanol from corn.

[Gatekeeper]

Cellulosic ethanol could be the next major break, if they can get the technology to the point where it's commercially feasible. If that happens, it brings down the cost of making ethanol even more.

But bio-diesel is good, too. Soybeans are just about as big as corn for farmers in my neck of the woods. Heh. If they can get their crops to local "value-added" facilities and rent out marginal lands to wind turbine companies, they won't be doing half-bad.

Gatekeeper

[Solly]

Peak oil

[Odin]

Originally posted by Park Avenue
Peak oil

Right, there is an endless supply of oil, there is nothing to worry about...

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Flubber

The interesting part comes when we move from the mining projects into the deeper oilsands that use steam extraction methods

Steam extraction isn't anything new. The older heavy oil fields in California have been using it since the 1960's and in the 1990's they started computer modeling things to improve the efficiency of deciding where and when to inject the steam. The cool developents have been in geophysics; meaning the huge leaps in the resolution of the seismonitors which they use to draw pictures of the underground stratigraphy. Now they can pinpoint exactly where to inject, exactly how much to inject, and at what temperatures.

Heating steam and puping it into the ground is expensive and it used to just be a guessing game. This new technology turns it into a science and allows the companies to really only spend exactly what they need thus lowering costs and making projects viable.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Odin
Right, there is an endless supply of oil, there is nothing to worry about...

That's a lot of nerve in a thread that completely owned you.

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


That's a lot of nerve in a thread that completely owned you.

Indeed... telling the truth, definitely an arrogant move

[Last Conformist]

The disconnect is that Odin believes that the fact that there's a finite supply of oil supports "peak oil" thinking.

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
The disconnect is that Odin believes that the fact that there's a finite supply of oil supports "peak oil" thinking.

It does. The only problem is determining when we will hit "peak oil." He believes it is imminent, while other people might think it's centuries away. I personally believe it will be reached within my lifetime, though not any time soon (I'm only in my 20s).

[RGBVideo]

TLC, Odin has said before that peak oil already happened. We had a whole thread about peak oil theory, where I along with DanS was in the crowd which thinked that oil prices will drop below something like $50 (can't remember ANY exact figures of that thread, sorry but you'll have to look up if you're interested), KrazyHorse was in the crowd that predicted that the days of cheap oil are long gone and price will go up slowly during the next few years, and Odin was in the crowd predicting that peak oil has already happened and price will go radically up.

Oh, and Odin has predicted in another thread this year that "gas" will hit $100 a barrel (probably meaning oil) within a few years.

He believes it is imminent

Like I said, he thought that it had already happened. That's what you get when you trust other people's opinions instead of an opinion of your own which you base on facts you'll have to search for.

[Victor Galis]

Well... the problem with the theory that oil price will only go up, is that while it's based on sound logic, the risk premium we pay on oil can fall, whereas the fundamentals will push the price slowly higher.

New fields that were previously unprofitable can never lead to cheap oil because they would become unprofitable again before the price of oil got as low as it used to be. That being said... those fields in Alberta don't suffer from the same risks as many of the Middle Eastern, Nigerian, Venezuelan, etc. oil fields.

[RGBVideo]

"cheap" is relative. As cheap as it was in the 90s? The answer can be "yes", if refinery chemistry improves enough, but I think the answer is "no".

IIRC making oil out of oil sands is profitable when the price is over $45.

[SlowwHand]

Massive oil field
found under Gulf
Reserves south of New Orleans could rival
North Slope, boosting U.S. supplies by 50%
Posted: September 5, 2006
11:57 a.m. Eastern



© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

Oil-drilling platform in Gulf of Mexico

Chevron and two oil exploration companies announced the discovery of a giant oil reserve in the Gulf of Mexico that could boost the nation's supplies by as much as 50 percent and provide compelling evidence oil is a plentiful deep-earth product made naturally on a continuous basis.

Known as the Jack Field, the reserve – some 270 miles southwest of New Orleans – is estimated to hold as much as 15 billion barrels of oil.

Authors Jerome R. Corsi and Craig R. Smith say the giant find validates the key thesis of their book, "Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil," that oil did not come from the remains of ancient plant and animal life but is made naturally by the Earth.

"We have always rejected the theories that oil and natural gas are biological products," Corsi told WND. "Chevron's find in the Gulf of Mexico validates our argument that the Gulf is a huge resource for finding oil and natural gas."

The Wall Street Journal reports today the find could boost the nation's current reserves of 29.3 billion barrels by as much as 50 percent.

Chevron discovered the field by drilling the deepest to date in the Gulf of Mexico, down 28,175 feet in waters nearly 7,000 feet deep, some seven miles below the surface of the Earth.

The second biggest source of oil in the world is Mexico's giant Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula. It was discovered in 1976, supposedly after a fisherman named Cantarell reported an oil seep in Campeche Bay.

In March, Mexico announced the discovery of a field that could be larger than Cantarell, the Noxal field in the Gulf of Mexico off Veracruz.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51837

[pchang]

7000 feet of water

would be the deepest off shore rig I know of, and incredibly expensive to build. This will not result in "cheap" oil.

We can easily up the average gas mileage for cars in the US from ~20mpg to ~40mpg, thus reducing our gasoline consumption dramatically. We can also turn soybeans into diesel to power our busses, trucks, ships, and trains.

It seems the US has the means to cut its dependence on foreign oil by at least 25% relatively easily if only the political and economic will could be summoned.