Re: Cheap oil forever!

From: Dave Morrison (fireplug_98_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/16/04 

Date: 16 Jun 2004 07:40:38 -0700

Grinch,

Despite your vehemence, you are totally unknowledgeable and almost no
worth responding to. Every point you made was wrong. It's as though
you have been living in a box since 1989 or so...

> (Remember the source is a free weekly hand-out downmarket from the
> Village Voice").

The NY Press is actually much more well-read and doing a lot better
journalism than the Voice these days. It's not the 1980s anymore.

> . it understated remaining oil supply by only a mere 2 trillion
> barrels as per the USGS

USGS numbers have been proven to be overly optimistic and
scientifically unsound time and time again. There are lots of good,
credible sources for this. You definitely should not take USGS numbers
at face value. They are trying to promote exploration.
 
> . somehow overlooked that there's six times as much oil in Canadian
> oil sands as in Saudi Arabia, and there are enough proven reserves in
> Alberta alone right now to meet North American import needs for the
> next 40 years.

The article was about the end of "cheap oil" not the end of oil in
general. Tar sands oil is most definitely not cheap. It's very
expensive to extract and is, in fact, only worth producing if light
sweet crude costs have run up to about $50/barrel. Tar sands and heavy
oils in Canada and elsewhere will most likely not prevent us from
peaking globally in the next ten years.

> .claimed oil keeps getting harder to find while neglecting to mention
> that the cost of finding each new barrel has dropped 75% in the last
> 20 years.

Not sure where you got that stat. In fact, we're having to go to
greater geological extremes to find ever-smaller reserves. The
economics of it are not good. It used to take something like 1 barrel
of energy to find 50 barrels of oil. Today it takes about 2.5 barrels
of energy to find one barrel of oil. You do the math.
 
> . claimed *all* projections, including the most optimistic, say
> production will peak by 2020 at the latest -- while the USGS and USEIA
> project the date at from 2037 - 2047 ... etc., etc.,

Data from both of these agencies is widly discredited by very
mainstream sources. Besides you're citing their most optimistic data.

> I could go on and on with the dumb-assedness in it -- frankly, proof
> of either incompetence or lying.
>
> But of course the Mother Dumbass Claim in it, compared to which the
> rest is all mere detail, is that there is *no substitute* for pumped
> oil -- as we can substitute bran for corn flakes -- so we must prepare
> for the coming production top "as seriously as for nuclear war"
> literally.
>
> *As if* Germany and South Africa hadn't already actually run their
> economies on oil-from-coal, and *as if* gasoline from Canadian oil
> sands isn't going into your car right now.

We are most definitely not going to be able to run the "American Way
of Life" as currently-configured with coal.
 
> And *as if* there isn't enough oil sands, coal, etc. and so on, to
> produce oil on the foreseeably desired scale for maybe another 1,000
> years, starting when those overlooked 2 trillion barrels should need
> topping off.

There is a lot of oil and fossil fuel left in the ground. But the
cheap stuff is dwindling fast.

Who do you work for?

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