Peak Oil? what Peak Oil?

[River Song]

I probably am a complete ignoramus but I recall hearing about Peak Oil and how oil was running out?

How come there is such a glut and it is at an all time low??

[Skean Dhude]

Peak oil occurred when we first started using it and as it takes millions of years to replace it has reduced since then with nothing new being added. There is a glut for political reasons and we should take advantage of that to stock up but we won't.

Eventually we will start to find it more difficulkt to extract as we hit the bottom of our biggest oil fields and they close as it costs more to extract than they make then oil rises and it makes those fields viable again. Repeat until we run out.

In the meantime as the price rises it makes other options, currently too expensive, more viable but at the moment there is a lot of things we make that we can't make without oil. We should be developing them now.

Predictions for when we run out of oil are like global warming... cooling... climate change. We just don't know but there are many fields that are looking to last for the next 30 years at least and that doesn't include shale and other methods we are investigating now.

If anything our only concern is that it leads to society collapse as oil becomes too expensive.

[Mortblanc]

Peak oil is a theory. It is an economic model, and every economic model ends with failure of the system. That is the nature of economic study and the reason economics is called "the dismal science".

That is why the collapse of the financial system is always eminent, the prediction models will always run to disaster.

Peak oil is a theory that can not predict advances in technology for the existing resource, discoveries of new sources or advances in alternate energy. It can only work with the data it had at the moment the computer enter key was pushed and run that data out to the end of existence of the resource.

As we have seen in the news, the model will work with oil, coal, cotton, maize, soy beans or any other resource. Using a set amount of resource, and use through eternity, there will always be the end result of collapse of the resource.

[bigpaul]

I have never come across an American yet that didn't think oil will last forever! oil peaked in 2006 and we are now on the downward slope, as for oil supplies ALL countries lie about how much oil they have in reserve, the Saudis most of all.

[Mortblanc]

BP, Dr. Hubbert who formed the "Peak Oil Theory", and it is a theory not a fact, had his first "Peak" dated to 1970.

Even before he died in 1989 his theory had been exploded!

And the latter 2006 date, and other various dates proposed by other theorists, has been exploded by the technologies now in use.

Oil may disappear from use, eventually, but even the "Peak Oil" theory as you want to promote leaves us with 150 years of oil use at the present rate.

150 years ago there were no cars, no planes, no phones, no electrical grids. Humans invent new things, new processes and new concepts now that have never been imagined in the past.

AND THEY ARE NOT GOING TO STOP DUE TO ORDERS FROM THE HEADQUARTERS IN DEVON

I trust my decedents to invent as many things I never dreamed would exist as my great grandfather never dreamed of and I take for granted daily in the present. Including power sources that will replace oil and make any imagined "peak" immaterial.

[Straight Shooter]

I suspect many new technologies exist RIGHT NOW but i can not offer evidence of such.....and people that can either are bought and paid for ....or most likely DEAD .

[Tarrel]

We are living through peak oil right now. Why else would the shale and tar-sands producers be incurring massive amounts of debt to deploy vast amounts of capital to frack oil out of the ground? Because that's all there is left. If there were more Texas-style gushers to be exploited, you can bet your bottom dollar the oil co's would be doing so. Fracking technology and horizontal drilling are not new, it's just that they didn't make economic sense until the oil price climbed high enough to make them viable.

The current low oil price is probably as a result of two things; demand destruction driven largely by China's growth slowdown and, to a lesser extent, by efficiency-led demand reduction in US / EU and, secondly, short-term supply-manipulation to squeeze out the high-cost producers such as the US and/or to screw Russia.

The problem is not peak oil, but peak cheap oil. The "Triangle of Doom" principle suggests that, as time goes by, the oil price per barrel required to maintain investment in exploration, exploitation and supply goes up (because there's less cheap-to-obtain oil around), while the price per barrel needed for economies not to fall into recession goes down (because said economies are carrying an ever heavier burden of debt). When the first figure meets the second, we have a problem, because the only oil that can be produced will be unaffordable. At that point supply dries up (even though there is plenty of oil left in the ground) and the price skyrockets. But of course there's no financial system left to provide the credit to the oil producers to exploit this new lucrative high price.

Remember, the price of oil is a false construct, affected by speculation, market confidence, currency movements, market manipulation, etc.. But the COST of producing oil is very real and increasing.

[bigpaul]

(8 September 2015, 21:04)Mortblanc Wrote: 150 years of oil

I REST MY CASE!!