If I can foresee these, think of what else might come down the pike—er, pipe! Genetically-engineered deep-sea mining creatures, anyone?

/Mr Lynn

Roger Sowell (13:15:37) :
. . . The interesting chart is the top chart for gasoline price, dating from 1919. Note that “peak oil” was cried out by alarmists many times during the entire period (1919 – 2008).

Never happened. (gasoline would have been $10 to $20 per gallon in a post-peak-oil scenario…clearly that has never happened).

Never will.

Well, ‘never’ is a bit of hyperbole. The oil under the Earth’s crust may after all be finite, and some may prove way too difficult (i.e. expensive) to get with any foreseeable technology (realizing that a hundred years ago much of our present technology could not have been foreseen). But by then the market will come up with plenty of alternatives.

Let’s get rid of the CO2 bugaboo and start growing the US economy—and the world’s economy—once again. Drill, baby, drill!

/Mr Lynn

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/fsheets/real_prices.html

The interesting chart is the top chart for gasoline price, dating from 1919. Note that “peak oil” was cried out by alarmists many times during the entire period (1919 – 2008).

Never happened. (gasoline would have been $10 to $20 per gallon in a post-peak-oil scenario…clearly that has never happened).

Never will.

Neven (12:22:43) :

Daily global oil consumption is 80+ million barrels (and soon to grow again when the economy rebounds as it always does and always will). Let me see. This huge oil field would provide the world with 100 days of oil, right? That means that within 100 days of drilling this huge oil field a new huge oil field has to be found.

Your premise is invalid. You’re assuming ALL the world’s oil would be coming form this one field. There are hundreds if not thousands of such fields.

If you truly believe we are at or past the peak of oil production, then you should make a fortune investing in crude oil futures.

Let us know how that works out.

And there are only 10 billion barrels of easily recoverable oil in ANWR. So we shouldn’t bother getting it. Right? Is that what you’re saying?

In fact, there is more oil available every time new exploration takes place. Alaska is a big, big place, but without exploration, we only know about what’s available in ANWR and a few other fields. And ANWR is only a 3.13 square mile dot on the map: click. [ANWR is the tiny red square.]

Think of the possibly probably trillions of barrels of oil in Alaska and off the coast of Alaska. And there are trillions of barrels of oil under the continental shelf. And many billions more in the Dakotas.

The problem is NOT a lack of oil. The problem is the enviro movement, and the Representatives and Senators they own lock, stock and barrel.

Oil can be extracted with minimal environmental risk [that's obvious, because when the inevitable little spill happens once or twice a year, the media has a conniption fit, and runs to groups like Greenpeace to get their quotes]. But much more oil is emitted naturally from natural seeps than all the oil ever spilled by mankind, doubled and squared.

So explain to us: why should we not make use of the really enormous amounts of domestic oil that are available?

Daily global oil consumption is 80+ million barrels (and soon to grow again when the economy rebounds as it always does and always will). Let me see. This huge oil field would provide the world with 100 days of oil, right? That means that within 100 days of drilling this huge oil field a new huge oil field has to be found.

No new elephant fields, huh?

First, ExxonMobil (March 13,2009) announced the discovery of a huge oil field off the coast of Brazil. The recoverable barrels of oil is estimated at 8 billion. The day of Peak Oil is moving further out, as it always has.

Second, a huge oil field was just discovered in Iraq, with between 2.3 and 4.2 billion barrels of oil. The figure will be improved as more wells are drilled. This qualifies as an elephant field, and again puts the lie to those who say we have passed the peak of oil. Not so. Never have, never will. Imagine the world as a stack of pancakes, and we have just stuck a fork in the upper layer of the top pancake. Such is our situation with drilling for oil. There are lots of pancakes down deeper, and we have not even begun exploration and drilling there.

Regarding natural gas, more natural gas is being liquefied and shipped around the world, so much so that there is a glut of natural gas. The world is swimming in natural gas. More is found almost daily, it seems, in shale formations. Even more is produced from coal beds, known as coal bed methane. The price of natural gas is around $3.5 to $4 per million Btu. On an equivalent basis, a barrel of oil would be $25. So, either natural gas should increase to $8, or oil should drop from around $50 back to around $25. Yet, OPEC is throttling production to prop up prices in the $50 range. They would prefer it be in the $70 to $80 range. As more car owners wise up, and convert their cars to CNG as fuel, the demand for gasoline and diesel will decrease. What a strange turn of events…OPEC countries may go broke, as they cannot raise prices for oil enough to produce the cash flow they must have to support the infrastructure in place. Stay tuned on this one, and watch for massive dis-array within OPEC, as the smaller members cheat and produce more than their quotas.

http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2008/09/peak-oil-not-big-deal.html

Meerkat: a mongoose like vivverine of South Africa, having a face like a lemur and only four toes.

Murray Duffin (17:57:01) :
. . . TSHTF long before a decade. the trouble is that energy has always been so cheap and plentiful that we have not economized, and we can’t do it now overnight. Dream on. Murray

If that prediction comes true, the Congress of the United States, and states like California, will be to blame, for restricting off-shore drilling, refinery construction, and atomic power development over the last few decades—not that “we have not economized.”

It is well known that efficiency can (and often does) lead to more consumption, not less. More efficient gizmos mean we can have more gizmos for the same amount of energy—and what’s a few more? It’s fashionable for the eco-nuts these days to complain about all the little power adaptors and warm, stand-by circuitry in our gadgets, which use miniscule amounts of electricity but in the aggregate add up to a lot. Efficiency means we find more ways to use energy, not less; that’s progress, man! Why should we give up instant-on TVs, GPS devices, cell phones, MP3 players, and all the rest? Was life so much better when you had to crank up the phone and ask the operator in town to connect you to your neighbor?

The solution is not more efficiency, though that is always good, but more energy. I don’t know about gigantic oil fields, but Brazil just found some off-shore, and the Russians are about to plant a flag on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, because they smell petroleum. And some say there’s a trillion barrels more or less in the oil shale in the US and Canada. If there were the will, we could start cranking out turnkey nuclear plants within a decade, too.

If gasoline goes over $4 again, you’ll see the Democrats turned out on their ears, and we’ll get back on the path to cheap, abundant energy again—the path we abandoned three decades ago.

/Mr Lynn