Thread: Peak Oil

Depending on who you ask, we have already reached peak oil or we will reach it very soon. M. King Hubbart's bell-curve for peak oil has been the staple graph for predicting it. This will cause a tremendous change in our energy future. In other words, we will never produce as much oil as we do when peak oil is reached which I believe we already have. Many people think that hydrogen power will save us but that is a pipe dream. It requires a vast amount of electricity to generate hydrogen power and you have it get it from somewhere. Ethanol is also very inefficient. It would require almost all available farmland to produce enough fuel to continue running the way we run things at the speed and magnitude that they are run. We would not have enough land for our food. So I want your opinions on what kind of future we need to plan for now.

They keep finding the stuff........



Hey soon we will liberate Venezuela of their peak oil, they hit a mega field.

They didn't believe M. King Hubbart about it when he was talking about peak oil in concern to the US either. Turns out, soon after his studies the US hit peak oil.



Read some of the work of James Howard Kunstler. He goes into depth on the subject.

[quote name='Freedom for All' date='25 September 2009 - 11:50 AM' timestamp='1253897439' post='27275']

The United States has over two trillion barrels of accessible domestic reserves.

[/quote]



How long would it really take for the US to go through 2 tillion barrels at our consumption rate, which would only be expected to increase with the rising population.

[quote name='Freedom for All' date='25 September 2009 - 12:50 PM' timestamp='1253897439' post='27275']

The United States has over two trillion barrels of accessible domestic reserves.[/quote]

Can you link to this? The United States Geological Survey Energy Resources Program,* they did an estimate of accessible, undiscovered oil in and offshore of the United States. They put the average estimate at 126 billion barrels, which is way, way lower than your figure of over two trillion barrels.



Perhaps you're counting oil shale, which is not fiscally recoverable at this time? Oil shale is NOT interchangeable with the crude we all know and love. It's expensive to extract (which would of course be reflected in the price), and must undergo much heavier purification than crude. Until we have the technology to make shale extraction effective and lucrative, it's in the same experimental stages as tidal generators. I wouldn't bet on it at this time.





*Search for: "The U.S. Domestic Energy Resource Base – An Overview", slide 10

[quote name='Morgan' date='25 September 2009 - 12:02 PM' timestamp='1253894563' post='27237']

Depending on who you ask, we have already reached peak oil or we will reach it very soon. M. King Hubbart's bell-curve for peak oil has been the staple graph for predicting it. This will cause a tremendous change in our energy future. In other words, we will never produce as much oil as we do when peak oil is reached which I believe we already have. Many people think that hydrogen power will save us but that is a pipe dream. It requires a vast amount of electricity to generate hydrogen power and you have it get it from somewhere. Ethanol is also very inefficient. It would require almost all available farmland to produce enough fuel to continue running the way we run things at the speed and magnitude that they are run. We would not have enough land for our food. So I want your opinions on what kind of future we need to plan for now.





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Not saying you are incorrect, but Peak Oil has been claimed for over a decade now. Mostly by the oil industry that wants the United States to sell it leases on the cheap or in environmentally protected areas while getting speculators to bid up the price of oil. With huge new finds off the coast of Brazil and new technology for increasing the yields of existing fields, it may be a while before we get to Peak Oil. Unfortunately, much like the fall of the NASDAQ, we won't know we hit it until a while after the fact.



In the interim, we should be adjusting our economy to increasing renewable sources, but with utility companies running things we end up with retarded ideas such as "clean coal" and the even dumber "drill, baby, drill".

I think our best bet right now is a gradual switch to solar, wind, geothermal, wave, and nuclear. Any combination there of. Still, it won't produce enough energy for our consumption needs, so we're going to have to downscale everything we do. We'll have to localize our economies. We can still be a powerful economy. You say we have found new sources and we now have new technology to extract it better. That may be true but there are many nations out there besides us that are in a sense, "coming online" to oil and oil consumption for their own needs. With China and India already starting to become two new powerhouses on the world stage, how much oil will they consume, far more than we do.

[quote name='Morgan' date='25 September 2009 - 01:25 PM' timestamp='1253899558' post='27337']

I think our best bet right now is a gradual switch to solar, wind, geothermal, wave, and nuclear. Any combination there of. Still, it won't produce enough energy for our consumption needs, so we're going to have to downscale everything we do....[/quote]

Actually, nuclear could meet our consumption needs. You're quite correct on all the others though.