West Coast Connection Forum
Lifestyle => Train of Thought => Topic started by: Big BpG on April 07, 2005, 11:39:17 PM
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ok, before I tell you why... shall you read the following, remember, it's a theory about our 'energy' crisis, but it's quite interesting indeed. This is brain food. This will make you think. Even if this crisis is a boring topic, read it, I was quite impressed.
If you want a quick summary, I'll post one below. However, go to this site and read it... I mean it, read it all.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Summary
Well, it all deals with Oil... whether you believe it or not... we did not go to Iraq for Weapons Of Mass Destruction. We went to protect the oil reserves there. Why? Because our society and the whole world as a whole has become to dependent on this resource. If you don't know... Oil is not renewable (however there our theories that state it is) ... it doesn't grow from a tree, or live in some magic black sea... it's a resource created from Millions of tons of pressure under the earths crusts. It takes millions of years to achieve the amount of Oil that we had discovered in the early 20th century. The first Oil Drill was used in 1859. That's not even 150 years ago. However in the 20th century we discovered how potent oil was for our energy. Power Plants use oil, Cars, Boats, Planes, Motorcycles... all use oil. Plastic, which was a great creation... is created from oil... our society is TOO DEPENDENT on Oil... and guess what...
WE ARE RUNNING OUT... In fact, many theorists believe, that we only have a few years left.
FACT:
In the 1970's a bunch of geek/intelligent scientist got together to decide when we would run out of OIL... they said in the first decade of the next century. Well, it's 2005 now. We got five years left to see if it's true... and too many people, they believe it will be sooner.
FACT:
The U.S.A. populates 5% of the world total population
FACT:
We use 57% of the Oil's resources
Why is this a crisis?
Think about it... food comes from oil...it's shipped in trucks, boats and planes...with no oil, there is no transportation. Plastic is made from oil. It's cheap, it has become a great substitue for products we used to make out of metal. Farmers use tractors and machinery that use oil... we need these abilities to keep up with our worlds demands... you can't expect a farmer to go out everyday and pull every corn stalk... not if you expect him to feed thousands of people. Maybe a town, but not a city, and definetly not a country....
What will happen?
The theory states that more than 4 billion people will die... our countries will have oil wars, in which we fight to conserve our final resource to stay prosperous... our cities will become concrete jungles with no life. Our civilization will have to backtrack to old colonial ways... and our kids will become scavengers of the goods we have years before... they will also revolt against us for not reserving our resources more wisely... most of us will starve to death as food won't be able to travel across states, countries and seas.
In other words... our tank is on empty...
Interesting...
read it though... the theory is called "peak oil" and our government is aware of it. They've been preparing for such drastic effects since 1977, when they announced that if it becomes necessary, use military forces to protect oil reserves... 28 years later...that's exactly what we're doing
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as far as using oil for energy, fusion will take care of that in the future ;)
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How ironic..... the so-called, 3rd world, underdeveloped, uncivilized, nomads will be the only people not in chaos. You know it's funny because they always critisize Islam for not being able to keep up with modernization, but it may end up that the people who are not "modern" will make the transition smoothly.
Maybe Africa, and islands like Indonesia will be the superpowers future, because they can survive without oil. Societies that have become dependant on oil will suffer the most.
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There are alternative fuel sources...look em up.
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There are alternative fuel sources...look em up.
"What About all the Various Alternatives
to Oil? Can't we Find Replacements?"
Many politicians and economists insist that there are alternatives to oil and that we can "invent our way out of this."
Physicists and geologists tell us an entirely different story.
The politicians and economists are selling us 30-year old economic and political fantasies, while the physicists and geologists are telling us scientific and mathematical truth. Rather than accept the high-tech myths proposed by the politicians and economists, its time for you to start asking critical questions about the so called "alternatives to oil" and facing some hard truths about energy.
While there are many technologically viable alternatives to oil, there are none (or combination thereof) that can supply us with anywhere near the amount of net-energy required by our modern monetary system and industrial infrastructure.
People tend to think of alternatives to oil as somehow independent from oil. In reality, the alternatives to oil are more accurately described as "derivatives of oil." It takes massive amounts of oil and other scarce resources to locate and mine the raw materials (silver, copper, platinum, uranium, etc.) necessary to build solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants. It takes more oil to construct these alternatives and even more oil to distribute them, maintain them, and adapt current infrastructure to run on them.
Each of the alternatives is besieged by numerous fundamental physical shortcomings that have, thus far, received little attention. For a detailed analysis of the various alternatives oil, go on to page two.
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This thread is a collection of Dumbasses. One chicken Little, and one guy sticking up for "The Little Man", who just happens to be the exact opposite of his father, who he despises in his drunkeness.
THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!
The basic fallacy of the argument put forth in the first post is, 1. we cannot destroy the earth, we're much too insignificant and powerless to do that, and 2. Since we're basically enlightened animals, all we ultimately need to keep 'the world' alive is the earth and the sun. We could take all the oil we could find, pour it all over the ground, set it all on fire and burn it all up at one time. Still the earth would go on.
We could try to blow the earth up ourselves with Nuclear weapons, and still not destroy it, and there would still be survivors. We cannot 'end the world', so saying "Our world will end very very soon" is just idiotic.
I got an idea, lets all realize that our small minds cannot possibly understand something as great as the earth, and just live our little personal, insignificant lives the best we can, and while we're at it, be polite and courteous to the earth, instead of thinking we can save or destroy it. It saves or destroys us.
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The basic fallacy of the argument put forth in the first post is, 1. we cannot destroy the earth, we're much too insignificant and powerless to do that, and 2. Since we're basically enlightened animals, all we ultimately need to keep 'the world' alive is the earth and the sun. We could take all the oil we could find, pour it all over the ground, set it all on fire and burn it all up at one time. Still the earth would go on.
We could try to blow the earth up ourselves with Nuclear weapons, and still not destroy it, and there would still be survivors. We cannot 'end the world', so saying "Our world will end very very soon" is just idiotic.
I got an idea, lets all realize that our small minds cannot possibly understand something as great as the earth, and just live our little personal, insignificant lives the best we can, and while we're at it, be polite and courteous to the earth, instead of thinking we can save or destroy it. It saves or destroys us.
Don't worry, it's nothing to feel threatened and insecure about. The author meant that our way of life and so-called standard of living was being threatened, he wasn't saying that the world would end.
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firstly nobody outside america....NOBODY....thought the US went to iraq looking for wmds or to oust saddam
coming to the oil situation.....it is running out and it will run out....but there are a lot of undiscovered oil fields in africa and west & nort asia which too will soon run out
that being said there are alternative energy sources...natural sources like...solar, wind, hydroelectric....right now people are too ignorant to make use of these sources but one day we will all have to....just installing solar cells on ur rooftop can take care of all ur household requirements....these will prolly become standard in approx 50 yrs with oil prices sky-rocketing
peace
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This thread is a collection of Dumbasses. One chicken Little, and one guy sticking up for "The Little Man", who just happens to be the exact opposite of his father, who he despises in his drunkeness.
THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!
The basic fallacy of the argument put forth in the first post is, 1. we cannot destroy the earth, we're much too insignificant and powerless to do that, and 2. Since we're basically enlightened animals, all we ultimately need to keep 'the world' alive is the earth and the sun. We could take all the oil we could find, pour it all over the ground, set it all on fire and burn it all up at one time. Still the earth would go on.
We could try to blow the earth up ourselves with Nuclear weapons, and still not destroy it, and there would still be survivors. We cannot 'end the world', so saying "Our world will end very very soon" is just idiotic.
I got an idea, lets all realize that our small minds cannot possibly understand something as great as the earth, and just live our little personal, insignificant lives the best we can, and while we're at it, be polite and courteous to the earth, instead of thinking we can save or destroy it. It saves or destroys us.
OUR WORLD will end...Do you know how dependent we are on this resource? OUR WHOLE WAY OF LIVING is depended on this resources and it's only been within the last 100 yrs in which we have used it. If there is no OIL... remember, we dont know how much there is... we only have an IDEA...anyway, with NO OIL, we would be screwed. We would have huge energy crisis everywhere... they seem to get them every summer in Cali and in NY ... we couldn't use machinary. We wouldn't be able to import or export goods. We would starting walking and biking everywhere because our cars would become decorations in our driveways. We would have no plastic, which is a petroleum bioproduct... Look in your room... how many plastic things are there... I have CD cases, a computer monitor, my keyboard, my printer, my stereo, all these things would have to be constructed some other way... WHICH IS SO MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE. If you burned all the oil in one shot, our way of living would be shot...
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Peak Oil is a myth.
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Peak Oil is a myth.
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Se what doesn't check out is the fact that there are alternative resources for energy. That whole persuasive essay right there acts as if all we have remaining in terms of energy is oil.
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Peak Oil is a myth.
how is it a myth ? so there is a never ending supply of oil ??
i thought you had a little more common sense than that.
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You little clown.
Do you know anything about oil? Crude, Sweet, Tar sands, shale?
Don't ever try and tell me that I don't have common sense when it's clear that you're a fucking moron.
Oil, Oil Everywhere . . .
BY PETER HUBER AND MARK MILLS
Sunday, January 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.
The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50 a barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 a barrel for the next 100 years at least.
The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion--over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.
Then you have to get the oil out of the sand--or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like Western coal, and that's very cheap--but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum.
In sum, it costs under $5 a barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily.
But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco. Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike--both up and down--not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh.
The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored.
In the short term anything remains possible. Demand for oil grows daily in China and India, where good government is finally taking root, while much of the earth's most accessible oil lies under land controlled by feudal theocracies, kleptocrats, and fanatics. Day by day, just as it should, the market attempts to incorporate these two antithetical realities into the spot price of crude. But to suppose that those prices foreshadow the exhaustion of the planet itself is silly.
The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't.
Messrs. Huber and Mills are co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy," just out from Basic Books.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006228
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that proved no point yes theres lots of oil out there and the costs are different but it will always be controlled by supply and demand current demand has been out growing supply so price increases add in the cost of terrorism in the major oil supplier's countries and you reach todays price. however oil supplies are no not never ending and when the time comes in hundred years or whatever we had better had gotten our act together. Oil is created over millions of years and we are extracting it at a far higher rate than it is being produced.
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Well there were some Bible codes and a man found some codes for the years from 2000-20006 and the first 2 codes who said precise what will happen really happened one of them is 9/11,and it says that in 2006 the world will have its 3rd world war!
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You little clown.
Do you know anything about oil? Crude, Sweet, Tar sands, shale?
Don't ever try and tell me that I don't have common sense when it's clear that you're a fucking moron.
Oil, Oil Everywhere . . .
BY PETER HUBER AND MARK MILLS
Sunday, January 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.
The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50 a barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 a barrel for the next 100 years at least.
The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion--over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.
Then you have to get the oil out of the sand--or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like Western coal, and that's very cheap--but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum.
In sum, it costs under $5 a barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily.
But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco. Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike--both up and down--not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh.
The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored.
In the short term anything remains possible. Demand for oil grows daily in China and India, where good government is finally taking root, while much of the earth's most accessible oil lies under land controlled by feudal theocracies, kleptocrats, and fanatics. Day by day, just as it should, the market attempts to incorporate these two antithetical realities into the spot price of crude. But to suppose that those prices foreshadow the exhaustion of the planet itself is silly.
The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't.
Messrs. Huber and Mills are co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy," just out from Basic Books.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006228
LOL at you insulting me first off, i imagined you would be more civilised than that due to your constant critisism of others...
before i go on, let me prove you wrong in one sentence, oil will run out eventually, maybe not in 30 or 40 years but it will run out - (that is common sense by the way).
lets use an example for you, there is a lake with a shitload of fish, a fisherman loves his discovery and there is enough fish to last him a lifetime, others find out about this and swarm to the lake, then all fish with the man, they catch the fish faster than they reproduce therefore the fish eventually run out, the people get hungry and start fighting over the remaining fish to survive... - does it make sense to you englewood ?
no-one has knowledge of how much oil is really out there, and there havent been any new oil discoveries since the 70's or some shit, and they also state the stupidest thing i have ever read "the world is bigger than people think".
peak oil isn't about the cost of extraction, it's about the fact that supply will not match demand, secondly extraction of the shale oil in Canada is not economical to extract, the profic margin is 1:1.5 unlike sandy oil or whatever the fuck it is the ratio is 1:15...
maybe you should read the other article maverick...
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good read.
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Se what doesn't check out is the fact that there are alternative resources for energy. That whole persuasive essay right there acts as if all we have remaining in terms of energy is oil.
no, there are pages the discuss alternative energy, but a lot of research shows that they won't be as efficient, cost friendly and we simply are preparing ourselves to convert to such energy... if we ran out of oil, we would have to buy news cars... however, you can't expect the population to all go out and buy a new car on the same day... i couldn't buy one now, i just dont hvae the money... but the other fact is to create new power plants that use alternative energy, would require the use of oil because how are we going to make these power plants if our machinery that uses oil doesn't have it.
and the real fact is that OIL is not a resource that we will always have... we will run out one day... and the other fact is... if there other forms of energy... why don't we use those instead of creating a war to get oil? Because we are dependent on this resource, we know how to use and well, we don't have the patience or the desire to use alternatives.
It's like a snowball, it jsut gets bigger the longer it's rolling.
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Fk that bullshit. Some ppl want to give up and let our country end cuz they r dumb and soft, and locked in defeated thought.
I mean if Dre was forced to put his mind in the fuel lab to save the country we'd be ridin' strictly on beats. Go ahead, cut the damm oil. Just see how much better WE make it.
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Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning
HOUSTON -- Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330.
Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while, it behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.
Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10 years ago.
Fill 'er Up
All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be.
"It kind of blew me away," says Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Connected to Woods Hole since 1973, Dr. Whelan says she considered herself a traditional thinker until she encountered the phenomenon in the Gulf of Mexico. Now, she says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just migrating" deep underground.
Conventional wisdom says the world's supply of oil is finite, and that it was deposited in horizontal reservoirs near the surface in a process that took millions of years. Since the economies of entire countries ride on the fundamental notion that oil reserves are exhaustible, any contrary evidence "would change the way people see the game, turn the world view upside down," says Daniel Yergin, a petroleum futurist and industry consultant in Cambridge, Mass. "Oil and renewable resource are not words that often appear in the same sentence."
Mideast Mystery
Doomsayers to the contrary, the world contains far more recoverable oil than was believed even 20 years ago. Between 1976 and 1996, estimated global oil reserves grew 72%, to 1.04 trillion barrels. Much of that growth came in the past 10 years, with the introduction of computers to the oil patch, which made drilling for oil more predictable.
Still, most geologists are hard-pressed to explain why the world's greatest oil pool, the Middle East, has more than doubled its reserves in the past 20 years, despite half a century of intense exploitation and relatively few new discoveries. It would take a pretty big pile of dead dinosaurs and prehistoric plants to account for the estimated 660 billion barrels of oil in the region, notes Norman Hyne, a professor at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. "Off-the-wall theories often turn out to be right," he says.
Even some of the most staid U.S. oil companies find the Eugene Island discoveries intriguing. "These reservoirs are refilling with oil," acknowledges David Sibley, a Chevron Corp. geologist who has monitored the work at Eugene Island.
Mr. Sibley cautions, however, that much research remains to be done on the source of that oil. "At this point, it's not black and white. It's gray," he says.
Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that led to its creation. And because even conservative estimates say known oil reserves will last 40 years or more, most big oil companies haven't concerned themselves much with hunting for deep sources like the reservoirs scientists believe may exist under Eugene Island.
Economics never hindered the theorists, however. One, Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has held for years that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he says.
While many scientists discount Prof. Gold's theory as unproved, "it made a believer out of me," says Robert Hefner, chairman of Seven Seas Petroleum Inc., a Houston firm that specializes in ultradeep drilling and has worked with the professor on his experiments. Seven Seas continues to use "conventional" methods in seeking reserves, though the halls of the company often ring with dissent. "My boss and I yell at each other all the time about these theories," says Russ Cunningham, a geologist and exploration manager for Seven Seas who isn't sold on Prof. Gold's ideas.
Energy Vacuum
Knowing that clever theories don't fill the gas tank, Roger Anderson, an oceanographer and executive director of Columbia University's Energy Research Center in New York, proposed studying the behavior of oil in a reservoir in hopes of finding a new way to help companies vacuum up what their drilling was leaving behind.
He focused on Eugene Island, a kidney-shaped subsurface mountain that slopes steeply into the Gulf depths. About 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, the underwater landscape surrounding Eugene Island is otherworldly, cut with deep fissures and faults that spontaneously belch gas and oil. In 1985, as he stood on the deck of a shrimp boat towing an oil-sniffing contraption through the area, Dr. Anderson pondered Eugene Island's strange history. "Migrating oil and anomalous production. I sort of linked the two ideas together," he says.
Five years later, the U.S. Department of Energy ponied up $10 million to investigate the Eugene Island geologic formation, and especially the oddly behaving field at its crest. A consortium of companies leasing chunks of the formation, including such giants as Chevron, Exxon Corp. and Texaco Corp., matched the federal grant.
Time and Space
The Eugene Island researchers began their investigation about the same time that 3-D seismic technology was introduced to the oil business, allowing geologists to see promising reservoirs as a cavern in the ground rather than as a line on a piece of paper.
Taking the technology one step further, Dr. Anderson used a powerful computer to stack 3-D images of Eugene Island on top of one another. That resulted in a 4-D image, showing not only the reservoir in three spatial dimensions, but showing also the movement of its contents over time as PennzEnergy siphoned out oil.
What Dr. Anderson noticed as he played his time-lapse model was how much oil PennzEnergy had missed over the years. The remaining crude, surrounded by water and wobbling like giant globs of Jell-O in the computer model, gave PennzEnergy new targets as it reworked Eugene Island.
What captivated scientists, though, was a deep fault in the bottom corner of the computer scan that was gushing oil like a garden hose. "We could see the stream," Dr. Anderson says. "It wasn't even debated that it was happening."
Woods Hole's Dr. Whelan, invited by Dr. Anderson to join the Eugene Island investigation, postulated that superheated methane gas -- a compound that is able to absorb vast amounts of oil -- was carrying crude from a deep source below. The age of the crude pushed through the stream, and its hotter temperature helped support that theory. The scientists decided to drill into the fault.
Unlucky Strike
As prospectors, the scientists were fairly lucky. As researchers they weren't. The first well they drilled hit natural gas, a pocket so pressurized "that it scared us," Dr. Anderson says; that well is still producing. The second stab, however, collapsed the fault. "Some oil flowed. I have 15 gallons of it in my closet," Dr. Anderson says. But it wasn't successful enough to advance Dr. Whelan's theory.
A third well was drilled at a spot on an adjacent lease, where the fault disappeared from seismic view. The researchers missed the stream but hit a fair-size reservoir, one that is still producing.
It was here, in 1995, that the scientists ran out of grant money and PennzEnergy lost interest in continuing. "I'm not discounting the possibility that there is oil moving into these reservoirs," says William Van Wie, a PennzEnergy senior vice president. "I question only the rate."
Dr. Whelan hasn't lost interest, however, and is seeking to investigate further the mysterious vents and seeps. While industry geologists have generally assumed such eruptions are merely cracks in a shallow oil reservoir, they aren't sure. Noting that many of the seeps are occurring in deep water, rather than in the relative shallows of the continental shelf, Dr. Whelan wonders if they may link a deeper source.
This summer, a tiny submarine chartered by a Louisiana State University researcher will attempt to install a series of measuring devices on vents near the Eugene Island property. Dr. Whelan hopes this will give her some idea of how quickly Eugene Island is refilling. "We need to know if we're talking years or if we're talking hundreds of thousands of years," she says.
http://interactive.wsj.com/archive/retrieve.cgi?id=SB924151147795357823.djm
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Just like ´John Titter´said their was going to be another Civil War in the US and how World War II will tart in 2006 and last for 40 years...
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Hmm... i don't think the U.S. will be willing to go to all out war (WWIII?) for the sake of Oil. We already have the Cold Fusion technology pretty much adapted to be put to use within the next 50 years, and the United States alone has enough Oil to run just on our own oil for another 50-75 years, so there's really no reason blow the shit out of proportion. In my opinion the reason Oil is so important right now is that the Oil companies and those who endorse them are in power and aren't willing to let their huge incomes dwindle, which is what would happen if oil consumption were to go down. Eventually, though, when the oil runs out, they will be forced to make the transition to the cold fusion technology. I remember reading that if the Cold Fusion were to be perfected, a city the size of New York could run off once glass of water a day. So no worries, if anything, WWIII be a result of other shit, and it DEFINITELY won't happen in 2006, that's just ridiculous.
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Predictably, the recent rise in oil prices has the usual doom-and-gloom crowd, which has consistently been wrong for 30 years, saying once again that this proves we are running out of oil and that severe curbs on gasoline consumption must be imposed to preserve what little is left for future generations. They need not worry. There is growing evidence that oil is far more plentiful than we have been led to believe.
The prevailing theory of the origin of oil is the dead dinosaur hypothesis and dates back to the 18th century. Its originator was a Russian scientist named Mikhail Lomonosov, who put it this way in a 1757 paper: "Rock oil (petroleum) originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transforms into rock oil."
However, in the 1950s, Russian and Ukrainian scientists developed a new theory about petroleum's origins called the abiotic or abiogenic theory. According to this view, oil is fundamentally inorganic and has no relationship to dead plant or animal life. Rather, oil originates deep in the Earth's crust from inorganic material that is part of the planet's origin.
In the words of geologist Vladimir Porfir'yev, "The overwhelming preponderance of geological evidence compels the conclusion that crude oil and natural gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the Earth. They are primordial materials which have erupted from great depths."
For more than 50 years, Russian and Ukrainian scientists have successfully used the abiotic theory to find oil and natural gas. For example, the Dnieper-Donets Basin has yielded a significant amount of oil and natural gas even though it is an area that conventional biological theories reject as unpromising. A recent technical paper found that the results "confirm the scientific conclusions that the oil and natural gas found in ... the Dnieper-Donets Basin are of deep, and abiotic, origin."
As Russia has opened up since the fall of the Soviet Union and because it has become a large and growing factor in the international oil market, American scientists are becoming increasingly knowledgeable about and interested in the abiotic theory of petroleum. Recently, the National Academy of Sciences published a paper on the topic. The Gas Research Institute has financed exploration based on abiotic theories, with encouraging results. And the American Association of Petroleum Geologists has taken an interest in the subject as well.
The leading supporter of the abiotic theory in the United States is Thomas Gold of Cornell University. His 1999 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere" (Springer-Verlag) is a thorough discussion of the issues. It is based in part on research financed by the U.S. Geological Survey. Among leading scientists whose work supports the abiotic theory are Jean Whelan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Mahlon Kennicutt of Texas A&M University and J.F. Kenny of the Gas Resources Corporation.
Interestingly, economic research also implicitly supports abiotic theory. A leading researcher in this regard is Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research and formerly chief energy economist for DRI-WEFA.
In a new paper, Mr. Lynch debunks a common theory called the Hubbert Curve, which postulates that the yield of oil fields is inherently limited. The problem, as Mr. Lynch points out, is that actual experience in many instances contradicts the Hubbert theory. Its primary flaw is that it views geology as the sole factor in oil discovery, recovery and depletion. In fact, oil prices, government policy and technology play critical roles. But the evidence he presents of oil fields that yielded far more than the Hubbert Curve predicts is consistent with the abiotic theory, which says that oil fields can be refilled from sources well below those in which production now takes place.
Finally, it is important to remember that improving technology improves the oil situation regardless of the theory of its origins. A study last year by Cambridge Energy Research Associates found that five emerging technologies — remote sensing, visualization, intelligent drilling and completions, automation and data integration — will greatly improve the ability of energy companies to increase their drilling success rate, better manage reserves and operate more efficiently.
William Severns, the study's leader, explained, "With these capabilities, companies may be able to increase the amount of oil and natural gas recovered in a given field by 2 percent to 7 percent, reduce lifting costs by 10 percent to 25 percent, and increase production rates by 2 percent to 4 percent."
Of course, higher prices also make known deposits of oil that were previously too costly to exploit viable economically, as well as reducing demand. Consequently, it is impossible to ever literally run out of oil. The possibility should not be a factor in the energy debate.
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040608-092733-4642r.htm
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While many scientists discount Prof. Gold's theory as unproved, "it made a believer out of me," says Robert Hefner, chairman of Seven Seas Petroleum Inc., a Houston firm that specializes in ultradeep drilling and has worked with the professor on his experiments. Seven Seas continues to use "conventional" methods in seeking reserves, though the halls of the company often ring with dissent. "My boss and I yell at each other all the time about these theories," says Russ Cunningham, a geologist and exploration manager for Seven Seas who isn't sold on Prof. Gold's ideas.
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look man that was a good read, but it didnt prove shit to me.... what if oil is like the blood of the planet and there is only so much you can take until it collapses ? there is no such thing as infinite when there is no input into the centre of the earth, and there is only output, or if there was natural output obviously it was a balanced one that the planet could handle, it is simple mathematics...
another analogy ? a person on average will acidentaly inflict damage on themselves and bleed a certain amount that the heart and body can handle replacing.... in comes a serial killer and stabs you so you bleed more than your body can handle therefore you pass out...
even this is a bad analogy because blood doesnt replace itself, you must eat food etc for blood cells to reproduce....
take that into consideration maverick...
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either way, I'm scared as shit for whatever happens in the future
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either way, I'm scared as shit for whatever happens in the future
dont be a pussy.
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;D