Slashdot Mirror

But what are they going to fill it w/?

Congress is still going forward w/ plans to close the Federal Helium Reserve:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443545504577567102314948314.html
http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2012/12dec/helium1212.cfm

and has intentionally been pricing helium low, so as to allow it to be used in party balloons instead of MRI units, &c.

A lot of people don't realize the gulf of mexico was formed by a giant hot spot like yellowstone.

Unless it wasn't(pdf).

This is exactly why "peak oil" predictions have continued to change. The original predictions had us hitting peak oil around, what, 1985?

Those predictions were for US oil fields, and they came true almost exactly on schedule. Current predictions are for world-wide supplies. These are a bit shakier, since some countries (Saudi Arabia, for one) treat oil reserve data as state secrets.

None of the predictions ever take into account new technologies. When the newest predictions were made, oil sands still weren't an economically feasible source of crude. Now they are. That makes a HUGE difference.

The cost of extraction continues to rise. Yes, it's cheaper now to extract from shale and oil sands than it was a year ago, but it's still more expensive than drilling, and I don't see anyway that it (or deep sea drilling) will ever be cheaper than land drilling. The only reason why these other avenues are being pursued now is that the easy/cheap places to drill are tapped out. We'll never completely run out of oil, but when it requires more energy to extract an amount of oil than that oil can provide, we'll stop using oil for energy. The economic consequences of even approaching that price point are staggering to contemplate.

Peak Oil refers not to "running out of oil" but the point at which production cannot be increased faster than demand is rising.

I dunno ... that's not my understanding of the peak-oil predictions, but if you're right then it's even more idiotic than I thought.

No, the grandparent poster is wrong. Peak Oil simply refers to the point when half of an area's economically-extractable oil has been depleted. By itself, that not too bad; it took 140 years to extract one trillion barrels. But production increases over time. For example, if production increases at 5% per year, then production doubles every 14 years. And if you do the math, no matter how long it took to get to that point, once you hit peak oil, you've got 14 years until it becomes economically infeasible to extract any more oil. Unfortunately, the industrialization of China and India has driven the rate of increase even higher, closer to 7%, which means a doubling period of 10 years.

I expect that you aren't interested in reading propaganda from admitted peak oil enthusiasts, but how do you feel about the American Association of Petroleum Geologists? http://www.aapg.org/explorer/2007/05may/nehring.cfm

There are also major new discoveries of oil in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. So why am I paying $3.40 for gas????

And why don't these new discoveries make to the news networks, radio or newpapers???

There are also major new discoveries of oil in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. So why am I paying $3.40 for gas????

And why don't these new discoveries make to the news networks, radio or newpapers???

You can't expect someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

Sounds like we need more plankton.

Indeed, in no small part because the acidification of the oceans from increased CO2 (quite independent of the warming effects) is dissolving the calcareous exoskeletons of many varieties of sea life, the base structure of coral, and much more. The reduction in CO3-- ions compared to HCO3- reduces their access to building material in the first place.

Note that we are not on the verge of running out of oil.

The "peak oil" claim is not that we are about to have no oil. It is that the world's production rate of oil is about to peak and decline (just as the USA's production peaked in 1971 and declined, and any individual oilfield of significance you care to name). What this means is that prices will be much higher and more volatile, and the key to managing energy costs is cutting demand.

I doubt we are on any verge of the ability of the earth to absorb co2 either.

Tell it to the climate scientists who are measuring uncomfortable trends like rapidly rising methane emissions from former permafrost in Siberia, and the rumored rise in methane alerts from tanker detection systems along undersea gorges such as the one at the Hudson River. Former sinks are becoming sources.

Whats more, all that fossil fuel carbon came out of the atmosphere to begin with anyway. Burning it just returns it back to the atmosphere to be absorbed again by life for the cycle.

Coal strata mostly date from the carboniferous, about 300 million years ago. Oil and oil shale dates as far back as the Cambrian, over 500 million years ago. This carbon has been out of circulation for as much as half a billion years, and no extant ecosystem or living species is adapted to the conditions which prevailed at that time.

As I mentioned before, the last time we had a surge in atmospheric CO2 (end of the Paleocene) we had a mass extinction. What sort of delusion lets you think that it wouldn't do the same thing all over again?

If you want to get technical, O2 is the real culprit.

I highlighted that in case anyone reading this had doubts that you are delusional or dishonest.

As for man and his technology - we're a tertiary effect at best

Humans with mere axes and muscle-powered saws denuded the forests of Michigan in just a few years. (One consequence was the extinction of the Michigan Grayling, which required cold water in streams protected from direct sun. These ceased to exist, and the fish along with them.)

That was over a century ago (the fish finally died out in the 1930's). Since the late 19th century, our ability to change the environment has increased many-fold. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 tracks human emissions. In short, anyone who says what you're saying is either lying or delusional.

If it suited the alarmist industry, we'd be back to expecting the next ice age and probably trying to put lamp black on the glaciers to melt them - like they wanted to do back in the 1970s.

You are confusing a media-driven phenomenon of the time with scientific discussion which never claimed that glaciation was about to recur; this shows the shallowness of your knowledge. The scientists were looking at the historic climate cycles and noting that the current orbital fo

Did your senator vote to help those people get cheaper gas by allowing oil drilling in ANWR? Or did he choose the convenience of caribou over the well-being of these poor people? How about drilling off shore? How about cutting the gas tax?

For God's sake, please, please, PLEASE stop dragging ANWR out as a "hippie-killer" - "see, you care more about caribou than children". It's a particularly ludicrous strawman.

This report from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, puts the amount of oil extractable from ANWR at a range of 5.7 to 16 billion bbl, with a mean of 10.3 billion bbl.

From the testimony of the administrator of the Energy Information Administration, our 2004 daily oil demand is 20.8 million bbl/day.

Basic math gives us the result of: ANWR reserves, at the most optimistic review by professional geologists, 770 days of oil at current consumption rates.

The mean reserve calculation gives us 496 days of supply. And that won't come on line for years, as the infrastructure needs to be built from scratch.

Find another strawman.

Not to metion that the friggin American Association of Petroleum Geologists gave them their 2005 Journalism Award for "serious efforts... to take current scientific knowledge and put it into an entertaining and stimulating format." Ack! Gag!

Not to metion that the friggin American Association of Petroleum Geologists gave them their 2005 Journalism Award for "serious efforts... to take current scientific knowledge and put it into an entertaining and stimulating format." Ack! Gag!

Gas Origin Theories to be Studied

My hypothesis on the origin of those (rare) Kimberlite pipes is that they are formed following the transit of a strangelet (or possibly a small black hole) through the earth. That would imply that there should be Kimberlite pipes on opposite sides of the earth (aligned on a chord), but in only a relatively small fraction of the cases would both sides be found on land. I suppose it would be very difficult and expensive to attempt to locate them, even with the proposed detection network. OTOH, the possible diamond find might encourage the exploration.

Did quark matter strike Earth? Also, check Wikipedia for "strangelet".

The current problem with these hybrids is that they are mostly more expensive than pure gas vehicles, and the costs can't be recouped unless you put in some insane driving time on them.

When world production falls by a few percent, American gasoline prices will jump to European levels and stay there. At that point the hybrid will pay off much faster (even ignoring lower maintenance and less time wasted at filling stations) and the resale value will make the owners look very shrewd.

From reading TFA it seems like all this guy did was rig in a bunch of extra batteries to gain some extra mileage, which doesn't really do anything worth a damn, since those batteries still have to be charged.

The batteries he used were lead-acid units sold for electric bicycles. If you look at the price of batteries, it seems likely that a unit built in volume might cost only about $200 to $300 (quite a bit less than the NiMH battery which comes with the car). Lead-acid batteries do wear out, but they are the most-recycled product in the USA. If you can get off-peak rates for charging at night, you'll pay a small fraction of what gasoline would cost for the same driving and replace most of the first few mile's worth of gas with coal, natural gas, hydro, wind and nuclear. Natural gas is getting scarce, but the rest are 100% domestic and not about to go away.

Hybrids are just smart. The plug-in hybrid is insurance.

P.S. Current production levels are not the same as resource availability. Learn the difference.

Peakoil.com was very insistant that the abiogenic theory is completely bunk, but their linked sources of informaiton seem far less so especially the AAPG site itself Considering that peakoil.com has the goal of causing everyone to use less oil under any circumstance and AAPG is a scientific and professional organization i would give their material more credibility than peakoil.

You mean the modern theory (singular) of abiogenic hydrocarbons, promoted here in the US by one man, Thomas Gold. The theory is still controversial in the extreme, primarily accepted only by the Russian oil industry.

Interesting article here

Can't speak for the American Oil crowd, but I know for a fact that the Euroeans are looking very seriously at all sorts of alternative/renewable energies. BP and Shell are two fairly big players in solar, biomass, geothermal, and forestry.

The green-leaning unwashed masses aren't the only ones who are aware that we're burning dinosaurs faster than we're making them. Forecasts vary on the catastrophic oil-running-out deadline (the USGS forecasts are held in fairly high repute). There are many more you can find, with wildly varying dates.

However, a fact much more interesting to an Oil company is when it's going to stop getting cheap to recover oil. All these businesses know it is definately going to get more expensive to extract oil. They also know it's a real posiblity it's going to get more expensive to buy it from countries which make it cheap (OPEC getting its shit together, and other "disaster" scenarios).

So yeah, they thought of that. They reckon that as companies who've got a pretty good idea how energy is used, they're pretty qualified to in this area. Anyone heard any oil company propoganda on fuel cells?

The problem with doing this sort of research is the tremendous amount of variables (it's why we can't forecast the weather more than a few days in advance); how exactly it changes seem to differ from region to region. Some industrial cities in Britain show cool islands, presumably from the water released by industrial processes. Cities in western desert areas often have lower temperatures due to increased vegetation and surface water (though the increased humidity often makes it more uncomfortable). If you have access to a good library, Robert Balling is probably the best known researcher working on it today; for fundamentals on urban climate, anything by Helmut Landsberg on the subject would probably be informative.

The problem is really, what are we going to do about this? A few storms are one thing, but a lot of cities are probably going to be running out of water in a few decades due to the fact that nobody wants to tell people things they don't want to hear; things like maybe the environmental health of a region is more important than having a really nice lawn or golf course, or that just because you've had a constant supply of water for the past 100 years, that it's going to continue. There's a very good reason that only recently have desert areas started attracting real estate development; through most of history they haven't been sustainable. And just because we have better plumbing and air conditioning that didn't exist a hundred years ago doesn't mean the environment has gotten better for us on an environmental level.

I guess I'm seriously off-topic, but I sometimes obsess with this subject the way some people obsess with the GPL license or open source...