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German Military Braces For Peak Oil
myrdos2 writes "A study by a German military think tank leaked to the Internet warns of the potential for a dire global economic crisis in as little as 15 years as a result of a peak and an irreversible decline in world oil supplies. The study states that there is 'some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later. ... In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse.' The report closely matches one from the US military earlier this year, which stated that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact."
Some people here are confusing 'global warming' and the 'green movement' with peak oil. You can argue all you want about whether global warming is really true or not, but Oil is limited, and we're running out fast. That is reality, face it.
The real enemies are those who scream bloody murder whenever the N-word is brought up. Mankind needs energy, and in the near future, our best and cleanest bet is nuclear power.
The climate is already changing because of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. We could stop burning fossil carbon today and global warming would still be a problem.
And what, you don't believe in peak oil? You think the earth is like a Tardis, bigger inside than out, with infinite reserves of oil? There will have to come a time when production starts to decline.
I just don't get how deniers can ignore simple logic. Oil companies will always find new reserves. We can keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere without it ever affecting anything. Yeah, right. Just because things are bigger than your tiny mind can comprehend doesn't mean they're infinite. If something isn't going to happen in your lifetime, that doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
Do you have children?
Its so simple. 'You' were wrong in 1970 - "haha" - therefore any prediction of oil running out, including the fact that oil is running out right now and has ran out any many places already, will be automatically dismissed and ridiculed by us no matter what. No analysis, no fact checking, onward christian straw men...
Peak Oil is not the same thing as running out of oil.
What these systems analysts working for the military industrial complex are saying is that the rate of production of oil can no longer keep up with our increasing demand for it. And increased demand does not automatically create new oil into the market forever - the same way that the hunger of the economists locked up in my cellar do not create sandwiched for them. At some point the 'laws' of economics meet the laws of physics - one of them wins and its called resource depletion.
Resource depletion is just that: depletion. Initially you discover a resource, you bring it to production at a certain rate. That rate is not arbitrary. The more 'contact area' you have with the resource, the greater the rate can be. Eventually however the resource depletes to a 'level' where your contact area can no longer increase but begins to decrease. From this point on your rate of production will decrease no matter what until the resource is exhausted or the rate of production no longer justifies continuing. The rate of discovery did peak at 1970. Finally now its the turn of production.
This is exactly what you are taught if you're into petroleum engineer. The rigs out there aren't simply sinking their pipes into liquid gold and sucking free money to the surface. Every stake is carefully evaluated, every well is a huge risk to take. Will it produce, at what rate and for how long? And there is no technological fixes left. We have already thrown the kitchen sink into the play for decades: from 3D-seismic modeling, from fracturing to horizontal drilling. All used extensively in all the largest oil fields of the world - most of which are now in decline. The reason is that many of these 'production enhancing technologies' are just 'super straws': they artificially increase your initial rate of production - but they don't increase the amount of oil down there - you are just sucking it dry faster. There is no engineering around Peak Oil.
The many years I have been following theoildrum and I have come to learn a great deal about the capability of people to deny and dismiss the reality around them. With the global warming it was way too easy for them - the science was difficult even for the experts. With Peak Oil it was always only misunderstanding or pure ignorance that worked - because a lot of the facts were out there plain to see with no complex math involved. In fact there was no debate amongst the 'experts' either. Any rig hand you talked to seemed to know exactly what you were talking about and some of the big oil companies like Shell, PB for example are now publicly talking about Peak Oil as well as some governments and the military are starting to publicly use the Peak Oil term.
What is left then for the denilists? Hide in slashdot world? At least have the courtesy of informing yourself and coming up with more then the lame same cliches. There is the mandatory criticism section down there although its been struggling recently. Good luck.
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It's funny that you are getting modded funny on this comment.
The Germans DO have experience with this. The article states that the German and US military both are planning ahead for this.
On a serious note, I keep hearing that the next World Wars will be fought over resources. It might be hard for us to imagine this right now, since most Slashdotters get to wake up in soft beds, in airconditioned/heated rooms, take hot showers with nice smelling bath products, and drive the 1-2 miles to Starbucks to enjoy over priced coffee and free Wi-Fi.
All of our amenities, seemingly abundant and unending, provide a natural barrier to understanding just how quickly and totally society can break down when the "basics" become extremely hard to obtain.
Most of us probably don't remember World War II or the Great Depression. My grandparents do though. They always told me that I would never really understand just how good and easy that I have it.
They are probably right.
So although your post is modded as funny (which it really kind of is), I am taking it on a more serious note too.
If peak oil is around now, and you're youngish, I think it's pretty likely you are going to understand very well.
Probably, most of people reading this story isn't aware, how much of whole german ww2 fuel production were not from crude. Here http://www.slcj.uw.edu.pl/htrp/PrezentacjePAA-RdSA-28-Jun-2006/Stanczyk-PaliwaPlynne.pdf (polish only) one can see volume of sythetic fuel produced by germans. And, personally i'm wondering if this technology will appear as one of most important technologies of times when technology of power productions changes?
>>Well, the German military does have some past experience in having to manage without petroleum. : - )
Right. They used the Fisher-Tropsch process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process) to generate oil from coal.
Or, as our lovely senator from California, Diane Feinstein put it, "An unproven, untested, and new method of generating gasoline."
Right before she voted against it in the senate.
There will be plenty of oil in the ground, around as much as has already been used in all of history in fact.
Well, here's the thing: collecting oil, like most other human activity, requires energy to accomplish. Currently, the amount of energy required to collect a gallon of oil is less than the amount of energy obtainable from a gallon of oil... but as the "easy" oil is used up, the remaining oil is (by definition) the oil that is more remote and harder to collect. At some point, the remaining oil will be difficult enough to collect that it will require the expenditure of more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon of oil... at which point, the remaining oil might as well not exist, because after collecting the oil you'd have less oil than you started with. So the fact that lots of oil still exists is a bit of a red herring.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.