Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Cables Reveal US Thinks Saudi Oil Reserves May Be Overstated
Mr.Intel writes with this excerpt from a UPI report which may interest those of you with cars, electricity, items made of plastic, etc: "Estimates of oil reserves in Saudi Arabia are overstated, meaning crude output could peak within the next decade, leaked US diplomatic cables reveal. Washington fears Saudi Arabia overestimated its oil reserves by as much as 40 percent and the kingdom can't keep enough oil flowing to control prices, US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and published by The Guardian newspaper in London reveal."
Canada, the 51st state, has all the oil the US needs.... all you need to do is invade^H^H^H^H^H^H ask
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Today's top story is that Saudi Oil reserves are actually critically lo, and we will need to transition to use more renewable energy sources to replace it.
In related news, NIMBY groups are opposing the construction of everything other than oil and coal plants on the basis that everything else is ugly and might even let the poor have enough electricity to survive the weather conditions of the coming years.
A leak originating from the Saudis themselves could be the real news.
...to ensure we are ready for the day when the oil runs out by embracing clean energy and slowly phasing out our dependence on foreign oil...
Oh wait, that was a dream I had. Shit.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Since oil is not a renewable resource, I think my pessimism is very well placed. Perhaps we won't see the oil run out in our lifetime, but it will eventually. It doesn't matter how much new, dangerous to drill, domestically based oil fields we find. It will eventually all be gone. Especially at the rate we consume it. But then again it's always easier to put off until tomorrow what can be done today, right?
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
i'm certain we can eke out some extra bits of oil here and there with some shiny new tech. meanwhile, china, brazil, india, are growing economically. it's simple economics: increased demand, and harder to get supply = price levels that make petroleum as a fuel source unpalatable
it just begs the question: what does it take to convince some people that the era of digging petroleum out of the ground is over, and you need to look at alternatives?
because when i read posts like yours, i just see denial
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not about a "blood for oil" trade. It's that the architects of the war grossly underestimated the costs of the invasion, and part of the pitch for the occupation was that the cost of war would be minimal considering that the money recouped from Iraq's domestic production would help to repay for the invasion. This link has a few good quotes:
"The bulk of the funds for Iraq's reconstruction will come from Iraqis -- from oil revenues, recovered assets, international trade, direct foreign investment -- as well as some contributions we've already received and hope to receive from the international community." -Donald Rumsfeld, 2003
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
At what cost? That method involves breaking rock under high pressure, by using gas, water, sometimes mixed with chemicals.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that we should be cracking rock and injecting crap into the ground, especially in a region that's already critically short of groundwater.
The fractured rock creates new pathways for water to migrate, and for pollutants to get around, and in general to fuck up acquifers in a region that may well be uninhabitable due to a lack of water in the near future.
The alternatives will start coming when A) we stop federal subsidies for "alternative energy" and B) when the price actually hits where it makes sense for people to transition.
All federal subsides do is delay real, marketable solutions for stuff that doesn't work in the real world. Just look at ethanol, it is completely impractical for use in the US, especially from corn, but because of all of the subsides going to it, we continued on even though it is a dead end. Perhaps if we stopped interfering with the automotive industries we might actually see a practical electric car on the market, rather than attempts to gain tax credits and subsides.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The problem with proven oil reserves is that they (by definition) include only economically recoverable oil at any given point in time, which is a stupid way to define things but that's beside the point. Saudi Light crude (which is the 15-20/barrel stuff, or less... a lot less), is not exactly going to last long, it's dead easy to get out of the ground and makes it hard to justify the effort in anything else for the saudis (as opposed to say canada, where we have relatively little of the cheap easy to get stuff). But the Saudi's have a lot of heavy oil that at 60 or 70 bucks a barrel wouldn't be economically viable, but at 100 bucks a barrel, with bangladeshi slave.. I'm sorry, foreign worker, labour becomes reasonably profitable. (In 20 years feel free to replace bangladesh with some random impoverished muslim nation in africa, I doubt the Saudi's care where the cheap labour comes from all that much).
So then we can ask a question. As the light, cheap, easy to get stuff dries up, and then there's inflation, economic growth etc. what will the price of oil be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 etc. The Saudi's and americans almost certainly disagree on what will be economically viable to extract, in the same way two experts on the price of oil aren't going to come to exactly the same number for 15 years from now. It's hard to see the future. There are different ways to count oil recoverability too, and that will depend a lot on well... price ( and technology).
Using some measures the US should run almost completely out of domestically produced oil in less than 8 years. Does anyone seriously think that's going to happen? That's supposedly been the case for at least a decade, and yet US oil production doesn't appear to exactly be in a massive imploding crisis of supply. In 2007 the US produced 8.5 million barrels/day (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_pro-energy-oil-production)... there's a long way from that to 0 in 11 years.
The geology question, of how much actual oil a country has, is mostly useless, since it only matters what you figure you can extract. But very reasonable people can have very reasonable disagreements on those numbers, with no one lying. Are the saudi's lying about their oil reserves? Probably not, at least, not significantly, at the current rate of production saudi arabia will run out of officially declared reserves... in 130 years (10 million barrels/day, 430 billion barrels of declared reserves). If they're lying by 40%, then they're lying about a problem that will manifest in the late 2070's or 2080's. That's a long time to hold onto a lie for relatively little gain, since shit will hit the fan either way. Can they disagree with the americans on what exactly the source of that will be? Certainly.
Essentially you could say the same thing about the US. If the figure the price of oil will be > 100 bucks a barrel (in todays dollars) then shale deposits suddenly become economically viable, given the US the largest reserves in the world, by a lot, if the price of oil is less than 70.. well then shale isn't viable to extract. Caveat: I'm not 100% sure on those numbers (100 and 70) but they're good enough to illustrate my point. Now anything in between and we have a fairly difficult calculation.
The Saudis could easily be lying about how long they can keep cheap production of 10 million barrels a day up. But I'm not sure how much of a problem that is, or how much difference it would make, since the price of oil is something like 4 or 5x the cost of most saudi oil, I'm sure for that much money they'll find something. It might be convenient to pay lip service to the americans and say 'oh yes Mr president we'll keep supplying cheap oil and keep the price down just give us more F15's' when they're still marking it up 300% (and that would still bring the cost down), but it's in their interest to convince the americans they're trying to keep oil cheap, when they probably can't do much about the price of oil anymore (by themselves), while at the same time
Read up on Hubbert's estimates. States they are indeed running out, peaked 4-7 years ago. OPEC production quotas are based on each country's stated reserve estimates, so it is always in the best interests for each country to lie about it (over stating their reserves).
Because OPEC members production is capped at a ratio of their reserves. So the higher they claim their reserves are the more oil they are allowed to sell.
Drilling service companies have injected at least 32 million gallons of diesel fuel underground as part of a controversial drilling technique, a Democratic congressional investigation has found.
Injecting diesel as part of "hydraulic fracturing" is supposed to be regulated by U.S. EPA. But an agency official told congressional investigators that EPA had assumed that the use of diesel had stopped seven years ago.
"The industry has been saying they stopped injecting toxic diesel fuel into wells," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who led the inquiry. "But our investigation showed this practice has been continuing in secret and in apparent violation of the [Safe Drinking Water Act]."
But heh, don't let oil/gas companies poisoning US citizens for profit keep you awake at night.
http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/01/31/31greenwire-fracking-companies-injected-32m-gallons-of-die-24135.html
The problem is that so much of this country has been built around the car. The bike is excellent in Europe, specifically Holland. But the zoning there doesn't seperated stores from the people in the same way they do it here, surburbia wasn't sold to them as the ultimate dream like it was here in the 1950s to get away from the cities.
Also, weight is not the ultimate problem. A honda civic gets 30mpg. A moped/motorcycle that has a small engine but still can go highway speeds gets maybe 75mpg, often 60mpg. For the sacrifice, not a huge multiplier. If you can get away with 60mph top speed, then maybe a moped with 100mpg. Really not the 300mpg some people I talked to thought in the past (when gas was nearing $4 a gallon). It surprised them because they see a lot of sacrificed weight (saftey) and convenience (space).
For one, standard bicycles/motorcycles have a tall profile with the rider in the standard position, not that aerodynamic compared to a lower car or recumbent bicycle (which hold the speed records since aerodynamics make a huge difference at speed). Then another factor is rolling resistance -- trains are heavy as hell but their steel wheels deform a lot less than a rubber wheel - giving them decent efficiency all things considered (along with not stop and going and aerodynamics). Lastly is the huge engines Americans love even though they never use 90% of the capacity. In Germany, with the unlimited autobahn and where they go at least 85mph (~140kph) on average on the autobahn, many drivers make do with 1.2-1.6L engines while in America so many people have 1.8-2.4L+ just so they can peel out the driveway a fraction of a second faster. And consume more fuel the rest of the time.
I don't see the US making the move to rail/bike lanes. Too much central control and will power needed to make the changes. Before we go to mopeds/bikes, something like the Aptera could provide similiar mileage w/o too many sacrifices. Too bad it'll never get made.
And the Republicans are trying to unfund any research into renewable energy.
They are trying to cut budgets across the board, because the government has no money.
Plenty of Republicans and other conservatives back things like construction of new nuclear power plants, a form of renewable energy that actually makes sense.
Wind energy makes little sense at the moment (all we will end up with is more dead windmill fields such as the ones in California and Hawaii). Solar panels are starting to make sense but why do they need government help to make it happen? People are already starting to buy things like solar shingles of their own accord.
Nuclear power plants are not renewable. Uranium will eventually run out just like oil. Granted, with breeder technology it might last a few centuries, but after Chernobyl I'm a bit wary about claims of safe fission reactors.
No, uranium will not eventually run out just like oil. We have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for 10,000 - 100,000 years. Not even counting reserves - I'm just talking about the leftover depleted uranium already processed and sitting around unused at enrichment plants. Yes, using fast breeder technology. Yes, it was in fact Democrats whom cancelled breeder, reprocessing, and fast reactor research.
As an interesting tidbit, for the amount of money Obama spent of the stimulus package, we could have built ~300 new nuclear reactors and converted the country to 90% nuclear power. Save the coal and natural gas for transportation, we'd have enough to last 1000 years and total energy independence forever.
Amazing how efficient liberals are at wasting money, eh? :)
As others have stated it's not so much as running out of oil, but rather the cheap, easy to extract oil.
In other parts of the world oil companies have developed technology to drill for deeper and harder to extract sources. Wells that at one time would not have been tried are today being developed. Part of this is due to the rising price of crude that has made the more expensive deeper sources worth going after. However the better technology available today also makes it less expensive than it would have been years ago. Still, there are increased risks and problems with these deeper wells (as BP has found out). If solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources can replace some dependence on oil demand will be lower and price will depend more on the cost of delivery rather than mostly on supply vs demand.
> But the Saudi's have a lot of heavy oil that at 60 or 70 bucks a barrel wouldn't be economically viable, but at 100 bucks a barrel, with bangladeshi slave.. I'm sorry, foreign worker, labour becomes reasonably profitable.
Not necessarily. Not if extracting that oil results in a net energy loss.
See, we extract oil to get energy out of it (well, among other things, but let's simplify here). But the extraction process itself takes energy. If you spend more energy than you get out of it, then the process will never be profitable. You talk about certain oil reserves being profitable at 100/barrel. But you are assuming today's energy prices. As the energy prices increase, the break-even point for those reserves will also increase. Some reserves will become profitable but some will be forever too expensive to bother.
Let me give you a practical example. Canada has 1/3 of the world's oil reserves. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those reserves are in the form of tar sands. You can't just pump the oil out of tar sands. You need to use steam extraction.
Here is how it works. First they strip the top layer of vegetation to get to the tar sands. Then they use natural gas to boil water and then use the steam to extract oil out of tar sands. The contaminated oily water is then dumped into massive reservoirs called tailings ponds, where it continuously kills wildlife.
To extract 3 barrels of oil out of tar sands you need to spend the equivalent of 2 barrels worth of energy. Oh and you also have to contaminate 15 barrels of fresh water. So the process is energy-positive, but the environmental damage is enormous.
> If they're lying by 40%, then they're lying about a problem that will manifest in the late 2070's or 2080's. That's a long time to hold onto a lie for relatively little gain, since shit will hit the fan either way.
Actually, huge gain. OPEC quotas for each country are limited by the amount of proven oil reserves (i.e. the more oil reserves a country has, the more oil it can export, according to OPEC rules). Therefore, it is in each OPEC country's interest to overstate their reserves to artificially increase their quota. The fact that Saudis, as well as every other OPEC country, has been overstating their reserves has been an open secret for the past couple decades. In the case of Saudis, it matters more because their reserves are (still) the largest.
Peak oil is already here. Two of the predictions came to pass:
1. Peak discovery, i.e. fewer new oil reserves are discovered than existing ones put in production. Happened in the 70's.
2. Peak production. Despite growing demand, production of existing fields cannot be increased. Happened in 2008.
3. Long tail of falling production and rising prices. We were "saved" from this by the economic downturn. For now. Once world economies start to pick up, oil prices will go through the roof.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.