Slashdot Mirror
Oil May Be Finite, But U.S. Production Is Ramping Up
Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that the discovery of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers, and according to Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, if fully developed the field in Bakken contains 24 billion barrels, doubling America's proven oil reserves. One reason for America's abundant supply of oil and natural gas has been the development of new drilling techniques, including 'horizontal drilling,' which allows rigs to reach two miles into the ground and then spread horizontally by thousands of feet." Not surprisingly, Hamm considers some of the current administration's loans and subsidies for alternative energy ventures to be misplaced.
Has he never heard of CO2? Why would any sane person want to burn all that and turn it into CO2?
Oh, yeah, profit. Fuck the Earth and all future generations, there's profit to be made! I can own sixteen mansions instead of twelve and have a bigger yacht.
No sig today...
No matter how much oil we find here it would be unwise to burn. Hot planet!
So they maybe found enough for three years and a half years of consumption at current rates. The problem is now truly solved.
Not surprisingly, Hamm considers some of the current administration's loans and subsidies for alternative energy ventures to be misplaced.
That guy is an idiot.
24e9 barrels / 20e6 barrels per day just for the US / 365 days per year = a bit more than a 3 year supply, assuming it can all be recovered. Realistic recovery ratios are always WAY less than 100%... Figure just several months supply, realistically.
So, some 1%er will make hundreds of billions of profit.. nice for him... and 3 years later, we'll be wishing you had a solar panel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Please note the byline at the bottom of the article stating, "Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board. ". This is an editorial, not a factual article. It's also informative to temper Mr. Hamm's personal enthusiasm with a look at the US oil production record from the U.S Energy Information Administration (205.254.135.24/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=M). Although there is an upturn in US production since 2006, it is unlikely that we will drill our way out of the peak oil decline.
Everybody panic!
Oh, wait, nevermind, we keep finding more - and we keep developing new technology to get to the stuff.
Granted, processed oil isn't the friendliest thing to the world, there is a finite (though huge) supply, and cleaner fuels are a better alternative once they're economically viable without gigantic government subsidies. But for now we're just fine.
Love sees no species.
Gas prices have doubled since this insane crusade against energy started. It's killing our economy at a time when it doesn't really need any more help.
This might well give us the relief needed to weather the current political and ideological insanity that is making our energy policy self destructive.
We'll use other sources of power eventually. But right NOW... we need that oil.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Regulations are so tight that Mr. Hamm has only been able to make the top 50 wealthiest Americans. This administration is killing billionaires! When a hard working man can't go from say, number 33 to number 5 in total wealth, it is time for us to realize Obama is killing oil production! (and now for something completely different)
Hamm has the nerve to say Obama is killing US oil with regulations?? How the hell have we ramped up production in the last 5 years if the regulations are so bad? Why are companies developing the Bakken if regulations are so bad? More like they aren't making as much money as they want. Cause billions upon billions just is never enough... never enough. The greed is beyond repulsive; it's psychotic.
(Happily will admit that US production helps keeps gas prices from soaring. I am not complaining about oil production. I am pointing out the greed of these bastards is insatiable.)
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Call them "not economically viable"; or "in my opinion not good investments", if you like.
There are reasons for government to put some money to effective use in promoting alternative energy technology research besides expected financial ROI. In fact... the government is really the only organization that really can put money in something that doesn't make economic sense... the private sector will mostly only invest if there is a profit to be made in a relatively short amount of time; the exception would be non-profit organizations, and their resources are more limited.
Reasons like greater long-term viability of our civilization; liberating our people and our way of life from dependency on some scarce resources...
We might lose money on the investment for the next 20 years, but it could still be a good "investment", if there's an ultimate improvement in our way of life
Our government just needs to make sure it makes the spend intelligently, so as little of the money is spent on dead ends, fancy office furniture/meeting rooms/expensive/excessive office space, or bureaucrats' pocketbooks / other blatant waste as possible.
Horizontal drilling or so called fracking poisons the ground water thus making it undrinkable. It should never be allowed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEB_Wwe-uBM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U01EK76Sy4A&feature=related
It is disaster and big companies shoudn't get away with this but apparently they do.
"One reason for America's abundant supply of oil and natural gas has been the development of new drilling techniques, including 'horizontal drilling,' which allows rigs to reach two miles into the ground and then spread horizontally by thousands of feet."
Also known as the "milkshake" technique, as in "I drink your milk shake!"
Economically, petroleum is even more of a finite resource. Currently Saudi and other middle eastern oil keep prices down. Estimates say it costs about $2 a barrel to extract oil in Saudi Arabia. Venezuela oil might costs three times that much to extract. US oil might be as much as $20 a barrel. At these extraction costs a barrel of oil is $80, and it costs over three dollars at the pump in the US. Now, one can blame the greed of the oil companies, but that is not going to change. Explorations costs are not going to decrease either.
OTOH, conservative extraction costs for so-called shale oil, the better name is tar pits, is $75 dollars a barrel. If the oil companies sell at a comparative markup, this means that the selling price would be $300 a barrel. If we just add $60 profit, that would still be $135 a barrel. This puts gas firmly in the $5 a gallon range.
Recall that the oil companies were going bust when oil was below $50 a barrel. This was still a large markup over extraction costs, but oil companies appear to be extraordinarily inefficient and require a large markup. It would be fantasy that the oil companies are going to give away the product. If shale oil forms a large percentage of the petroleum mix prices will go up, consumption will eventually go down as it did a few years ago. Oil companies will either have a choice of selling at higher prices for lower volumes, or find another product.
Therefore shale oil is not an indication of a long term prosperous oil economy, but a clear signal that oil is becoming too costly to base an economy on.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Funny how a game can emulate reality, and then reality can re-emulate the game: http://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy
After the initial rush, the Bakken wells settle down to about 100 barrels a day. The US uses about 18 million barrels a day. Do the arithmetic, then decide if it's even possible to drill that many wells.
Finally proper goatse link, thanks!. Look at my comment to see how you can improve that further. (I got 13,000 victims already)
My understanding is that new oil fields continue to be discovered, but the pace and size of the discoveries is trending downward or at least stagnating. Meanwhile global oil demand is accelerating.
Since oil price is the congruence of supply and demand, and because oil demand is relatively inelastic (it's very hard for people to do without the stuff), whenever demand pushes up against supply we tend to see outsized (and unpredictable) price increases.
Furthermore, while there's plenty of oil to be found out there, the cost of recovering that oil is expected to increase (tar sands, deep water oil fields, etc.).
And so far we haven't even dealt with the impact on the environment.
In any case, the point is not simply that our economy is dependent on oil, it's that our economy is dependent on inexpensive oil. Once you increase costs by a factor of 2-3, everything we take for granted -- trillions and trillions dollars of built infrastucture -- becomes completely unviable. When this predictable crisis actually rolls around, the cost of replacing this infrastructure (or switching energy technologies) will be unbelievably high.
The cost of doing something about it now is trivial by comparison.
That is a fact. Get over it.
The world is reaching peak oil now.
That is also a fact.
From here on out our production of oil is going to slowly drop off in a curve very much like how the production ramped up. So in about 200 years we will be completely out.
In the meantime the cost of oil is going to soar as the demand increases and the supply decreases.
Even if there were unlimited supplies of oil we would have to be retarded to drill and pump and burn it all. Assuming an annual growth rate of less than 3%, every 100 years would see a 10 times increase in the amount of oil we need to just maintain the economy.
This is simple math.
So in 300 years we would need 1000 times as much oil as we have right now in order to maintain the minimum level of growth our economy requires. Where the hell would we get 1000 times more oil? We can't. There is only one earth.
So, we're going to use up the last drops of oil and wait for the planet to boil? This is just insanity. We need to focus every last dime on alternative, sustainable sources of energy.
Pretty clear from the charts that the CO2 levels are rising because of man made contributions. It is also completely clear that the models linking rising CO2 to rising temperature are not quantitatively accurate (temperature flat for 10 years while CO2 continues the predicted rise). http://www.climate.gov/#climateWatch . The question now is whether or not the the models are even qualitatively accurate. Being an engineer, I do not think the climate scientist have models to the 4th significant figure.
I'm going to endeavor to make a comment to this matter, without picking up any agenda about it.
Conservation of any natural or manufactured resource makes simple sense, as does a behavior of taking an approach in which we ensure the sustainability of our own economic mechanisms, also ensuring the sustainability of available natural and manufactured resources and our industrial and individual reliance on the same.
Granted, to say that without trying to appeal to any common agenda, it might seem as though it was to waste my breath. I don't suppose rationality needs an agenda, though, for its tenets to be proved, now and in the long run.
Unless there is a quantum leap in the efficiency with which electricity can be produced from non-fossil sources, we are eventually going to exhaust all the retrievable coal, oil and gas in the earth's crust. What is considered "retrievable" is a moving target determined by current extraction technology. Even if the U.S. were to institute subsidies that evened the playing field between fossil sources and green sources in the U.S., it is unlikely those subsidies would be duplicated across the entire globe. Ergo it would remain profitable to extract U.S. oil. It seems unlikely there will ever be the political will to forbid oil exploration and extraction altogether in the United States.
It's also worth noting that extracting and refining this particular cache of oil does not significantly alter the global price, and therefore does not significantly alter global consumption. It is not the case that more oil will be used because this particular batch was extracted. More U.S. oil will be used, on the other hand, which means more jobs, etc. for U.S. citizens.
Given the economy is in the dumps, the only reasons I can see not to extract it are:
* Strategic. When oil becomes scarce (and thereby prohibitively expensive) we want to have national reserves on tap for military consumption.
* Environmental, but in a local sense. You could argue that the environmental costs at the point of extraction are just too high.
"Global warming" doesn't seem like a compelling reason at the moment given the small percentage of global production these new fields represent. "Drill here, drill now, pay less" is a ginormous fallacy. To the extent "pay less" is fallacious, though, so is the notion that domestic drilling will lead to more consumption and consequently more atmospheric CO2.
Are you some kind of spam artist?
If we SAVE that oil for now, when the world's supply starts to run low, we'll have 3.5 years of reserves (more with rationing).
If we use it now, we'll have 3.5 years of reduced imports ... and fewer reserves when the other sources start to run low.
Which plan is in the nation's best interest?
Anyone want to explain why a quick wikipedia search indicates 24billion additional reserves puts us no where near 3rd. Looks like it bumps us from 13th to 10th. I like the reserve to production ratio at the end. Canadas got the right idea.
No, we are not "going strong." Domestic oil production has been falling on average since 1970. The last couple years have seen an increase, but that's likely only due to a greater-than-expected dip from 2005-2008. Hurricane Katrina made a big dent, for one thing. If you look at this graph you'll see that even with the latest discoveries, we're only back up to where we were in 2003.
With the continued depletion of existing fields, there is no way that curve can ever reach where it was in 1970, unless there are huge vast fields yet to be discovered (which all evidence says aren't there).
There's a big difference between destroying it and transforming it into something sustainable. I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing out the environmental and political costs of our current approach are too high to bear much longer.
Yes and Solyndra is a perfect example of this great job producing industry right? No you are talking about creating non sustainable employment with cash taken from the taxpayer. Green energy companies are not profitable and will not be profitable anytime in the future.
I would love to see it myself also but unfortunately I can do simple math.
Got Code?
1) Show me this. Should be easy, right?
2) Eventually, we will run out. You understand the Earth's volume is finite, yes? And that oil only forms in a tiny region of that volume, yes?
3) Because geological time scales dwarf our puny lifespans, therefore you don't understand the numbers.
That explains the Tractor I saw with DUBS and Mink Trim. Hey Bugatti: can I get that with a tow hitch ?
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
These video kinda explain why some of the past running-out-of-oil predictions has not always been correct.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D
And we'll be running out of oil, rather abruptly than most people realize.
After reading TFA, I say this: "Not surprisingly, Hamm considers some of the current administration's loans and subsidies for alternative energy ventures to be misplaced." is a pretty disingenuous statement. He seemed not to be against the new energy subsidies so much as pissed they were harrassing his company over a minor bird kill... and if the situation is as de describes I agree with him. Anyways, we should be able to do both... help kick start new energy sources and allow the market to continue to develop traditional ones.
... of techniques. Nor is it new, for any meaningful meaning of "new". In fact, it was old hat a decade ago. As was "extended reach" drilling, which is likely to be next week's buzzword.
I've been doing horizontal drilling, in the oilfield sense, using Norwegian techniques from Finnish and South Korean rigs, with multiple nationalities, for longer than I've been posting on Slashdot. All of which time spans are bloody long times (in a non-geological sense of "bloody long").
("Extended reach" drilling ... about the same duration that I've been on Slashdot. Give or take a half-decade.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Seriously, America needs to quit doing loans to mainly solar. Instead, it should be focused electricity storage, as well as getting LOCAL electric car companies going.
Horizontal drilling makes me think of only one thing.
The world as we know it must be close to an end in the short term, and those in power should know about it. How else you explain promoting everything that gives no future for anyone (ok, maybe except for the few very rich ones) in the middle term? After them, the deluge.
In the late 19th century we believed we'd soon reach the upper limit of how large our cities could be built, since we would soon not be able to remove all the manure from the streets.
Then we replaced horses with cars.
(Point left as an exercise to the reader. If you really want to cheat, click the link)
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
it's in my head
Flamebait, eh? Looks like I've exposed a convenient fiction of the political-enviro-industrial complex and they're out to get me now. :(
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Talk about an inconvenient truth! Horizontal drilling and fracturing have increased oil and gas potential by a factor of 100. Meanwhile, electric technology is languishing. The petroleum economy is here to say. I'm gonna get a big new SUV to celebrate!
an ill wind that blows no good
No really the guy has a good point. We've been hearing "Oil is running out! It'll be gone soon! We are so fucked!" for a long, LONG time. We have already passed many "It'll be gone," benchmarks from the past.
Thus maybe you can understand why people are more than a little skeptical when someone trots out a new "We are fucked," benchmark. Doomsday has been upon us so many times before it gets a little old.
I don't think anyone is saying that resources aren't finite... But doomsayers seem to underestimate what the actually limits are quite a bit. In most cases the problem is assuming that technology won't ever get any better. The oil we could get at with 1950s technology is rather less than the oil we can get at with 2011 technologies.
None of this is to say we should just blithely proceed to use oil as though it will never run out, but please let's stop with the stupid doomsdaying. It isn't just useless, it is actually actively harmful. When you cry "We are doomed!" enough people just stop listening. They've heard it all before and it is always wrong. So if you happen to be right this time, well they'll still ignore you and rightly so as it has been shouted so many times.
But essentially (weasel word) correct.
However I think that most (citation needed) climate change models that favor a warming earth show that the C)2 warms the atmosphere just enough to causes a viscous cycle of water evaporation coupled with subsequent warming.
An analogy - the CO2 is simply the match that starts the forest burning.
All that said, I don't believe the above comment is a troll. But what the hell do I know? I am an embedded developer not a atmospheric scientist.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The idea that only an oil-intensive economy is capable of adaptation is laughable.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I disagree. They are just buzzwords and they have led to massive malinvestment and fraud by the Bolshevik Obama administration.
an ill wind that blows no good
Nothing changes until the vast majority of it (oil) is gone.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This is fantastic news. The sooner oil runs out, the sooner the importance of OPEC a.k.a. OIC diminishes, and once that happens, Islamic hellholes like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Indonesia, Brunei et al cease to have any strategic importance for economic reasons. Also, the Islamic governments will run out of money with which to spread Islamic propaganda in Western countries. The only reason these worthless countries are given the importance that they are is due to a geological accident of the bulk of the world's oil being buried under their jurisdictions. Had it been all buried under China, India, Australia and Canada, those Mohammedan savages would not even have the facade of modern looking cities like Dubai masking their barbarian hinterlands. Nor would pricks like Alwaleed bin Talal be owning major stakes in News Corp, and Western media can focus on real problems in other countries, like in Nigeria.
So please, let oil run out quickly. Flood the China market with cars - as it is, they've been buying major oil rights in countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Increase the demand to the point that production will be unable to keep up with it. Already, in Saudi Arabia, they have to drill deeper for the oil, as a result of decades of drilling. Let all OPEC countries, and even others, run out of it, and then neither will the 'Drill Baby crowd' oppose solar & wind, and nor will the 'Environmental wackos' oppose nuclear, hydro and other power sources.
So here's to the speedy extinction of petroleum.
A post from the Soviet Union prior to 1990 has somehow tunneled through time to appear on Slashdot in 2011. Impressive...
That, or the poster is a complete idiot.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The lesson that I extract from that is that horses were indeed an unsustainable technology and had to be replaced with something better and less polluting.
The same way, applied to the current situation, the point is that oil is unsustainable and needs to be replaced with something better and less polluting.
If back then things were like today, then we'd have lots of people insisting that manure isn't really a problem, after all it's an entirely natural thing, and that cars will spell doom for the economy.
The lesson is that sometimes* there's a currently unknown technical development that will alleviate the linearly projected future problem. The conference in the listed article had to be aborted since they could not even foresee how the problem would be solved. No subsidies or regulations were ever needed.
*) So far "sometimes" is "always". If you want to claim that this time is different, there would need to be a substantial burden of proof on your part.
it's in my head
The good thing is that we have alternatives right now. No need to wait for wait for something to magically happen.
Again, we're in a better situation: we have options, so we don't need to sit and wait until a solution happens to be found.
If you were back then, in a city full of flies, bacteria filled water and stinking of cow manure, would you want to try to push the change a bit faster, or would you be happy to wait a few more years until the transition happened naturally?
Also note that the oil industry gets plenty subsidies. This guy's point is that you shouldn't subsidize cars, you should subsidize this horse farm instead.
I see no problem using the currently cheapest form of energy until it's surpassed by alternatives, which will happen soon enough.
it's in my head
The US doesn't need to lead in these fields. We can route around local obstructions by investing in and buying from foreign companies who produce what we want.
Stop expecting America to be a force for good. That ended a long time ago. The WORLD is a bigger place than this Bible-Thumping Luddite hypocritical shithole.
Why shouldn't the EU and Asia take the lead in tech? The US didn't produce the solar panel I just purchased, CHINA did. I couldn't afford it were it made here.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I see many problems.
The important thing is not just oil, but cheap oil. This specific article is about exploiting the less available fields, which is expensive, complicated, and more polluting than the easy to access wells.
And of course, as can be seen with BP the industry will do anything they can to weasel out of paying for the damage.
If it's expensive other technologies will be used instead. It seems it is currently the cheapest option.
(PS: I live in a country where we produce a lot of our energy using hydro. A technology responsible for the loss of many human lives, sadly, but that's still not a reason for us to stop using it)
it's in my head
The switch will happen either way of course. But there are different types of changes. When it's clear that change is imminent anyway I'd rather have it happen smoothly.
Money isn't the only thing of value in life. I'd gladly have funded the transition to cars back then, to ensure that I have to spend less years drowning in manure. Life is short and I'd prefer to spend it as pleasantly as possible.
Money is simply a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Or follow this link to the most relevant chunk of the video beginning at Part 5, which deals directly with peak oil.
Your brain is not a computer.
I got news for you. Everything is finite if you can count high enough.
OK, guys here's the deal.
First review the numbers around oil (i.e. how much we've got and what that means energetically). For that, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
Then look here to see how much we have access to in the USA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States.
I'd refer everyone to a web site for consumption rates, but the ballpark answer is that the world uses 28-30 billion barrels of oil per year, and the USA uses between 7-8 billion barrels per year. We have about 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable conventional oil left. Perhaps about 50% of that is economically recoverable today. Perhaps a bit more as prices rise, if prices don't rise enough to break the world's supply chains or cause nationalistic hoarding - two very distinct possibilities.
The most optimistic assumptions regarding conventional oil that's both energetically and economically profitable is about 40 years max. Realistically, expect about half that. After that, we're um, scraping the bottom of the barrel. Oil doesn't disappear (It never will). We just won't be using it as much. Too expensive energetically and economically.
Bottom line? All the "Drill ANWR and we're saved " idiots would have us destroy the Alaska ecosystem for about 2 years extension of our oil supply. Every moronic Reuters news story that so breathlessly reports that over 1 billion barrels of oil have been found ignores the fact that 1 billion barrels is less than 2 months supply just for the USA, much less the planet.
There are plenty of alternatives and solutions, just none that involve having 7 billion people or more living on Earth in the year 2100 using as much energy as an American uses today.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The more money and energy we make now from the resources we have, the more money and energy we'll have to spend to get resources later, and invent new ones. Human living standards do not decrease, ever, and we've burned through more different kinds of resources than you apparently think, with newer better stuff coming to replace them each time without a hitch.
I'm not opposed to environmentalism, but sustainability? No thanks, sustainability means stagnation. We should always be striving for more and more growth, more and more resources consumed, because we inevitably innovate our way out of each shortage we create. With that innovation, we get a higher standard of living, better stuff, and greater understanding. We can and should become more efficient, but never to conserve what we have left, only to maximize what we get as we burn through it as fast as possible.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Well make up your mind. Does global warming cause rain or does it cause drought, because it can't cause both because both happen all the time, global warming or none.
Actually yes it can. Adding heat (energy) to a system can sometimes drive it into oscillations, like the pendulum under an old clock. More energy, more oscillation. The system isn't necessarily linear like you are supposing.
So it's entirely possible that adding heat energy to the weather system could make it do all sorts of crazy things, like snow in July. The weather system is chaotic and terribly complex and complicated and driven by energy inputs - and that's what has people worried. It's hard to tell what the results of futzing with it will be.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Nobody with any sense suggests it may be infinite (the Earth is finite), but some consider that it may be a lot more than supposed, and a lot of it may be coming from other processes than supposed.
I don't think it enhances your position to label those who look at data you reject out of hand, and/or who interpret data differently, as "wackos." I submit that it is indicative of religious nuttery to so label those with whom one disagrees. It is in any case the mark of a weak debating position and an enemy of the scientific method. It is not known to a certainty that abiogenic oil is either completely fallacious, or does not contribute any component at all to the supply.
Some others of your suppositions are clearly suspect. For example why do you suppose all of the markup in oil from well to pump is multiplicative and none of it additive? In general, there are always both multiplicative and additive components to any markup. And even $5/gallon gasoline beats any known alternative to gasoline. In fact, worldwide data shows that consumers will pay closer to $10/gallon if need be. That doesn't necessarily mean shale oil is The One And True Answer, but it means that it needs to be seriously investigated as a national imperative, not to say a world imperative.
The proved petroleum reserves of the U.S. are about 21 billion barrels (and 263 billion for Saudi Arabia). It is estimated that 1.5-2.6 TRILLION barrels of shale oil reserves can be added for the U.S. alone. We don't know yet what it would cost to produce from those reserves because no one has seriously tried on any significant scale. It is apparent that it would be worth a large investment to find out. At some price level, those reserves become economically justified to exploit. That is simple economics. The need is to obtain an informed estimate of what that point might be, without preconceptions.
It is not an all or nothing proposition. Serious sums need to be spent on proving reserves and methods for exploiting shale oil and other sources of oil, in addition to continuing the effort to make alternatives economically viable. For example, if covering the U.S. desert areas with huge thermal chimney driven windmills would make a significant and economically effective dent in imported energy sources and/or dwindling energy sources, we should have that debate, not necessarily without passion, but at least without summarily ruling out options. And the same for shale oil.
This is quite possibly the most idiotic thing I have ever seen on slashdot.
Literally every sentence in your post is complete, utter bullshit.
We are all dumber for having read it. I award you no points. And may god have mercy on your soul.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Why does that matter? You're both just as anonymous to me.
I agree that we need to use oil in the near- term, and quit throwing money at ridiculously expensive alternatives that don't have reliability. Nuclear is reliable, and newer plants will have safety measures that surpass the decades old standards of plants that have had issues. Modern combustion vehicles can be powered by on- demand generated HYDROGEN. No batteries. No BS with low power, high cost. You aren't storing miniature Hindenburg levels, you don't even have to store at all. Emissions... aren't.
While I strongly support ditching alternative garbage near-term, which supports the oil industry, I am quite certain that the oil industry is the leading reason why the hydrogen powered combustion never got off the ground much.
Please note that BMW has done this. I know of a real world converted vehicle that gets better power than gas.
I also know that, just like the 110+ octane fuel made from roadside "nuisance" grass in Indiana will never be mass produced.
We need to think like a country gone corporate. We need to promise big oil our love, and then ditch them with the reminder that they tried to usurp our authority as their boss (the consumer).
All my moderately informed opinion. Converting to hydrogen now would force a LOT of lost jobs, as an aside. We need to be back on top before doing this.
"Lovely piece of nature" is a complete lie. The place is a cold, barren, dark, mosquito-infested wasteland. It's one of the least hospitable areas on earth.
Why are you spreading falsehoods about it?
Also, the part they want to drill for oil in is ecologically insignificant.
The arguments against drilling there are all essentially "I hate oil" and "I don't care about the people who would benefit from drilling there. Screw them."
Maybe you haven't noticed yet but the EU economy is on the verge of collapse.
The EU model is clearly the way *not* to go.
For starters, the US would be the world's number three oil producer with or without the Bakken Shale. In fact it has been second or third (depending on what is going on in Russia and Saudi Arabia) since 1970. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Russia and note that the accompanying chart shows conventional oil production only. The US also produces about 3 million barrels a day of "Natural Gas Liquids" -- Basically liquid hydrocarbons that are coming out of gas wells along with natural gas.
And production from the Bakken Shale is about 400,000 bpd -- about 5% of total US production and about 2.5% of US oil consumption. Yes, the Bakken (and other formations) will help. No, these discoveries are extremely unlikely to solve the US energy problems. Anyone who is seriously interested in world and US energy issues should spend some time at www.theoildrum.org
I assume that "Hugh Pickens" is getting his information from the editorial page of the WSJ. IMHO. The Wall Street Journal editorial page should be read only by those whose goal is to be systematically and seriously misinformed on a wide variety of subjects. The paper version of the editorial page is excellent for lining bird cages.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
NO!
Bartlett talks about exponential growth like that is exactly what happens, no exceptions, no escape.
That is *NOT* the way the world works. In the real world everything happens on the MARGINS. On the EDGES.
As prices get high enough/supplies get tight enough/space gets to enough of a premium/etc. alternatives become viable, and something else takes it's place. There is not (and never has been, nor never will be) a constant unlimited growth of anything. Moore's Law being no exception
There's a selection bias here: if it were different - if we'd failed to get said technical developments in time - we would not be here now. Most cultures didn't, and disappeared. As for a particular example, look at the history of the norse settlers in Greenland; that's a culture that failed to adapt their technology to changing conditions and died out to the last man. For an example of man-made ecological disaster wiping out a civilization, look at Eastern Island.
Basically, every one of your ancestors managed to breed before dying, but that doesn't mean that all of us necessarily will. As for evidence that this time will be different, just look at the economic chaos that strikes every time oil prices hike. Now imagine that the price tends towards infinity; what do you think will happen?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
just look at the economic chaos that strikes every time oil prices hike
Yes, you'd see something as horrible as ... the 70s.
We'll adapt. There's no shortage of solutions, they're just not currently economically vaiable. When they're needed they'll step in.
(And even if no shocks happen, they'll replace the old technologies anyway due to normal technical devolopment)
(PS: Don't bring up the Norse settlements. A lot of people here still believe there was no MWP)
it's in my head
OT: I love your sig, I'd give a leg to see it happen for the sheer entertainment value.
weinersmith
Well, I guess second hand. Anyway, my brother worked up on ANWR for an oil company. Every single thing was movable, including the building. It was insane what expenses they went through to protect the wildlife. He had a friend who was getting into his truck in the morning and a rabid fox was in the floor boards. When it tried to bite him he reflexively hit it with a flashlight - killing it. Rabies is really common up there apparently. The guy was fined $1500 and immediately fired. I thought that was really sad that killing a rabid fox in self-defense can cost an otherwise honest worker his job. Also, ANWR is a complete wasteland for 11 months out of the year. For 9 months it's a block of barren ice, and for the other two it's a giant mosquito infested mud pit. People have no problem with pumping oil out on their lawn in Oklahoma - yet a barren waste in the arctic nets such trepidation? I myself wonder why? The 1% can afford to protect some mystical northern fairy land, everyone else needs the oil and the jobs. Thankyouvermuch.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
IMO, the problem is -- it kind of freaks me out too, when I hear people go on and on about how "unsustainable" things are. The next jump in logic from there tends to be ideas about population reduction, including possibly putting something into the drinking water to poison a percentage of people, or maybe spraying chemicals in the air, or ?? (Don't laugh, the current science adviser on Obama's staff wrote a book suggesting some of this back in the 70's.)
Yes, oil is probably a finite resource. There are a few people going on about theories of it slowly seeping up from the center of the earth and re-filling formerly empty oil fields -- but I'm willing to toss that out as incorrect/unsubstantiated.... The thing is though, I'm not sure we're usually just best off, overall, letting nature take its course. If we DO manage to use up most of the oil, we'll simply see its prices increase until financial issues force a change. It becomes cheaper to use alternatives, so the problem self-corrects. If we try to "head the problem off at the pass" without even knowing how much oil is left in the ground, we spend more money than necessarily try to force through solutions that aren't really financially sensible yet -- and that encourages fraud. (Look how many companies take federal grant money for alternative energy plans and then go under.)
Central Planning is NP-hard
NASA should reconcider plans to visit the moon, mars and asteroids and instead develope a deragable tanker to Titan to suck up the hydrocarbons and send them back to Earth to refine to kerocene, gasoline, etholine et. et.
Solar energy has always been a Ponzi scheme.
Now looks were Solynadra got Obama ... giving out $535 million dollars, using DoE to launder the credits and transfers of cash to banks in the Bahamas and Kenya, then having to hire killers to target the Solynadra CEO, CFO et. et. ... oh ... they are already skipping out to ... parts unknown ... since they got 40% of the cash.
Looks like the DoE Sec ... aka. ... Chink Shit Boy Chu ... will be Obama's fall-guy for this one.
What's a President of the USA to do I ask. He trusts his DoE chief to do the dirty ... but the Chink gets caught ... and with a prostitute .. can't China produce an offspring with more common sense than Chink Shit Boy Chu I ask.
Dear dear dear.
What would Al Capone do ... I imagine Obama is asking himself just now.
Answer. Baseball. Al Capine loved the game of .... Baseball.
"Baseball. Such an Iconic game I tell you. Baseball. A man. Alone. Stands at the base with the bat. What is this? A time for individual effort. But when the team goes to the field and the man stands at his position what is this? TEAM EFFORT. Individual achievment is NOTHING without TEAM EFFORT."
At which point Obama with his baseball bat kills Chink Shit Boy Chu just for the sport of it.
What a way to end a White House Dinner I tell you.
--
You are making the assumption that stopping to burn fossil fuel will prevent climate change. It will not do so. The polar ice caps will melt no matter what we do. Coast lines will move around, that parts of the globe will become uninhabitable, and that other parts will become habitable. Change is part of living on this planet. If we set up societies that can't deal with that, we are doomed. Given that most of the houses and infrastructure we build doesn't last more than a few decades anyway, there isn't even a big problem with that in principle.
Wrong. Climatically speaking, we are still in the middle of an ice age. An "ice age" is any time when there are big polar ice sheets, and there are. We are merely at the end of a deep glaciation cycle within that ice age.
The normal state of earth is to have no polar ice caps and for the sea levels to be about 180 ft higher than they are right now. The temperature at the poles was about 12C (21F) higher 50 million years ago. Mankind already witnessed a 120m (360ft) rise in sea levels. That's why many archaeological finds are on the bottom of the ocean and why we have all the flood myths.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
We are "at the warmest" only within the rapid glacial cycles, but those cycles invariably will end. And they better end, because if we get another deep glaciation like we experienced before, we are in much worse trouble than any global warming.
You are "psychopathic", because your entire life and standard of living is based on burning huge amounts of fossil fuels and you don't even see it. You think there are some magic bullets that make CO2 emissions go away with minimal change, and that if we stop CO2 emissions, the climate will stabilize. Both notions are as ridiculous as believing that the earth is flat.
It is very much worth investing in. But it won't reduce our carbon emissions for many decades, and it certainly won't reduce China's and India's. And even if we could totally eliminated human carbon emissions, it still wouldn't prevent climate change.
...which I read over my Christmas holiday, having jetted 12,000 miles, is "Oil 101" by Morgan Downey. Very very good information, written by an oil trader. Explains how they find it, how they get it, and what they do to it to make the stuff we use. One good point in this book is that now that a lot of the "low hanging fruit" has been tapped dry, the remaining wells produce a more sulfurous product which yields poorer quality feedstocks and requires more hydrogen (you know, the stuff we're gonna run our cars on in the Magical Future) to refine. Somebody please stand up and say we have to consume less of this stuff. Not "none", just "a lot less".
You have to nuke a country first, then demand an unconditional surrender. Take Japan for example.
Well you're just the mac-daddy king of smug, aren' t you? I bet you're a very important person.
That's what got the Kuwaitis into trouble with Iraq and look where the US ended up as a consequence. Stuck in a quagmire.
Well, she's said she's not going to stand (if I heard a snippet on the news correctly - I don't waste more attention on foreign politics than it deserves), which is a pretty good sign that she's going to. Though it may be another election before she does.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Not by fallible man-made laws of economics but by inviolate laws of physics
Executive summary (h/t Charles Dickens)
If it takes the energy equivalent of 0.99 barrels of oil to extract and process a barrel of oil, then all is well
If it takes the energy equivalent of 1.01 barrels of oil to extract and process a barrel of oil, then all is perfidy
(captcha is 'refuel' - spooky!)
Bragging about being third when the USA used to be first only 40 years ago.
We produced about twice as much oil in the early '70's as we do now, putting our historical production on par with Saudi Arabia.
Oops, already underway.
Carry on.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
it's not "horizontal drilling", it's "fracking" and it's bad for things like the water supply.
When I was growing up, I could go into the hardware store and pickup a small basket to hold purchases, and load needed items that I needed into it. When it came to screws and bolts, I could take a 1 pound paper bag, put the screws into it, with the quantity, and mark the price per dozen. I could even write the bar code information.
Today everything is blister packaged and to make matters worse, we are financing the big behemoth stores and their waste of blister packaging.
Instead of screws being twenty cents a dozen, you are asked to pay $4.00 for 6 screws inside a blister package.
Profit to the store is 50%. Worse, the packaging costs more than the screws. Why do we need to overpay for blister packaging and a waste of oil derivatives? There is something really really wrong.
In my view, when the big box store opens, it has a lot of square feet to have variety, and as soon as competition is killed, the prices of items triple or as I see it, increase by factors of up to 10. Six "two cent items" in blister packages should not cost $4.00. Visit your local hardware store and prove me wrong. We abuse the customers, we finance the next big box store due to overpricing items, and we wonder why we can't make ends meet.
Now they are putting 6 tomatoes into blister packages. Another waste of oil as the tomatoes have to be blister packaged and to cost double the price. Blister packaging is the bane of consumers.
Fortunately we can still buy eggs by the flats (2.5 doz) per flat, or eggs in cardboard containers. I believe that blister packaging of semi-perishable food does not improve hygene, but does add significantly to costs.
Is this related to blister packaging? I am opposed to wasting oil reserves. If we get 1-2% bank interest, corporate gross profits should not be more than 5 times that amount. or 5-10%
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Throughout history, there have been voices saying that such and such resource is limited, and won't last, has to be conserved, etc. Yet technology progresses and old "shortages" get taken care of. So many voices on this site are saying that oil is so limited, it would be nearly useless to seek more. Has anybody considered that these fuels are not simply compressed dinosaurs? (miles below the surface-yea right) Perhaps the earth makes oil regularly-like plants and animals do! Old wells get re-filled after time-surprise, surprise. We don't understand these things nearly as well as we think. Don't be like the lemmings of the past who always predicted doom and gloom. God gave man authority over the earth (take dominion over the earth) in the beginning of the Bible. That is why the energy future will not run dry. We will only have problematic shortages if enough modern doom-sayers shut down production. Remember-it will be the poorest people that you will punish the most-its your choice. The future is bright-for the right people!
Just an addition to your already informative post... Hydraulic fracturing has been done successfully over 1 million times since 1948 in the United States alone. These wells, however, were mostly vertical. The newness is in relation to combining hydraulic fracturing with horizontal drilling. This relatively new combination (horizontal drilling + fracture stimulation) has been hugely successful in the Barnett, Marcellus and Haynesville Shale plays here in the United States to release natural gas from "tight rock" (low permeable shale). This isn't to say that horizontal drilling and fracture are not used in wet (oily) plays as well. Recently, 21 discovery wells drilled in the Utica (Ohio) proved that its formations hold rich deposits of oil, wet gas, and dry gas from west to east respectively. 12 of these wells were drilled horizontally, 9 vertically (all were hydraulically fractured). When wells are properly cased before hydraulic fracture stimulation is performed, it is 100% safe, and there is zero chance of a water table being contaminated. There are scare tactics put forth by those whose agenda is to go cold turkey on fossil fuels; they usually lack an understanding of the drilling/fracturing process, and are unaware that alternatives (wind, solar, etc.) are economically infeasible at this time. I have seen multiple responses to this article that are marked "interesting", "informative", and "insightful", that have no scientific basis what-so-ever. Maybe I'm begging for a 'you must be new here', but really, slashdot, we can do better.
What is slashdot?
Quite. In fact, growing up in an oil state, I can remember when "horizontal drilling" used to be a euphamisim for stealing. Drilling sideways a bit under the ground is a real good way to swipe someone else's oil from your own (relatively oil-poor) franchise site.
If I recall the corporate bullshit correctly, they were involved in one of the first "claim-stealing" lawsuits somewhere in Texas, when Sun Oil proved that someone else was "stealing" oil from under their claim. Which opened up a whole big new can of worms for technical measurement of wells.
Of course, that was back in the 1930s. Back when men were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
And hand me your CV - I need to get this dog shit off my shoe.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"