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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.
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.
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.
Because the only people who make any money are the CEOs with the twelve mansions you mention? What about the tens of thousands of jobs that we could use in our economy, right now - or the fact that energy prices are climbing precisely when Americans are suffering through the toughest economic times since the 1920s?
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.
I love how "climatologists" are economically driven by grant money (as if a competent scientist couldn't make a better living easier working for private industry than working for government grants!) but oil producers are altruists who clearly have only humanity's best interests at heart.
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.
Kind of sounds like a drug addict. "I'm going to quit eventually, but right now I need that hit."
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.
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
As opposed to renewable energy sources who's sites are crewed by unicorns?
CO2 concentrations have already significantly increased due to human influence (burning of fossil fuels). So there should be more than enough for the growth of plants.
The contribution to the Greenhouse effect is estimated at 9-26% of all greenhouse gases according to Wikipedia. Not dominating, but not negligible either.
So GP was either uninformed or trolling. Probably the latter.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Funny how a game can emulate reality, and then reality can re-emulate the game: http://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy
Gas was as expensive as it is now when Bush was in office. In any case, your argument is post hoc ergo proper hoc.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
That reminds me about the man who fell off a tall building, and every time he passed another floor he said to himself, "so far, so good!"
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Your first link: 165 million barrels.
US consumption: about 20 million per day.
Yep, an 8 days supply proves that there's nothing to worry about.
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.
Plenty of money to be made in renewable energy and lessening our environmental impact/stretching resources further. Finding a few years more harvestable oil is a good thing for our immediate future but isn't going to solve the problem long term.
More to the point it seems you're talking more about hippies than environmentalists. It's pretty safe to ignore the ones who've joined hands and begun swaying.
Alternative energy sources need to be researched and then they will create many, many more jobs without killing the climate.
Renewables are much more likely to produce jobs, and improve our economic outlook. Continuing to service the needs of the oil companies has not improved our economic outlook for a decade now. Why do you think it might suddenly start?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
If you really believed that, why did you post as Anonymous Coward?
there should be more than enough for the growth of plants.
In unrelated news, we're also cutting down tons of forests and rainforests. And there is a limit of CO2 up to which plants will grow, more than that and its just extra.
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.
Uh no.
Carbon Monoxide is unstable and will eventually decay. Its only toxic if you're in a very confined space (which is why you shouldn't run a car in a closed garage).
Plants do use CO2, but we're also cutting rainforests down (good job) and anyway there is only a limit to how much CO2 plants can take. There was a balance before we started with heavy industry.
Other problems with fossil fuels are oxides of sulfur (which contribute to acidic rain and are toxic), Oxides of Nitrogen (pretty much the same), and lead (which is a metal poison which will kill you slowly over time).
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.
But the taxpayer's investment is never paid back. Subsidies are not a solution, it's a broken window fallacy that replacing powerplants with solar panels makes things better.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
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?
There may be plenty of money to be made for specific people, like say solar panel or wind turbine manufacturers. The problem is switching to the more expensive renewable resources is a net loss to the economy, and we can't afford it right now as grandparent said.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
This guy can't drill oil at low prices ... it's the increased price which is making shale oil profitable, and then only just (which is why he's crying for subsidies, to make even less easily recovered oil profitable). There are security reasons to have your own oil supply, but cheap it's never going to become again.
Wind/Solar and "synthetic natural gas" [sic] have much a better chance of getting large cost reductions going forward.
If we're using less oil, the energy costs should diminish by an amount, meaning that in the end we're doing better from a purely economic perspective.
Its not really broken window, because the upkeep you need on solar panels (aside from replacing every 25 years or so - by which time technology moved up), is incomparable to the upkeep you need on oil.
Not really. Obama is shutting down oil extraction out of the gulf and is complicating extraction throughout the country.
Furthermore, new EPA regulations are forcing a sizable percentage of US power generation to be shut down or upgraded for environmental reasons. And do I even need to cite this:
http://youtu.be/HlTxGHn4sH4?t=30s
Pay attention.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Assuming you're indeed an American, quit whining about gas prices and it "killing the economy". Apparently one dollar per liter is currently considered "zomg expensive" (ref: http://gasbuddy.com/gb_gastemperaturemap.aspx). In Europe, ten years ago, one liter costed anything between 99 and 109 EUROcents (that's $1.32-$1.45). You don't even want to know what they're paying there now.
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?
Aha. I wonder how this can be moderated "Informative". First, it only contains a statement an opinion and no fact. Second, this opinion has been proven wrong over and over again. The only country which still believes that global warming does not exist or is not man made is the US. At least the US-media produces that vision.
Europeans think the CO2-production nowadays is a problem. China and India think it is a problem. The third world countries and pacific states think it is so. But obviously they all are hand in gloves with each other. Especially India and China.
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.
Ah, but is the reduction of pollution really worth the extra cost from an economic point of view, especially when the economy is down in the dumps?
Reducing pollution is a luxury we can ill afford at the moment.
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
If I remember correctly, obviously depending on where you live - small panels pay for themselves in 5-10 years.
Panels are currently guaranteed for around 25 years.
So basically you're paying 5-10 years of your electricity bill now (sure, its a high cost, that has to be admitted), but then you're getting at least 15 years of a free ride.
I don't know too many places where investments are secure and give you 150%.
And this is just for you putting them on your roof. If you're investing in a large power station with focusing lenses and less Silicon, then the costs are likely to be much less.
Well, it depends what you mean by "cheap". Cheap compared to, say, the mid/late-90s? No. We'll probably never see 99c/gallon gas again in our lifetimes (at least, not under any scenario not involving massive government subsidies to maintain artificially-low prices and rationing of that artificially-cheap (and almost certainly scarce) gas).
Cheap compared to $4/gallon? Probably. The magic price point for shale to become profitable is retail gas prices of approximately $3/gallon. Until the oil industry is convinced that the retail price of gas (taking inflation and taxes into account) will never sustainably fall below that price, it's not going to bet the farm on shale without government subsidies, because something like $2.50/gallon (retail price) is pretty much the absolute floor value at which it can even keep shale operations running without it being worthwhile to just walk away from them. On the other hand, if the US went enthusiastically into shale mining, we can feel pretty confident that no matter what happens to Saudi Arabia or demand from China and India, gas in the US won't ever creep much above $3-4/gallon ever again once production ramps up to maximum levels. The devil's in the $3 detail -- if Saudi-level oil reserves were conclusively identified in Alaska and Congress gave the go-ahead, or China and/or India suddenly found similar Saudi-like domestic oil reserves, shale would become cost-ineffective almost overnight, so it's going to be a LONG time before the oil industry as a whole will be willing to "bet the farm" on shale.
Put another way, environmentalists celebrating dwindling oil reserves in Saudi Arabia with the hope that it's going to force naughty Americans to conserve gas are likely to be in for a bit of a long-term disappointment. The US has a shitload of petroleum... it's just locked up in places we aren't currently allowed to drill and in forms that aren't very nice (economically or environmentally). The fact is, the US economy depends upon cheap petroleum, as does every modern economy on earth. Europeans (or at least Germans) might willingly march back to stone age lifestyles in the holy name of Mother Earth, but Americans (and Russians, and Indians, and China) won't stand for it. The medium-term alternative to oil isn't solar and wind power... it's nuclear fission and coal. Fight shale and nuclear, and the real-world outcome won't be sunny skies and clean solar energy... it's going to be skies that look like those over industrial cities in China, and overburdened reactors built in an era where redundant levels of safety weren't deemed to be important.
The smart "green" strategy would be to push for the replacement of old nuclear reactors with modern ones, and the construction of new ones, to keep energy prices low enough that it's cheaper for consumers to buy electric cars and charge them with nuclear-generated electricity than to buy gas manufactured from oil shale, ethanol, or processed coal. Solar and wind power are economic dead ends, because both have serious scalability and 24/7-availability problems. The fact is, it's just plain cheaper to generate a gigawatt of power in one place and transmit it a hundred miles over power lines than it is to generate a megawatt in a thousand different places, each of which has to be individually maintained and kept in good repair. It was true back when Tesla & Westinghouse argued with Edison, and it's still true today. If you need a point source of electricity far from existing infrastructure, solar and wind might be cheaper. If you need 24/7/365 dependable electricity in the middle of even a small town with existing power transmission infrastructure, it's almost inconceivable that any market-priced solar/wind solution could ever viably compete with any centralized power generation scenario.
... 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"
1 informative, one overrated, and one troll. Two out of three mods got it right. The one who modded "informative" probably works in the oil industry, or holds a lot of BP and Chevron stock, or has simply been brainwashed by the industry propaganda.
Free Martian Whores!
Yes, it's worth the cost. If you ever lived near a factory before the Clean Air Act you would vehemently agree. That pollution has costs in the most expensive of commodities -- health care. Monsanto didn't go out of business in 1970, and the cost of their goods didn't increase any faster than anything else (cost of oil caused the '70s recession after the Arab Oil Embargo; that and paying for the Vietnam War).
The fact that the price of gasoline more than quadrupled from 2000 to the crash in '08 surely was a big part of the cause of the ruined world economy.
BP should change their name to "Magrathea Energies".
Free Martian Whores!
"Not really. Obama is shutting down oil extraction out of the gulf and is complicating extraction throughout the country."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904491704576571052525514860.html
If you're willing to fabricate this fact, why should we believe anything you say here?
Ask your grandpa what a factory was like before the EPA. Environmentalism a luxury in poor countries? Yeah, and so is food.
You have no right to dirty up MY air and water. Clean air is my right.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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."
Because his "no warming since 1998" claim relies on some serious cherry-picking of temperature data, and he's afraid of people linking this dishonesty back to him.
(IANAL)
Watch Potholer54's YouTube series on Climate Science.
http://www.youtube.com/Potholer54#p/c/0/52KLGqDSAjo
CO2 is a gas vital to all life on earth.
This doesn't mean that it doesn't have warming effects.
The concentration is very minute
Yes, it is. However, light interacts differently with greenhouse gases than it does other gases. Light passes through most gases without having any effect. Greenhouse gases absorb it and heat up. (On the topic of "concentration is very minute" the same thing could be said for chlorofluorocarbons which acted as catalysts for the breakdown of ozone - the same ozone that protected us from radiation. One molecule of chlorofluorocarbons helps catalyze the breakdown of 50,000 molecules of O3 within it's lifespan.)
Speaking of "very minute" concentrations of CO2: It's also worth pointing out that CO2 concentrations before 1850 AD were around 280 ppm. During the past ice ages, CO2 levels were around 180 ppm, and currently, they're at 390 ppm. If a "very minute" drop from 280 ppm to 180 ppm can be the difference between a normal global temperature and an ice age, then why can't a "very minute" increase from 280 ppm to 390 ppm (or more) cause global warming?
and its effects on global temperature are totally dwarfed by the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor.
Yes, water vapor is a larger greenhouse gas than CO2 (see chart):
Gas Contribution(%)
Water vapor (H2O) 36 – 72%
Carbon dioxide (CO2) 9 – 26%
Methane (CH4) 4 – 9%
Ozone (O3) 3 – 7%
However: it's impossible to regulate water vapor going into the atmosphere, water vapor concentration is relatively static over time (unless something is causing it to increase; see below), water vapor has a short term effect on climate change (as opposed to CO2 and CH4, which affect climate change for hundreds of years), and it's known that greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 cause warming which increases the water vapor. So, the increase in water vapor is partially the result of CO2.
The "climatologists" are politically and economically driven, not scientifically.
Then I'm actually amazed that there aren't more climate scientists on the oil companies side, since the oil companies have billions of dollars to throw around to protect their industry. There are still over a trillion barrels of known oil reserves in the world. At a price of $100 per barrel, this means oil companies stand to earn $100 trillion in revenue from oil that's still buried in the ground. If climatologists are economically motivated, they should be jumping on the oil industry bandwagon.
And, again, to reiterate: watch potholer54's videos on Climate Science.
http://www.youtube.com/Potholer54#p/c/0/52KLGqDSAjo
Europeans (or at least Germans) might willingly march back to stone age lifestyles in the holy name of Mother Earth, but Americans (and Russians, and Indians, and China) won't stand for it.
Germans are hardly in the stone ages. They have some of the highest tech energy solutions available - and they have positioned themselves to be leaders in the new energy economy. They currently have 20% renewable energy sources and are on target to decarbonize midcentury. They are also the European country with the strongest economy. So how is Germany able to move beyond combustibles so far ahead of other modernized countries? Their primary advantage is that they don't have fossil fuel funded misinformation campaigns like we do here in the U.S. according to state minister Franz Untersteller.
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.
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 says climatologists are pure altruists. All people say is that they're generally competent at their jobs, and aren't especially corrupt. Because there's no legitimate reason to say otherwise. There are illegitimate reasons to say otherwise: liars, polluters, the generally corrupt and the stupid have plenty of illegitimate reasons.
Success as a scientist requires that a lot of the science profession agrees that you have professional integrity. Science has some of the most objective, testable and routinely tested criteria for integrity.
Climatologists are professionals who overwhelmingly say humans are making too much CO2, because it's causing the climate to change in damaging ways. Corrupt and stupid people lie about that for their own personal (or simply psychological) benefit. It's not any more complicated than that.
--
make install -not war
It's those low prices which have "killed the economy". Going from $1.50 gallon to $3.50 gallon is a much bigger shock than going from $4.00 to $6.00 gallon.
Gas taxes need to be raised - at a minimum enough to pay for road infrastructure, but probably a good amount more (gradually, of course). But no-one has the balls to do it.
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
The scientific community is rarely wrong about a major conclusion that many thousands of scientists agree with high confidence over many years of research
Our latest chemistry Nobel Prize winner disagrees.
http://news.yahoo.com/vindicated-ridiculed-israeli-scientist-wins-nobel-183256852.html
it's in my head
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.
"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."
I'm more swayed by the people who actually live there who are fighting tooth, nail, and claw to PREVENT drilling...but thanks for the typical "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a whiner...and probably a libural!" schtick (as made popular by talk-radio).
P.S. -- I could care less what people think who DON'T live there...it isn't for the people who do to sacrifice just to subsidize every 10mpg SUV driver who's too stupid to see the writing on the wall (even when it's directly in their face).
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
It wasn't "a single Nobel Prize winner". Racial theories, Einstein's relativity, evolution, the settlement of the Americas, deep space and time, quantum mechanics--most major scientific revolutions took decades, sometimes centuries, to be settled and widely accepted. Your faith in "scientific consensus" is based on your ignorance of science, nothing more. Science is ill-equipped to make definitive short-term conclusions. Really the only time a matter is settled in science is when almost nobody is working on it anymore.
So it's a waste land yet there are people that live there and want to work? Perhaps they should get a job in a field that isn't dying.
If you think it will lower gas prices you're living in the land of make believe.
So you delay the people losing their jobs for a year? Unless they're all like a year from retirement that's pretty freaking useless. The volume is too low because there isn't that much oil up there. When that happens you have to shut it down. Delaying it for a year or if we're lucky a few years doesn't fix the problem and they still run in to the same problems.