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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
Kind of sounds like a drug addict. "I'm going to quit eventually, but right now I need that hit."
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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)
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.
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.