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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Nifty idea about taboo animals but it would never work. It has been shown over and over that people would far rather die than eat taboo animals.
I think you are both over-estimating the intelligence of the American government. There's not much oil there and who wants to take on the wildlife lobby?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I think you are both over-estimating the intelligence of the American government. There's not much oil there and who wants to take on the wildlife lobby? |
There are reasons and then there are systemic reasons. I am just wondering if there's an underlying reason.
And some people would rather die than break a taboo. True. All the more food for the rest of us.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| You will remember what actually happened when the Eyeties banned it....the English alum industry was founded, followed by the English Industrial Revolution and the permanent eclipse of Italy as a source of mercantile power. |
The vagaries of politics can change the location but not, it seems, the supply; at the turn of the century half the world's oil supply came from Baku which was reduced to practically nil when the Bolsheviks took over. If, say, Russia invaded Saudi, which controls about a quarter of the world's oil, America may well start drilling in Alaska and Saudi would doubtless eventually lapse into a forgotten corner. Who has the necessary expertise must surely be relevant as well.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Who has the necessary expertise must surely be relevant as well. |
This used to be a huge consideration in the days when the Seven Sisters ruled. In the thirties, when Mexico nationalised its oil industry (against the interests of the Sisters inc Britain and USA) she was frozen out of world markets and basically went bust. But that can't happen now, the whole industry (upstream and down) is just too diverse.
| The vagaries of politics can change the location but not, it seems, the supply; at the turn of the century half the world's oil supply came from Baku which was reduced to practically nil when the Bolsheviks took over |
True, but that was in 1913 when the whole industry was in its infancy. Also I think it was probably half the world's exports, since I'm sure the US was outproducing Baku. But I could be wrong there.
| Saudi would doubtless eventually lapse into a forgotten corner. |
Wha-a-at? With a quarter of the world's proven reserves (or whatever). Also, I was interested to see, Iran can't sell her oil at the moment because it's too heavy and refining space is at a premium. Saudi oil is sweet and light (and it comes up under its own pressure!) This is going to become more and more important as the years roll on.
| If, say, Russia invaded Saudi |
Not much would happen. This is the duffest bit about conspiracy theories and the US in Iraq. Basically it doesn't matter a hoot who actually owns the stuff, so long as it's pumped onto the world's market. And I trust Russia at least as much as I do Saudi Arabia.
Though on the other hand the reason why the USA took such a strong line against Saddam in 1991 was not because of Kuwait but because of the fear he would go on to take Saudi. That's worth a small war.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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Is oil in fact running out?
What evidence is there that it is an ever diminishing Fossil Fuel?
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| Komorikid wrote: | Is oil in fact running out?
What evidence is there that it is an ever diminishing Fossil Fuel? |
Can we make the question smaller? Has oil production ever peaked in Texas, or are they producing more now than they ever have?
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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World Land surface area = 150,000,000,000 m2
* If the entire land surface was covered with ALL organic life that exists MINUS the 90-95% water that is the composition of all organic life on the planet we would have let's say Goo a metre deep. The same Goo that geologists tell us is the prime raw material of crude oil.
* That is 150,000,000,000,000 Litres of Goo or 937,500,000,000 barrels (in crude oil terms) 937.5 Billion Barrels.
* The total crude oil production just since 1960 is 941.5 Billion Barrels. And we have been pumping crude out of the ground for 130 years.
* The entire organic composition of the entire world represents the total oil production for just the last 47 years and that's assuming that ALL the organic matter is converted into crude oil.
* WE know that it isn't as natural gas and coal are also products of the same Goo.
* So if all the organic matter in the world amounts to less than 50 years' production, and there is still plenty left.
Where did all the oil come from?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Can we make the question smaller? Has oil production ever peaked in Texas, or are they producing more now than they ever have? |
The AE way of dealing with this question is to ask how early and how often have 'the experts' assumed Texas oil will run out. Presumably Texas was one of the earliest oil fields in the known universe and is still producing (though of course they may not be precisely the same fields). The point is that Texas is fact whereas predictions are orthodoxy so the Texas example makes a good case for scaling up to world production and world predictions. And hence world longevity.
As to peak production, that raises different questions which presumably would need quite a lot of detailed investigation before you could say whether it is a matter of price, of politics or oil-still-in-the-ground.
| Where did all the oil come from? |
This is the AE version of the question because the word 'all' renders it counter-orthodox. Human beings tend to (naturally enough) take a historical view of these things: at first everything is scarce and expensive but thereafter it gets plentiful and cheap. At which point human beings tend to go into hair shirt mode and start worrying about when all these good times are going to end.
But remember the paradigm is always formed at the beginning, in the times of scarcity. So in the case of oil, the assumption is that oil is created by more or less freak circumstances and it is only the size of the earth and the length of geological history that means there is enough oil. (With of course the implied subtext: so it takes a real man to keep finding the stuff.)
We come along and say...mmm, that may be true but at what point does the sheer amount of oil that we are discovering point to oil not being produced in freak circumstances but being in fact an ordinary product of regularly occurring geological forces. But, as you know, from orthodoxy answer comes there none.
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From the New York Times:
| Texas remains the country's biggest oil producer, representing 20 percent of national output, but production has been declining steadily, from 444 million barrels in 2000 to 397 million last year (2006). |
Not as significant as I imagined it to be.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Have another look at your source, Endless. For instance, there may be no decline. What about expressing the same figures thisaway: "Texas oil shows no sign of running out, production has scarcely varied by ten per cent since the turn of the millennia."
And then again, there's the choice of 2000 as the bench year. This may be perfectly proper, or it may be chosen because that was a particularly high figure. But, you say, "I can trust the New York Times." Well, yes you can in terms of the actual figures being correct but the guy writing the story and the sub-editor judging the story are neither oilmen nor statisticians. If the general theme is "US oil on the skids" then there is every chance that General Industry Orthodoxy is being swallowed uncritically.
PS What will General Industry Orthodoxy be when more money and fewer restrictions are required from the US government?
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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A friend of mine works for an American drilling contracting company, he's currently working in India and the ME and tells me that the oil company's main problem is with corruption, especially in India. Since, one imagines, the Indian government doesn't get as much grief from environmentalists as the US president, their inefficiency must be due to slipshod work and patronage.
He also claims there is oil and gas to be discovered, developed or better exploited . . . and then there's the option of what he calls "the sensible man's energy" -- nuclear.
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lyndserae
In: A Spacesuit
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If this thread isn't dead, this may be interesting. The CIA World Fact book lists for each country the estimated reserves for Petroleum, Natural Gas and so on. One evening, out of idle curiosity I compared extraction rates and size of reserves for a few countries - Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador - I think. Unless I made some colossal arithmetic blunders, it looked like there about 300 years worth of known reserves.
I would be thrilled if someone else with proven arithmetic skills could look at this and (hopefully) confirm what I found.
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lyndserae
In: A Spacesuit
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What I did at the time was to look at the numbers for "petroleum production", "petroleum exports" and "petroleum imports" which appear at the same place. And then thought that if this is true for Venezuela why wouldn't it also be the case for the middle east, Indonesia, Nigeria etc.
Clearly it would be very tedious to try to make an accurate world-wide picture by pulling individual country data from CIA Factbook. Maybe world-wide numbers would be available from OPEC if it has such a site.
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