[quote]flyboy51v wrote:
You think 100 years of oil is pathetic. It’s not. It’s an eon. 5 years in technology is a long time. 100 years in technology is beyond our ability to predict and possibly even imagine. We won’t be using gasoline in 2100.
You think we need some kind of program to push for new technology. I’m assuming you mean a government program? I think you’re simply mystified by the workings of a free market. The free market has produced every single advancement I can think of. The car, the train, the aircraft, the lightbulb, the telephone, the internet, the transistor and on and on and on.
I just read yesterday that some little startup in San Jose has developed microbes that eat biomass and excrete crude oil. They believe it will be viable. No government 5 year plan was necessary for this … just 3 or 4 smart guys in a warehouse.
You think oil based economies are volatile. They’re not. We’ve had one for 75 years or more and it’s been incredibly stable. What shockwave btw? People are bitching … driving a little less? Adjusted for inflation the price of gas today is about the same as it was 50 years ago.
You think oil isn’t going to be cheap anymore. Well definitely not if we continue to refuse to pump any of the trillions of barrels of it we have in the ground.
You say oil shale can’t be extracted profitably. I’ve read multiple articles in the last few days that say it is. $70-$95 a barrel is the magic number. And that’s with existing technology but there’s a few more efficient new technologies that are being developed that would make it even better. There are countries around the world that have been operating with prices like this for years …
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I never said we needed a program to explore new energy technology, where did you get that idea? I’m not at all enthusiastic about the government controlling our economy, that is daft.
As for the rest, I do not disagree, but I am also not writing it off, because for all of the talk about our future, energy, oil and the availability of it(read: to produce cheaply), the only thing that is abundantly clear, is that we really do not know.
We’re(being us in this forum, as well as the owners and operators of the major oil enterprises) speculating on speculation. We’re pretty sure we can get some stuff done with oil shale, and/or offshore drilling, but we won’t actually know if they are economically viable in the long term.
In the 70s there was an oil scare that had to do with the US production peaking. We began to import heavily, crisis averted. Today we are seeing signs that global production is peaking, whether or not it has peaked, or will peak in 5 years or 30 years, we’re not sure(again, so much of this discussion is speculation on speculation).
I think you can agree that once the discussion is revolving around sketchy offshore reserves and squeezing oil out of rocks, that things are not all fine in the world of oil production.
With shale oil, it is tremendously costly(not just financially) to extract and convert to crude, we have little to no infrastructure to do so on a mass scale, the environmental concerns are significantly greater than conventional crude extraction, both in terms of physical land destruction and pollutants, even the processes that we use to extract it are ugly and infantile.
It is hardly better off than Solar power when it comes to being a ‘viable option’. With the only notable bonus being that we can make petroleum out of it, thus, run our cars.
Other than that, the fact that we are even considering oil shale, should be raising numerous red flags.
Additionally, as best I am aware, the stat about gas prices being the same as they were 50 years ago is no longer true. Given the recent steep hike in gas prices has not followed a comparable spike in inflation. But you are free to correct me on that if you have a citation.
Another thing to consider. Let’s assume global oil production has not peaked yet(many people disagree, but let’s be conservative here) Let’s say it won’t peak for another 20 years.
It will take at least that long to establish a wide scale Shale/tar sands oil operation, but, by then, all of our estimates about the costs of these things will more than likely be completely off the mark, because in the mean time, our oil production will have begun to slow, while our demand will have continued to rise.
How do you expect shale oil operations to scale up quickly enough when these offshore drilling operations are expected to take upto a decade to materialize, knowing that shale oil is significantly more challenging to produce at scale?