When the last oil well runs dry

BBC News Online ^ | Monday, April 19, 2004 | By Alex Kirby

[Momaw Nadon]

FYI and discussion

[#1CTYankee]

Hogwash, alternative energy sources will reduce the need for oil.
Invest in hog farms!

[Blzbba]

Methane hydrates will save us, once the energy industry develops a method of harvesting the methane....

Methane Hydrates

[JudgemAll]

Yawn... Coal and nukes... why don't we use them more to save on oil? Oh, I forgot, we cant because of windmill huggers.

And by the way, every year new oil deposits are discovered as well as new methods to develop previously unpracticable huge deposits, like the one in Canada that is greater than the Saudi's.

It's all a matter of offer, demand and prices and "get out of the way governments and enviro wackos".

[don'tbedenied]

In !850 this guy would have written about the disaster that awaited the world when whale oil ran out.

[Monty22]

I remember when I was 5 years old in 1979 and hearing they'd run out of oil before I was old enough to drive.

[BlueLancer]

Note that the chart stipulates ...

"Reserves that can be recovered economically in existing operating conditions."

Well, that leads to several questions on several levels ...

"Economically" today does not mean "economonically" tomorrow. As the prices go up, so does the availability of pumping oil out of deposits that are not "economically-feasible" at this time.

"Existing operating conditions": well, we're already pumping oil out of places that, just a decade ago, were not able to be accessed with that level of technology. Who knows what technology will become available next year or within the next five years.

Finally, remember, in the early 60's, that great ecologic guru Ehrlich foresaw the end of oil in the '70s along with mass starvation in America and around the world. When compared against the inflation that has occurred since the days of the 25-cents per gallon gasoline in the 60's and early 70's, gasoline and oil is not really that much more expensive .. if at all.

[Swiss]

It was predicted that we would run out of oil by 1920 before the Texas oil fields was discovered.

[Night Hides Not]

Yawn... Coal and nukes... why don't we use them more to save on oil? Oh, I forgot, we cant because of windmill huggers.

And you can only put the windmills where the huggers allow you to...can't mess with their pristine view of the ocean!

[blackdog]

Oil comes from the molten core of the earth outgassing into cavernous mantle layers of the earth where it cools and distilates into oil reserves. It does not come from dead dinosaurs.............

Oil wells in California and Texas pumped down to dry in the mid century are now full again to the shock of their owners. It's just cheaper to import oil than to do it here.

Once the core of the earth cools down another few miles, I guess that will mean fewer oil reserves, but that should be right around the time we start beaming aboard the USS Enterprise, captained by Jeanne-Luc Picard.

[Junior]

Gee, most of the replies on this thread appear to be of the "we'll have oil forever" variety. If we're pumping it out of the ground quicker it can replenish, then there will come a time when the stuff will no longer be available. Of course, when that happens, the same people claiming that we'll never run out of oil will just claim its an environmentalist conspiracy.

[TexasCowboy]

"but our forebears lived without oil and thought themselves none the worse.

We shall have to do the same, so we might as well make the best of it. And the best might even be an improvement on today."

This has to rank as one of the dumbest things I've ever read on FR!

Let's all get nekkid, hug a tree and go live in a cave!
Sheesh!

[snooker]

"I remember when I was 5 years old in 1979 and hearing they'd run out of oil before I was old enough to drive."

That be Jimmy 'the dumb one' Carter.

World was on empty by the year 2000, according to him. Of BTW, did he tell you he was a nuclear scientist who knew about these things?

[BlueLancer]

"If we're pumping it out of the ground quicker it can replenish ..."

There's the fallacy of your argument. That's a mighty big "if" ... one that the Luddites have been foreseeing for the last 80 years or so.

Every year, new deposits are discovered. Every year, new technology makes accessing previously unobtainable supplies possible. There's no reason to believe that the oil supply will be extinguished any time soon ...

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Exactly when that day will dawn nobody knows, but people in middle age today can probably expect to be here for it.

I don't believe I'll still be in this world 1000 years from now.

[Gorjus]

If we're pumping it out of the ground quicker it can replenish, then there will come a time when the stuff will no longer be available.

Yup. And someday the sun will burn up all it's hydrogen, too. And, um, let's see - oh yeah, current indications are that the universe is open so eventually everything will die the ultimate heat death.

The key question is: When?

And while I won't presume to provide an answer, I will observe that every alarmist prediction on the 'when' question has been wrong - in fact, not only wrong but wrong on the trend. There are more known oil reserves today and more production capacity today than at any time in history. The will indeed come a time when production peaks, and a time after that when oil reserves are gone, but to say, "The only alternative right now is to shrink our economies" condemns the mass of men to "lives that are nasty, brutal, and short."

How is this a good thing?

[17th Miss Regt]

In a similar vein, it was discovered that Apprentice candidate Omarosa was not injured by falling plaster. It was a piece of the sky.

[EQAndyBuzz]

"Hogwash, alternative energy sources will reduce the need for oil.
Invest in hog farms!"

"Break the deal and spin the wheel"

Beyond Thunderdome

[TexasCowboy]

Okay, people! Common sense time:

No, oil did not come from dinosaurs falling in the tar pits. No one knows where it came from.

The reason oil wells which were formerly dry and now are pumping again has nothing to do with the earth's mantle or convection currents of the core.
Oil in a reserve is either gas driven or water driven, but to drive it, there must be holes in the formation for it to go through. We call that porosity. The connection from hole to hole we call permeability.
When a formation is "tight", that is, lacking permeability, the oil simply doesn't have enough transit velocity to fill the well bore so the well quits producing oil until it can replenish from the surrounding area. We call that lateral extension.

No one has the vaguest idea when the United States will run out of oil.
In our proven reserves, we have a finite volume which is based on the witch doctoring of figures supplied by reservior engineers, but we have hundreds of thousands of acres of land that has not even had a seismic truck on them.
Some of those will boost our reserves if the econazis will let us drill.

Because of the price of oil and it's expected increase, deep water drilling off the Continental Shelf is in high gear. Those wells will also boost our reserves.

The final fact to keep in mind:
We have enough natural gas reserves here in the continental United States to be energy self sufficient.
We are NOT going to run out of energy derived from fossil fuels in your lifetime or your grandchildren's lifetimes.
Burn your Greenpeace card, eat a spotted owl, chop down a tree, drown a darter snail and buy the biggest gas guzzling SUV you can afford.

[American_Centurion]

...eat a spotted owl, chop down a tree, drown a darter snail and buy the biggest gas guzzling SUV you can afford.

Best Earth Day advice I've heard yet!

Will do!