How Long Will the Oil Age Last?

Popular Science ^ | August 2004 | Kevin Kelleher

[SunkenCiv]

So, IOW, it's not BS, you'd just solve that particular problem differently. Driving a car is not generally a matter of cruising at a fixed speed, and that's what he's referring to.

[editor-surveyor]

"The Club of Rome is resisting the idea of developing outer space."

And what do you suppose that it could be 'developed' into?

Perhaps a giant black hole to suck up massive amounts of tax dollars?

[SunkenCiv]

Yet I note that West Texas Intermediate has advanced in price

Plenty of oil is available, and that hasn't got anything to do with the fluctuation in price -- that's a matter of how much is available right now, and on guesses as to what the price will be in various time periods in the future. Crude used to sell at lower prices, but so did everything else. Forty years ago $2000 would buy a family sized four door car, and crude ran about $8 a barrel. Minimum wage rose to $1.15 in September of that year, and by 1974 (OPEC embargo) had risen to $2. Oil remains cheap, even though the minimum wage is only $5.15. Fuel economy of said autos has risen (not much in recent years) and that has reduced the amount spent by consumers on the actual fuel.

[Fintan]

 

I have about ten half-filled cans of these in my garage. That's how I determine my "oil age".

 

[SunkenCiv]

IOW, no extra heating -- since the light converted in orbit would have been intercepted by the Earth anyway -- and actually cooling -- because the best available photovoltaics are only 30 per cent efficient.

[SunkenCiv]

The same cannot be said for Ginger Baker though. ;')

[editor-surveyor]

"Everything we do in our everyday lives depends on oil."

Everything that we do in our everyday lives will always depand on something, and there will always be doom-sayers telling us that we are about to run out of it, or that it is excessively influencing our foreign policy.

[SunkenCiv]

Tell me about these bent columns, it rings no bells.

[SunkenCiv]

I agree, and was aware of that. I don't think people who get sucked into the whole "greedy oil companies" rhetoric (or for that matter, "greedy Halliburton" rhetoric) think it through. Oh, well, we don't need to move around as much; we don't need paint, pharmaceuticals, polyester...

[neutrino]

By all means, advance your arguments. I hope lots of people agree with you. It gives me more opportunity to accumulate investments that will make profits for me as oil advances.

[SunkenCiv]

Were the energy cost to extract a barrel of oil to approach a barrel of oil, productivity would fall, because the energy cost of doing pretty much everything would rise, leading to so-called COLAs in labor contracts and so forth, wild wild inflation, etc, worse in degree but similar in quality to what happened in the early to mid-1970s. However, saying that will happen is like saying Soylent Green is a documentary -- the price will rise over time, and as it does, other sources become economical to use. And all the time, the efficiency of various processes (including transportation) will increase, reducing the amount spent. As the late Julian Simon wrote, what does and doesn't constitute a natural resource is a function of human ingenuity.

[SunkenCiv]

:'D

[William Terrell]

The oil age will last until replaced by the Fusion Age.

Perhaps even the Tesla Age.

[editor-surveyor]

"Tell me about these bent columns..."

I believe that it was 1989, or 1990, when two researchers, working on ideas similar to Pons and Fleischman's work, had made a tightly sealed vessel of about 1 liter capacity to contain their experiment. The experiment was only about 20 seconds old when the vessel ruptured catastrophically, killing both men and badly damaging the columns.

Nobody has ever fessed-up about what was in the vessel, but witnesses said that it was quite benign for the 24 hours that it had rested on the bench before being closed. It was fully self contained, and was not heated, or even connected to anything else.

[bert]

....I want to know why we aren't generating electricity using the Fission age......


It's quite simple. The leftist who are now supporting John Kerry told and believed the big lie..... Nucs kill.

They kept adding trivial safety measure after trivial safety measure until the cost and complexity were overwhelming. It was death by a thousand adds. Each drew a drop of blood and the cumulative effect was death.

"A little Nookie never hurt anybody."

[SunkenCiv]

from "Wired" though probably a dead link, I didn't check:

Neutralizing Diesel's Idle Threat
by John Gartner
02:00 AM Oct. 10, 2002 PT

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

[John Lenin]

The longer we can hold out with oil the more advanced the technology to replace it will be. Oil is cheap compared to all the other energy sources, so drill, drill. drill !

[SunkenCiv]

I like how you think. :')

"Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point in the universe. This idea is not novel... We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians... Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic.? If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic - and this we know it is, for certain - then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature." -- Nicola Tesla, late 19th century

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Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheney

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[SunkenCiv]

I couldn't agree more, and let's start with the ANWR!

[bikepacker67]

It's quite simple. The leftist who are now supporting John Kerry told and believed the big lie..... Nucs kill.

I'm an angler/backpacker/MTB'er and these guys are IDIOTS.

Yes, nuclear waste is dangerous and must be securely stored. But it's overall amount compared to the tons and tons of sulfides that coal and oil power-plants produce is far more dangerous to ecosystems.

We could be producing googlewatts (kidding) of electricity via modern nuclear power-plants - and use the extra to produce H₂ for fuelcells.