Posted on 08/24/2005 6:06:17 AM PDT by minerboy
hink high gas prices are bad?
Get a load of what ex-oilman and ex-Princeton professor Kenneth Deffeyes believes are following closely behind:
"War, famine, pestilence and death," he said. "We've got to get the warning out."
The threat? Peak oil.
The term refers to the time when the worldwide production of oil peaks and begins a rapid decline. From then on, this incredibly efficient fuel source, which still costs less than most bottled water, will be ever more scarce and ever more costly.
Highly respected sources, including the U.S. government, think that day is distant, and most mainstream economists think it won't cause much of a ruckus.
But Deffeyes thinks peak oil is coming in November, and could bring humankind to the brink.
"It's been like pulling teeth to get public awareness," he said.
So who is this well-credentialed Chicken Little?
Deffeyes grew up next to gushing oil wells. He is a former petroleum geologist himself, having worked for Shell Oil for six years after earning a doctorate from Princeton.
He is a devotee of former Shell geologist M. King Hubbert, who correctly predicted U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Deffeyes is also the author of "Hubbert's Peak" and "Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak," which was published last spring.
He is among a cadre of peak-oil proponents who sketch out a frightening near-term future in which the American way of life is upended as the United States, China and great nations scramble after oil fields like desperate players in a game of musical chairs.
(Excerpt) Read more at statesman.com ...
And it doesn't do anything to reduce the so-called greenhouse gases from the cars that use it. It simply moves the source of the gas from the car back to the electric generation plant which supplies the juice to charge the batteries.
Besides all that....when big oil really knows that they are near the end...they will have already positioned themselves in some viable alternative. They ain't stupid.
Yes, diesels are nice, the reason they are a dead-end as well is that they are also filthy and inefficient at low RPM (hence the need for a turbocharger in most passenger vehicle applications).
You have the sensible application of diesel engines exactly backward. Diesels are used in commercial application because they produce huge mountains of torque for heavy work.
Ask a Jehova's Witness.
then you'll know the EXACT date AND time when peak oil runs out.
trust me on this one folks.
I used to drive an '80 Audi 5000 diesel with a 5-speed manual tranny. Whenever some jerk would tailgate me I'd simply downshift to 4th, take my foot off the gas, and bathe his/her windshield with about half an inch of sludge. They rarely sneak up on me a second time.
I'm just a geezer living in the Peoples Republic of Oregon.
I don't, but some of what I believe CAN be found on the internet.
So, was Saudi Arabia, a sandbox since the beginning of time as we know it, some sort of mecca for sand eating dinosaurs?
Trillions of dinosaurs could not have existed on earth, Nor could oil have been formed from tiny bugs. How would they have gotten there? A door? Oil isn't found just in sand and shale either, thats just where alot of it ends up. What about oil found under the Canadian shield which hasn't moved in Billions of years? How did dinosaurs and tiny bugs crawl under that? Oh yea, "underground rivers" that somehow magically turned into trapped oil deposits.
There are much better explanations. The fossil fuel theory isn't a logical one, and 300 years later, it still hasn't a shred of evidence to prove it. Ice ages, lack of vegitation and life makes it an impossible theory. Of course, adding trillions of years to theories like that make anything possible.
I think I'll keep my mind open to science which isn't limited to an unprovable theory some dare not step outside of.
We use a quarter of the @ 84 million barrels consumed daily on the planet. The Chinese are catching up rapidly. In 2002 the usage number was 79 million bbls daily. The rate of usage growth is unprecedented. While it is true that there are generations worth of reserves in the ground, the means to exploit them are not keeping up with the growth in demand. There is a dearth of both qualified engineers and the raw materiel they would need to build new infrastructure facilities to meet the rapidly rising demand.
Saudi Arabia produces @ 10.5 million bbls daily. They are the only "super power" in the oil industry. Their stated goal is 12.5 million by 2009. That is an additional 2 million bbls per day in four years. Nice, but the demand is growing at a rate that is exponentially higher. They say they can get to 15 million eventually but the demand might very well get there years before the ability to meet it can...that is the problem, not how much oil is in the ground.
And, there is no way to verify what the Saudis claim. They use their own engineers to calculate capacity and resevoirs but will not permit any outside party to even peek at their books. All the Saudis have is oil. It is not in their interest to paint a less than glowing picture of the near and long term.
There is an oddly archaic tendancy on this forum to lump all negative predictions into the same chicken-little category. I think that attitude is dangerously smug. Peak oil questions are not global warming questions. It is not "conservative" to dismiss either without thorough examination, it is just plain dumb.
There is no biblical reason to think they weren't created during the 6 days. The only reason to think that is because "scientists" say it isn't so.
"War, famine, pestilence and death," he said. "We've got to get the warning out."
"Starving to death again will become fashionable," Deffeyes said.
Horse hockey. As prices go up, we'll conserve, we'll develop alternative energy, we'll find expensive extraction techniques profitable, we'll invent better extraction technology, we'll live, and we'll prosper again.
Sir you have not read, for one thing those 6 days are not 6 of what we commonly refer to as 24 hour days. Peter says they are not.
This earth is the evidence of what is Written and they do not conflict. The earth is a very very OLD place. Man causes the conflict by ignoring what is actually Written.
And somehow ends up 5-6 miles below rock that's been there forever in the middle of a continent. Not as simple as you think, unless you believe every oil well is in the ocean, and the whole planet was one for billions of years. But then it would have been a frozen ice ball for a great many of them, so your bugs wouldn't have been able to live.
They must have been washed into them by underground rivers I guess.
If anything is psycho babble, it's the fossil fuel theory.
And liberals and eco-wackos and all their kept politicians (which the current administration refuses to confront) standing in the way the whole 9-yards. Look at Jeb Bush and the California wackos opposing even SLANT DRILLING...which leaves no visible coastline footprint or oil leakage whatsoever. And while I'm on that, where the HELL is all that 1 trillion barrels of U.S. SHALE OIL we were told could be economically processed at the market price of $35/barrell??? Seems to me that someone has that locked up tighter than, a'hem...a drum. Wildcatters inventing new processes for extraction are claiming even better prices than the $35/barrel cost...how about $10? I.e,.:
"A Utah-based, privately held corporation called Oil Tech, Inc., says it has developed and installed an improved surface retorting process that can produce shale oil for less than $10 a barrel. Located in eastern Utah, the company says that Unified Engineering witnessed a demonstration of the new technology..."
If the goal is not to more or less secretly "drain the swamp of terrorists, by DRAINING THEIR OIL SUPPLY FIRST" then the Western World is just proceeding on an adhoc basis with no clear production agenda, and just letting the tail wag the dog. Heck, not even the tail. THE FLEAS are running the show with the environmentalist-wackos saying what we will be alllowed to do.
To put the shale-oil trillion barrel reserve of the U.S. into perspective....note that Saudia Arabian oil fields have "proven" reserves officially pegged at 261.9 billion barrels, but this can't be independently verified...and is a state-secret. Then taking all the other oil fields in current production or on tap...the following excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle notes the global number at 1.3 trillion:
"Oil-producing companies and countries publish estimates of their proven reserves -- essentially, the amount of oil they can pump with existing technology under current market conditions. It all adds up to about 1.3 trillion barrels worldwide, enough to keep humanity's cars, factories and power plants humming for 42 years at our present level of consumption."
One trillion barrels of U.S. shale oil could keep the U.S. humming along at our current per capita oil consumption for over 400 years. And we are only a little over 200 years old as a country. And by then, indeed, we will have found something else.
If only we could bring back Reagan and James Watts.
Actually, ELECTRIC drive blows Diesel away, even in the low end... which is exactly why DIESEL-ELECTRIC is how every large vehicle is built.. whether it be Railroad or Earth Movers, and why Diesel-electic should be applied to things like Busses and such, and is being used in test cases around the country now.
Plus, your planton theory falls apart fairly quickly, because it breaks down rapidly and turns into methane gas which bubbles up from the sand and crap it settles in, then over time turns into limestone sandstone and there is where you find the fossil record, not oil. It's not very deep at all.
Catastophic event? Yes, that could bury stuff deep enough and quickly enough to prevent it from breaking down before it could be buried under great preasure.
But that opens up a whole other can of worms evolutionists are very frighted of.
Underground rivers 10,000 feet deep? Or how about faults where friction produces these "sands" you keep talking about?
I'm told that it's these faults that are where they like to find and drill into.
Right, because electric motors have a flat torque curve - the produce the same amount no matter how how fast it spins. People who buy gas-electric hybrids for MPG are actually buying them for the wrong reasons. Their purpose is actually to reduce emissions. Somewhat better MPG is a happy coincidence because the electric motors allow the use of much less powerful gasoline engines.
At any rate gas-electrics are the answer for now to balance emissions reduction with improved fuel economy.
Whatever..... I'm sure you know more about it than I do.
The oil rich Persian Gulf area is oil rich due to its being located on top of the ancient Tethys Sea.
http://www.worldoil.com/magazine/magazine_link.asp?ART_LINK=01-10_tectonic-mann.htm
Tectonic setting of the world's giant oil fields
Paul Mann and Lisa Gahagan, Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin; and Mark B. Gordon, GX Technology
The pertinent section from the article:
Arabian Peninsula / Persian Gulf. There are 151 giants in this region, Fig. 4. They are concentrated in a large foreland basin formed during the Late Cenozoic collision of the Arabian Peninsula with Eurasia. Downward flexure of the Arabian Peninsula beneath the Zagros Mountains of Iran / Iraq was caused by the northeastward consumption of the Tethys Ocean at the Zagros suture zone. Additional causes of this flexure were the eventual Cretaceous-recent convergence and collision of the Arabian plate against the Eurasian plate. This protracted convergent event has created the Persian Gulf and Mesopotanian lowlands as a sag in the foreland basin, as well as formation of the Zagros Mountains, with a culmination of fold-thrust deformation in Miocene and Pliocene time.
However, other than minor tilting, large areas of the foreland appear completely undisturbed by Zagros-related convergent deformation, as manifested in the variety of giant-field shapes. For that reason, formation of elongate giants parallel to folds and thrusts in the Zagros Mountain and foreland basin was classified as a continental collision margin, while those giants to the southwest were counted as continental rifts and overlying steer's head sag basins.
The basal stratigraphic section underlying the present-day foreland basin was deposited along a Cambrian-Permian passive-margin setting along the southern Tethys margin. Deeply buried salt, possibly deposited in Cambrian rifts, was activated by small-displacement basement faults during Permian to Jurassic time. These gave rise to salt ridges and diapirs, forcing folds in the overlying sedimentary section, which include some of the largest giant fields, such as Ghawar, Saudi Arabia. These folds are at a high angle to later folds and thrusts related to the Zagros convergence. Source rocks in this basin phase include Cambrian-to-Permian units, with the main reservoir in the Permian.
A second hydrocarbon-formation period occurred from the Triassic through Tertiary, with Middle Jurassic source rocks and Upper Jurassic reservoirs. Migration is primarily upward from underlying source rocks in giant fields that are removed from the Zagros deformation. 7 Structural traps formed in the area adjacent to the Zagros foldbelt and relate to early collisional effects in Eocene and younger time.
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