Posted on 05/08/2008 6:31:14 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
True enough. Sadly Karl Marx (whom I can agree with on this one point) once said "The worse it gets the better it gets." or something along those lines.
World Production has not yet peaked. That is estimated to happen around 2020. (Based on conservative estimates.)
oh, i’m sure we can find oil on mars and venus too (sarc).
Of course, but also that is not Peak Oil. That is the kindergarten version.
I know I told you before, but I’m so glad you’re on our side!
Absolutely! There is much new oil yet undiscovered. The Williston Basin is a prime example. In the ‘70’s we went right by it, (Vertical hole) knowing there were trace amounts of hydrocarbons, targeting the Red River and Inter Lake formations.
Then, Marathon brought in horizontal exploratory wells in the late ‘80’s and there you have it, a vast new resource.
Rommel drove right past the Libya oil fields while trucking his own fuel from Tunisia. Germany tried for the Baku oil fields and ignored the undiscovered North Sea oil. Japan failed to reach Prudhoe Bay or any other viable oil source thanks to a foggy day at Midway. Probably wouldn’t have made any difference in the long run anyway if they had secured those reservoirs then and won the war, but it was close. We are in Peak Oil now.
You must not have read the article that started this thread.
I recommend that you do.
It makes the point that everytime we think we have found all that is worth finding, we find more.
LOTS more.
Given the cost of uranium, reprocessing the spent fuel is not economically feasible. The spent fuel can be safely stored either onsite at each plant or in a recoverable central repository. When there are enough plants built and running, and the curent closed uranium mines are re-opened and running full tilt, then it may be time to think about re-processing spent fuel.
Hydrogen and hydro power are not the same thing. HYdrogen is not ecomonically feasible due to the large anmount of energy needed to break the H-O bonds on a water molecule. Much more energy will go into it that you get out of it.
Practical electrical cars are just like fusion power, just around the corner........and have been for 40 years.....
I highly doubt that the Japs could have developed the Prudhoe Bay field. At the time, it was still locked up in ice. There were no roads or equipment capable of building anything of the sort. The Japs built most everything with pick and shovel and poorly outfitted labor gangs.
I worked there for close to 20 years, believe me, they would not have even been able to drill a well there. The oil they did get was mostly pirated from some other industrial nation.
Then why does Japan, Russia, England and France all reprocess fuel?
Processing of Used Nuclear Fuel for Recycle
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf69.htm
There is an isotope that is much easier to break down, which is found in vast quantities on the Moon. (H3)
As far as electric cars, has there been any impact studies on the effects of all the Ozone emissions they will generate? It seems that when any new technology is advanced en mass, it emerges with countless oversights and unforeseen difficulties.
PMBR’s of commercial size have not been built yet. The design is unproven and until one is built ibigger than the little 15 MWe one that ran in Germany for many years, we will not know if the technology can be economically sclaed up. There was a lot of hope for the HTGR designs back in the late 1960’s based upon small scale reactor operations. When they finally built a commercial size one at Ft. St. Vrain it was discovered that scaling up the HTGR design was not reliable. That plant had a very lousy (~30%) capacity factor and was continously going offline for equipment failures. Maybe the PMBR will work scaled up, then again, maybe not. MY repdiction is that it will not get much utility interest even if it works mostly due to its small size (~200 MWe). The utilities prefer baseload plants in 1000 MWe size or bigger. Much cheaper to operate. That is why the AP600 offered by Westinghouse in the 1990’s never even got any foreign orders.
Government mandate and HUGE subsidies. It is not economically cost effective. In Japan’s case, (they pay France to re-process) it is a lack of land for storage that makes it somewhat less costly to reprocess.
A foggy day at Midway??????
Fusion power is still not practical, and has barely put out enough energy to sustain itself for a few seconds, maybe minutes. Even with helium 3, it still has way too many issues with plasma containment to be a net energy producer.
The best battery so far has less than 1/10 the energy density of gasoline/diesel, when it reaches at least the halfway mark, and can stand repeated deep discharge cycles for years on end, then maybe we’ll have practical electric cars.
My prediction: Our grandchildren will be using gasoline/diesel for transportation and making electricity with nuclear fission (in LWR reactors), and coal/gas/oil fired boilers driving steam turbines with a fewf combined cycle gas fired plants for peaking and swing loads.
Japan has 800 tonnes per year facility at Rokkasho.
How, by government fiat??? The last time I checked the refineries were privately owned and could do anything they damn well pleased. Do you suggest nationalizing the oil industry ala Mexico/Venezuela????
Do you want the equivalent of the USPS in charge of oil production???
Or should we taxpayers shell out hundreds of $$$$billions more in oil subsidies/incentives so that we can still be hosed at the pumps and the CEO of Exxon/Mobil can retire with a $400 million retirement package????
I get a chuckle out of all these "we need to" posts. "We" don't get to vote on what Valero or Marathon plan to do to maintain or increase their refining capacity. Their bean counters will decide when it is economically feasible and the market will support it, not a second before. They are in business to turn a profit, not to provide charitable services to society.
If they were to "crank up production" to the extent that it exceeded current demand(they are currently running at 85% capacity), that would result in a surplus situation. Surpluses usually cause prices to plummet. Why would a company in business to turn a profit, intentionally cause the price of their product to plummet voluntarily????
Other than that I agree with a lot of your points. Ethanol is a scam foisted on us by ADM lobbyists.
35 boutique fuel blends all across the country is idiotic.
I would like to correct you in that instead of making carbon credit scams unlawful, we simply make AlGore unconstitutional.
Pebble-bed reactors are interesting, so is the CANDU design, but I'm a huge fan of fast breeder reactors and reprocessing spent fuel rods from thermal reactors, no reason to let all of that plutonium get buried at Yucca Mountain.
I'm not sure how you'd convince politicians to limit their gluttonous appetite for tax revenues short of tarring and feathering. I think you'd sooner convince a pig to cut back on its slop intake.
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