The end of the age of oil?

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | November 26, 2004 | Chris Bennett

[rellimpank]

---Iran will lead the way to a non-oil economy with its nuclear program--(sarcasm)

[Haro_546]

Its true that we will not run out of Oil, yet the world will become virtually dependent on OPEC and the Former Soviet Republic.

[Young Werther]

Last year there was a report about a company in Philadelphia that had developed a chemical means of processing the organic wastes in our garbage into oil!

A national effort to implement this process and the "Oil Problem" goes away.

BTW our Toastmasters Club meets at the local Solid Waste and Recycling offices and the Director is a club member. I apprised him of this technology and he is looking into it!

[cripplecreek]

Nothing would make me happier than ending our dependence on middle eastern oil. Let them go back to being small roving bands who kill each other in fights over what little water they can scrape out of the sand.

[alloysteel]

It took a crisis in the availability of whale oil for lamps to encourage the technology that led to the use of cheap kerosene derived from petroleum as a substitute.

[yankeedame]

"...as certain as death and taxes, we shall one day be forced to learn to live without oil." Further, "people in middle age today can probably expect to be here" for the terminal oil shortages....

This is have never understood. I mean, if oil came from dinosaurs (plus any other pre-historic plant or animal) and these creatures lived -- and died -- for about 100+ million years, and if only a tiny % of them did convert into oil, how can mankind use up all this oil in what? 200 years? 250?

And remember, for the greater part of those past few centuries we're not even talking about all of mankind, only that small % in industralized nations.

[Westbrook]

Haro_546 wrote:

Its true that we will not run out of Oil, yet the world will become virtually dependent on OPEC and the Former Soviet Republic.

Not if the enviro-whackos get out of the way and allow us to extract oil from our own vast reserves.

[Sam the Sham]

I followed that story about Changing World Technologies and the related one about the Con Agra (Butterball) turkey waste recyling plant. But no updates, not even on their web site.

Is it economically unfeasible ?

[hlmencken3]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold_pr.html
Fuel's Paradise
World-class contrarian Thomas Gold has a theory about life on the planet: It's pumping out of the Earth's crust - and it's swimming in oil.

Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, Gold has been saying that the Earth is hugely well endowed with these hydrocarbons - hundreds of times more so than most geologists, or oil companies, or OPEC leaders believe. The general belief in scarcity that drives up gas prices and causes fears of inflation, Gold argues, is a mirage that has served vested interests among oil producers for decades.

see aslo
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/

[SAJ]

Not if the enviro-whackos get out of the way...

Not if we GET the enviro-whackos out of the way -- they won't be going away voluntarily any time soon, true?

[Haro_546]

We dont have enough reserves.

[SamAdams76]

Since I've been old enough to read, I've been reading constant scare stories about how we would run out of oil soon. I remember my Weekly Reader from 1973 (I was in 6th grade that year) telling us schoolchildren that we would likely be out of fossil fuels by 1980. Damn! Just as I would be old enough to drive! I was bummed.

Now that I'm older and wiser, I know better than to fall for this scam yet again.

I also know enough about the laws of supply and demand in a capitalist society to know that even if we do start running out of fossil fuels, civilization will not end as we know it. Instead, alternative sources of energy will developed and put into use long before the last drop of oil is extracted from the ground.

Whenever you are confronted by a panicked liberal over the "looming energy crisis", all you need to remember is the following two phrases: "Supply and demand" and "economies of scale."

So long as oil is plentiful and less expensive than other sources of energy, it will continue to be used as our primary energy source - at the expense of other, more expensive, alternative sources of energy.

As soon as alternative sources of energy are developed that are CHEAPER than oil, you will see a very rapid changeover to those energy sources. We actually have these alternative energy sources being developed now but so long as oil remains plentiful and cheaper, those alternative energy sources are going to be slow to be adopted.

Once the price of oil exceeds the cost of these alternative energy sources - BANG! We will see an explosion in R&D and within a few years, everybody will be driving around in hydrogen powered cars (or whatever is developed) and the economies of scale will bring the price of these products down even more.

[vote_quimby]

bump to read later.

[Lessismore]

Correct, we won't run out, but the price will go up. Most of the crude oil reserves are in the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and Africa. Next in ease of extraction is the Orinoco tar belt in Venezuela. Then the Athabascan tar sands. There may be other tar belts and tar sands. After that, it is on to coal reserves, of which the US and China have a major share.

However, in the interim, there is a huge foreign trade drain on the US to import energy supplies. We've been exporting debt and importing oil, but that is likely to stop soon as the dollar falls.

[yankeedame]

This is the man you can thank for America's dependency on oil. John L. Lewis:

Merciless, "Fuhrer" [1920-1960] of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)

"...Lewis was a despotic leader of the Mine Workers: he expelled his political rivals within the UMWA...and bullied those whom he did not drive out.... A powerful speaker and strategist, Lewis used the nation's dependence on coal to ...masterminded a five-month strike...even during several severe recessions...." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis)

The end result being that businesses, depended on coal, told Lewis and the UMWA, in effect, " *&^%*#@ you!" and any-and-all who possibly could switched over to oil as their source of energy.

Needless to say, to many, many liberals this man is a god.

[Jaysun]

By the time we run out of oil, the oceans will be full of sperm whales again.

[aaCharley]

>>> Its true that we will not run out of Oil, yet the world will become virtually dependent on OPEC and the Former Soviet Republic. <<<<<<<

Is this supposed to be a prediction that Canada will be conquered by the Saudis or the Russians?

The article did not even mention the reserves in the methane hydrates - larger than both coal and oil.

There will be no shortage. Nutty to predict it.

[Haro_546]

YEah, Im talking about Oil. Canada can not increase gas production beyond the current level.

[rellimpank]

--although I bow to no one in my loathing of John L. Lewis' tactics, he has had a lot of help recently from the "environmental" extremists and their allies, both willing and the ignorant--