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To: Graybeard58; pandoraou812
The world will never give up the use of petroleum as long as it has petroleum.
Known reserves are enough for decades and more is found all the time.
21 posted on 12/01/2007 9:08:28 PM PST by TigersEye (This is the age of the death of reason.)
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To: TigersEye

True.


23 posted on 12/01/2007 9:28:58 PM PST by pandoraou812 ( Its NOT for the good of the children! Its BS along with bending over for Muslim's demands)
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To: TigersEye
More oil is indeed found all the time. But less oil has been found than has been used each year for more than a decade and the peak in discoveries occured in the late 1960s well before the first oil shock.

BTW, it isn’t the amount in the ground that is the immediate concern. It is the rate at which oil can be produced. Individual wells, fields, provinces, countries and one can surmise the world as as whole follows production curves. Wells generally start out with the highest production rates they will achieve in the most productive formation they have tapped and then decline. Fields build up over time as wells are drilled until the point where new wells cannot make up for the decline of existing wells [or until they are fully drilled out] and then decline. Provinces, countries and the world are made up of fields large and small all following a pattern of rising and then declining production.

When the world as a whole fails to find enough new producers to make up for the decline curves in the existing wells, [and / or to build enough capital and energy intensive unconventional projects] the decline begins for the world. Peak oil.

At the point of peaking, there is a lot of oil left to be produced. Maybe 50 or 60 percent for light crudes ... and even more for heavies. The problem is they won’t come out of the ground are fast as they used to. Once again “peak oil”.

Are we there yet. No way to tell until after the fact, but IMO the signs don’t look good for anything beyond the next few years. One last thing: Natural gas appears to have a longer period until absolute decline. Gas exists at deeper depths [oil generally isn't found beyond 15 to 16 thousand feet as it appears to cook down] and can be produced from tight formations, shales and coal beds that could never produce commercial quantities of oil.

24 posted on 12/01/2007 9:40:52 PM PST by R W Reactionairy ("Everyone is entitled to their own opinion ... but not to their own facts" Daniel Patrick Moynihan)
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