There is nothing to debate - CO2 is not pollution by any stretch of the imagination. The fact that it is constantly brought up as such is a sign of scientific ignorance. CO2 is a naturally occurring trace gas in our atmosphere that is necessary to support life on this planet, if there was no CO2 we would all be dead.
Subsidies are a legitimate concern and they should all be abolished but that does not change the fact that prices are still what drives energy production and consumption.
Actually the debate over the existing huge reserves comes down to the price as it always has.
“In the real world, however, investors don’t care a fig whether they earn positive Eroei. What they care about is dollar return on dollar invested. And the two aren’t the same–nowhere close–because different forms of energy command wildly different prices. Invest ten units of 10-cent energy to capture one unit of $10 energy and you lose energy but gain dollars, and Wall Street will fund you from here to Alberta.”
Personally, I couldn’t care less whether all oil ends or not. I will simply react to market prices as they develop. What those prices depend upon is not any consideration of mine, since I am a simple consumer of oil, not a producer or trader in it.
Btw, didn’t we already see peak oil in the shape of the sudden $140 price peak last year? It sure looks like a peak on all price charts, and just about when all prophets had warned us for that “comet”. Or was that too just another an act of “trrrsm”?
Peak oil doesn’t really have anything to do with TotC. It’s not like the oil is unowned, and everyone is consuming because there are no property rights.
More to the point, peak oil is a bogey. If we’re running out of oil, then the price will rise, which creates incentives to conserve the resource, invent new technology to increase supply, and discover substitutes. Supply and demand. Society isn’t going to collapse because a resource is scarce.
Statistics on the supply of oil are irrelevant (except to speculators). The point is that the price system automatically regulates the supply of resources.
I think the flaw with this analysis is that assumes there is no difference between light sweet crude, heavy crude and shale.
If you go to valero energy’s website (the nation’s largest oil refiner) they have an excellent analysis of the different grades of oil and the differences in both cost and quantity of gasoline produced by refining the various oil grades.
Light sweet crude, the stuff thats near the surface, you convert 30% per barrel to gasoline. Heavy crude or deep sea crude its only 16%. Shale while being abundant below the ground is the least efficient, its basically tar that has to go through an expensive refining process before you can get something useful out of it.
Peek Oil refers to the loss of light sweet crude. the stuff that is near the surface of the earth that is under pressure that can be cost effectively drilled. The other forms of oil involve mining. Mining and drilling are two different animals.
This lack of understanding about the various grades of oil is what obfuscates the oil debate.
No there is not a misunderstanding of the different grades of oil. If light crude gets expensive then heavy crude is used, if heavy crude gets expensive then oil sands are used, if oil sands get expensive then oil shale is used. Efficiency is irrelevant, Market pricing drives everything. The only thing that can cause an energy crisis is government interference with worthless green regulations preventing the building of refineries to process heavy grades of crude, worthless green taxes on the use of heavier grades of crude or the restriction of access to the energy reserves by the state. All of the heavy grades of crude are profitable below $80 a barrel. And when that gets to expensive you can make it from garbage:
Correct! I was just pointing out the that ‘Peek oil’ is one of the most misused terms out there. There are many people who are running around thinking that the world is running out of oil. That is not what the data is saying. its saying that the days of the Beverly Hillbillies Jeb Clampet shooting the ground with a shotgun and out gushes oil are at an end. The cheap surface oil is all but exhausted, what is increasingly left requires a higher cost structure to extract and process that must be passed on to consumers. This will of course, result in more efficient machines to use less energy but that too requires capital outlays. So, as usual there is no free lunch.
Peak Oil is simply when the world’s oil production will reach a peak and decline. I have heard them try to change the argument to cost of the oil but that has never been what the theory is. It has always been a production peak. Peak Oil is impossible to predict without knowing how much fossil fuels are in the earth how oil is created and irrelevant for energy concerns due to the price mechanism. Efficiency is also largely overrated as a solution.
I agree that a society following the principles of free market would have every chance of readjusting well to a less oil-dependent economy. The problem is, the more necessary this becomes and the more expensive oil becomes, the more incentive states have to go to conflict, whether economical or physical for that oil, since it will postpone the economic shrinkage for someone who achieves success at it. And middle east, being a hot spot for both conflicts and the only area still not declining in oil production, could suffer wars and due to the resultant rapid decrease of oil available for the rest of the world, panic, unrest and anarchy could set in.
After reading through this thread it seems to me like many do not understand what exactly peak oil theory is based on…I think many would benefit with these videos linked earlier on in the thread but were obviously ignored:
Oil discoveries peaked in 1964…we have been finding increasingly less and less oil each decade
With individual oilfields the production profile (barrels produced in a year vs time) resembles a bell curve with production increasing each successive year until the half-way point whereby production decreases each year (this is a matter of physics and not economics)
Because individual fields peak, and our oil discoveries have peaked, the overall production profile will also follow the bell curve shape
Therefore we will peak in oil production at some point…most estimates range from already having peaked to as far as 30 years away
Again, I doubt the anti-peak oil theory people will watch the links above, but if you do, and still don’t agree with peak oil then please quote this line and state your reasoning. Because after watching the two videos above I don’t know how one could refute Peak Oil Theory…So if one is able to I’d like to learn the flaws in my logic. Thanks in advance.
Those are not facts they are assumptions. Over and over, I understand the “theory” very well, except it does not deal in reality. Please show me where I can find the source that gives me the exact amount of fossil fuels on the planet and exactly how they are formed. When you can do that, get back to me.
Peak Oil Theorists are like a Cult, just repeating and repeating the same thing over and over.
I don’t see how you can have tragedy of the commons where everyone pays for what they consume and produce.
A tragedy of the commons comes when there are free riders who use a service or resources with no cost to themselves, and thus you have abuse.
My take on the alarmism, is that people can envision a future problem, and demand that the market react NOW. They want green energy NOW. They want electric cars NOW. They want oil prices to rise NOW, regardless of what market pricing tells us about supply and demand.
It doesn’t occur to many of these soft-headed folks that we will probably have new solutions or wipe ourselves out with nuclear armageddon long before we use up all of the oil.
I don’t understand the logic in peak oil theory not being valid unless we know the exact amount of fossil fuels on the planet. I would love to hear that argument explained with rational. What we do know, is given CURRENT known levels of oil, we will be hitting peak production in the next 3 decades. We also know that if we were to discover vastly new quantities of oil that could prevent peak oil it would DRAMATICALLY buck the trend of the previous 5 decades of exploration…
I also don’t understand the logic in peak oil not being a valid theory because we DON’T know exactly how it is formed. In my opinion this is almost a greater case FOR peak oil as we are running out of something and we don’t know how it is created.
What we do know is that there is a dramatic trend of discovering less and less oil each successive year. Therefore our current production will be cutting into our total known reserves. We also know that oil production profiles follow a bell shaped curve due to the physical manner in which they are extracted (pressure decreases and so flow rate decreases).
Much in the way that U.S. oil discoveries peaked in 1930’s and then the production of U.S. oil peaked in the 1970’s, peak oil theory asserts that because we have peaked our oil discoveries (1964) our production is now going to peak UNLESS we discover MASSIVE new oilfields…which the current trend of the past 5 decades does not appear likely.
Why is it that I’m sure you didn’t watch those videos? I genuinely want to learn more about this but currently don’t see how your arguments support the statement that peak oil theory is invalid.
Which of the 4 facts I put above are you saying are assumptions? Is it just number 4? I could perhaps concede that that one is not a fact per se, but are you in anyway contesting facts 1-3?
If you hold facts 1-3 to be valid then it is a perfectly logical deduction to come to the conclusion that a peak in oil production will occur. So again, please specify which of those 3 facts you are calling an assumption.
You don’t understand basic logic? How can you determine something is peaking when you do not know how much of it exists? It is a logical impossibility.
If you don’t know how fossil fuels are formed then other theories are just as valid:
You keep repeating the same things over and over, I’ve seen the videos, I’ve over a dozen on Peak Oil, none answer my questions and all make wild assumptions. Two things make Peak Oil Theory irrelevant - 1. Free Market Economics and 2.Thermal Depolymerization:
Over and over and over and over. Peak Oil Cultists search the internet to repeat their hysteria and you are proof of this because you are claiming that no one watches your economically illiterate videos when they talk about the same damn thing I already went over - which you never read.
“The economic value of energy just doesn’t depend very strongly on raw energy content as conventionally measured in British thermal units. Instead it’s determined mainly by the distance between the BTUs and where you need them, and how densely the BTUs are packed into pounds of stuff you’ve got to move, and by the quality of the technology at hand to move, concentrate, refine and burn those BTUs, and by how your neighbors feel about carbon, uranium and windmills. In this entropic universe we occupy, the production of one unit of high-grade energy always requires more than one unit of low-grade energy at the outset. There are no exceptions. Put another way, Eroei–a sophomoric form of thermodynamic accounting–is always negative and always irrelevant. “Matter-energy” constraints count for nothing. The “monetary culture” still rules. Thermodynamics And Money”
I’m afraid that most oil resources which are today exploited, ARE INDEED UN-OWNED! I.e. they are managed by governments. And government is the greatest “tradgedy of the commons” which ever existed…
If oil is projected to get scarce and hence more expensive in the future, then why does king Fahd pump the hell out of his wells? I’d guess because he won’t live forever. And he doesn’t want to introduce the privete property rights and market economy necessary for being able to sell it for some fair present value. So short sighted over-exploitation is his best personal option, dumping oil prices for as long as he breaths. And maybe the US administration encourage him in that venture. It always wants to get reelected for another four years, and low oil prices tend to be helpful for that prospect.
I always objected against “peak oil”, that if peak oil is predicted, then why don’t people lower their oil output today in order to sell it more expensively in the future? That would smooth out the transition from oil to alternative energy sources and eliminate the whole “problem”. I’ve then thought that the political non-market dominance in the area of oil production could indeed justify a disastrous scarcity situation coming rather soon. But hey, maybe the simple answer is that most oil resources as a matter of fact ARE NOT EXTRACTED, but saved in expectation of increased prices! That’s what I gathered from the paragraph I quoted above. Then, in good time before the Middel East dries out of oil, investments in new oil resources will be made and the transition to successively more expensive oil and successively more competitive alternatives, will indeed proceed smoothely. At least over a span ov several years. Political oil crises can always be created in the short term.
