Oil.

[bautforum]

Im not sure if their is any threads on this but on google if you search somethings on oil, humanity is heading into the stone ago within the next 30 years. Oil prices are sky rocketing, its getting harder to get oil as we run out. Cost of barrel oil is sky rocketing. Eventually we will run out and then what? Everything stops no cars, no electricity, billions loose jobs. Would it really be the end of civilization as we know it?

[Van Rijn]

It's a lot more than 30 years before we run out of fossil fuels, and we will be moving on to longer term energy sources like nuclear and solar (including biofuels).

[Ronald Brak]

Would it really be the end of civilization as we know it?

No. If your not an old coot yourself, find one and ask him or her how they managed during world war two. Also, the world only used about 2% the oil we do now in 1920 and that wasn't exactly the stone age. And remember that oil won't suddenly disappear, it will just get real expensive, like now. Although high prices don't cause much decline in the short term, over months and years people will change their habits, buy economical cars, buy electric cars, move closer to work, improve public transport, and so on. If you're an average Australian you can probably cut your oil consumption by nine tenths without suffering a great deal of hardship. Just get rid of your car. It won't kill you and won't cause civilization to end.

[Doodler]

Give us a few years and we'll harness the ultimate biofuel. If we can just work out the details of harnessing all the energy expended by illegal immigrants sneaking into the US, we could probably write fusion off as a bad idea and stick with the all natural stuff...

[Ronald Brak]

Give us a few years and we'll harness the ultimate biofuel. If we can just work out the details of harnessing all the energy expended by illegal immigrants sneaking into the US, we could probably write fusion off as a bad idea and stick with the all natural stuff...

America already has in the form of cheap food, cheap restaurant meals, clean homes, tidy gardens and so on.

[BigDon]

Doodler, that reply might make some folks upset, though not myself.

[BigDon]

Wow, I almost posted something mean and snarky to Mr. Brak. Which would be something I'd equate to being rude to David Niven for some reason. It's only 5:30PM local but I'm going to log out and lay down for a while. I feel odd.

Good morning Mr. Brak, no offense intended.

[Doodler]

America already has in the form of cheap food, cheap restaurant meals, clean homes, tidy gardens and so on.

Stolen identities, unpaid taxes, increased crime, single family homes turned into tenements, pressing one for service in English...we've paid the dues for having them here.

[bautforum]

http://www.film.org.pl/soundtrack/images2/mad_max_2.jpg
I'm not so sure. How many perople were there in ww2? Less than 2 billion? If petrol goes over $2 AU there'll be riots. I know because I'll be starting them.

[Ronald Brak]

Stolen identities, unpaid taxes, increased crime, single family homes turned into tenements, pressing one for service in English...we've paid the dues for having them here.

Yeah, you should treat 'em like the Irish.

[Doodler]

Doodler, that reply might make some folks upset, though not myself.

It'd be easier to shoot down my satire if it weren't so well rooted in the reality of the situation. ;)


To the actual point at hand, civilization will get over it. I do not believe we're looking at the end of human civilization, since oil does not power our power plants, and there's been a significant push in larger cities to get public transportation on alternative fuel sources. A massive oil crash will simply push the alternatives to the forefront faster.

[Ronald Brak]

I'm not so sure. How many perople were there in ww2? Less than 2 billion? If petrol goes over $2 AU there'll be riots. I know because I'll be starting them.

Thanks for you constructive help. How on earth is a riot going to increase the amount of oil available? That stuff takes millions of years to form. If you want to actually help, buy a bicycle, or a bus ticket, or a scooter. You can even buy electric scooters now.

And if you are going to riot anyway, remember, the police have horses in Australia, so they'll still be able to get you no matter how expensive oil is.

[Van Rijn]

A massive oil crash will simply push the alternatives to the forefront faster.

Assuming there is a massive oil crash, which seems unlikely.

[Doodler]

Assuming there is a massive oil crash, which seems unlikely.

We'll see how well the US Congresscritters do when they crack the legislative whip on the commodities traders who are creating the investment bubble over here. If they've got the backbone to take on the moneycrowd, despite other economic instabilities, then other nations may follow suit, which might throttle back some of the pressure on prices.

Nothing out there really can adequately explain why the price of oil is so off the wall. OPEC's pumping along nicely, Baby Huey is spending more time irritating the Columbians than he is screwing with the flow of oil, and Russia is busy breaking out the hammers and sickles for a little kinky political roleplay. I mean, yeah, its unnatural and perverse, but its not exactly earthshattering...

[sarongsong]

Im not sure if their is any threads on this...:rolleyes: (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=opera&rls=en&hs=eVh&q=oil+site%3Abautforum.com&btnG=Search)

[Ronald Brak]

Here's the number of cars in the world:

http://www.theglitteringeye.com/images/carprofleet.gif

Here's oil production:

http://members.aol.com/vrex/oil/figure_3.gif

As you can see, we have more cars without much increase in oil production.

[RalofTyr]

Yes, let's just all scapegoat illegal immigration and suddenly oil is down to under a dollar a barrel and cancer is cured. All of these east coast transplants come to California and then they start whining about how it's full of Mexicans. Look, Mexicans have been crossing the boarder to find work in our agricultural areas since before your ancestors immigrated to America. As soon as oil gets too much for farmers to run their farming machines, they are going to turn to cheap Mexican labor. And there better not be a wall by then, or you're looking at literally astronomical food prices. Then again, Americans could stand to loose a few pounds.



No. If your not an old coot yourself, find one and ask him or her how they managed during world war two. Also, the world only used about 2% the oil we do now in 1920 and that wasn't exactly the stone age.

Well Ronald, how was it back in the 1920's?

[Ronald Brak]

Well Ronald, how was it back in the 1920's?

It sucked. Oh sure Australia was riding high on the sheep's back and was the world's OPEC of animal fibre, but just try being black or a woman or asian or gay or a black gay woman with an asian lover and see how far you got. No one would offer you a movie deal back then. And if you were a white male you had it made except for a maybe 80% chance of being killed or crippled by war or industry before you hit 65. And the beer was warm and you couldn't download a Meatloaf track to save your life. Mind you, I liked the flappers and their wasn't a lot of competition around that hadn't been wounded in the Dardanelles. And I had enough white feathers given to me to stuff a mattress, which was quite handy because with a vast number of males of killed or crippled, a good mattress was just what I needed. And heroin, cocaine, cannibis and tins of concentrated nicotine were legal back then but people were too busy trying to ban jazz to care.

[ASEI]

Originally Posted by Van Rijn
Assuming there is a massive oil crash, which seems unlikely.

We'll see how well the US Congresscritters do when they crack the legislative whip on the commodities traders who are creating the investment bubble over here. If they've got the backbone to take on the moneycrowd, despite other economic instabilities, then other nations may follow suit, which might throttle back some of the pressure on prices.

Well, an oil crash would be unlikely, provided we were allowed to mine it somewhere outside the 3rd world - but actually drilling for something other than the easy stuff under Saudi Arabia never crosses people's minds. They're too busy finding some witc capitalists to burn. After all, a good isn't something people produce or anything. It's something you get by looting other people.

You can have a NIMBY, desperately poor eco-utopia, xor you can have the modern world, which requires some plumbing in someone's backyard, and economic rather than coercive interaction.

we have not found a major oil field for over thirty years and the ones they have found are not offsetting the decline in mature fields e.g Cantrell, Gahwar...
There's plenty of other oil sources besides the "proven reserves". It's just not light sweet crude, so it doesn't make it into modern calculations. We could go on shale oil for 200 years or so. Canada has it in spades. The midwest has it. Colorado has it. South America has it. And it's far larger than the proven reserves in amount. Congress just put a moratorium on mining it. Guess why.

edit: Nevermind. People are still stalling, but it looks like some production was allowed. http://www.postindependent.com/article/20071218/VALLEYNEWS/745640703
edit2: aaaand ... it died in the senate. Since when did it take laws to allow people to do things?


It's also interesting that the one other source of energy besides oil and coal that could sustain industrial civilization is hated by the environmental movement.

[Van Rijn]

Well, an oil crash would be unlikely, provided we were allowed to mine it somewhere outside the 3rd world - but actually drilling for something other than the easy stuff under Saudi Arabia never crosses people's minds. They're too busy finding some witc capitalists to burn. After all, a good isn't something people produce or anything. It's something you get by looting other people.

You can have a NIMBY, desperately poor eco-utopia, xor you can have the modern world, which requires some plumbing in someone's backyard, and economic rather than coercive interaction.


Well, Canada seems to have figured it out. For the U.S., NIMBY certainly has been a major factor, but there's also the issue that some things just weren't economical so there wasn't a lot of reason for companies to push it. There was some oil shale development, but that dried up when prices dropped in the '80s. And there was some work on coal to synthetic fuel facilities, but again, they couldn't compete with low priced oil. If prices stay up, that will change.


There's plenty of other oil sources besides the "proven reserves". It's just not light sweet crude, so it doesn't make it into modern calculations. We could go on shale oil for 200 years or so. Canada has it in spades. The midwest has it. Colorado has it. South America has it. And it's far larger than the proven reserves in amount. Congress just put a moratorium on mining it. Guess why.

I think a lot of people miss an extremely important point: A lot of options that don't make sense at $60 dollars a barrel make a lot of sense at $120 dollars a barrel, so supply options at $120 are going to be much greater than at $60. Of course, prices need to stay high enough long enough for companies to commit. They wouldn't want to be caught producing $70 a barrel oil if the price drop back down to $50.

Regarding the oil shale moratorium, this was a continuation of an existing moratorium, but it looks like it was a close thing. I wonder how much longer that can last?

[Van Rijn]

6 billion people on a planet that, without oil inputs, can only accommodate 2 billion? the last thing we should be thinking of is alternative biofuels and transport! :mad:


When fossil fuels (not just oil) do run out, nuclear and solar can support a larger population than that indefinitely. And, there is more to biofuel than alcohol from corn.

[Ronald Brak]

6 billion people on a planet that, without oil inputs, can only accommodate 2 billion?

China and India managed to support 2 billion between them while using only a trickle of oil, so your figures seem a bit off.

[Argos]

What have illegal immigrants to do with oil? Am I missing something? :think:

[Tinaa]

I'm not quite sure what to do with this thread. Several posts, while perhaps not really political, do put a bad taste in my mouth. Can we discuss this without getting political?

[Larry Jacks]

We'll see how well the US Congresscritters do when they crack the legislative whip on the commodities traders who are creating the investment bubble over here. If they've got the backbone to take on the moneycrowd, despite other economic instabilities, then other nations may follow suit, which might throttle back some of the pressure on prices.

If history is any guide, Congress will make the problem even worse. What exactly could they do to restore balance in the price of oil? Price caps only lead to shortages. Off hand, about the only thing Congress could do that might have a chance of working would be to increase the short-term capital gains tax on commodity trading. However, we'd need to examine what might be the unintended consequences of that.

The high price of oil is what's making many alternatives economically viable. Back in the 1970s, the US researched several energy alternatives. At the time, they wouldn't be economically viable especially when the price of oil fell in the 1980s. Today, projects like tar sands and shale oil are or are on the cust of being viable. So are other alternative energy sources.

[Gruesome]

Drill ANWAR. Some might disagree with this concept for environmental issues, but if the price goes high enough even that crowd will change their tune. "I don't care if you have to drill through Bambi's head, drill ANWAR!"

Also more refineries and more nuclear power.

Congress seems to be one the wrong side of the issue...keep moving...nothing new here.

[Larry Jacks]

I see a reasonable US energy policy consisting of three points:

1. Conserve to the extent it is practical. If nothing else, it will lower the rate of growth in energy conservation. Over the next 100 years, even a 1% reduction in the growth rate will save a tremendous amount of energy.

2. Increase domestic energy production. If the Cubans and Chinese can drill 75 miles off of the Florida coast, then we should too.

3. Increase energy production from alternative sources where practical. Lift tariffs on things like ethanol imports and limit the duration of any subsidy to a finite term - say 10 years. If the source can't be economically viable in that time then it really isn't practical.

[mugaliens]

Give us a few years and we'll harness the ultimate biofuel. If we can just work out the details of harnessing all the energy expended by illegal immigrants sneaking into the US, we could probably write fusion off as a bad idea and stick with the all natural stuff...

I can see a Hestonistic figure staggering through the future city streets saying, "Oilent green is people! It's peeeopllleleee! (sob) Ahhhggghhh!"

That would make for an interesting sequel...

[Glom]

There's plenty of oil around. Rates are the tricky bit. But the high oil price does mean that wellwork becomes ever more economical. For example, one of the common ops at Wytch Farm is workovers to replace duff ESPs, which help lift oil from the bottom of the hole to surface. Workovers are expensive so the benefit of the replacing the ESP in times past may not cover the cost. Today, it will. And then there's subsea interventions. Very, very expensive. You need to bring out an expensive rig or light intervention vessel to intervene on a subsea well because, being on the sea bed, there's not platform to use. The high oil price is causing a boom in rig construction, which will drive down the cost of rigs and will also mean that the benefit of these interventions becomes much greater.

[mike alexander]

There's lots of oil
If we just toil
And bust our hocks
To boil the rocks
To drive our cars
From here to Mars
'Cause without oil
The land will roil
And curse the Lord
Who starved my Ford
And stole my right
At morning light
To turn the key
And drive for free
From dawn to dusk
My alloy husk
From dusk to dawn
The autobahn
Its concrete coils
With Standard Oil's
Machines that cruise
On ancient ooze
Bears testament
To our intent
To burn it all
Before next fall
'Cause if we do
There's none for YOU

[JustAFriend]

And a Manhattan Project for FUSION would give us more energy than we'd know what to do with for millions of years.

Hydrogen is pretty danged plentiful in the oceans......

[mike alexander]

I've been alive long enough to remember how controlled fusion has been just fifty years away for the last fifty years.

No, I'm not terribly optimistic about that.

[sarongsong]

Would a fusion plant be as detectable as a fission plant?

[BigDon]

Would a fusion plant be as detectable as a fission plant?

Yes, both would weigh in at around 100,000 tons complete. Can't miss anything that big.

[Delvo]

And a Manhattan Project for FUSION would give us more energy than we'd know what to do with for millions of years.Actually, right now, that would be a Somewhere In Southern France Project...

[Ronald Brak]

That was the second most beautiful thing a staple remover has ever said to me.

[ASEI]

Yes, both would weigh in at around 100,000 tons complete. There are many varieties of fission plants that weigh a lot less than that. Ships reactors for example.

[BigDon]

I included all the buildings and cooling towers and such. You're not going to find one free ranging.

[ASEI]

You're not going to find one free ranging.
Ships reactors? What about the small ones we built for the nuclear rocket and ramjet programs, that were designed to fit on air and spacecraft?

I doubt the whole aircraft carrier weighs 100,000 tons.
From wikipedia (Nimtz class carrier):
Displacement: 78,280 tons light
101,196 tons full load

The ship has two nuclear reactors, and I doubt it's even 10% powerplant by mass considering all the other systems it has to support.

[Wear Protection!]

Ships reactors? What about the small ones we built for the nuclear rocket and ramjet programs, that were designed to fit on air and spacecraft?

I doubt the whole aircraft carrier weighs 100,000 tons.
From wikipedia (Nimtz class carrier):


The ship has two nuclear reactors, and I doubt it's even 10% powerplant by mass considering all the other systems it has to support.

some passenger cruise ships weigh more. amazing how they float.

i was also wondering, i know this may seem illogical and dumb, but if the hull of a ship had an oil-like surface could the ship slip through the water instead of held up by displacement? just curious.

[banquo's_bumble_puppy]

everything is rosey....

[Larry Jacks]

i was also wondering, i know this may seem illogical and dumb, but if the hull of a ship had an oil-like surface could the ship slip through the water instead of held up by displacement? just curious.

If the ship had a smooth oil like surface but insufficient displacement, that smooth surface would likely just help it sink faster towards the ocean bottom. There has been research over the years to find ways to reduce a ship's drag. The problem is that things like barnacles like to attach themselves to ships, they're persistent, and hard to remove. Water is about 900 times as dense as air so the drag caused by disruptions like barnacles can get considerable, meaning it takes more energy to move the ship at a given speed or that the ship is slower for a given power setting.

From what little I've read on the subject, anyone who can find a practical way to keep a ship's hull clean at all times would likely become very wealthy.

[Torsten]

I had to periodically clean the barnacles off the bottom of the floats of my plane, which was usually moored in saltwater. They never had the chance to grow to full size, yet I could feel the difference in take-off performance after a cleaning.

[Romanus]

I don't think we'll ever really run out of oil; there are oil resources that are largely untapped, such as extant, still-subterranean oil that was too heavy to pump, to say nothing of oil shales and tar sands. What I'm guessing will happen, though, is that oil will become too expensive to use in our current spendthrift manner, a cost that will both curb demand and catalyse a search for alternatives.

[BigDon]

I friend of mine went through several boats of larger sizes until now he owns a small ship.

But I remember his first one, the Jeanette was one of those converted lifeboats. Not lifeboat lifeboats, but one of those rescue boats. A very heavy keel for its size for rough water work. Somebody sailed it from Britain to California, via the Panama Canal, which just amazes me.

The ocean makes an aircraft carrier small in about 2 months. The Jeanette would have been like living in your own shoe in a lot less time. And probably smell that way as well. (Another friend now owns her)

Well, he had her for a couple of months (and became addicted to living on boats) when he decided to have her hauled after a diver he hired informed him the hull had 18 inchs of fouling!

When they craned it up and we started cleaning it was embarrassing! We had to push a four foot tall, 25 foot long mound of life off the dock three times when the hard looks got too intense.

The summery: Before the clean up, 4 knots with the wind, after, almost 10 beating against it.

On the other hand....

The denticles on sharks, for example, cause micro-vortices which break water's hold slightly. Allows for a more effortless glide. I believe this led to a modification of artillery projectiles. IIRC, a small smoke generator behind the projectile breaks the hold of the atmosphere drag and allows for a "not insignificant" increase in range.

[aquitaine]

I don't think we'll ever really run out of oil; there are oil resources that are largely untapped, such as extant, still-subterranean oil that was too heavy to pump, to say nothing of oil shales and tar sands. What I'm guessing will happen, though, is that oil will become too expensive to use in our current spendthrift manner, a cost that will both curb demand and catalyse a search for alternatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

It isn't an issue of running out, it's an issue of all the easily pumped/reachable oil being depleted, causing production to drop. The of the oil the US imports, %15 comes from Mexico. Right now mexican oil production is collapsing at an alarming rate, and the country will be a net importer of oil in 3-4 years.