Posted on 03/20/2010 12:45:18 PM PDT by bananaman22
Whenever government regulation or subsidy interferes with the free market there will be "peak" something because supply/demand has been tampered with.
At this point we could be sitting on top of 100 times the Saudi supply of light, sweet crude and it wouldn't increase the world supply at all. There is no political will to pump it.
It's time to drill some politicians, then we can drill some oil.
#1 - Peak Oil = fraud
#2 - the only reason the US doesn’t control oil prices is because we are currently under the control of anti-Americans who are occupying our nation’s capital.
I guarantee, if the US shut off imports of oil, and immediately opened up all of our own oil fields, both on land, and under the seas - we would OWN the oil markets.
The energy the USA has is the only thing that will help us reboot the economy, create wealth and pay down the debt. Energy creates wealth.
People do not realize that the earth is making oil all the time. The core of the earth, I would assume, is like a nuclear reactor like the sun. The heat and pressure create oil or hydrocarbons. Oil is being “created” every minute of every day.
That is a theory put out by a Russian geologist 30 some years ago that has been gaining popularity especially over the last decade. That theory could explain some of the very deep oil deposits that have been found recently; deposits that would very unlikely have come from organic detritus. Isotope studies have also suggested that it is not of organic origin.
Although I wouldn't say it is proven, I think the earth's oil supply is probably a combination of organic and geophysical processes and though the supply is probably not unlimited, we are no where near the end of commercially extractable oil supply.
All we are lacking is will.
Wealth is just stored energy.
There is NO PEAK OIL! DRILL HERE, DRILL NOW!
Atlease ONE TRILLION barrels (+++) of recoverable oil sits in the Green River Formation! Obama, Salazar and the pricks at the EPA won’t let us go get it!
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/other/oil_shale/green_river.html
Overview of estimated in-place resources for the Green River Formation in Utah, Colorado. In-place shale oil resources in the Piceance Creek Basin in billions of barrels per township. Total is 1.007 trillion barrels. Click for a larger image.
Other estimates:
http://knol.google.com/k/oil-shale#
“...The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Petroleum Reserves estimates that the Green River Formation contains 1.8 trillion barrels of shale oil in deposits yielding greater than fifteen gallons per ton, with over eighty percent of the formation’s recoverable resources located in Colorado’s Piceance Basin. (Oil shale formations yielding less than 15 gallons of oil per ton of rock are not considered economically viable for extraction.)[2]
And, I’ve said nothing about US coal and natural gas reserves!
I think the guy is just talking about peak production point on his chart. Production went up, peaked, and has declined for various reasons - none having anything to do with known or proven reserves. The companies just are not pumping as much, is all. IMHO.
You have asked a legitimate question. And since most of the responses on this thread are wrong, I thought I might offer something else. I also invite you to do your own research. Use your favorite search engine and try something like "Hubbert Peak Oil."
But in a nutshell, "Hubbert's peak" or "peak oil" is simply a term to describe the observation that in any hydrocarbon producing region, the production curve from first discovery to final depletion has a "bell curve" shape.
That is to say that production in any basin starts from zero (prior to the first discovery), rises to some peak value and then falls to zero (over time, could have a long tail) as the fields deplete. Note that the only assumption in the above is that the recoverable pool of oil in the basin is finite.
In the original formulation, Hubbert, a Shell geologist made quantitative estimates of the time between first discovery, peak production and the ultimate final decline. But the basic premise of the theory is as obvious as the conclusions reached from "Laffer's Curve" about the effect of tax rates on government revenues.
The theory is obviously true for any given basin. It is therefore also true for all the basins in any region in aggregate (again the only assumption is that the resource is finite).
Hubbert was originally making predictions about production the United States. As it turned out his quantitative prediction for the US was pretty good.
Note that whether the world in total is at Peak Oil today is a question separate from the validity of Hubbert's theory.
Oh, and by the way, the fellow posting about oil being generated continuously in the center of the earth is a crank. But, to be fair, he is the only one with a logical argument against Hubbert's theory. He just happens to be wrong.
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