Posted on 11/19/2007 10:08:53 PM PST by B-Chan
A growing number of oil-industry chieftains are endorsing an idea long deemed fringe: The world is approaching a practical limit to the number of barrels of crude oil that can be pumped every day.
Some predict that, despite the world's fast-growing thirst for oil, producers could hit that ceiling as soon as 2012. This rough limit -- which two senior industry officials recently pegged at about 100 million barrels a day -- is well short of global demand projections over the next few decades. Current production is about 85 million barrels a day.
The world certainly won't run out of oil any time soon. And plenty of energy experts expect sky-high prices to hasten the development of alternative fuels and improve energy efficiency. But evidence is mounting that crude-oil production may plateau before those innovations arrive on a large scale. That could set the stage for a period marked by energy shortages, high prices and bare-knuckled competition for fuel.
The current debate represents a significant twist on an older, often-derided notion known as the peak-oil theory. Traditional peak-oil theorists... [have] been proved wrong so often that their theory has become debased.
The new adherents -- who range from senior Western oil-company executives to current and former officials of the major world exporting countries -- don't believe the global oil tank is at the half-empty point. But they share the belief that a global production ceiling is coming for other reasons [...] This will create a global production plateau, not a peak, they contend, with oil output remaining relatively constant rather than rising or falling.
The emergence of a production ceiling would mark a monumental shift in the energy world...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The suggestion that Saudis are content to sit on the flow of revenue at present (and thus have little incentive to invest in production expanding equipment and facilities) is a bit weak. In the short run there is little alternative to oil for personal transportation and a host of other uses. But as the price increases with demand, the Saudis would plausibly have an incentive to get revenues now (or in the next few decades) rather than chase them in a market say 20 years from now when what are now experimental technologies (e.g. hydrogen powered autos) are able to take a huge bite out of demand.
Technologies like this are going to make the oil sheikhs sorry they tried to sheikh us down.
We’ve got to drill on our coastlines and on Alaska’s North Slope. That’s the only thing that can keep us going until other technologies get better established.
The dirty secret is that Middle East oil producing nations are producing nearly all that they can (even Iran). See the bottom of the excerpted article posted above, or better yet, have a look at the relevant statistics on the Dept. of Energy website.
I wondered when a publication like the WSJ would publish that news.
Fording Coal.
“”I liked this Nanosolar article posted a day ago. For less than $10,000, I could cover my Arizona roof with this stuff, and be generating over $6K worth of electricity per year. Unlike Al Gore, I don’t use that much, so I could sell it back to the power company.
Technologies like this are going to make the oil sheikhs sorry they tried to sheikh us down.””
No! The oil sheiks are cognizant that crude oil represents about 40% of the world’s energy mix and that the demand for oil is still growing They are also aware that it will take 30 to 50 years to replace oil as a primary energy source so they have plenty of time to “soak” us. The fact of the matter is they have us over a barrel and aren’t worried about a bunch of “alternatives” that require lots of oil to build.
In regards to solar panels, make sure that there are ample supplies of the doping agents before you invest in companies that make those things...because there simply is not enough germanium, gallium, and other metals to produce those doping agents.
“”We’ve got to drill on our coastlines and on Alaska’s North Slope. That’s the only thing that can keep us going until other technologies get better established.””
This is the correct short term solution. In the long term we need to develop nuclear fusion...but that will take at leat 50 years.
"What makes it also cheap are the materials used in it’s productions, being made of an Aluminum foil for stability, Molybdenum electrode, an ink made of indium, copper, selenium and gallium, a semiconductor that doesn’t absorb light and a clear Zinc oxide semiconductor."
My engineer brother has suggested that Nanosolar and similar sheet-based solar technologies may be a reason that the price of molybdenum has gone up by a factor of 10 over the past year.
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