Peak Oil

[rational thinker]

Real or not? Please reply only if you have evidence to back up any claims. Thanks.

[Alex Libman]

I used to be a greenie (when I was young and stupid), and I can tell with absolute certainty that it's a fraud, same as "global warming", "global dimming", etc. Yes, there is uncertainty in the energy market, but much of that is caused by government interventionism and the greenies themselves. If it wasn't for socialism throughout the 20th century, we'd all be flying 700 MPH in our own safe nuclear-powered RV's by now!

E does equal M * C squared, and there's a whole lot of M out there in our vast universe... At least until the socialists come to power. Then they announce the sun won't rise tomorrow unless their gods are worshiped with absolute obedience...

[Truth Warrior]

The whole frickin' universe IS Energy!

[LiveFree79]

I don't believe in peak oil. But I do believe that even if oil is abiotic and replenished like trees in a forest at the rate we are going we'll end up running short of it. Look at what human beings have done to the rain forests. Look at how over fished our oceans are. This has nothing to do with "greenies" or socialist this or socialist that. It's scientific fact. The polar ice caps are melting for whatever reason you want to attribute it to....man made or not. The world is becoming more and more polluted. I mean fuck just study how denatured soil is nowadays due to monoculture farming practices. But don't worry Monsanto, technology, and private industry will come save the day. LOL.

[Anti Federalist]

I'm in the offshore oil drilling business.

2/3 of the earth's surface is water and seas and we have barely started exploration there.

200 miles from the shoreline is about the max right now.

The days of cheap oil, however, flowing freely out of the ground from a quick and easy well drilling operation, are probably over.

[Dieseler]

If peak oil was real we would all be in work camps already at the barrel of a gun.
The elite would not let us continue to consume at the rate we do right now with no decrease in sight.
Doesn't make sense to me.

Second thought...Maybe thats the plan.
:eek::confused::eek::confused::eek:

Just kidding.
Or am I?
:confused:

[Conza88]

Henry A. Kissinger, Rockefeller's well-compensated, multi-purpose minion and long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) said: "Control the oil and you can control entire Continents. Control food and you control people."

[Matt Collins]

This book dispells Peak Oil Theory and is an EXCELLENT read!!!
I HIGHLY recommend it!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51831HTQZEL._SS500_.jpg


http://www.amazon.com/Black-Gold-Stranglehold-Jerome-Corsi/dp/1581824890/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212527846&sr=8-2



Experts estimate that Americans consume more than 25 percent of the world's oil but have control over less than 3 percent of its proven oil supply. This unbalanced pattern of consumption makes it possible for foreign governments, corrupt political leaders, terrorist organizations, and oil conglomerates to hold the economy and the citizens of the United States in a virtual stranglehold. There is no greater proof of this than the direct relationship between skyrocketing gas prices and the explosion of wealth among those who control the world's supply of oil.

In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth's surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth's rotation.
Jerome Corsi explores the international and domestic politics of oil production and consumption, including the wealth and power of major oil conglomerates, the manipulation of world economies by oil-producing nations and rogue terrorist regimes, and the shortsightedness of those who endorse expensive conservation efforts while rejecting the use of the oil reserves currently controlled by the U.S. government.


As an expert in tangible assets, Craig Smith provides an understanding of the history of America's dangerous dissociation of the dollar with precious—and truly scarce—metals such as gold and the devastation that would be inflicted on the U.S. economy if Middle Eastern countries are able to follow through with current plans to make the euro the standard currency for oil instead of U.S. dollars.
Black Gold Stranglehold is a thoughtful work that is certain to dramatically change the debate on oil consumption, oil dependence, and oil availability.

[pinkmandy]

The whole frickin' universe IS Energy!


+ Infinity.

[LibertyOfOne]

The whole frickin' universe IS Energy!

Which is absolutely useless if you can't harness it.

[LibertyOfOne]

If peak oil was real we would all be in work camps already at the barrel of a gun.
The elite would not let us continue to consume at the rate we do right now with no decrease in sight.
Doesn't make sense to me.

Second thought...Maybe thats the plan.
:eek::confused::eek::confused::eek:

Just kidding.
Or am I?
:confused:

Maybe that is evidence that there is no super evil secret ruling elite. You know there does not need to be some grand order to everything. Some things are best left to the explanation that no one knows what the fuck is going to happen, and the "order" we have now is structured out from chaos.

[Truth Warrior]

Maybe that is evidence that there is no super evil secret ruling elite. You know there does not need to be some grand order to everything. Some things are best left to the explanation that no one knows what the fuck is going to happen, and the "order" we have now is structured out from chaos.
ILLUMINATI ( TPTB ) MOTTO: "Ordo ab chao"

PROBLEM -> REACTION -> SOLUTION

[pcosmar]

In the late 60s and early 70s I remember that they were talking about it in school. They said we would run out before the end of the 80s at (then) current use. Then came the Gas crunch and and they said that was proof.
And yet military use has increased, supply has increased, Cars have gotten more efficient (on the whole), and there is still oil in places that we can not drill.
At this point in life (after being lied to often) I call bullshit.:(

[LibertyOfOne]

This book dispells Peak Oil Theory and is an EXCELLENT read!!!
I HIGHLY recommend it!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51831HTQZEL._SS500_.jpg


http://www.amazon.com/Black-Gold-Stranglehold-Jerome-Corsi/dp/1581824890/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212527846&sr=8-2



Experts estimate that Americans consume more than 25 percent of the world's oil but have control over less than 3 percent of its proven oil supply. This unbalanced pattern of consumption makes it possible for foreign governments, corrupt political leaders, terrorist organizations, and oil conglomerates to hold the economy and the citizens of the United States in a virtual stranglehold. There is no greater proof of this than the direct relationship between skyrocketing gas prices and the explosion of wealth among those who control the world's supply of oil.

In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth's surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth's rotation.
Jerome Corsi explores the international and domestic politics of oil production and consumption, including the wealth and power of major oil conglomerates, the manipulation of world economies by oil-producing nations and rogue terrorist regimes, and the shortsightedness of those who endorse expensive conservation efforts while rejecting the use of the oil reserves currently controlled by the U.S. government.


As an expert in tangible assets, Craig Smith provides an understanding of the history of America's dangerous dissociation of the dollar with precious—and truly scarce—metals such as gold and the devastation that would be inflicted on the U.S. economy if Middle Eastern countries are able to follow through with current plans to make the euro the standard currency for oil instead of U.S. dollars.
Black Gold Stranglehold is a thoughtful work that is certain to dramatically change the debate on oil consumption, oil dependence, and oil availability.





Given the recent creation in the lab of a bacteria that can shit oil it could be a totally natural process by which microorganisms produce the stuff. As for coal well that is the product of long dead super ferns. But the thing you have to remember is that with the current move towards globalization countries have become interdependent. The Saudis just now upped their production a half a million barrels a day. I wonder how they would fair without American military protection? You see the way things are you can't go it alone anymore. The way the system has naturally come about and pushed towards is so that countries have to rely on each other as a built in incentive against war. Of course American interventionism has only hurt progress in this regard by isolating certain countries.

[hypnagogue]

We will run out of oil. How anyone could suggest that there is an infinite supply of oil, I do not know. When this will happen is left up to speculation.

[Truth Warrior]

Anyone want to buy a Hummer or other "guzzler" SUV cheap?

Just wait a couple of years. :D

[LibertyOfOne]

In the late 60s and early 70s I remember that they were talking about it in school. They said we would run out before the end of the 80s at (then) current use. Then came the Gas crunch and and they said that was proof.
And yet military use has increased, supply has increased, Cars have gotten more efficient (on the whole), and there is still oil in places that we can not drill.
At this point in life (after being lied to often) I call bullshit.:(

They were right. The fields that were known in America peaked. The only reason why the prices dropped because America became hooked on the outside world for most of it's oil. See when peak production hits there still will be oil flowing for a long time to come. It's just that you will never be able to pull as much oil out as you did before. After the peak there is an exponential drop in production followed by a slow asymptotic drop in production. That prediction was for the peak production of all the know American oil fields at the time. Now there is a different prediction of when oil will peak globally.

[pcosmar]

Anyone want to buy a Hummer or other "guzzler" SUV cheap?

Just wait a couple of years. :D

You can convert it to propane/LP for a couple grand. From there Hydrogen is only an adjustment.
I need 4WD where I live, and am considering the conversion.
The price of LP has not been increasing at the same rate as gas.

[Matt Collins]

Given the recent creation in the lab of a bacteria that can shit oil it could be a totally natural process by which microorganisms produce the stuff.
Check out this article Discover Magazine did about a company that "can turn anything into oil":

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil

[Truth Warrior]

Given the recent creation in the lab of a bacteria that can shit oil it could be a totally natural process by which microorganisms produce the stuff. As for coal well that is the product of long dead super ferns. But the thing you have to remember is that with the current move towards globalization countries have become interdependent. The Saudis just now upped their production a half a million barrels a day. I wonder how they would fair without American military protection? You see the way things are you can't go it alone anymore. The way the system has naturally come about and pushed towards is so that countries have to rely on each other as a built in incentive against war. Of course American interventionism has only hurt progress in this regard by isolating certain countries.
Perhaps the "system" is/was "engineered" to come out this way. ;)

[DriftWood]

Peak oil.. of course it is not going to run out over night, but its going to get more and more expensive to get at the stuff thats left. It probably does not make business sense to extract oil form the Canadian sand pits, from the deep sea reserve off the coast of Brazil, or the reserves found in Antarctica. It probably makes more business sense to just grow fuel from plants like sugar, to insulate your house, to change your car to an electric one, to use more public transport, to expand nuclear energy, to produce more stuff domestically etc. Sure there is always going to be fossil fuels around, but there is not always going to be cheap fossil fuels around. I think cheap oil, is a thing of the past. It will not be the end of the world though, there is plenty of alternatives at 150 a barrel.

Cheers

[LibertyOfOne]

Perhaps the "system" is/was "engineered" to come out this way. ;)

Perhaps social "systems" gravitate towards an equilibrium.

[FindLiberty]

This was interesting... I think I found this URL here on RPF in another thread.

Lindsey Williams - recorded 10-2007 - prediction of planned $4 gal gas price, Oil/$/War
Economic Hit man stuff. The presentation is slow (75min) but it is very thorough...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...147&pr=goog-sl

It ties a lot together: taxes, oil (locations, reserve, OPEC, profits), world bank, war for USD-Oil link, and it may have also addressed fiat inflation, etc.

[Dieseler]

If the end of that Lindsey Williams video don't at least near bring a tear to you're eyes, I reckon you are already dead.

Don't much matter whether anyone believes in the Illuminati.
I personally do believe they are real.
And what matters most is what they believe.

[humanic]

It seems to me that the concept of Peak Oil, as predicted by Dr. M. King Hubbert, is "real", and that we are at or near the world Peak. Here are some resources for those who want to explore that point of view.

This is a very difficult topic to get to the bottom of, and I can't say that I am 100% certain either way at this point.

Articles/Sites
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/171
http://books.google.com/books?id=ezyLJrAu1SIC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=%22petroleum+man%22+ruppert&source=web&ots=gfrSbJ_Dfx&sig=PC66K-i70CVFGm7EysXF69HtxKo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100404_abiotic_oil.shtml
http://www.peakoil.net/
http://www.fromthewilderness.com

Videos:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2141508903056009420
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4862673521005190888
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4884753318463778980
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=crude+impact&sitesearch=#q=crude%20impact%20of%208&sitesearch=

[Truth Warrior]

Perhaps social "systems" gravitate towards an equilibrium.
Perhaps social "systems" are often "driven" towards an equilibrium. :)

Accidental history or conspiratorial history?

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

[rational thinker]

What's Ron Paul's position on this?

[Fox McCloud]

What's Ron Paul's position on this?

he thinks it's completely bogus, but he said if it were real, the markets would take care of it, as oil would become more and more expensive, and the result would be that people would move towards another fuel.

Of course nearly all of the price increase in oil, as of now, is due to inflation/devaluation of the dollar and not supply+demand issues.

[humanic]

What's Ron Paul's position on this?


he thinks it's completely bogus, but he said if it were real, the markets would take care of it, as oil would become more and more expensive, and the result would be that people would move towards another fuel.

I found this quote by Ron Paul on the issue:


I don't worry about peak oil as much as I do about geopolitics and inflation. If we had sound money, and if we were not provoking wars and oil supplies, and if peak oil all of a sudden not only arrived but the supply was decreasing much faster than we ever dreamed of, I wouldn't even worry about it, because I have such confidence that the price mechanism in the free market helps us decide what to do. If we had a truly free market and gasoline prices go to $5 per gallon, all of a sudden ethanol may be the answer. The last thing we want is the government to be doing this. If we let the markets handle this , we should never worry. We don't need to worry so much about a limited supply as much as how we mess things up after that with inflation and regulation and radical environmentalism and geopolitical intervention. That is where the real problems are.

That doesn't sound to me like he thinks the theory of Peak Oil is "completely bogus", only that if we had a truly free market (which we don't) it would make irreversible decline in oil production-- if that is indeed what is happening/about to happen-- no big deal. He doesn't seem to be weighing in on whether or not Peak Oil is "real" either way, let alone to an extreme as you imply.

If you have any other quotes by him on Peak Oil I'd be curious to read them.

[LiveFree79]

Peak oil.. of course it is not going to run out over night, but its going to get more and more expensive to get at the stuff thats left. It probably does not make business sense to extract oil form the Canadian sand pits, from the deep sea reserve off the coast of Brazil, or the reserves found in Antarctica. It probably makes more business sense to just grow fuel from plants like sugar, to insulate your house, to change your car to an electric one, to use more public transport, to expand nuclear energy, to produce more stuff domestically etc. Sure there is always going to be fossil fuels around, but there is not always going to be cheap fossil fuels around. I think cheap oil, is a thing of the past. It will not be the end of the world though, there is plenty of alternatives at 150 a barrel.

Cheers


Haha I actually agree with you. I'm watching Out of Gas right now on CNN. V ery informative. ALL oil wells peak at some point. So peak oil to some extent is scientific fact. There is PLENTY of untapped oil in the world but like you said it's extremely expensive and inefficient right now to get it out of the ground. North America has billions and billions of barrels worth in tars and rocks etc. But if you've ever seen how destructive it is getting this oil to the environment, it's no different than mining other things. Million tons of earth being moved daily? And thee environmentalists are just whackos? LOL. Our great great grandchildren will thank the environmentalists when we realize how fucking stupid we have been relying on fossil fuels and oil.

[LiveFree79]

Corn ethanol is completely backfiring. I guess the reason we can't rely on sugar cane ethanol is due to climate? Another thing that pisses me off is the lack of availability of diesel engines in cars and trucks in America. I'd buy a diesel any day over a gas engine even though diesel is a little more expensive.

[Carole]

I posted on the following thread earlier. There is also a video online.


http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?p=1527690#poststop


The Energy Non-Crisis by Lindsey Williams

http://www.reformation.org/energy-non-crisis.html

[Carole]

I don't believe in peak oil. But I do believe that even if oil is abiotic and replenished like trees in a forest at the rate we are going we'll end up running short of it. Look at what human beings have done to the rain forests. Look at how over fished our oceans are. This has nothing to do with "greenies" or socialist this or socialist that. It's scientific fact. The polar ice caps are melting for whatever reason you want to attribute it to....man made or not. The world is becoming more and more polluted. I mean fuck just study how denatured soil is nowadays due to monoculture farming practices. But don't worry Monsanto, technology, and private industry will come save the day. LOL.

When they were drilling in Alaska in the 70's the found tropical growth and a type of bull frog that normally would be found in Louisiana. The book I reference, "The Energy Non-Crisis" by Lindsey Williams, also speaks of tropical growth in Antarctica.

See my post further down for the Lindsey Williams book.

[Carole]

The truth is being suppressed and has been for years. The fact that our government owns 90% of Alaska should tell us something.

I did not believe the 70's energy crisis and I do not believe the current crisis. The more I read, the more convinced I am that it is a lie, and a war against Americans.

We are surrounded by traitors in our government.They want to nationalize oil/energy.

Please read all you can about it. Look up Sen. Hugh Chance of Colorado also.

[damania]

Read Lindsey Williams's book The Energy Non-Crises online (scroll down): http://www.reformation.org/energy-non-crisis.html


There's more oil in Alaska than Saudi Arabia and they don't want you to have it!

[LiveFree79]

So what if there is plenty of oil in Alaska. That doens't mean we should drill it. Alaska is the last wild place in all of the world. I say keep it that way. You don't give a crack addict more crack. He has to go through detox and get clean. Well, America has to detox itself off of oil altogether. We have to "get clean". Drilling in Alaska is a short term fix to a long term problem.

Oh also I suggest William Engdahl's A Century of War..........it covers a lot of the same themes as The Energy Non Crisis but is vastly superior in scope and content. The Prize by Daniel Yergin is a good read as well.

[mekrob]

I'm always a bit dismayed by the anti-intellectual, specifically anti-scientific, attitude of many conservatives. So many people seem to be willing to believe in conspiracy theories rather than learn basic facts about the world. You see this, in this issue, in people believing in Lindsey Williams. And that's exactly what it is: belief. Belief is when you have no proof of something but still having confidence in it. He's never actually presented facts about an "energy non-crisis". He simply says it's so and people believe it. Really ridiculous.

I'd read his book a few years ago, after coming across peak oil. As a student of science, whenever you come to have confidence in a subject, it's best to read as much as possible, no matter how crazy or asinine, from the "other side". So I did. I read about abiotic oil, Lindsey Williams, all of the other crap. And I concluded that it was crap based off of the facts presented. In Williams' case, it's easy: he presents no facts. It's always: "a man told me blah blah blah". He never names anyone, never provides facts for what he says, etc.

I mean, read what he writes:


All the time I was trying my best to find out what it was in specifics, because after all, I did not know all those terms he was using. I was a layman, and as a layman and a Chaplain, I didn't understand some of the data they were discussing, so I cannot present it here.

He can't present it? Probably because it doesn't exist. You get the feeling, while reading the book, that it's just a novel and not an investigative book about the potential for oil reserves in the US. He claims that he had "executive status" because he was a CHAPLAIN! And that's how he came across this information? If you owned a company that produced a couple of millions of barrels of oil every day (and thus millions in profits everyday), would you be handing out executive status to a ******* chaplain? To someone who, according to his own words, doesn't understand what he's hearing?

It's absurd that so many people are willing to believe this garbage rather than pick up a geology book to learn about how oil is extracted and how production models are. Or dig through the facts to show that even with the 4 mpd of production that Lindsey claims we have in Gull Island, that we'd still need to import 8 million barrels per day. And that that number would increase as US domestic production would decrease and consumption would increase.


North America has billions and billions of barrels worth in tars and rocks etc. But if you've ever seen how destructive it is getting this oil to the environment, it's no different than mining other things.

Oil shale isn't very destructive. At least with in-situ extraction methods. What you do, is put pipes around the rocks which they cook the rocks for a few years. That releases the oil and then you can pump it out. However, it takes a large nuclear power plant (1000 MW) to produce half a million barrels a day, IIRC. The main problem is the extremely high cost of production as well as a low EROEI (energy return on energy investment). But for a system based on liquid fuels where electricity currently can't run much of the US fleet, it's a possibility.

Interesting side note, tar sands and oil shale have the energy density (roughly) of a potato. That's just to show how horrible of an energy source it is. "Normal" petroleum has an energy density hundreds of times greater, I believe. (31,000 calories per gallon in gasoline).

[humanic]

Thanks for the thorough post, mekrob. Welcome (back) to the forum!


So what if there is plenty of oil in Alaska. That doens't mean we should drill it. Alaska is the last wild place in all of the world. I say keep it that way. You don't give a crack addict more crack. He has to go through detox and get clean. Well, America has to detox itself off of oil altogether. We have to "get clean". Drilling in Alaska is a short term fix to a long term problem.

Well put.

[mekrob]

http://www.petroleumnews.com/pntruncate/359622793.shtml

Peak production from Kuparuk was 320,000 bpd. Ultimately recoverable oil is expected to be 2.6 bln barrels. However, Lindsey claimed that it was twice the size of Prudhoe Bay. But Prudhoe Bay is 25 bln barrels and had a peak production of 2.0 mpd in the late '80's. This is pretty clear that Kuparuk is far smaller than Prudhoe Bay. This shows a very clear lie or exaggeration by Lindsey. And he's still never offered one shred of evidence for Gull Island which he says is the largest in the world.

From Chapter 17 of his "book":


Prudhoe Bay can produce two (2) million barrels of oil every 24 hours for 20 to 40 years at artesian pressure

Really? 2 mpd for 20 to 40 years? Hmmm...

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/11/prudhoe_bay.gif

That's odd. Cuz Prudhoe Bay never even produced 2 million barrels per day for a SINGLE day. So he's wrong on two accounts. Now why should we trust him for the third count: the claim about Gull Island?

I understand why people are so distrustful of the government. But whenever you believe anything, read what the other side has to offer as well. Do a little bit of homework. Don't just believe every word that someone, who's distrustful of the government, says.

I'll give Williams credit. He wrote a great novel. I mean, look at how many people actually believe what he's saying! It reminds me a lot of the War of the Worlds scare many years ago. But people: it's just a novel.

[humanic]

I'll give Williams credit. He wrote a great novel. I mean, look at how many people actually believe what he's saying! It reminds me a lot of the War of the Worlds scare many years ago. But people: it's just a novel.

Except that if anything, Williams wouldn't be scaring anyone; he would be lulling them into a false sense of security.

[Zippyjuan]

Gull Island is less than ten miles (12km) from Prudhoe Bay. No way is it larger than Saudi Arabia or contain more oil. The main Saudi field covers hundreds of miles.
Would you like to see a photo if the island? Here it is with the hills surrounding Prudhoe Bay in the background. http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/gull-island-alaska.html

The status of Saudi Oil:
http://www.iags.org/n0331043.htm

New study raises doubts about Saudi oil reserves

With over 260 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, a quarter of the world's total, Saudi Arabia is not only the top foreign supplier to the United States - the world's largest energy consumer - but also essentially the sole source of liquidity in the oil market. According to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA), the world will become more dependent on Arabian oil in the next two decades. To meet global demand for oil, Saudi Arabia will need to produce 13.6 million barrels a day (mbd) by 2010 and 19.5 mbd by 2020. Both the International Energy Agency and EIA assume Saudi oil output will double over the next 15 to 20 years. In a new study soon to be released, Matthew R. Simmons, president of Simmons and Company International, a specialized energy investment banking firm, contends that this is not likely to happen. He argues that Saudi Arabia's oil fields now are in decline, that the country will not be able to satisfy the world's thirst for oil in coming years and that its capacity will not climb much higher than its current capacity of 10mbd. Considering the growth in demand, this could easily spark a global energy crisis.

Simmons analyzed 200 technical papers on Saudi reserves by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and his work was peer reviewed by a dozen senior technical experts. What he discovered tells a different story than the conventional wisdom.

Saudi Arabia has over 300 recognized reservoirs but 90% of its oil comes from the five super giant fields discovered between 1940 and 1965. Since the 1970s there haven't been new discoveries of giant fields. The most significant of the oil fields is Ghawar. Found in 1948, the 300-mile-long sliver near the Persian Gulf is the world's largest oil field and accounts for 55%-60% of all Saudi oil produced. Ghawar's current proven reserves are 12% of the world's total. The field produces 5 mbd, which is 6.25% of the world's oil production. According to Simmons, Ghawar's northern regions are almost depleted. Two other giant fields, Abqaiq and Berri, also seem to have peaked in the 1970s.

Simmons analyzed 200 technical papers on Saudi reserves by the Society of Petroleum Engineers and his work was peer reviewed by a dozen senior technical experts. What he discovered tells a different story than the conventional wisdom.

Saudi Arabia has over 300 recognized reservoirs but 90% of its oil comes from the five super giant fields discovered between 1940 and 1965. Since the 1970s there haven't been new discoveries of giant fields. The most significant of the oil fields is Ghawar. Found in 1948, the 300-mile-long sliver near the Persian Gulf is the world's largest oil field and accounts for 55%-60% of all Saudi oil produced. Ghawar's current proven reserves are 12% of the world's total. The field produces 5 mbd, which is 6.25% of the world's oil production. According to Simmons, Ghawar's northern regions are almost depleted. Two other giant fields, Abqaiq and Berri, also seem to have peaked in the 1970s.

Saudi Aramco officials flew especially to Washington to refute Simmons' analysis. In a speech before the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, Nansen G. Saleri, a manager of reservoir management for Saudi Aramco said Saudi Arabia can maintain production capacity at the current rate of 10 mbd for the rest of this decade and if needed they could increase maximum output by 20-50% within a decade. His colleague Mahmoud Abdul-Baqi, Saudi Aramco's vice president for exploration also expressed optimism about the future of their industry. "We have a lot of area to explore and find a lot of oil and gas. Our track record shows we delivered for the past 70 years and we will continue to deliver in the next 70 years and beyond." Saudi Aramco says that with more investments it can expand its capacity to 12 mbd or more. But according to the New York Times, privately, Saudi oil officials are less self-assured, cautioning that production beyond 12 mbd would damage the oil fields. Even if their prediction is wrong, the road to the 19.5 million barrels a day by 2020 projected by the EIA is very far.

Some economists who reviewed Simmons' work rejected it on the basis that if oil prices rise high enough, advanced recovery techniques will be applied, averting supply problems. But Simmons disputes this wisdom. For a decade the technological revolution which includes horizontal drilling accelerated the extraction and created "monstrous decline rate." He is adamant that the Saudi oil miracle is fading. "The next generation of Saudi oil will also be harder to extract and therefore more expensive. In 2-3 years we will have conclusive evidence that Saudi oil is peaking," he told Energy Security. Furthermore, he explained that in Saudi Arabia, seawater is injected into the giant fields to pressure the oil toward the top of the reservoir. The problem is that over time, the volume of water that is pumped along with the oil increases, and the volume of oil declines proportionally until it becomes uneconomical to lift the oil.

Analyzing Saudi Arabia's capacity is not an easy task. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, has not provided production data for more than two decades. OPEC, the IEA and EIA data systems shed little light on what underlies Saudi sand. "Their predictive track record has been awful. In the land of the blind, reliable OPEC data is either untrusted or non-existent " Simmons said. Simmons calls for a new era of true energy transparency. "The IEA should roll up their sleeves and work to obtain far better demand and cost data and far better decline data for non-OPEC oil. OPEC should provide field by field production and well-by-well data, budget details and third party engineering reports."

"The entire world assumes Saudi Arabia can carry everyone's energy needs on its back cheaply. If this turns out not to work there is no 'plan B.' Global spare capacity is now 'all Saudi Arabia.' This is the world's insurance policy and no third party inspector has examined it for years. Conventional wisdom says 'don't worry. trust today,' but if conventional wisdom is wrong, the world faces a giant energy crisis." Calling for large-scale research into new energy sources, he said: "If all these worries are wrong, it is like our preoccupation with nuclear war or future global warming. But even if part of it becomes true and not expected, the results are awful." Coming from someone who has advised the secretary of energy and the 2000 Bush campaign, this is a warning worth heeding.




Even if you beleive that oil is produced biologically even today, it is being used up at a much faster rate than it can be reproduced.

New technology takes lots of time and money to develop and distribution systems put into place. If there was a sharp decline in oil available, we are not able to quickly transition to something else.

Biofuels have a limited ability to be used. Their yields are not that great and growing plants for energy for fuel comes at the expense of growing plants for food- we are already seeing the impact of that with respect to corn based ethanol. It also requires lots of water which is another recource becoming more scarce.

I am not agianst drilling in Alaska or off the coasts. We will have to eventually. But there is not enough oil in those places to even replace our imports which are over 10 million barrels a day.

[damania]

It doesn't matter how far Gull Island is from Prudhoe Bay. The fact is the chemistry of the oil is different than that oil from Prudhoe Bay. Also there's been the biggest discovery of oil ever in southern Alaska. Google Swanson River oil. You will see it's 5x as big as Prudhoe Bay.

Lindsey Williams goes into details on how they're pumping natural gas back into the ground instead of bringing it down here to the states. Do you have any stats on how much natural gas they are bringing out of the area?

As to the Prudhoe Bay production, here is the quote from Wikipedia:
Cumulative North Slope oil peaked in 1998 at 2 million barrels per day (320,000 m³/d) (Greater Prudhoe Bay: 1.5 million barrels per day (240,000 m³/d), but had fallen to 943,000 barrels per day (149,900 m³/d) in 2005,[4] while Greater Prudhoe averaged 411,000 bbl/d (65,300 m³/d) in December, 2006 and Prudhoe itself averaged 285,000 bbl/d (45,300 m³/d).[5] Total production from 1977 through 2005 was 13 billion barrels (2,100,000,000 m³).

I think you will have to find something more substantial to discredit him on. Is he wrong on the fact that the Arabs are buying our debt and holding up our economy, or that Henry Kissinger went around forcing all the arabs into the agreement to buy our Treasuries? Is he wrong that the pipeline with the huge overrun cost $20 billion? Is he wrong when he said the pipeline in the midwest was shutoff during the oil crises of 1973? Is he wrong when he quotes people that have seen drilling in protected forests?

I'd like to see you really discredit Lindsey Williams. Come on you've got to do better than this. Can you prove there isn't oil in Alaska? I cannot believe we have do not have as much oil as Saudi Arabia up there. There's NO WAY there's only a little bit of oil in Alaska when Russia is finding all kinds of oil in their Arctic.

PS: You've got to see his other video in video.google.com where he interviews the banker in jail where he talks about about the 13 families that control banking.

[Zippyjuan]

Size in this case does matter. If you are an oil company and wanting to make profits and you have an oil reserve that has been in decline for ten years now (since 1998 according to your Wiki info) and knew that just seven and a half miles away was this supposedly over 300 square mile pool of oil (that is the aproximate size of Ghawar which this find is said to be larger than), would you not want to put in a couple of wells since you are already in the area and even have a pipeline to carry the oil so the only real expense is drilling and constructing the wells? With that much oil. they could start dictating the oil market and reap larger profits. Even if they did not have a permit to drill in those waters, they could drill a diagonal well from where they do have permits and reach it if it was that big.

It is a myth.

How many wells were dug? Did they find enough that came up with the same quality of oil to believe it was indeed one large pool and not seperate finds? One or two or even a dozen wells could not tell you that.
Your own figures confirm that Prudhoe Bay itself did not achieve 2m barrels a day but 1.5 million. You are including all North Slope production.

The pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez has a maximum capacity of 20m barrels a day so there would be no reason to produce more than that from the wells.
http://www.commerce.state.ak.us/dca/commdb/CIS.cfm?Comm_Boro_Name=Prudhoe+Bay

At this time, any Artic oil reserves are in the "might be" or "could be" category- words sometimes followed by "up to 25% of the world's reserves". None of this has been proven yet. In part, that has been due to the climate. Frozen tundra is not easy to operate in to try to explore for oil and gas. Warmer temperatures and higher energy prices are making it more feasable to explore the regions now.

World demand continues to rise faster than the discovery of new sources. The large and easy to ge to oil has probably mostly been located already and so they are going after deeper and less accesable and smaller pools. Prudhoe Bay is not one large pool but several smaller ones.

Do you mean this Swanson River field? http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5261/is_199305/ai_n20382660

The legendary Swanson River oil field passes into a new phase of gas development. Within the year, the legendary Swanson River field, Alaska's first major oil discovery and father of Cook Inlet petroleum development, will be converted to produce mainly gas as the oil reservoir nears the end of its natural life.

The North Slope today produces more oil in three months than Swanson River has during the past 35 years. However, it was Swanson River that launched Alaska into the oil age, serving as the inspiration for additional exploration that led to oil and gas development throughout ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.
Google does not fine me any mention of any new oil discoveries there. Maybe you can provide a news link. Swanson River oil discovery occured in 1957 and this article above is from 1993 saying its oil was pretty much gone by then but their is still natural gas there.

[mekrob]

Lindsey Williams goes into details on how they're pumping natural gas back into the ground instead of bringing it down here to the states. Do you have any stats on how much natural gas they are bringing out of the area?

You're pretty dense, aren't ya? I just got through saying that there are too many people that will believe hype rather than look into the facts and counterarguments. Have you ever considered a possibility for WHY you may want to pump natural gas back into the field?

The reason has to do with pressure. In order to extract oil, there must be greater pressure beneath the rocks and above it. If that occurs, then oil (or any liquid) will flow upwards. When you suck through a straw, you are doing just that. You decrease the pressure at the top of the straw and that forces the liquid at the bottom, with a higher pressure, to move upwards until it hits your mouth. All liquids work the same way.

What happens in oil fields is that much of the time, there is an impermeable rock above the oil. This means that the oil, which is not very dense, can not move above the rock although it "wants" to. When you drill through that rock, the oil will move up if there is enough pressure. This often causes gushers. However, as the oil is extracted (or gushes out a century ago), the pressure decreases. This means that less oil flows through as the pressure gradient decreases.

Eventually, you will reach a point where the pressure at the "oil pool" is equal to the ground pressure and there will be no flow. In order to produce a flow, you must either pump it out (see the stereotypical Texan field with pumps) or put another liquid into the field. There are numerous liquids that can be used, all with different properties and thus outcomes. A common one is water as seen in Saudi Arabia. They pump tens of millions of barrels in for less than 10 million barrels of oil (per day). Nitrogen is another as in Yemen and Mexico but it has HORRIBLE repercussions just a few years later. CO2 is another. However, none of these are great options for Alaskan oil. The water is saltwater from the sea which means it would corrode the pipes - bad idea. And no CO2 or N2 to pump in. So they use the natural gas that is produced alongside the oil.

So you can either have oil or gas. And considering we don't have natural gas pipelines in Alaska, it kind of makes sense, actually complete sense, to pump in the natural gas to "maintain" pressure so that you can pump the oil out for use.

Or you can believe that it's "evil corporations" that are trying to screw us out of NG. Take the anti-scientific view if you want. Or you can take a physics class, open a damn book and think about it.


It doesn't matter how far Gull Island is from Prudhoe Bay. The fact is the chemistry of the oil is different than that oil from Prudhoe Bay.

Where's the proof that Gull Island is actually able to produce anything? I've already shown Lindsey VASTLY overstating the facts from Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk. He's presented no proof that Gull Island is actually a major or even a minor oil field. And his word is already shattered based on other accounts. So why would we trust him on Gull Island? Why do YOU trust him?


Can you prove there isn't oil in Alaska?

Wow. You can't read at all can you? We've already said that there IS oil in Alaska. Just that it's vastly overstated in myths propagated by Lindsey.


There's NO WAY there's only a little bit of oil in Alaska when Russia is finding all kinds of oil in their Arctic.

Tens of billions of barrels is hardly a little bit. Russia isn't finding hundreds of billions of barrels in the Arctic. They are finding similar numbers. Plus, they have an area that covers the Arctic much larger than Alaska.


I cannot believe we have do not have as much oil as Saudi Arabia up there.

LOL Idiots. It's not about BELIEF. It's about FACTS. You want to believe? Go to Church. You want to actually say that we have as much oil as KSA? Then prove it. Otherwise, you offer nothing but well...nothing. You're simply saying to believe it because you want it to be there.

I'll put it nice and easy for you: there has never been proven to be a field larger than Prudhoe Bay in North America. If you can prove otherwise, show me. But we've heard from Lindsey that there exists not one, but TWO fields in Alaska that are each at least twice as large as Prudhoe Bay. One of those, Kuparuk, is about one FIFTH the size of Prudhoe Bay. I've proven that. That means, it's smaller (ie. not larger) than Prudhoe Bay. Secondly, he's never proven that Gull Island even has an oil field. He simply says so.

I find it highly appropriate that people actually believe the shit he shovels. Why? Because he's a minister. He's used to getting people to believe in BS. What is he? An engineer? A geologist? Nope. A minister. What a joke.

Swanson River oil?

Never found anything major on it. Just was Zippyjuan found. It was a medium sized field found in the '50's that practically dead. He says that it's been proven to be 5x larger (and you copy that). Really? Is there any, Oh, I don't know, PROOF? Never seen it in OGJ or Rigzone nor anything else. So who's proven it?

Notice that he always says "someone told me". I imagine "someone" is "God" or a voice inside of his head. Why doesn't he name anyone?

I did find this interesting clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mtalqk6aglg) from Lindsey Williams.

He says, around 30 second mark, that Prudhoe Bay HAS (not even had) enough oil to supply the ENTIRE United States for 200 years. We use 7.5 BILLION barrels of oil a year. That means he thinks and propagates that the US has a single oil field with 1.5 trillion barrels of oil in it. That is roughly the amount of economic oil that is left in the entire world. Oh yeah, and there is that pesky problem with Prudhoe Bay only supply 1% of the US. Silly me. How he thinks it can produce 100% of our oil for even a single year is beyond me. It can't even produce all of the oil used by California for a year.

Face it. From the two very obvious LIES in his book about Prudhoe Bay and now this whopper of a LIE, it's becoming to seem like those that believe him about Gull Island are simply willfully blind. Perhaps you'd like to believe that the Sun is dragged across the sky by a Sun God? Or that Sun revolves around the Earth? That the Earth is flat? Any other things you'd like to BELIEVE in rather than simply prove?

Come on, man. You are really looking pathetic for continuing to believe this BS that he's feeding you. Just think for yourself.

[asgardshill]

Eventually, you will reach a point where the pressure at the "oil pool" is equal to the ground pressure and there will be no flow. In order to produce a flow, you must either pump it out (see the stereotypical Texan field with pumps) or put another liquid into the field. There are numerous liquids that can be used, all with different properties and thus outcomes. A common one is water as seen in Saudi Arabia. They pump tens of millions of barrels in for less than 10 million barrels of oil (per day). Nitrogen is another as in Yemen and Mexico but it has HORRIBLE repercussions just a few years later.

Besides the supply infrastructure needed and the cost, what are the repercussions of using nitrogen? I thought it was an inert gas and comprised 78 percent of the atmosphere, so its not intuitively obvious to me why using it would cause downhole problems later.

[mekrob]

Besides the supply infrastructure needed and the cost, what are the repercussions of using nitrogen? I thought it was an inert gas and comprised 78 percent of the atmosphere, so its not intuitively obvious to me why using it would cause downhole problems later.

Nitrogen injection works like other injection programs. Gas goes in, pressure rises, oil pumps out. But with most injection programs, the average rate of decline of the production rate (the negative acceleration) is around 5% or so after peak production. So if peak production, say for Prudhoe Bay, is 1.6 mpd, then the next year, it will produce ≈95% of the production from last year (1.52 mpd). This rate, in the case of Prudhoe Bay, increases over time so that, as seen from the graph a few posts back, the production rate is fairly linear with time. It has started to level off since 2000.

But in the cases for nitrogen, which are few, this isn't so. When nitrogen injection programs were begun in 2000 in Cantarell (on Mexican side of GOM), production was 1.6 mpd. With N2 injection, production reached a peak of 2.1 mpd (30% increase). But since then, production rates have fallen sharply. Decline rates at the field started out at 14% a year:


Luis Ramírez Corzo, head of PEMEX's exploration and production division, announced on August 12, 2004 that the actual oil output from Cantarell is forecast to decline steeply from 2006 onwards, at a rate of 14% per year

Wikipedia

However, this rates have increased pretty rapidly nearly every year and were up to 18% last year. It's estimated that oil production this year will only be about 1 mpd which is 33% lower than what it was producing just 8 years ago. '09 will likely see another 15% drop in production.

Green Car Congress (http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/01/mexicos-cantare.html)

What nitrogen did was basically sacrifice future oil production for current oil production. It increased dramatically the rate of oil production from 2000 to '04 but then afterwards, it's suffered dramatic decreases in production. The main problem is that it doesn't provide stability. With 4-5% decline rates, companies and nations are able to adjust accordingly. Same with the market, to move money and resources to new fields. But when the world loses a 100,000 bpd production or more every year just from a single field, it causes a lot of volatility in the markets since the decline rates come so quickly. The rapid decline in Mexican exports is a very significant factor in the run-up of the price of oil over the past few years.

Cantarell is not a run of the mill field. At peak, it produced 60% of Mexican oil and provided something like 10% of all revenue for the entire state of Mexico. Thought the illegal immigration problem was big when they were shipping more oil to us than any other nation but Canada? Wait until they're IMPORTING oil at $200/barrel. That's gonna be fun.

[asgardshill]

Thanks for the explanation, mekrob.

[Zippyjuan]

Some countries pump water into oil fields to try to get more oil out- the oil tends to floart on it, but that dilutes the quality of the oil. Saudi Arabia has been injecting water.
The list of coutries switching from being net oil exporters to net importers keeps growing. Mexico is expected to join us in about six years. It is a combination of oil field production dropping and domestic consumption in the oil producing countries. Add to that growing demand around the rest of the world.
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/05/oil-exporters-a.html

Those of you in the "Oil is a bubble" camp should read this article in today's WSJ, titled, Oil Exporters Are Unable To Keep Up With Demand:

"The world's top oil producers are proving unable to put more barrels on thirsty world markets despite sky-high prices, a shift that defies traditional market logic and looks set to continue.

Fresh data from the U.S. Department of Energy show the amount of petroleum products shipped by the world's top oil exporters fell 2.5% last year, despite a 57% increase in prices, a trend that appears to be holding true this year as well.

There are several reasons behind the net-export decline. Soaring profits from high-price crude have fueled a boom in oil demand in Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East, leaving less oil for export. At the same time, aging fields and sluggish investments have caused exports to drop significantly in Mexico, Norway and, most recently, Russia. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries also cut production early last year and didn't move to boost supplies again until last fall.

In all, according to the Energy Department figures, net exports by the world's top 15 suppliers, which account for 45% of all production, fell by nearly a million barrels to 38.7 million barrels a day last year. The drop would have been steeper if not for heightened output in less-developed countries such as Angola and Libya, whose economies have yet to become big energy consumers."



We not only have strong demand, we have an ongoing supply problem. The map below reveals that the world's top 15 exporters are shipping 1 million barrels a day less in 2008 than in 2007:





Source:
Oil Exporters Are Unable To Keep Up With Demand
Domestic Needs, Sluggish Investment Crimp Shipments
NEIL KING JR. and SPENCER SWARTZ
WSJ, May 29, 2008; Page A8
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121200725158327151.html





There are other sources of oil like tar sands and oil shale, but it seems that the cheap and easy to get to oil is pretty much all out there now.

[bander87]

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

Lots of other scary stuff in there!

[youngbuck]

Oil Is NOT A Fossil Fuel - It Is Abiotic
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Contributing Writer

It seems so easy to believe this idea. Oil contributes greatly to polluting the environment. The industrial age has intensified its use greatly. The more we use, the more we lose fresh air, even the ozone. And therefore it seems almost divine justice that we are about to exhaust this so-called "fossil fuel" within several decades and two hundred years, this cursed blessed hydrocarbon which took millions of years to produce.

And, therefore, it almost seems we get what we deserve: a petro-powered society in which once the oil supposedly runs out we will suffer mass annihilations of population, famine, war, total deceleration, a withdrawal into the caves. And, therefore, we should have our prophet From the Wilderness.com, Michael Ruppert, predict this on an ongoing basis. And his biblical tome, Crossing the Rubicon shall subhead the big idea: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. Well, no, not so, kimosabe, not by a long shot.

To begin with, oil is not a fossil fuel. This is a theory put forth by 18th century scientists. Within 50 years, Germany and France's scientists had attacked the theory of petroleum's biological roots. In fact, oil is abiotic, not the product of long decayed biological matter. And oil, for better or for worse, is not a non-renewable resource. It, like coal, and natural gas, replenishes from sources within the mantle of earth. This is the real and true science of oil. Read all about it.

In fact, working in the 1950s, Russian and Ukrainian scientists, cut off from the Western World's oil supply, applied their keen minds to the problem and, by the 1960s, had thoroughly demolished the idea of oil as a 'fossil fuel,' Is it any wonder then that Russia is one of if not the leading producers and exporters of oil. The isolation of the Cold War forced Russia to dig deeper, literally, to find oil deeper in the earth in some places, and to look in other places where no one had thought to look to reveal more. This while America feels incumbent upon itself, since it claims oil production and discovery has peaked and will fade to nothing in several decades, that America's feels it must make war to take other people's oil: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Caspian Basin, Sudan, etcetera.

And to others who have oil, it must either rattle its saber, as with Venezuela, threaten to kill its president who will not buckle and sell all his oil to America. And with the Saudis we will protect them from their own terrorists and any Saddam that comes along. And we will get in bed with them so long as we can have the lion's share of their oil, and the say-so as to who gets the rest. And therein lays the evil genius, secret and sham of the 'Peak Oil' put on.

If oil, as coal, and natural gas, restores itself by nature, if we will more likely run into it then out of it, how do we continue to make money on it? Certainly not by giving oil away at some reasonable price. After World War II, oil was about 25 cents a gallon at the pump. Even given the spiraling inflation since then-last week I paid $3.50 a gallon for it in New York City, 14 times that price. A week after the summer holiday season ended (the peak usage season), oil is down to $3 a gallon. I doubt if I'm the only one who notices oil's price shoot up every summer, then slither down a bit after, and then climb up in the middle of the winter when the heating bills waft in, and old and poor people who can't afford the hikes begin to freeze and die in their own homes.

Someone is shilling for the American petro-brokers, because 'Peak Oil' is a wonderful concept to use to go out and war for "the control" of oil resources. So that a barrel of crude can suddenly jump from $20 to $70 to $100 a barrel, or to two, three or four hundred dollars a barrel, therefore providing exponentially expanding profits for oil companies and oil suppliers who relish the idea of having an "inelastic demand" for their gasoline. 'Peak Oil,' as writer Dave McGowan points out in his priceless Newsletters, which you can find at Educate-Yourself.org, 'Peak Oil' will even drive oil companies like Shell, to attempt to shut down an incredibly profitable facility, like the one it owns in Bakersfield, California,.

This Bakersfield facility, like others in California, runs along the San Andreas fault line, which abounds along its route through the state with rich crude oil and natural gas fields, products of seepage from the earth's mantle, from the tectonic plates, as Dave would say, 'passing gas' and rumbling as they move. In fact, oil and the family of hydrocarbons are often found at volcanoes and fault lines, as they are in deserts, watery gulfs, and sea basins. Let's demystify it all.

The real reason a company like Shell Oil would close a facility like Bakersfield-to bulldoze it, stop it-is to halt the production, refining, and supply to drive up the price of oil. It's that goddamn simple and ugly. And we're doing the same thing today in Iraq, bulldozing a country, to control and reduce its oil supply. Never mind supplying a botched democracy that we can't even supply for ourselves in America.

Concurrently, we are also bringing apocalypse to its population, thinning it with more than 100,000 dead, tearing its infrastructure apart, water, sewage, power, media, hospitals, name it. We are decentralizing Iraq's cities, driving people out of them or out of the country, or bombing them back to the Stone Age as our generals are so found of saying. And Iraq, like Afghanistan, is the paradigm of the future, of how we will engulf and devour countries, cities, even our own, like New Orleans for instance, whose Gulf is a rich source of oil, and through whose ports pass a large percentage of our nation's supply.

The U.S. political henchmen are thinning the Iraq population to fatten the profits of the oil barons like David Rockefeller. In McGowan's own inimical words, from page three of another Newsletter:

THE ROCKEFELLER CORPORATE OIL MAJORS should be thrown into jail for selling fraudulently priced items as well as cheating on generations of their corporate taxes (due to tax write off 'depletion allowances,' which they knew were lies. This abiotic oil story is perhaps the largest underground ((no pun intended)) scam story of the past 200 years: an ongoing corporate success of pricing abiotic renewable oil to act out an artificial scarcity, combined with all the related ideologies required to sell that motif of artificial scarcity, and all the millions they have made and still make on the fraud, and all the tax dollars they have, stolen, etc."

In this concept of 'Peak Oil' you have the system's secret to hold the world hostage. Not that we shouldn't take care to not overuse oil, not that we should avoid conservation, or even to stop poking the planet, and actually seek purely organic ways in which to live. But now, now that we are here, and have billions of people to sustain, we must not let vast numbers of them be harmed, murdered, abused, because of feigned shortages, economies overturned by outrageous prices, everyday working people be bankrupted by same, to get to work, to warm their homes, to cook their families' food, to participate in an organized society. We must not make the beasts, the Bilderbergers, the elites, the oligarchs use the 'Peak Oil' lever to bend the backs of the world on its wrack.

Believing in 'Peak Oil' is not a price to pay to avoid the price of drilling for oil in new ways, for setting fair and unwavering commodity prices. The cost of blood and lives and the future of nations are too much to pay for the folly of 'Peak Oil.' In fact, realizing that oil is a self-renewing resource puts the neocon agenda into a new perspective. Instead of seeing 'Peak Oil' as the end days of technological civilization literally losing its power, see this idea as the further manipulation towards fascist power and subjugation that it is: still another way to scare the world into believing its resources are terminally finite, and that we must be led into another and another war that must be waged to survive.

If we do not accept the lie, the manipulation of 'Peak Oil," it is not to say we can't devise new systems to bring life and the world forward. It is only to put the petroleum barons on notice. It then gives us a chance to bring people together, to tear away the false scarcity, to share resources, to experience peace, to alleviate poverty with the abundance of renewable hydrocarbon resources, as with the abundance of the human imagination. Or else we end up with another Ruppert rubric, Sizing Up the Competition - Is China the Endgame?, another piece of priceless paranoia to peddle for perdition, another dark ops for a bright new generation of believers. More war, endless war it is, to enrich the already rich, to impoverish the already poor.

Do not let this happen, even in the short run. As reported by the Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency, files: "THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF OIL."

"Before hurricane Katrina reached the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, most oil companies had taken the precautionary measure of evacuating their 30,000 offshore employees and shuttering their platforms and oil rigs. Therefore, it was not a surprise that on Aug. 30, some 95% of the Gulf's production of 1.5 million barrels of oil per day was 'shut.' By Sept. 6, that figure had dropped to 58%, with close to half of the oil production capacity having been restored.

"On Sept. 2, the 26-nation International Energy Agency agreed to make Available to the U.S., 2 million barrels of oil per day, half petroleum and half gasoline. In other words, when the gasoline shipments start arriving from Europe in the next week or so, along with the 1 million barrels per day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which are being released under IEA guidelines, the U.S. will be swimming in oil."

And then there's this from the LaRouche Executive Intelligence Report News Service: "When Sen. Byron Dorgan (ND-N.D.) introduced his Windfall Profits Act on Sept. 7, he estimated that the major oil companies were stealing $7 billion more per month in profits than they had been 18 months ago. There is no shortage of oil." Again from EIRNS:

"THE HOUSE OF WINDSOR-PIVOTED OIL CARTEL IS POISED TO CARRY ON ITS GLOBAL LOOTING OPERATION BY PUSHING THE PRICE OF OIL ON THROUGH $70 PER BARREL. Key to this is that the oil cartel controls all the critical facets of the industry, as a single integrated system: (1) in the U.S., the oil production system (aside from the imports); (2) the oil refinery network; (3) the oil distribution network; and (4) international, the oil derivatives market. It extracts a margin of $40 per barrel of petroleum in pure theft to try to bail out the bankrupt world financial-monetary system."

From the Observer, 9/11/05: THE OBSERVER OF
LONDON DESCRIBED KATRINA AS HALLIBURTON'S "PERFECT STORM." Halliburton stock has risen 10% since Katrina on expectation of "Iraq-style" contracts-no-bid, cost-plus bonanzas. The Observer notes that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who leads the fight against the massive corruption by Halliburtn and other Bush/Cheney cronies in Iraq, is 'keeping a very close eye' on the contracts now being put together for Katrina reconstruction.

The Observer also notes that Joe Allbaugh, Bush's first FEMA chief and now a lobbyist in D.C., with Halliburton's KBR as a client, is known as the "Karl Rove" of contracting."

And on and on it goes. And thanks to men of good will like Dave McGowan, Lyndon LaRouche, geologist Thomas J. Brown, and many others, for their knowledge, their courage, and their guiding light. Let us follow wherever it shines, far from the "Peak Oil' precipice to a level playing field for humanity. We have nothing to lose but our shortages.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer residing in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.

The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of Online Journal.
Email editor@onlinejournal.com
© 1998-2005 Online Journal. All rights reserved.
You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.

http://onlinejournal.com/Commentary/091705Mazza/091705mazza.html

[BenIsForRon]

If you want to understand peak oil and its implications watch this movie.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8183966529898602701&hl=en

The only proof anybody presents of abiotic oil are studies by the soviets from the 1960's. Does this not seem silly to anyone one else?

[mekrob]

The only proof anybody presents of abiotic oil are studies by the soviets from the 1960's. Does this not seem silly to anyone one else?


Of course not. Libertarians and conservatives absolutely love the Soviets and other communists.



In fact, working in the 1950s, Russian and Ukrainian scientists, cut off from the Western World's oil supply, applied their keen minds to the problem and, by the 1960s, had thoroughly demolished the idea of oil as a 'fossil fuel,' Is it any wonder then that Russia is one of if not the leading producers and exporters of oil. The isolation of the Cold War forced Russia to dig deeper, literally, to find oil deeper in the earth in some places, and to look in other places where no one had thought to look to reveal more. This while America feels incumbent upon itself, since it claims oil production and discovery has peaked and will fade to nothing in several decades, that America's feels it must make war to take other people's oil: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Caspian Basin, Sudan, etcetera.

Right Cuz it's not like the Soviets were involved in Afghanistan at all. Oh wait...Nor were they involved in the Caspian Basin...oh wait, they were: TWICE. Those must have had nothing to do with oil, right?

If oil is abiotic and comes from deep within the Earth like abiotists believe (again, without proof), then why does nearly every single oil field in the world (all except one, I think) come from sedimentary formations? Sedimentary rocks are rocks that were weathered from the surface, breaking them down and compiling them in layers. In these layers like all of the fossils. Coincidence?

Meanwhile, the rocks that come from beneath the surface are igneous rocks. And not a single igneous rock formation has been found to have oil in it. Not a single one. If oil is from deep beneath, then wouldn't magma, which later cools to form igneous rocks, contain large amounts of petroleum? But it doesn't. Methane, the most basic hydrocarbon, is found in limited quantities in volcanic gases. It's one of dozens of gases that are released during eruptions and vents, but it's percentage of the total gas release is very small. There's simply no way to assert that oil is made from the Earth.


This Bakersfield facility, like others in California, runs along the San Andreas fault line, which abounds along its route through the state with rich crude oil and natural gas fields, products of seepage from the earth's mantle, from the tectonic plates, as Dave would say, 'passing gas' and rumbling as they move. In fact, oil and the family of hydrocarbons are often found at volcanoes and fault lines, as they are in deserts, watery gulfs, and sea basins. Let's demystify it all.

Where's the volcanoes in Saudi Arabia? In Iraq? In Iran? In Russia? They don't have many if any (in the case of KSA). No major fault lines. Little tectonic activity in the Middle East yet more than half of all oil left is in that region. According to what this article asserts, there should be plenty of tectonic and volcanic activity in the region but there isn't any.

Abiotic oil is in the same camp as Lindsey Williams. It's so easy to disprove the theory because each answer they give only prompts another question.

If you believe in abiotic oil and that oil is everywhere as they claim, borrow a few million and drill in your back yard. If you're so convinced then you should be willing to do whatever it takes. I mean, think of all of the unlimited oil you'd have access to and then you could sell it for $140/barrel! You'd be rich!

[Zippyjuan]

Let's just take a look at the Russian oil situation. Like all other countries, they are facing declines in their oil.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011205_no_free_pt2.shtml

Russia
Proponents of abiotic oil like to point out that although Russia's oil production peaked in 1987, their output has increased tremendously over the past several years. They link this to the Russian development of the abiotic oil hypothesis, which is held by a small minority of Russian scientists, to claim that Russia's production is growing because of abiotic oil. This is nonsense. In the first place, Russian oil production dropped precipitously in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The current surge in oil production is in large part due to the revival of the Russian oil industry. Oil is just about the only thing currently holding up the Russian economy. They are overproducing their oil fields and, as we have said numerous times, this overproduction will catch up with them. Russian discovery peaked in 1960, and has since diminished to almost nothing. Colin Campbell's model suggested a secondary peak around 2010, followed by another steep decline due to overproduction.21 However, it now appears the Russian production is already approaching its second peak.


The Moscow News has reported that Yuri Shafranik, the head of the Russian Union of Oil and Gas Producers, stated on November 9th 2004 that Russia has almost reached its maximum production and the decline will start within two years. Mr. Shafranik referred to experts from the International Energy Agency.22 The Moscow News also recently reported that Russian oil producers have cut back on drilling. Production drilling fell by 3.4% in the first nine months of 2004, while exploratory drilling fell by 20.6%.23 Such a large drop in exploratory drilling could indicate that investors see a trend of diminishing returns from further exploration.

Investment Company Finam, headquartered in Moscow, reported on its investigation into the Russian oil industry in a special investment bulletin issued on August 17, 2004. In this report, Finam stated that the boost in Russian oil production was no miracle, but was entirely due to capital expenditures to rejuvenate old fields using enhanced and aggressive recovery methods. Western investors and subcontractors have pressed Russia into adopting these more aggressive recovery techniques. The production techniques traditionally employed in Russia result in a gentler production profile, with a longer build up time to peak, a lower but longer peak, and a gradual decline. The more aggressive western techniques build quickly to a higher but shorter lived peak and then diminish more rapidly. These western techniques, which include intense hydraulic fracturing, submersible electric pumps and hydro-fracturing on newly drilled horizontal wells, damage the fields and result in short-lived production and even the collapse of fields. These techniques are applied by the global majors outside of the U.S. and Europe because of regulations on maximum rates of hydrocarbon production in developed countries which effectively ban such practices.24

The so-called western production techniques result in a production spike with no plateau at peak, and decline rates that seldom fall below 20%. Mature Russian fields are seeing water cut oscillating between 60% and 90%. Just this year (2004), Yukos, Sibneft and Rosneft have all announced plans to cut production. According to Finam, Yukos faces big problems due to declining production.25 And they will likely be only the first Russian oil company to feel the pinch.

From this discussion, it can be seen that Russian oil production is no miracle of abiotic oil. It is entirely due to capital investment and the switch to aggressive recovery techniques. And the Russian oil industry will pay a heavy price for overproduction.

Dneiper-Donetsk Basin, Ukraine
Most abiotic supporters point to the Dneiper-Donets basin as the major support for their argument. The basis for these claims rests upon a paper delivered before a symposium in 1994, authored by V.A. Krayushkin, J.F. Kenney and others, "Recent applications of the modern theory of abiogenic hydrocarbon origins: drilling and development of oil and gas fields in the Dneiper-Donetsk basin."26 While Dr. Krayushkin appears to avoid any debate with skeptics, Dr. Kenney has been most vociferous in his attacks upon the biological theory of oil generation.

The authors of this study claim that the Dneiper-Donetsk basin was chosen as the area for their study because it had already been deemed to possess no potential for petroleum production.27 However, the authors did not mention that the Dneiper-Donetsk basin is the home to most of Ukraine's proven oil reserves, and has been the focus of traditional oil exploration within the country for some years.28 The report claims the discovery of abiotic reserves totaling some 8,200 million metric tons of oil, or about 60 billion barrels of oil.29 There are many conflicting reports on the estimated reserves of Ukraine, and inconsistencies related to the Krayushkin study only complicate matters (see note 26 below).

In their 2003 country analysis brief, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) only recognizes 395 million barrels of proven reserves for the entire Ukraine, most of which resides in the Dneiper-Donetsk basin.30 The USGS has stated that the Dneiper-Donetsk basin holds reserves of about 1.4 Gb.31 Meanwhile, the Oil and Gas Journal reports current Ukrainian reserves at 0.40 Gb, and Colin Campbell estimates total providence-including future discoveries-will be in the range of 4.00 Gb.32 Not one of these sources credits Ukrainian reserves to abiotic origin. Russian petroleum geologist A.A. Kitcha, himself a supporter of the abiotic hypothesis, has been quoted as saying these claims of abiotic reserves in the Dneiper-Donetsk basin are… "difficult to demonstrate, partly because of multiple completions in basement and overlying cover."33

1.4 Gb is sizable enough to have drawn the attention of the majors. Yet the only major to take an interest in the region is BP, which plans to set up a joint venture in Dneiper-Donetsk basin to develop gas reserves. Several smaller players are also setting up ventures to produce gas reserves.34 No mention of oil.

Regal Petroleum Plc. is a small British company which listed on the London Stock Exchange in September of 2002. The core business of the company is production of oil and gas in the Ukraine's Dneiper-Donetsk basin. Regal is the first western company to be officially registered as an oil and gas producer in the Ukraine by the Ukraine oil department. Regal Petroleum's operations in the Ukraine are totally geared toward gas production. On their website, they estimate that their licensed areas of the Dneiper-Donetsk basin contain an estimated 25 billion cubic metres of proven and probable gas reserves, along with 5.8 million cubic metres of gas condensate reserves.35 Nowhere does the company mention the existence of or exploration for oil reserves in the Dneiper-Donetsk basin.

In the USGS World Petroleum Assessment 2000, geologist G.F. Ulmishek states that the Dneiper-Donetsk hydrocarbons have been classified into two oil families, which have their source in two different rock suites in the Upper Devonian and Lower Carboniferous sections. The Lower Carboniferous source rocks are Visean organic rich marls and shales. The Devonian source rocks, which occur much deeper, are organic rich marine anoxic shales similar to the shales of the Pripyat basin. The source rocks are largely overmature throughout the basin where they dip below the oil window, though they are mature in marginal areas where they reside within the oil window.36 This explains why most of the hydrocarbons in the basin are in the form of gas.

One of the few companies producing oil in the Ukraine, Naftogaz, reported that oil production declined by 5% during the first quarter of 1999, partially attributing this to declining oil deposits.37 The EIA states that production has been relatively flat since independence from the Soviet Union.38 Jean Lahererre has analyzed the available data on the second largest gas field in the Dneiper-Donetsk basin, Khrestyshchi-Zakhidny, and states that it does not show any sign of refilling from an abiotic source.39 He produced the following graph which illustrates that this field is declining naturally with time.

From this review, it would seem that neither the industry nor the scientific agencies have placed much credence in the Krayushkin study. The hydrocarbons of the Dneiper-Donetsk basin have been firmly established to be of organic origin.

Conclusion
Other questionable fields could be surveyed here, but for considerations of length. Suffice it to say that a sound argument for organic origin can be built for all other examples. The fields surveyed here constitute the core examples repeatedly adduced by abiotic adherents. And we have found ample evidence that none of these plays are of abiotic origin. As for volcanic outgassing, that too is explained by organic chemistry in conjunction with plate tectonics. The abiotic hypothesis remains just that, an hypothesis which has failed in prediction and so cannot be elevated to a theory. It is completely ignored by the oil industry worldwide, and even within Russia. And that is the final testament to its failure.


Charts and graphs available at the link.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100404_abiotic_oil.shtml

Abiotic Oil: Science or Politics?

By
Ugo Bardi

www.aspoitalia.net

[Ugo Bardi is professor of Chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy.

OCTOBER 4, 2004: 1300 PDT (FTW) -- For the past century or so, the biological origin of oil seemed to be the accepted norm. However, there remained a small group of critics who pushed the idea that, instead, oil is generated from inorganic matter within the earth's mantle.

The question might have remained within the limits of a specialized debate among geologists, as it has been until not long ago. However, the recent supply problems have pushed crude oil to the center stage of international news. This interest has sparked a heated debate on the concept of the "production peak" of crude oil. According to the calculations of several experts, oil production may reach a maximum within a few years and start a gradual decline afterwards.

The concept of "oil peak" is strictly linked to a view that sees oil as a finite resource. Several economists have never accepted this view, arguing that resource availability is determined by price and not by physical factors. Recently, others have been arguing a more extreme view: that oil is not even physically limited. According to some versions of the abiotic oil theory, oil is continuously created in the Earth's mantle in such amounts that the very concept of "depletion" is to be abandoned and, by consequence, that there will never be an "oil peak."

The debate has become highly politicized and has spilled over from geology journals to the mainstream press and to the fora and mailing lists on the internet. The proponents of the abiotic oil theory are often very aggressive in their arguments. Some of them go so far as to accuse those who claim that oil production is going to peak of pursuing a hidden political agenda designed to provide Bush with a convenient excuse for invading Iraq and the whole Middle East.

Normally, the discussion of abiotic oil oscillates between the scientifically arcane and the politically nasty. Even supposing that the political nastiness can be detected and removed, there remains the problem that the average non-specialist in petroleum geology can't hope to wade through the arcane scientific details of the theory (isotopic ratios, biomarkers, sedimentary layers and all that) without getting lost.

Here, I will try to discuss the origin of oil without going into these details. I will do this by taking a more general approach. Supposing that the abiogenic theory is right, then what are the consequences for us and for the whole biosphere? If we find that the consequences do not correspond to what we see, then we can safely drop the abiotic theory without the need of worrying about having to take a course in advanced geology. We may also find that the consequences are so small as to be irrelevant; in this case also we needn't worry about arcane geological details.

In order to discuss this point, the first task is to be clear about what we are discussing. There are, really, two versions of the abiotic oil theory, the "weak" and the "strong":

- The "weak" abiotic oil theory: oil is abiotically formed, but at rates not higher than those that petroleum geologists assume for oil formation according to the conventional theory. (This version has little or no political consequences).

- The "strong" abiotic theory: oil is formed at a speed sufficient to replace the oil reservoirs as we deplete them, that is, at a rate something like 10,000 times faster than known in petroleum geology. (This one has strong political implications).

Both versions state that petroleum is formed from the reaction of carbonates with iron oxide and water in the region called "mantle," deep in the Earth. Furthermore, it is assumed (see Gold's 1993 paper) that the mantle is such a huge reservoir that the amount of reactants consumed in the reaction hasn't depleted it over a few billion years (this is not unreasonable, since the mantle is indeed huge).

Now, the main consequence of this mechanism is that it promises a large amount of hydrocarbons that seep out to the surface from the mantle. Eventually, these hydrocarbons would be metabolized by bacteria and transformed into CO2. This would have an effect on the temperature of the atmosphere, which is strongly affected by the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in it. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is regulated by at least two biological cycles; the photosynthetic cycle and the silicate weathering cycle. Both these cycles have a built-in negative feedback which keeps (in the long run) the CO2 within concentrations such that the right range of temperatures for living creatures is maintained (this is the Gaia model).

The abiotic oil-if it existed in large amounts-would wreak havoc with these cycles. In the "weak" abiotic oil version, it may just be that the amount of carbon that seeps out from the mantle is small enough for the biological cycles to cope and still maintain control over the CO2 concentration. However, in the "strong" version, this is unthinkable. Over billions of years of seepage in the amounts considered, we would be swimming in oil, drowned in oil.

Indeed, it seems that the serious proponents of the abiotic theory all go for the "weak" version. Gold, for instance, never says in his 1993 paper that oil wells are supposed to replenish themselves.1 As a theory, the weak abiotic one still fails to explain a lot of phenomena, principally (and, I think, terminally): how is it that oil deposits are almost always associated to anoxic periods of high biological sedimentation rate? However, the theory is not completely unthinkable.

At this point, we can arrive at a conclusion. What is the relevance of the abiotic theory in practice? The answer is "none." The "strong" version is false, so it is irrelevant by definition. The "weak" version, instead, would be irrelevant in practice, even if it were true. It would change a number of chapters of geology textbooks, but it would have no effect on the impending oil peak.

To be sure, Gold and others argue that even the weak version has consequences on petroleum prospecting and extraction. Drilling deeper and drilling in areas where people don't usually drill, Gold says, you have a chance to find oil and gas. This is a very, very weak position for two reasons.

First, digging is more expensive the deeper you go, and in practice it is nearly impossible to dig a commercial well deeper than the depth to which wells are drilled nowadays, that is, more than 10 km.

Secondly, petroleum geology is an empirical field which has evolved largely by trial and error. Petroleum geologists have learned the hard way where to drill (and where not to drill); in the process they have developed a theoretical model that WORKS. It is somewhat difficult to believe that generations of smart petroleum geologists missed huge amounts of oil. Gold tried to demonstrate just that, and all that he managed to do was to recover 80 barrels of oil in total, oil that was later shown to be most likely the result of contamination of the drilling mud. Nothing prevents others from trying again, but so far the results are not encouraging.

So, the abiotic oil theory is irrelevant to the debate about peak oil and it would not be worth discussing were it not for its political aspects. If people start with the intention of demonstrating that the concept of "peak oil" was created by a "Zionist conspiracy" or something like that, anything goes. In this case, however, the debate is no longer a scientific one. Fortunately, as Colin Campbell said, "Oil is ultimately controlled by events in the geological past which are immune to politics."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[herBcNH]

Think that everyone is missing the point of this oil crisis. We need a new resource not more oil. We need a solution to this problem not another way around it… US Offshore Oil Drilling (http://pollclash.com) this is the problem that Obama and McCain need to solve this problem..

[moonrigger]

I don't know if you caught the excellent documentary called Crude on the History Channel last month, but it was very informative and well done. It can be purchased for I think about twenty bucks or so...and well worth studying.

I had the opportunity to visit the Petroleum Museum in Midland Odessa abut 10 years ago, and according to their very own videos (paid for in large part by the Bushes, don't ya know), we hit peak somewhere around 2004. That being the case, our best bet is to get off the oil teat as much as possible, and get serious (as in WWII devotion to saving the world) about alternatives. As the film Crude points out, because we are so dependent upon plastics and other uses of petroleum in our everyday lives, it's silly to use oil for home heating and unnecessary transportation. Petrol is in paint, medicines, packaging, furniture, cars, agriculture, our computers and most gadgets, nearly everything we touch in the modern world. Anything we can do to conserve is absolutely essential.

[Trance Dance Master]

"Peak oil" is a scam. It is being used to explain the currency crisis so that people don't wise up to the federal reserve system.

http://www.the7thfire.com/politics_and_society/Politics%20and%20History/peak_oil/peak_oil_is_a_known_fraud.htm
http://www.rense.com/general75/zoil.htm

[MozoVote]

I think Peak Oil is quite real, because it's a practical theory with plenty of data behind it. If anything, the empty promises of Saudi Arabia every year to increase production, lend more support to the implication that they CANNOT.

Odds are there is not even another Cantarell or Prudhoe Bay out there, when we finally get to exploring the arctic. The big, easy finds have been tapped already. Now, we get to suck out the sour and hard-to-extract stuff from icelands and deep water.

We haven't made major gold or silver discoveries in decades, because people scoured the Earth looking for them, and the easiest veins have been dug out. Oil is just another buried resource, it's essentially the same problem.

[Zippyjuan]

Saudi Arabia, the country with the largest reported reserves in the world right now, is trying to increase their production to help meet global demand. To do so, they have started up work on a field they discovered in 1957 known as Al Khurais and are spending $10 billion (with a "B") on the project. They hope to be able to extract 1.2 million barrels a day from the field- which is about the amount that world demand for oil increased by last year. Why haven't they used the field before- estimated to house 27 billion barrels which is larger than the total US reserves? Because of the difficulty and expense needed to get the oil up.

To help get the oil out, they are planning to pump 2 million barrels of seawater into the ground to help push the oil up. This is a procedure normally reserved for a field past its prime which is falling in production and you are trying to keep it going a while longer. The water increases pressure and the oil also floats on top of the water helping to bring it closer to the surface. Eventually the oil gets diluted by the water and it becomes less useful. To be going after a field that requires that much water going in at the START of production says that they do not have any other easier to drill and extract sources left or they would go for them. This is more evidence that they too are starting to run lower on supplies.


Now the Saudis are deploying an extraordinary engineering effort to bring Khurais’s mile-deep oil to the surface. Seawater will be carried through new pipelines from the Persian Gulf and injected into oil-bearing rock to pressure the oil upward. Usually Aramco pumps seawater into a field only after several years of production, and some skeptics point to this as a reason to doubt that Khurais will live up to its billing. But Mr. Nasser said the huge seawater injection system at Khurais was about cost and logistics, not a sign of a weak field.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/world/middleeast/01saudi.html

[MozoVote]

I favor the "bumpy plateau" theory... There is enough uncertainty now between supply interruptions (strikes, equipment failure, rebel attacks) with some new production coming online, that we'll have blog fodder for several more years before we can be sure the world has peaked.

But I buy into the essential premise that once the peak has happened, the world won't see increasing oil supplies ever again.

Just yesterday, I was penciling out what it costs for me to maintain my car, and pay the fixed costs for property tax and insurance, etc. It's around $3400 a year with gasoline being about 60% of that. (I was surprised to realize that it could make economic sense to buy a new one with better gas milage... I had assumed the increase in insurance, taxes, and new car payments would offset the gas savings.)

We will be seeing large scale changes in transportation over the next few decades. Not everyone will want a car anymore.

I own several rental properties, and two of my tenants do not have cars. They tell me it's too expensive to own one. My parents have two cars, but will probably cut to just 1 when the older car is ready to be chucked.

Financial rumors look bad for Ford and GM right now. They may be facing the "adapt, or perish" stage.

[PatriotG]

"Peak oil" is a scam. It is being used to explain the currency crisis so that people don't wise up to the federal reserve system.

http://www.the7thfire.com/politics_and_society/Politics%20and%20History/peak_oil/peak_oil_is_a_known_fraud.htm
http://www.rense.com/general75/zoil.htm


There have been a number of major finds over the last few years, but this doesn't prevent people like this claiming that peak oil is still an issue.

http://rawstory.com/rawreplay/?p=1125

Wells in Texas that had been corked are being re-opened. More new wells are being drilled in Texas.

The Chinese are drilling all over the Gulf of Mexico and bringing up oil.

Russia claims to have made a huge find in the Arctic.

And then there is Alaska. You can view the Lindsey Williams youtube video on RTR (http://www.restoretherepublic.org/?page_id=94) or you can read about it: http://www.reformation.org/energy-non-crisis.html

[Zippyjuan]

China has not drilled a single well in the Gulf of Mexico yet. They have signed agreements with Cuba to help develop oil fields, but have not done anything other than sign a paper yet.
Russia says they think there is lots of oil in the Artic but do not have any huge finds there yet. Their total output is startting to fall. http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11332313

We discussed Lindsay Williams earlier and showed that he is HUGELY overstating oil in Alaska and elsewhere. He claims 200 years worth of US oil consumption in oil is there. We consume 7 billion barrels a year. That would mean that Alaska would have to have 1.4 TRILLION barrels of oil. The reported reserves of the ENTIRE WORLD right now are 1.2 trillion barrels. He claims that Gull Island, which sits in Prudhoe Bay, has more oil than Saudi Arabia. The largest field in Saudia Arabia is over 300 square miles. Prudhoe Bay is considerably smaller and cannot contain more oil than Saudi Arabia. Prudohoe Bay has estimated reserves of 10.4 billion barrels- not over 200 billion. Gull Island itself is less than one square mile. The oil there is a myth. Nobody other than Mr. Williams (who heard it from somebody supposedly- but no scientific evidence of any kind) believes that there is 200 years of US consumption worth of oil there. British Petroleum drilled a couple test holes there in the early 1990s. There was a dispute about the well they had near Gull Island being too close to another lease owned by Arco which went to court and BP lost in 1993. That is when and why they capped the well- not because the government ordered them to. The case ruling: http://www.state.ak.us/admin/ogc/orders/co/co300_399/co329add.htm

[MozoVote]

Here is Jim Rogers on crude oil (and the dollar, and the recession)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQxsHILVOIw