End of Peak Oil: 200-Year Supply Of Oil In One Single Shale Formation

[John F Kennedy III]

End of Peak Oil: 200-Year Supply Of Oil In One Single Shale Formation

There’s plenty of oil, and even the global elites can’t hide it anymore.

A.M. Freyed
Infowars.com
June 8, 2012

GAO: Recoverable Oil in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming ‘About Equal to Entire World’s Proven Oil Reserves’ …
The Green River Formation – an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming – contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves. – CNS (5/11/12)

About 6 months ago, the writer was watching a news program on oil and one of the Forbes brothers was the guest. The host said to Forbes, “I am going to ask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer; how much oil does the U.S. have in the ground?” Forbes did not miss a beat, he said, “More than all the Middle East put together.” – Media Matters (5/1/12)

Carbon Currency is not a new idea, but has deep roots in Technocracy … The principal scientist behind Technocracy was M. King Hubbert, a young geoscientist who would later (in 1948-1956) invent the now-famous Peak Oil Theory, also known as the Hubbert Peak Theory. Hubbert stated that the discovery of new energy reserves and their production would be outstripped by usage, thereby eventually causing economic and social havoc. – Voice of the Resistance (5/12/12)

British-based explorer Tullow Oil PLC says it’s discovered oil off the shore of Ivory Coast. The announcement Thursday comes a year and a half after the company began pumping crude from an offshore field in neighboring Ghana worth billions of dollars. Exploration Director Angus McCoss called the finding encouraging and said the company looks forward to future drilling. –Washington Post (6/7/12)


Peak Oil nonsense has been promoted for the past half-century in the mainstream media and even in parts of the alternative media. Now, a huge discovery (see above) may finally put this elite propaganda to rest.

There are varying interpretations of how recoverable the oil is, currently anyway, but the best possibility would be to open up the site to commercial exploitation and find out. (Since it’s apparently federal land, we won’t hold our collective breath.)

This huge discovery is only one of many. Of late, there have been significant finds both in the US and abroad – and offshore as well – even around the Ivory Coast (see above). Many of these finds are only lightly reported by the mainstream media that seems to determined to ensure that people continue to think the world is running out of oil.

Peak Oil and scarcity memes in general are used to control people. Marketed by the global elites, they are intended to frighten people into giving up power to the so-called new world order. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, the whole “green” claptrap has gradually been exposed for what it is – propaganda designed to benefit the elites that seek world government.

The idea is to control people monetarily via central banking, militarily via the “war on terror” and in almost every other way via environmental propaganda. The thought is that if oil is accepted as scarce or its outputs such as “carbon” are accepted as poisonous, then people’s lives can be constrained and appropriately organized.

To the elites, every problem looks like a nail and every solution is an international one. No doubt Peak Oil’s founder M. King Hubbert shared this perspective. Hubbert was also the force behind “Technocracy” – the idea that scientists and intellectuals ought to lead society within areas of their expertise.

That Peak Oil should have been “discovered” by M. King Hubbert ought to raise red flags. Here’s a fellow who believed in top-down dictates of those “big brains” who knew best. This follows along the lines of the ancients including Plato who believed in the rule of philosopher kings.

This is Hubbert’s pedigree. He not only believed in rule by philosopher kings, he also created a crisis that would bring these kings to the fore. That crisis was to be Peak Oil (among others).

Whenever one of these articles is written, Peak Oilers gather like metaphorical flies to point out what Peak Oil actually means and what it doesn’t. So here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline.

Peak Oil, within the context that Hubbert wanted it used, does NOT mean that the world is in danger of imminent scarcity only that no more oil can be extracted than is already being generated – that the world has reached peak production.

This is a fairly ridiculous perspective from an economic point of view. Legitimate economics shows us clearly that left alone human beings in the modern era will almost always find some alternative to whatever it is they are running out of. Only when people are prevented from doing so will they fail to generate what is necessary.

People, in fact, have a firm reluctance to sit at home starving in the dark. Thomas Malthus, who wrote in the 1700s and 1800s, found this out when he predicted that based on various indices, the British population would soon run out of food.

And yet … the British did not. Faced with the possibility of starving, the British did what normal, resourceful people do … they planted more foodstuffs!

In fact, as one of the Forbes brothers pointed out recently, the US itself is nowhere near running out of oil – or at least out of energy. Shale oil, oil and natural gas have all provided the Lower 48 and Canada with more energy than the Middle East.

Of course, since oil is made of “fossil fuels” it is an expendable resource. Not so fast.

In his video, “The Origin Of Oil,” Leroy Fletcher Prouty Jr., a Colonel with the United States Air Force, provides us the evolution of the phrase. Colonel Prouty, who is deceased, was a serious man who wrote two books, “The Secret Team” and “JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy.” He was also consultant to Oliver Stone on the movie “JFK.”

What Prouty tells us was that “fossil fuel” was developed in the late 1800s by John D. Rockefeller’s top men to make sure people believed oil was scarce. They were provided their insights by a European conference in the late 1800s that showed “life” had a similar chemical composition to oil. Thus, they decided, oil had specific biological antecedents.

You see? Believe Prouty and even the nomenclature regarding oil is suspect. And there are even those – an increasing number – that believe oil is abiotic, the product of geological processes, which would explain why oil wells continue to fill back up.

Oil is made of hydrocarbons that have supposedly been found off-world as well, on a moon of Jupiter where no dinosaurs ever died (not a single one). And there are plenty of oil substitutes waiting in the wings should oil indeed prove scarce (not that it seems so). Cold fusion is just one of many such that seems increasingly feasible.

There is likely plenty of oil in the world … probably trillions and trillions of barrels, some of it offshore, some of it hidden away in places where various governments including the US government won’t let people drill.

So here is an alternative definition of so-called “black gold” ….

Oil: a commodity defined by subterfuge and falsely promoted by the elites as scarce via the opinions of an authoritarian scientist with a yen to run the world under technocratic philosopher kings.

You may believe in Peak Oil, but increasingly in this Internet era, it’s a stretch.


original article here:
http://www.infowars.com/end-of-peak-oil-200-year-supply-of-oil-in-one-single-shale-formation/

[TheGrinch]

As if this will stop them from manipulating prices based on "supply" concerns :rolleyes:

Also, huge shocker that our fuel is not made from liquid dinosaur remains... They never cease to amaze with how much BS they spew to maintain their control.

[BenIsForRon]

What Prouty tells us was that “fossil fuel” was developed in the late 1800s by John D. Rockefeller’s top men to make sure people believed oil was scarce. They were provided their insights by a European conference in the late 1800s that showed “life” had a similar chemical composition to oil. Thus, they decided, oil had specific biological antecedents.


This is the most retarded conspiracy theory I've ever heard, hands down. Including David Icke's lizard people theory.

[Petar]

This is the most retarded conspiracy theory I've ever heard, hands down. Including David Icke's lizard people theory.

My mind is not made up on this one, but I do wonder how hydrocarbons exist on planetary bodies sans ancient rain-forests.

I mean if oil can exist abiotically there, then why not here?

Maybe someone with more knowledge in chemistry can help explain.

[ghengis86]

As if this will stop them from manipulating prices based on "supply" concerns :rolleyes:


Lol. Don't forget the other side of the coin; demand is...lower now than it was almost 30 years ago?!??!? That can't be right, can it?!

Oh but it is!

US Total Gasoline Retail Sales by Refiners have been falling hard since ~2003.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=A103600001&f=M

[idiom]

Peak Oil has been promoted in the Mainstream media? Since when?

Peak Oil was tinfoil until about five years ago when it hit.

[PaulConventionWV]

This is the most retarded conspiracy theory I've ever heard, hands down. Including David Icke's lizard people theory.

And the easiest one to carry out. Just propagate a certain definition of the word "oil" with a certain stigma attached to it, and voila! You have a nation that believes oil is scarce. If they can do this, why do you think they wouldn't?

[BenIsForRon]

Peak Oil has been promoted in the Mainstream media? Since when?

Peak Oil was tinfoil until about five years ago when it hit.

Exactly, and the media still isn't willing to talk about the implications of peak oil on the American suburban lifestyle.

I think some on this forum are unwilling to accept peak oil because it demonstrates that the free market usually doesn't solve problems before they happen. We're going to have a rough time in this country dealing with really expensive gas until we reconfigure our society to not need it so much.

[wrestlingwes_8]

And do you guys know how they extract the oil from shale? Fracking; which is a guaranteed way to fuck up the surrounding ecosystem. My town is on the edge of the oil boom that is occurring in North Dakota and let me tell you, nothing good is coming of it. Our roads are being destroyed by all the semi traffic, crime is on the increase, the water and air are being polluted, and farmers and ranchers are essentially having their land stolen. Many people who own land only own the property rights, not the mineral rights. So whoever owns the mineral rights can have oil companies come and drill on the farmer's or rancher's land and they can't do anything to stop them. The property owner is then only compensated for surface damages that occur, not for the pollution to the air, land and water table. Each oil well only destroys 2 or 3 acres of land so the property owner is usually only compensated, at the very most, $2,000 per well (number of acres x the average price of land). I feel so bad for the ranchers north of me, their land is being invaded and there is NOTHING they can do about it. Their cattle are getting sick and their well water is being contaminated to the point it can no longer be used. And it's only a matter of time before they move farther south towards us. My family owns about 2,500 acres and we don't own the mineral rights to about 300 acres of it. Back in the 1910s they had an exploratory oil well constructed on our land for a brief time so you can guarantee the asshole who owns the mineral rights to the small portion of our land, will have an oil well set up as soon as he can. So yeah, my family pays the property taxes on the land for 60 years and then we have it all basically stolen from us in the name of black gold. Makes me fucking sick.

So yeah, all the jackasses can continue to drive their Hummers and SUVs because they have cheap gas, while at the same time we lose this once beautiful ecosystem of western North and South Dakota. Seriously, fuck you all..

[ghengis86]

Seriously, fuck you all..

Could have done without that.

Most/all here sympathize with you believe it or not. Property rights are the only true rights and that is what the government should be protecting. Pollution, land destruction, etc., should be the types of things one can hold another party liable for, but in our world the big money interests own the government and little guys like you ( and the rest of us) get boned.


So please, don't lump everyone together and insult us at the same time. We're on the same team.

[Aratus]

this is where we are at

[Warrior_of_Freedom]

It's the year 2012, we should be moving past oil.

[Indy Vidual]

fossil fuel = LOL?
Take 15 10 5 seconds to think about it, was there ever that many animal bones?

http://i.imgur.com/HoCv5.png


And the easiest one to carry out. Just propagate a certain definition of the word "oil" with a certain stigma attached to it, and voila! You have a nation that believes oil is scarce. If they can do this, why do you think they wouldn't?

+1984

[Vessol]

Just kinda a correction I feel I have to say. Peak oil has never been about the supply of oil, it's been I believe about the ease of extracting said oil. Oil has not become rarer, but the oil that we extract now is harder to extract, similar to various ores.

[seraphson]

And let's not forget the Marcellus Shale formation said to have almost 2 trillion cubic ft of natural gas. (http://www.oilshalegas.com/marcellusshale.html)

Vessol does bring up a good point though in regards to the difficulty of extracting the stuff; kind of like getting gold is getting harder every year. By no means however should there we any doom and gloom about "peak oil", especially since I would assume we'll have some nice technoligcal breakthroughs in the future (assuming we don't piss away our production on a police state with plenty of dig-a-hole fill-a-hole type jobs).

[John F Kennedy III]

And do you guys know how they extract the oil from shale? Fracking; which is a guaranteed way to fuck up the surrounding ecosystem. My town is on the edge of the oil boom that is occurring in North Dakota and let me tell you, nothing good is coming of it. Our roads are being destroyed by all the semi traffic, crime is on the increase, the water and air are being polluted, and farmers and ranchers are essentially having their land stolen. Many people who own land only own the property rights, not the mineral rights. So whoever owns the mineral rights can have oil companies come and drill on the farmer's or rancher's land and they can't do anything to stop them. The property owner is then only compensated for surface damages that occur, not for the pollution to the air, land and water table. Each oil well only destroys 2 or 3 acres of land so the property owner is usually only compensated, at the very most, $2,000 per well (number of acres x the average price of land). I feel so bad for the ranchers north of me, their land is being invaded and there is NOTHING they can do about it. Their cattle are getting sick and their well water is being contaminated to the point it can no longer be used. And it's only a matter of time before they move farther south towards us. My family owns about 2,500 acres and we don't own the mineral rights to about 300 acres of it. Back in the 1910s they had an exploratory oil well constructed on our land for a brief time so you can guarantee the asshole who owns the mineral rights to the small portion of our land, will have an oil well set up as soon as he can. So yeah, my family pays the property taxes on the land for 60 years and then we have it all basically stolen from us in the name of black gold. Makes me fucking sick.

So yeah, all the jackasses can continue to drive their Hummers and SUVs because they have cheap gas, while at the same time we lose this once beautiful ecosystem of western North and South Dakota. Seriously, fuck you all..

Sell the property. Oh and I guarantee there's a much better way to get the oil, so I'm sure you only have a problem with how the government does it.

[John F Kennedy III]

It's the year 2012, we should be moving past oil.

Amen.

[John F Kennedy III]

And let's not forget the Marcellus Shale formation said to have almost 2 trillion cubic ft of natural gas. (http://www.oilshalegas.com/marcellusshale.html)

Vessol does bring up a good point though in regards to the difficulty of extracting the stuff; kind of like getting gold is getting harder every year. By no means however should there we any doom and gloom about "peak oil", especially since I would assume we'll have some nice technoligcal breakthroughs in the future (assuming we don't piss away our production on a police state with plenty of dig-a-hole fill-a-hole type jobs).

In a free market, free society we would be so much more advanced than we are. In our current world technological advancement is either suppressed or held back. Or not even sought because the current tech is so profitable.

[Petar]

Can someone more knowledgable than myself please explain how it is that hydrocarbons exist elsewhere in our solar system, yet abiotic oil is considered a non-possibility according to orthodox scientific thinking.

[paulbot24]

I really hope they find a better method than fracking for one really important reason. Halliburton owns the patent on the process. Can you believe THAT shit? Returning to the drawing board.....

[John F Kennedy III]

I really hope they find a better method than fracking for one really important reason. Halliburton owns the patent on the process. Can you believe THAT shit? Returning to the drawing board.....

Yeah we need a new method ASAP.

[Zippyjuan]

Oil shale is one of the hardest and thus more expensive forms of oil to extract. It isn't the same as drilling down with an oil rig and pumping it to the surface. Fracking won't help you get to most of it either. The reason for this is that most of the oil is contained within rock. To extract that oil, you have to dig up the rocks, crush them, and then heat them to extract the oil from them. It takes a lot of energy- with current technology, an estimated energy equavelent of one barrel of oil for each two barrels you get in return so half of the energy is lost simply trying to get it and that does not include the energy to refine and transport it. Litterally tons of earth need to be dug up and the waste desposed of- another big problem. It also requires a lot of water and in the part of the country where the Green River Basin is found is pretty dry country. Some are experimenting with drilling a ton of holes and pumping something very hot into the ground and try to get it to flow to a point where it could be pumped out but again that takes a lot of energy to bring the rocks to the needed temperature. You would also have to control for any groundwater contamination.

http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/oilshale/

The term oil shale generally refers to any sedimentary rock that contains solid bituminous materials (called kerogen) that are released as petroleum-like liquids when the rock is heated in the chemical process of pyrolysis. Oil shale was formed millions of years ago by deposition of silt and organic debris on lake beds and sea bottoms. Over long periods of time, heat and pressure transformed the materials into oil shale in a process similar to the process that forms oil; however, the heat and pressure were not as great. Oil shale generally contains enough oil that it will burn without any additional processing, and it is known as "the rock that burns".

Oil shale can be mined and processed to generate oil similar to oil pumped from conventional oil wells; however, extracting oil from oil shale is more complex than conventional oil recovery and currently is more expensive. The oil substances in oil shale are solid and cannot be pumped directly out of the ground. The oil shale must first be mined and then heated to a high temperature (a process called retorting); the resultant liquid must then be separated and collected. An alternative but currently experimental process referred to as in situ retorting involves heating the oil shale while it is still underground, and then pumping the resulting liquid to the surface.



Oil Shale Mining and Processing

Oil shale can be mined using one of two methods: underground mining using the room-and-pillar method or surface mining. After mining, the oil shale is transported to a facility for retorting, a heating process that separates the oil fractions of oil shale from the mineral fraction.. The vessel in which retorting takes place is known as a retort. After retorting, the oil must be upgraded by further processing before it can be sent to a refinery, and the spent shale must be disposed of. Spent shale may be disposed of in surface impoundments, or as fill in graded areas; it may also be disposed of in previously mined areas. Eventually, the mined land is reclaimed. Both mining and processing of oil shale involve a variety of environmental impacts, such as global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, disturbance of mined land, disposal of spent shale, use of water resources, and impacts on air and water quality. The development of a commercial oil shale industry in the United States would also have significant social and economic impacts on local communities. Other impediments to development of the oil shale industry in the United States include the relatively high cost of producing oil from oil shale (currently greater than $60 per barrel), and the lack of regulations to lease oil shale.


The Canadian Tar Sands (which provide our biggest source for oil in the US) needs the price of oil to be about $85 a barrel to break even. Oil shale is more expensive to produce than tar sands are.

[John F Kennedy III]

//////////////

[Indy Vidual]

If anyone cares, the old-school Russian dictators poured a lot of money into studying oil, and concluded long ago that:
1) fossil fuel is a myth
2) the world is not running out of oil.

I also agree we need cleaner alternatives.

[Zippyjuan]

Water requirements for oil shale- an estimated range from one to three to five barrels of water for each barrel of oil produced:
http://www.postindependent.com/article/20070915/VALLEYNEWS/109150056

High oil prices and a diminishing global supply have renewed interest in the oil shale industry, which went bust in the early 1980s. If the industry took off, full production could reach 2.5 million barrels per day. Each barrel could require 1 to 3 barrels of water to produce.

If full production occurred, that would require additional withdrawals of water from the Colorado and other rivers in western Colorado, said Cathy Wilson, who has studied the oil shale industry's water needs for Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Her study found that the White River in northwest Colorado might be able to support production of 500,000 barrels of oil per day, but only with creation of 16,000 acre feet of new water storage to provide backup during dry years.

She said it remains unclear how much water might be needed to do "in-situ" oil shale production. That process, which is under research by Shell, involves heating shale underground and pumping oil to the surface, rather than mining the shale and then heating it to produce oil.

Wilson's forecasts for water needs project that it would take 105 to 315 million gallons per day to produce 2.5 million barrels of oil per day from shale. However, an industry that size also would result in a regional population growth of 433,000 people, who would require another 58 million gallons per day.

Colorado, Utah and Wyoming used an annual average of 3.8 million acre feet of Colorado River water from 2001-2003. That's 70 percent of the water they're entitled to under an interstate compact governing use of the river by states including those in the dry Southwest.

Use by Colorado, Utah and Wyoming is projected to increase to 4.8 million acre feet, or 90 percent of that allocation, by 2020. A full-scale oil shale industry could increase that use by another 0.2 to 0.4 million acre feet.

Wilson added that the river's flows are likely to be impacted by drought and climate change.

[NewRightLibertarian]

Peak Oil has been promoted in the Mainstream media? Since when?

Peak Oil was tinfoil until about five years ago when it hit.

They push the negatives of oil dependence because they're desperate to enact carbon taxes and world government.

[Zippyjuan]

Costs for all sources of oil have been soaring. Cheap to produce oil is being used up. That is the basics of Peak Oil- not that we will have zero oil one day. It gets more difficult and more expensive to produce that additional barrel of oil so you do hit a point where production begins to decline- that is the "peak".

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/energy-futurist/the-cost-of-new-oil-supply/468

A few decades ago, we could produce conventional oil profitably in the U.S. for under $15 a barrel. But those days are long gone for the U.S., and for most of the world (except a few old fields in places like Saudi Arabia). As every major oil company has admitted in the past few years, the age of easy and cheap oil has ended.

As the cheap oil from old mature fields is depleted, and we replace it with expensive new oil from unconventional sources, it forces the overall price of oil up. This is because oil prices are set at the margin, as are the prices of most commodities. The most expensive new barrel essentially sets the price for the lot.

Research by veteran petroleum economist Chris Skrebowski, along with analysts Steven Kopits and Robert Hirsch, details the new costs: $40 - $80 a barrel for a new barrel of production capacity in some OPEC countries; $70 - $90 a barrel for the Canadian tar sands and heavy oil from Venezuela’s Orinoco belt; and $70 - $80 a barrel for deepwater oil. Various sources suggest that a price of at least $80 is needed to sustain U.S. tight oil production.

Those are just the production costs, however. In order to pacify its population during the Arab Spring and pay for significant new infrastructure projects, Saudi Arabia has made enormous financial commitments in the past several years. The kingdom really needs $90 - $100 a barrel now to balance its budget. Other major exporters like Venezuela and Russia have similar budget-driven incentives to keep prices high.

Globally, Skrebowki estimates that it costs $80 - $110 to bring a new barrel of production capacity online. Research from IEA and others shows that the more marginal liquids like Arctic oil, gas-to-liquids, coal-to-liquids, and biofuels are toward the top end of that range.

My own research suggests that $85 is really the comfortable global minimum. That’s the price now needed to break even in the Canadian tar sands, and it also seems to be roughly the level at which banks and major exploration companies are willing to commit the billions of dollars it takes to develop new projects.


http://i.bnet.com/blogs/cost-per-well-1960-2008-eia.jpg

[PaulConventionWV]

Sell the property. Oh and I guarantee there's a much better way to get the oil, so I'm sure you only have a problem with how the government does it.

What is the connection between fracking and the government? I thought the oil companies were private.

[John F Kennedy III]

What is the connection between fracking and the government? I thought the oil companies were private.

Apparently Halliburton owns the patent on the process. They're not exactly seperate from the government.

[BenIsForRon]

Fracking for oil reminds me of a crackhead searching through his couch for one last rock.

[paulbot24]

lol. That is hilarious. I like the quote in the above article: "As every major oil company has admitted in the past few years, the age of easy and cheap oil has ended." This until they magically have patents that seem to save the day every time.

[Krugerrand]

Costs for all sources of oil have been soaring. Cheap to produce oil is being used up. That is the basics of Peak Oil- not that we will have zero oil one day. It gets more difficult and more expensive to produce that additional barrel of oil so you do hit a point where production begins to decline- that is the "peak".

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/energy-futurist/the-cost-of-new-oil-supply/468


http://i.bnet.com/blogs/cost-per-well-1960-2008-eia.jpg

Is that graph adjusted to inflation?

[KingNothing]

Lol. Don't forget the other side of the coin; demand is...lower now than it was almost 30 years ago?!??!? That can't be right, can it?!

Without looking it up, I would say that there is absolutely no way this is true, globally.

[KingNothing]

The property owner is then only compensated for surface damages that occur, not for the pollution to the air, land and water table. Each oil well only destroys 2 or 3 acres of land so the property owner is usually only compensated, at the very most, $2,000 per well (number of acres x the average price of land). I feel so bad for the ranchers north of me, their land is being invaded and there is NOTHING they can do about it. Their cattle are getting sick and their well water is being contaminated to the point it can no longer be used.



You realize those things are cause for lawsuits, right? My guess is that you're exaggerating or speaking without all of the details. And for what it's worth, I believe that mining and drilling companies usually buy up land from property owners too, so that they can have easier access to the minerals. They can't just trespass on someone elses land to extract what is under it.



while at the same time we lose this once beautiful ecosystem of western North and South Dakota.

This is true, and it's why I'm not against leaving the mining of rare earths and other "dirty" minerals to the Chinese and those outside of our country.

[Zippyjuan]

Is that graph adjusted to inflation?

"Nominal" means in current dollars. "Real" is adjusted for inflation. The chart shows both.

[Zippyjuan]

Lol. Don't forget the other side of the coin; demand is...lower now than it was almost 30 years ago?!??!? That can't be right, can it?!

Oh but it is!

US Total Gasoline Retail Sales by Refiners have been falling hard since ~2003.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=A103600001&f=M

The US oil consumption hit one peak back in the 1970's and the Arab Oil Embargo and resulting energy crisis led the country to examine what it was doing and significantly reduced their oil consumption- so much so that it took nearly 30 years before total (not even per capita which is still lower than then) oil consumption hit the same level (that is with more cars being driven, more businesses, more people using oil for all kinds of things, huge increase in plastics which are made from petroleum, etc). With a slowing economy, consumption again has been declining (not as dramatically as in the 1970's) since about 2003 but is still above that 1970's peak.

(Looking for the chart of US consumption- here is one on global consumption since 1970:)
http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/20110611_WOC898.gif
http://www.economist.com/node/21519035

[Original_Intent]

Zippy is right in that for oil shale, fracking is NOT the method used to extract. It has to be mined and cooked per his post. And where tar sands need a price per barrel of about $85 to be feasible, I BELIEVE the last I heard on oil shale is more like $120 per barrel.

And I am no tree hugger, but I believe you are looking at essentially a strip mining operation. On the plus side, a lot of the locations where it would be mined doesn;t have a lot of "environment" that needs protecting.

I definitely hope for better alternatives, but it is good to know it is there in a pinch. Water would probably be the biggest issue, but I bet if push comes to shove we will find a way - we always do.

[puppetmaster]

It's the year 2012, we should be moving past oil.

corruption will not let that happen yet

[Mani]

We don't need shale, there are perfectly good spots for oil drilling just bubbling under the surface with more oil than saudi Arabia. Sitting under dead tundra land with no wildlife or trees in site in Alaska.

The non oil crisis. The area was banned because they saw a bird fly by and they didn't want to harm some alge native to that area. It has been sitting untouched for 30 years after it was discovered and we made a deal with the Saudis not to drill it.

[Zippyjuan]

We don't need shale, there are perfectly good spots for oil drilling just bubbling under the surface with more oil than saudi Arabia. Sitting under dead tundra land with no wildlife or trees in site in Alaska.

The non oil crisis. The area was banned because they saw a bird fly by and they didn't want to harm some alge native to that area. It has been sitting untouched for 30 years after it was discovered and we made a deal with the Saudis not to drill it.

You been listening to Lindsay Willliams? One of the places he says has more oil than Saudi Arabia in Alaska is Gull Island Island which is less than one mile in area-it sits within Prudhoe Bay. The largest field in Saudi Arabia is 200 miles long. Here is a picture of it:
http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Photography/Images/POD/g/gull-island-alaska-91799-ga.jpg

Prudhoe Bay's (the largest oil field in the USA) estiimated oil reserves are about 25 million barrels and over half of that has already been pumped out. The area has been experiencing declining production since 1987. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudhoe_Bay_Oil_Field

"Bubbling just under the surface", eh? I guess that is why companies like BP are spending $1 billion a hole to drill litterally miles below the Gulf of Mexico to try to get at some when they already have rigs and leases for Prudhoe Bay. If BP is a rational company and seeking to maximize profits, they are going to want to get the cheapest sources first before they go after the more expensive ones like deep water drilling in the Gulf. This is exactly why companies went to China looking for labor- because it offered the lowest costs for them to produce their goods.

[Republicanguy]

Peak Oil is real, in 2005 Alex Jones said that it was a scam. With Which David Strahan replied in an email I sent him in 2007, "He's an idiot."

Read some books on the subject.

[osan]

Exactly, and the media still isn't willing to talk about the implications of peak oil on the American suburban lifestyle.

Peak oil is possibly true, possibly not - at least in the currently delineated time frames.

Let us not forget the very deep wells the Soviets drilled and hit oil - as I recall up to 57,000 feet. That's over ten miles. If there really is oil that deep, the fossil fuel theory of formation is pretty well out the window and one must ask how does the oil come into being way down there.


I think some on this forum are unwilling to accept peak oil because it demonstrates that the free market usually doesn't solve problems before they happen.

Careful now, or your ignorance may start showing. We don't have "free" markets and probably never did, thus far - though they were once far closer to it than they have been in the past 100 years.

Economies are not simple creatures, particularly large ones such as that of the USA. Many factors bring effects upon them and one of the biggest and most perfidious has proven to be government interference. There is a place for some governance in the free markets, e.g. making sure XYZ Inc is not filling your local water table with violent chemical poisons that end up killing your children or causing dead fetuses to grow from the sides of your head. But the range of such legitimacy is extremely narrow and as currently practiced constitutes an immense drag upon the economy and a great insult to the liberties of the individual.

It is precisely the unfree nature of our markets that have resulted in most of the disasters we have enjoyed over the years. I will also point out that a great proportion of the regulatory infrastructure in this nation appears to have been set into place not for the purposes of protecting one and all and ensuring equal market opportunity for every player, but rather the precise opposite: to ensure the entrenched interests maintain their standings at the least, grow them at possible, and are able to abandon all worry of any meaningful competition in the otherwise free markets.

The markets are free on the buy-side. You may purchase or not as you please - though even that is now falling by the wayside. On the sell-side the story is very different in many cases. In many markets, regulatory requirements have erected barriers to entry such that only the most well-heeled efforts stand even the first chance of breaking into oligopolistic markets with heavily entrenched players. You can have a Model-T in any color you like, just so long as it's black because this is America - land of opportunity and choice. Not.


We're going to have a rough time in this country dealing with really expensive gas until we reconfigure our society to not need it so much.

This may or may not be true. You are stating it a bit too confidently. And at any rate, if it proves out as you predict it does not follow that it does so for the reasons you assert. There have been far too many synthetic crises foisted upon the American people for any intelligent man to accept what you claim on its face. Hanky panky runs amok in this world to the point you cannot really trust that the sky is blue if "authorities" tell you it is. My suggestion to you is to not be quite so horny to dismiss possible conspiracies to manipulate public opinion because the history of such affairs prove you so brutally and conclusively wrong.

Be more careful in how you consider the things you "know". That goes for all of us.

[osan]

Just kinda a correction I feel I have to say. Peak oil has never been about the supply of oil, it's been I believe about the ease of extracting said oil. Oil has not become rarer, but the oil that we extract now is harder to extract, similar to various ores.

The age old "low hanging fruit" deal.

[osan]

Can someone more knowledgable than myself please explain how it is that hydrocarbons exist elsewhere in our solar system, yet abiotic oil is considered a non-possibility according to orthodox scientific thinking.

I believe the technical term is "bullshit". We have been lied to. How surprising, don't you agree?

[osan]

Peak Oil is real, in 2005 Alex Jones said that it was a scam. With Which David Strahan replied in an email I sent him in 2007, "He's an idiot."

Read some books on the subject.

Reading some books convinces you? Man, you're easier than shit.

Seriously, you need get back to proper skepticism. Nothing has been proven. The "peak oil" deal is based on a whole load of assumptions that may or may not hold. Peak oil theory is based on PROVEN reserves. What if there are more reserves out there? What if there are MANY more reserves out there, yet undiscovered but discoverable? What if abiotic oil proves to exist - perhaps in huge quantities?

I am not advocating for a continuation of the petroleum energy culture. Quite the opposite, in fact - but I an equally opposed to this possibly synthetic crisis of scarcity designed to corral people for purposes upon which one may only speculate, but may also deem with some nontrivial confidence to be less than in our better interests. I believe our future, such as it may be at this point, lies in other avenues of technological advance, particularly in the energy sciences. We do have a problem there, however, in that the incentives for research and development are not only absent, but going in the wrong direction. Once again it can be readily demonstrated how government established strong negative incentives for innovation along pathways by interfering with the freedom of the market to explore. Some of this may be misguided good intention, but some of it is almost certainly turf protection. Large oil companies have a vested interest in maintaining their positions of market power and may not be particularly interested in mew avenues so long as the cash cow is milking well. And when the cow starts running dry, those same companies want to make damned sure that they will be the ones to discover and develop the next generation of energy solutions, thereby ensuring and hopefully growing their positions. This is strategy 001 - remedial stuff. If you think people do not think and act in such manners you must have precious little experience in the world of big business - something I've been doing going on 30 years. Having been lunch buddies with a few notable CEOs, I can attest very directly to the mode of thinking. They have been great men, but they also have a mission to deliver the greatest value to the shareholders and that often leads companies to tread fine lines.

Government has been the single greatest enabler of perfidy and outright crime in our lives. That shit needs to be swept aside in favor of principle-based governance not by the so-called "government", but by one and all. It's a hokey sounding and trite platitude, but is is true. If we fail to govern ourselves, someone else will govern us. That is where we stand today and look at just how very lovely it all is. Spy cameras everywhere, regulated to near-death, opportunity vanishing by the minute. Oh yes, government is the answer. We CAN have governance without "government", but it is a lot of work and can only be pulled off when sufficient numbers of people want their liberty enough to actually do the work of getting it and maintaining it.

[Mordan]

if I was CEO of Halliburton, I would buy any technology competing on my fracking patents.

[osan]

if I was CEO of Halliburton, I would buy any technology competing on my fracking patents.

Precisely. This is called "tactics pursuant to strategy".

[febo]

Peak Oil is just common sense. Finit e world, finite resourses.
I find is astonishing that anyone could think it a "myth".
As others have indicated, the crucial issue is not how much oil there is, but how much oil there is that can be extracted for a net energy gain. There may be huge reserves but if it requires more than a barrel's worth of oil-energy to extract a barrel, it may as well be on the moon.
At the beginning of the oil age 100 years ago you could get 100 barrels at the cose of 1. Its about 10 to 1 now.

[Kotin]

Hydraulic Despotism will still continue..

[Uncle Emanuel Watkins]

End of Peak Oil: 200-Year Supply Of Oil In One Single Shale Formation

There’s plenty of oil, and even the global elites can’t hide it anymore.

A.M. Freyed
Infowars.com
June 8, 2012

GAO: Recoverable Oil in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming ‘About Equal to Entire World’s Proven Oil Reserves’ …
The Green River Formation – an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming – contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves. – CNS (5/11/12)

About 6 months ago, the writer was watching a news program on oil and one of the Forbes brothers was the guest. The host said to Forbes, “I am going to ask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer; how much oil does the U.S. have in the ground?” Forbes did not miss a beat, he said, “More than all the Middle East put together.” – Media Matters (5/1/12)

Carbon Currency is not a new idea, but has deep roots in Technocracy … The principal scientist behind Technocracy was M. King Hubbert, a young geoscientist who would later (in 1948-1956) invent the now-famous Peak Oil Theory, also known as the Hubbert Peak Theory. Hubbert stated that the discovery of new energy reserves and their production would be outstripped by usage, thereby eventually causing economic and social havoc. – Voice of the Resistance (5/12/12)

British-based explorer Tullow Oil PLC says it’s discovered oil off the shore of Ivory Coast. The announcement Thursday comes a year and a half after the company began pumping crude from an offshore field in neighboring Ghana worth billions of dollars. Exploration Director Angus McCoss called the finding encouraging and said the company looks forward to future drilling. –Washington Post (6/7/12)


Peak Oil nonsense has been promoted for the past half-century in the mainstream media and even in parts of the alternative media. Now, a huge discovery (see above) may finally put this elite propaganda to rest.

There are varying interpretations of how recoverable the oil is, currently anyway, but the best possibility would be to open up the site to commercial exploitation and find out. (Since it’s apparently federal land, we won’t hold our collective breath.)

This huge discovery is only one of many. Of late, there have been significant finds both in the US and abroad – and offshore as well – even around the Ivory Coast (see above). Many of these finds are only lightly reported by the mainstream media that seems to determined to ensure that people continue to think the world is running out of oil.

Peak Oil and scarcity memes in general are used to control people. Marketed by the global elites, they are intended to frighten people into giving up power to the so-called new world order. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, the whole “green” claptrap has gradually been exposed for what it is – propaganda designed to benefit the elites that seek world government.

The idea is to control people monetarily via central banking, militarily via the “war on terror” and in almost every other way via environmental propaganda. The thought is that if oil is accepted as scarce or its outputs such as “carbon” are accepted as poisonous, then people’s lives can be constrained and appropriately organized.

To the elites, every problem looks like a nail and every solution is an international one. No doubt Peak Oil’s founder M. King Hubbert shared this perspective. Hubbert was also the force behind “Technocracy” – the idea that scientists and intellectuals ought to lead society within areas of their expertise.

That Peak Oil should have been “discovered” by M. King Hubbert ought to raise red flags. Here’s a fellow who believed in top-down dictates of those “big brains” who knew best. This follows along the lines of the ancients including Plato who believed in the rule of philosopher kings.

This is Hubbert’s pedigree. He not only believed in rule by philosopher kings, he also created a crisis that would bring these kings to the fore. That crisis was to be Peak Oil (among others).

Whenever one of these articles is written, Peak Oilers gather like metaphorical flies to point out what Peak Oil actually means and what it doesn’t. So here’s a definition from Wikipedia:

Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline.

Peak Oil, within the context that Hubbert wanted it used, does NOT mean that the world is in danger of imminent scarcity only that no more oil can be extracted than is already being generated – that the world has reached peak production.

This is a fairly ridiculous perspective from an economic point of view. Legitimate economics shows us clearly that left alone human beings in the modern era will almost always find some alternative to whatever it is they are running out of. Only when people are prevented from doing so will they fail to generate what is necessary.

People, in fact, have a firm reluctance to sit at home starving in the dark. Thomas Malthus, who wrote in the 1700s and 1800s, found this out when he predicted that based on various indices, the British population would soon run out of food.

And yet … the British did not. Faced with the possibility of starving, the British did what normal, resourceful people do … they planted more foodstuffs!

In fact, as one of the Forbes brothers pointed out recently, the US itself is nowhere near running out of oil – or at least out of energy. Shale oil, oil and natural gas have all provided the Lower 48 and Canada with more energy than the Middle East.

Of course, since oil is made of “fossil fuels” it is an expendable resource. Not so fast.

In his video, “The Origin Of Oil,” Leroy Fletcher Prouty Jr., a Colonel with the United States Air Force, provides us the evolution of the phrase. Colonel Prouty, who is deceased, was a serious man who wrote two books, “The Secret Team” and “JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy.” He was also consultant to Oliver Stone on the movie “JFK.”

What Prouty tells us was that “fossil fuel” was developed in the late 1800s by John D. Rockefeller’s top men to make sure people believed oil was scarce. They were provided their insights by a European conference in the late 1800s that showed “life” had a similar chemical composition to oil. Thus, they decided, oil had specific biological antecedents.

You see? Believe Prouty and even the nomenclature regarding oil is suspect. And there are even those – an increasing number – that believe oil is abiotic, the product of geological processes, which would explain why oil wells continue to fill back up.

Oil is made of hydrocarbons that have supposedly been found off-world as well, on a moon of Jupiter where no dinosaurs ever died (not a single one). And there are plenty of oil substitutes waiting in the wings should oil indeed prove scarce (not that it seems so). Cold fusion is just one of many such that seems increasingly feasible.

There is likely plenty of oil in the world … probably trillions and trillions of barrels, some of it offshore, some of it hidden away in places where various governments including the US government won’t let people drill.

So here is an alternative definition of so-called “black gold” ….

Oil: a commodity defined by subterfuge and falsely promoted by the elites as scarce via the opinions of an authoritarian scientist with a yen to run the world under technocratic philosopher kings.

You may believe in Peak Oil, but increasingly in this Internet era, it’s a stretch.


original article here:
http://www.infowars.com/end-of-peak-oil-200-year-supply-of-oil-in-one-single-shale-formation/

This argument is so nineties. Since that time, Gore invented the Internet.

[Uncle Emanuel Watkins]

Peak Oil is just common sense. Finit e world, finite resourses.
I find is astonishing that anyone could think it a "myth".
As others have indicated, the crucial issue is not how much oil there is, but how much oil there is that can be extracted for a net energy gain. There may be huge reserves but if it requires more than a barrel's worth of oil-energy to extract a barrel, it may as well be on the moon.
At the beginning of the oil age 100 years ago you could get 100 barrels at the cose of 1. Its about 10 to 1 now.

A better solution would be to genetically alter our DNA so everyone in the world would shrink a little during each generation. In order to feed a world of what would become trillions, the cattle would remain the same size. In time, the feed stock would become massive standing fifty stories high.

[CaptainAmerica]

In 2006 the US Military consumed 117 million barrels or 320,000 barrels per day. War is a racket,and it is tied into the oil industry.


The Department of Defense (DoD) per capita energy consumption of 524 trillion Btu is 10 times more than per capita energy consumption in China, or 30 times more than that of Africa.



The US Military budget was raised to US$532.8 Billion for the year 2007, around 3.7% of the country’s GDP. This is more than the combined defense budget of China, Russia, UK, India, Japan and the next 10 countries which top in world military spending. To keep all the tanks, ships, aircrafts and Humvee’s moving in battle’s around the world takes a lot of fuel. Did you know that the Abrams tank can travel less than 0.6 mile per gallon of fuel.
http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/top_5_facts_on_us_military_oil_consumption.php

[Republicanguy]

I don't like saying this, but for some individuals in the liberty movement, need realise that not everything out there is just conspiracy, lies or propaganda. Nothing lasts forever.

If you can't talk about this issue then nobody from the liberty movement can get elected to office, and be taken seriously. One answer fits all, doesn't work for this.

This is like saying we don't have any impact on the planet in any particular way, and we shouldn't do anything about it, and be selfish and let the next generation deal with it.I'm 23, the generation before have failed to make the world a better place for mine, so what will my generation do collectively in certain ways to make the world we live in better. Nuclear weapons is one example, we still have them.

While doing so, not to repeat the mistakes of empire building, or nation building or particular crap groups creating more problems for their own interests.

[Republicanguy]

http://youtu.be/c-h5D0anrfU

David Strahan's 2007 short clip.

[jmdrake]

Not everyone who discounts peak oil is a "conspiracy theorist".

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/on-energy/2011/09/14/abiotic-oil-a-theory-worth-exploring

Abiotic Oil a Theory Worth Exploring

By Gregg Laskoski
September 14, 2011 RSS Feed Print

It's our nature to sort, divide, and classify. We label ourselves to identify political leanings, religious beliefs, the food we enjoy, and the sports teams we cheer. The oil industry too has its own distinct labels which include the "Peak Oil" theorists, those who believe the world is fast depleting the finite supply of fossil fuel; and the pragmatists, those who recognize that engineering and technological advances in oil drilling and extraction continuously identify new reserves that make oil plentiful.

And there's a third group you may not know. These people are deeply interested in oil and its origins, but their advocacy of "abiotic theory" has many dismissing them as heretics, frauds, or idealists. They hold that oil can be derived from hydrocarbons that existed eons ago in massive pools deep within the earth's core. That source of hydrocarbons seeps up through the earth's layers and slowly replenishes oil sources. In other words, it turns the fossil-fuel paradigm upside down.

[Read: How Much Oil is There?]

Perhaps the breakthrough for this theory came when Chris Cooper's story appeared April 16, 1999, in The Wall Street Journal about an oil field called Eugene Island. Here's an excerpt:

Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while, it behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.

Then suddenly—some say almost inexplicably—Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10 years ago.

According to Cooper,

Thomas Gold, a respected astronomer and professor emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, has held for years that oil is actually a renewable, primordial syrup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attacked by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs, he says.

All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be.

More recently, Forbes presented a similar discussion. In 2008 it reported a group of Russian and Ukrainian scientists say that oil and gas don't come from fossils; they're synthesized deep within the earth's mantle by heat, pressure, and other purely chemical means, before gradually rising to the surface. Under the so-called abiotic theory of oil, finding all the energy we need is just a matter of looking beyond the traditional basins where fossils might have accumulated.

[Read the U.S. News debate: Should offshore drilling be expanded?]

The idea that oil comes from fossils "is a myth" that needs changing according to petroleum engineer Vladimir Kutcherov, speaking at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. "All kinds of rocks could have oil and gas deposits."

Alexander Kitchka of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences estimates that 60 percent of the content of all oil is abiotic in origin and not from fossil fuels. He says companies should drill deeper to find it.

Is abiotic theory the real deal? Is Eugene Island "Exhibit A?" Look how long it's taken for this conversation to reach a tipping point!

[Zippyjuan]

Carefull examination of data does not support the abiotic theory of oil. Let us consider the Eugene Island example. It claims a "miraculous reversal" of the decline in production there. Here is their production chart:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/images/Eugene330.jpg
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011205_no_free_pt2.shtml

It did get a slight bump but then continued to decline again.


In the early 1990's an ambitious investigation of Eugene Island was undertaken through the joint auspices of the Global Basins Research Network, the Department of Energy and the oil industry.18 The purpose of the project was to develop new technologies to extract hydrocarbons from the streams which feed reservoirs instead of merely draining the reservoirs themselves, or to enhance the streams so that they will better feed the reservoirs. The study focused on Eugene Island and on the Gulf of Mexico in general because newly migrating hydrocarbons were well documented in this region, and migration approached rates of extraction. The project first had to determine the pathway of the migrating hydrocarbons and their origin.

The study determined that hydrocarbons were indeed migrating along the Red Fault. They concluded that as oils at depth are over-cooked and cracked into gas, this results in an increase of pressure. This is due to the expanding volume of gas produced from the more compacted volume of oil. When the pressure grows to hydraulic fracturing stress, the faults open and release a stream of oil and gas upward toward the surface. The migration pathways seem to branch from what appear to be three primary source areas at depth.19

The migrating hydrocarbons contain biomarkers, heavy metals, and sulfur isotopes which indicate a carbonate marine source of Cretaceous age. The three sourcing depobasins are believed to be turbidite sands: organic detritus rich sands stirred up and deposited by deep sea turbidity currents. These turbidites were capped by a salt sheet and then buried beneath 3 million years of deltaic sands, resulting in the geopressures and temperatures necessary to transform the organic detritus into oil and gas.20

Anderson, et al., concludes that a conservative estimate might place undiscovered hydrocarbons in the Northern Gulf at 20 billion barrels. The report suggests that a concerted effort to explore the entire U.S. Gulf of Mexico for similarly situated reserves might result in the discovery of greater than 50 billion barrels of unrecovered hydrocarbons.

There is no doubt that the hydrocarbons of Eugene Island are of organic origin. The recharging of Eugene Island reserves is simply the result of complicated geological structure.



The site did get an influx of oil- but from where? If the theory of abiotic oil which says that oil is being constantly being produced within the Earth and pushed towards the surface is true- this oil should be younger than the oil they were already extracting. But that is not the case. They examined the oil and tried to date it. The "new" oil is actually quite a bit older

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/26/science/geochemist-says-oil-fieldsmay-be-refilled-naturally.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Although the reservoir from which Pennzoil is pumping oil was formed at the time of the Pleistocene epoch less than two million years ago, oil now being recovered from the reservoir has a chemical signature characteristic of the Jurassic period, which ended more than 150 million years ago,

[LibertyRevolution]

Helium 3 fusion is the future... soon as we start bringing it back from the moon.

[Zippyjuan]

The hard part is getting it. You have to dig up one billion tons of the moon and heat it to 600 degrees celsius (1,120 degrees Fahrenheit) to separate it (using lots of energy for both of those activities) to get 50 tons of H3 (H3 is estimated to be fifty parts per billion of the moon's surface) and then ship it back to Earth. That would power the US for two years (an estimated 25 tons a year needed).

http://io9.com/5908499/could-helium+3-really-solve-earths-energy-problems

Obtaining helium-3 from lunar regolith will not be an easy task. Best estimates of Helium-3 content place it at 50 parts per billion in lunar soil, calling for the refining of millions of tons of lunar soil before gathering enough Helium-3 to be useful in fusion reactions on Earth. Should we be so eager to strip mine the moon and destroy its surface to provide a clean energy source for Earth?

After mining lunar rock, Helium-3 is separated by heating the mass to over 600 degrees Celsius, consuming a large amount of energy in the process.

And meanwhile, transporting large quantities of Helium-3 back to Earth will be another problem. A spacecraft would likely be able to only carry a few tons of Helium-3 as payload, necessitating a revolving door of shuttles to supply enough Helium-3 to care for the Earth's energy needs. Thus, it's likely that Helium-3 is more likely to become a fuel source for lunar colonies, eliminating a need for start-up additional supplies and costly flights to and from Earth.

Due to the effort and energy needed to mine, heat, and transport Helium-3 back to Earth, it will not be a cheap energy source, but a clean alternative, one we might have to turn to in the next 100 years. Frequent trips to the Moon may also open up the lunar tourism industry, as passengers travel along with canisters of Helium-3 destined for use in fusion reactions back on Earth.


Plus building the fusion reactors to use it. Recently aproved fission nuclear reactors have an estimated cost of $14 billion each to be built and costs usually well exceed estimates.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/02/09/146646228/u-s-regulators-approve-first-nuclear-power-plant-in-a-generation

The National Regulatory Agency announced it had given Southern Co. the OK to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia, making it the first new nuclear power plant approved in a generation.

The AP, which reported earlier today that the NRC was poised to give its approval, reports that one of the $14 billion reactors could be ready as soon as 2016. The second reactor could begin operating in 2017.

[PierzStyx]

For those who would like to share this, but don't want their liberal friends to dismiss it outright because it comes from Infowars, here is another site talking about the discovery. http://thegwpf.org/energy-news/5706-200-year-supply-of-oil-in-one-single-shale-formation.html

[PaulStandsTall]

The site did get an influx of oil- but from where? If the theory of abiotic oil which says that oil is being constantly being produced within the Earth and pushed towards the surface is true- this oil should be younger than the oil they were already extracting. But that is not the case. They examined the oil and tried to date it. The "new" oil is actually quite a bit older

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/26/science/geochemist-says-oil-fieldsmay-be-refilled-naturally.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

This one example is not by any stretch an open and shut case on abiotic oil. Here's one line from above:
"The migration pathways seem to branch from what appear to be three primary source areas at depth."

That is not science. That is a fallible geologist team doing their best to track it, but well it's a little difficult when it's deep below the earth's crust.

Also any hypothesis that tries to disprove abiotic oil must explain oil on other planets we have found.

[ninepointfive]

please stop fracking, because it pollutes the groundwater for human, animal, and agricultural uses!

[NoOneButPaul]

Helium 3 fusion is the future... soon as we start bringing it back from the moon.

Interesting... can you tell me more?

[Zippyjuan]

For those who would like to share this, but don't want their liberal friends to dismiss it outright because it comes from Infowars, here is another site talking about the discovery. http://thegwpf.org/energy-news/5706-200-year-supply-of-oil-in-one-single-shale-formation.html

There is no question that large amounts of oil are indeed there- the problem is that the oil is very expensive and messy to try to extact from the rocks. It isn't in a form that ordinary drilling or fracking can get it. It is bound up in solid rocks which need to be crushed and heated to get the oil out of them.

[Zippyjuan]

Interesting... can you tell me more?

It is seen by some as a possible nuclear fussion (vs fission of modern nuclear reactors) reactor fuel. So far, fusion energy remains a dream as tests have not yet been able to produce more energy than the reaction consumes to get going. If it works, the problem of radiation waste is also practically gone which makes it very inviting to look at.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/408558/mining-the-moon/

Advocates of He3-based fusion point to the fact that current efforts to develop fusion-based power generation, like the ITER megaproject, use the deuterium-tritium fuel cycle, which is problematical. (See "International Fusion Research.") Deuterium and tritium are both hydrogen isotopes, and when they're fused in a superheated plasma, two nuclei come together to create a helium nucleus--consisting of two protons and two neutrons--and a high-energy neutron. A deuterium-tritium fusion reaction releases 80 percent of its energy in a stream of high-energy neutrons, which are highly destructive for anything they hit, including a reactor's containment vessel. Since tritium is highly radioactive, that makes containment a big problem as structures weaken and need to be replaced. Thus, whatever materials are used in a deuterium-tritium fusion power plant will have to endure serious punishment. And if that's achievable, when that fusion reactor is eventually decommissioned, there will still be a lot of radioactive waste.


"He3-He3 is not an easy reaction to promote," Kulcinski says. "But He3-He3 fusion has the greatest potential." That's because helium-3, unlike tritium, is nonradioactive, which, first, means that Kulcinski's reactor doesn't need the massive containment vessel that deuterium-tritium fusion requires. Second, the protons it produces--unlike the neutrons produced by deuterium-tritium reactions--possess charges and can be contained using electric and magnetic fields, which in turn results in direct electricity generation. Kulcinski says that one of his graduate assistants at the Fusion Technology Institute is working on a solid-state device to capture the protons and convert their energy directly into electricity.

More info- pro and cons- at the link.

[QuickZ06]

What about thorium?

[Zippyjuan]

What about thorium?
Sounds very promising. Even though it has a better energy yield than Uranium and is safer, it did not get a big push in the early days of nuclear energy. Why? Its byproducts can't be converted into nuclear weapons like plutonium from Uranium reactors can.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html



China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.


Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.


“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.

“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own “issues” but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. “There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,” he said.

Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be “orders of magnitude less” than in a uranium reactor.

The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining.

More at link.

[osan]

Sounds very promising. Even though it has a better energy yield than Uranium and is safer, it did not get a big push in the early days of nuclear energy. Why? Its byproducts can't be converted into nuclear weapons like plutonium from Uranium reactors can.

This is precisely correct. There is a huge amount of thorium out there, but has been shelved because of the weapons deal. Just how demented is that? And why have thorium reactors not been put into service since the "fall" of the soviets? Safe, efficient thorium-fueled reactors providing plentiful inexpensive energy does not play at all well into the hands of those who seek to gain control over the "global stage". I doubt that at the bottom of things it is much more complicated than that.

How can one group of humans gain control over the rest when life is good - when people have plenty, their lives are content and all is more or less well? They cannot. Under such circumstances the "rest" simply ignore the noise makers, dismissing them. That, of course, is the one thing the conquest-seeking personality simply cannot tolerate. They are as bratty children in this respect, demanding attention be paid them and when they cross some threshold of power that they be obeyed as well. We are now well past that threshold. Our history documents this readily observable and predictable quality of the tyrant in great volumes. In fact, it is a damned challenge to find examples counter to this. This, of course, is deeply pathological.

The consistently successful method for gaining the attention and eventual obedience of the mob lies in crisis. Humans, when they form large cohesive groups, become part of what I like to call a "super organism" whose power grows in direct proportion to its size and the level of its cohesiveness. A least-common-denominator aspect arises when a loosely-knit population of humans is confronted by a super-organism (usually a large and powerful foreign armed force), usually forcing them to make the choice of forming a super-organism themselves or risk being conquered or wiped out. When so threatened, populations very predictably freak out and are willing to congeal under the command of some individual or group in the shadow of their fear. The knowledge of this seemingly hard-wired characteristic of human behavior has been taken keen advantage of by an endless parade of personalities who have sought dominion over others.

Because of this, a prosperity-enabling technology that provides abundantly affordable energy to everyone must perforce be suppressed - at least until such time that control over the greater mass is so perfected that any resulting change in the general state of living conditions for the better poses no possible threat to the state of central control. With the years of observation and cogitation over such matters I have come to suspect that there is no level or manner of control as yet possible that perfects the grip of the tyrant. Therefore, as things currently stand it appears that a general state of minimally tolerable crisis and the attendant miseries issuing therefrom will become the standard of life for the great unwashed masses of the earth. Reduction of the entire global population to a single and uniform state of subsisting poverty that stifles the creative power of the individual, and therefore all prospects of anyone elevating himself above the rest, will be effectively zero. One of the things those seeking global domination must not tolerate are any examples to the rest that show to them the possibilities for independent and prosperous life. Indeed, the very meaning of "prosperity" has been slowly redefined before our very eyes over the decades through an endless and powerful barrage of wildly successful propaganda. One must hand it to these people, whoever they are, for the genius, discipline, patience, and single-mindedly vicious and treacherous devotion they have displayed in their pursuits.

We may one day see thorium reactors, but I suspect that by that time, the standard of psychological expectation regarding the quality of life and the avenues of possibility perceived by the average man will have been so tightly circumscribed that such energy facilities will put out only subsistence levels of power for the subsistence-level lifestyle that will be doled out by the masters to a grateful population of domesticated beasts. The spark of the individual is by no means extinguished yet, but it is so very apparent that the trend is heading in that direction at an ever accelerating pace. If the economic hammer is brought down with great craft and absence of pity, that spark will be gone in 1/2 a generation and the world as we have known it will become nothing but a memory.

[LibertyRevolution]

Interesting... can you tell me more?

http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2006/12/72276?currentPage=all

They are doing fusion in lab now, but when they fuse hydrogen or normal helium it creates too many neutrons.
Neutrons are waste partials, they have no charge and cannot be channeled, so they just smash into the reactor wall destroying the reactor.
Helium 3 when fussed create only a fraction of the neutrons.

[Revolution9]

My mind is not made up on this one, but I do wonder how hydrocarbons exist on planetary bodies sans ancient rain-forests.

I mean if oil can exist abiotically there, then why not here?

Maybe someone with more knowledge in chemistry can help explain.

H2O and Calcium carbonate under great pressure produce hydrocarbon soup. Really simple shit here.

Rev9

[Revolution9]

Exactly, and the media still isn't willing to talk about the implications of peak oil on the American suburban lifestyle.

I think some on this forum are unwilling to accept peak oil because it demonstrates that the free market usually doesn't solve problems before they happen. We're going to have a rough time in this country dealing with really expensive gas until we reconfigure our society to not need it so much.

Propaganda.

Rev9

[Revolution9]

Peak Oil is just common sense. Finit e world, finite resourses.
I find is astonishing that anyone could think it a "myth".
As others have indicated, the crucial issue is not how much oil there is, but how much oil there is that can be extracted for a net energy gain. There may be huge reserves but if it requires more than a barrel's worth of oil-energy to extract a barrel, it may as well be on the moon.
At the beginning of the oil age 100 years ago you could get 100 barrels at the cose of 1. Its about 10 to 1 now.

It regenerates. It is only H2O and calcium carbonate under huge megabar pressures creating hydrocarbon soup. Interestingly they established the event horizon of a black hole by calcium in the spectral bands from the light that escapes.. BTW..many formerly tapped out reserves have filled back up.

Rev9

[John F Kennedy III]

It regenerates. It is only H2O and calcium carbonate under huge megabar pressures creating hydrocarbon soup. Interestingly they established the event horizon of a black hole by calcium in the spectral bands from the light that escapes.. BTW..many formerly tapped out reserves have filled back up.

Rev9

You learn something new everyday. I had no idea it regenerates.

[Zippyjuan]

It regenerates. It is only H2O and calcium carbonate under huge megabar pressures creating hydrocarbon soup. Interestingly they established the event horizon of a black hole by calcium in the spectral bands from the light that escapes.. BTW..many formerly tapped out reserves have filled back up.

Rev9

The "refill" is never complete. It is often seepage from surrounding areas. To see this effect, drink a glass of a beverage. A couple of minutes later you may see liquid again in the bottom of the glass. Did it spontaneously appear? No, it was drips stuck to the side of the glass which dripped back down to the bottom. The same can happen in oil wells. Wells are never 100% emptied either. There is a certain amount which is "recoverable".


As others have indicated, the crucial issue is not how much oil there is, but how much oil there is that can be extracted for a net energy gain. There may be huge reserves but if it requires more than a barrel's worth of oil-energy to extract a barrel, it may as well be on the moon.
At the beginning of the oil age 100 years ago you could get 100 barrels at the cose of 1. Its about 10 to 1 now.

For example, the shale oil deposits in the original post will require about one barrel's worth of energy to get out one barrels of oil (that energy could come from other sources like natural gas or coal- the heating the shale rocks to extract the oil is the biggest user of that energy) and would also require if I recall correctly about two barrels of water for each barrel of oil- water being a scarce resource in the region.

[Revolution9]

The "refill" is never complete. It is often seepage from surrounding areas. To see this effect, drink a glass of a beverage. A couple of minutes later you may see liquid again in the bottom of the glass. Did it spontaneously appear? No,

Correct up to here. After the hydrocarbon soup is drained residual oils in fissures and cracks and from porous rock may infiltrate back in but it is the water that is constantly created within the earth (see the work of Viktor Schauberger) that fills it back up and dissolves the calcium carbonate within the chambers. It is under enormous pressure and at points change forms as it cycles through various compositions and precipitations which get redissolved at future points when the polar solvents build up in the soup bringing forth further compounds such as calcium oxalate which will heat up the entire mix and cause chemical reactions to occur at a quickened pace. Due to the reactions releasing and recombining gazillions of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen in a highly volatile solvent per second(hydrogen under extreme pressure exhibits the qualities of a conductive metal and water is not a stable compound but several that cross combine) and the stray dance up a jig and get long chains going where the carbon hooks grab the hydrogen and oxygen. Various surrounding mineral traces will affect the final composition of the crude. It takes a while but wells tapped out in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the century are filled. Russians knew of this phenomena since the 50's and the process has been successfully recreated in the laboratory.

Rev9

[Zippyjuan]

It takes a while but wells tapped out in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the century are filled.

Do you have any links to the Pennsylvania wells refilling? Thanks!

Granted not a great source but from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvanian_oil_rush

After 1871, the oil industry was well established, and the "rush" to drill wells and control production was over. Pennsylvania oil production peaked in 1891, but Pennsylvania still has some oil industry.

Found a chart going back a long ways showing Pennsylvania oil production:
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/11/peak_oil_in_pen.html
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/11/pa_peak_oil1.gif


For two decades the state of Pennsylvania was to be the world's main producer of crude oil. Although production rates from the initial wells on Oil Creek dropped off quickly as the oil was taken out, these were more than replaced by other sources within the state. For example, in 1865, Pithole City, PA became a phenomenal boom town, accounting for a third of the 2.5 million barrels produced in the world that year, only to turn into a ghost town as production rates fell substantially by 1868.

Pennsylvanian production continued to increase as ever-more-productive new fields within the state were developed, reaching almost 32 million barrels in 1891. But I was interested to learn that, despite amazing improvements in technology since the nineteenth century, that was the highest annual production rate that Pennsylvania would ever achieve.

BIt more info on older field areas:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-gold-rush-boom-and-bust-and-boom-again-in-pennsylvania-834598.html

In five years, production of the waxy, paraffin-rich crude from Pennsylvania's Appalachian basin field has shot up 50 per cent to 3.8 million barrels. But experts reckon that two-thirds of the oil that was there when Drake drilled his way into history is still in the ground. Once it wasn't worth bothering with, but no longer. Rock Well Petroleum, a Canadian company, has plans not only to drill scores of new wells, but to dig huge underground caverns to collect the oil and pump it to the surface.

There's just one problem, however: what to do with the brine that comes with the oil, especially from older wells. McClintock No 1, for instance, now delivers 300 barrels of brine for every barrel of oil, says Barbara Zolli, the director of the state oil museum in nearby Titusville, at the site of Drake's first well.



Doesn't sound like they are completely refilled with oil. Sounds like water has been filling them up.

[Revolution9]

Do you have any links to the Pennsylvania wells refilling? Thanks!<snip BS>
Doesn't sound like they are completely refilled with oil. Sounds like water has been filling them up.

Yes. They fill up with water and it changes to hydrocarbon soup. Oil reserves have been kept in the ground in the US on purpose. Are you frikkin' dense or being paid to shill constantly. Links? Dude.. I read the internets like 20 times over and do not care if fools cannot do their own research but I read like 200-500 pages a day and have a mind like a STEEL TRAP FOR DATA..BUT NOT AUTHORS OR WEBSITE LINKS.. These facts are on the web and your charts and rhetoric mean shit. I ain't doing legwork for an Obama shill. And I don't give a frak who believes these facts. I know them to be accurate and the lab data on oil creation to be accurate and true. So..what is your gambit then if you are trying to disprove abiotic oil??

REV9

[AmericasLastHope]

I wonder what Jim Rogers thinks about this.

[Zippyjuan]

Yes. They fill up with water and it changes to hydrocarbon soup. Oil reserves have been kept in the ground in the US on purpose. Are you frikkin' dense or being paid to shill constantly. Links? Dude.. I read the internets like 20 times over and do not care if fools cannot do their own research but I read like 200-500 pages a day and have a mind like a STEEL TRAP FOR DATA..BUT NOT AUTHORS OR WEBSITE LINKS.. These facts are on the web and your charts and rhetoric mean shit. I ain't doing legwork for an Obama shill. And I don't give a frak who believes these facts. I know them to be accurate and the lab data on oil creation to be accurate and true. So..what is your gambit then if you are trying to disprove abiotic oil??

REV9

I see. Jesus works in the oil fields- turning water into oil. Water (which is one oxygen atom and two hydrogen and zero carbon atoms) is miraculously being changed into carbon atoms. Amazing stuff! Do you have any links showing how this works? that would be cool to check out. Thanks!

You offered as an example of abiotic oil the refilling of Pennsylvania oil wells from 100 years ago and said they had completely refilled. I tried to see if that was true and could not find that it was- the opposite instead seems to be true- they have not refilled with oil. I asked if you had anything which would help show that and I guess you could not- but thanks for looking.

I will agree that we do not know with absolute certainty how oil is formed (even the fossil fuel idea is a theory but based on evidence the most likely right now), but observations so far do not support abiotic theories. If the oil is being formed within the earth and pushed up to the surface, then deeper sources should be younger oils and so far, they are not.

Perhaps the 100 years since the oil was taken out from the Pennsylvania field is not enough time? If so, then this is still a problem because it means that it is still being used up much more quickly than it can be replaced.

[gerryb]

Can someone more knowledgable than myself please explain how it is that hydrocarbons exist elsewhere in our solar system, yet abiotic oil is considered a non-possibility according to orthodox scientific thinking.

Hydrogen is abiotic?

Problem solved?