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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
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To: kormac who wrote (78317)4/25/2008 12:32:55 PM
From: koan  Read Replies (3) of 116555
 
kormac; "
Why would one want to convert coal to synthetic oil? There is no point of doing so. There is an article in the March 24th, 2008 issue of Oil & Gas Journal on this and the author claims that you lose half the energy in the process. He also has a table with the following numbers. World reserves of:

Oil 191000 million tonnes of oil equivalent
NG 165000 million tonnes of oil equivalent
Coal 213000 million tonnes of oil equivalent

So, the world's coal reserves are only 11% larger than the oil reserves in energy value. How about leaving some of this stuff to our children?"

koan: "kormac, I am on your side"!!!

I think those numbers above are wrong. In fact they seem sort of nuts, they are so wrong.

1) IMO, and many others, we are past peak oil. From what I have read we cannot produce more than 85 million barrels a day producing flat out. Russia, the largest producer of oil in hte world, had its production start to fall for the first time in jan of this year.

We consume about 86/87 million barrels a day. And while the US is using 2% less, asia et al *which use about the same amount as us) are using 4% more. So the supply demand equation causes prices to rise as there is a 2% net gain in demand over supply.

Right now with high oil prices they are reworking old oil fields and going after heavy oil, but there is just not enough of either left to make up the deficit.

2) Lots of NG, but hard to move i.e LNG. How do you get the NG from Alaska to the lower 48 for example? And in the US the total NG production is falling at about 5% a year as the NG deposits age.

3) We have about 1,000 years of coal at the present rate of use. I am not saying it is a good thing to convert coal to oil. I am saying prctically speaking there will be no choice.

The world will need fossil fuels for the forseeable future and coal is the only viable substitute I know of. If you know another equation that gets the job done I am all ears.


Cheers,
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