donc: if true, nucleation origins for oil could mean one of two things: still a finite amount of recoverable/economic oil, but a lot more of it (by orders of magnitude) than previously/currently projected; or, there are some nucleation theories that suggest an almost infinite supply in terms of human perception of time if (and it's a big if, IMO) nucleation processes can occur where our molten iron core meets the next layer up -- as long as there's still a molten core and raw "feedstock" of matter to convert.
To be fair, dvdw seems to be suggesting the former with his emphasis on impact event nucleation, and IMO is the more likely of the theories to be correct. But there are a number of people (mostly dead now) who argue the latter and in fact argue that it also means we have an infinite supply of fresh water and other things -- nucleation would mean that literally anything... any matter could/can become something else, it's just a matter of figuring out how all of the sub atomic and atomic level particles sort themselves out during nucleation.
It's actually interesting stuff, however, for the moment it (if true) is only being observed in the market place with the ascent of the Bakken/North Dakota/Alberta production boom. If they can replicate that reliably in more and more locations, it will be, indeed as dvdw suggests a game changer for the human race for possibly generations.
Economic production? Well, we didn't think the shales would be economic and we've known about them for a long long time... new applications of existing drilling tech coupled with a couple real innovations and coupled with the depletion of the really really easy to find/produce oil led to the boom in the Bakken.
Until it isn't economical to develop, i.e., if a lot more Bakken fields are exploited in roughly the same time frame, then the price of oil would look a lot like the current ng production/supply/price curves... we saw a lot of conventional ng shut in because they sorta had to produce the shale stuff to secure/maintain leases (and of course prodigious initial production flows -- sufficiently large that they could quickly pay for the wells and make money despite surpluses, price slumps and rapid production declines).
There are still a lot of questions in my mind about all of the above, but I won't reject it out of hand -- nor accept it as reality just yet. |
