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Non-Tech : Alternative energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (389)	12/26/2001 12:15:54 PM
From: Jerry in Omaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 16955

Thread: The Economist in a recent article presents, in effect, the oil industry's optimistic response to arguments put forth in Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage a book by Kenneth S. Deffeyes, published by Princeton University Press, 2001. [read Paul Raeburn's Scientific American review posted here #reply-16403271] I was surprised to learn the following from the Economist article. It seems once you punch open an oil reservoir, oil immediately starts to leak away forever lost. <SNIP> The second factor behind the oil industry's present scramble to embrace the new E&P technology is that oil reservoirs are self-depleting assets. Once a well is drilled, an unrelenting geological process is unleashed that depletes the reservoir even if none of the oil is pumped out. Not counting exploitation, today's mature fields are declining by an average of 7-8% per year. In Venezuela, the natural depletion is as high as 25%. The reasons for this vary from place to place, but have to do with the interplay between water, natural gas, sand and other forces “downhole”, over which man has little control. <END SNIP> And this paragraph sure takes a big bite out of the old reality sandwich: <SNIP>The third force behind big oil's technological push is the world's insatiable appetite for hydrocarbon fuels. In its latest “World Energy Outlook”, the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that global production of oil must rise from today's level of less than 80m barrels a day to around 115m barrels a day by 2020 if expected demand is to be met. Experts at the Houston office of McKinsey, a management consultancy, reckon that when such an incremental demand is added to the existing task of compensating for depletion, the result is equivalent to adding a whopping 65m barrels a day of oil production over the next two decades. If oil producers in non-OPEC countries are to meet that challenge, the IEA believes they must invest about $1 trillion (in today's money) upstream over the next decade—much of it on technology. <END SNIP> I wonder what a trillion dollars would do for alternative energies? Read the rest of the article here: economist.co.uk It's worth the time. Jerry apparently-engaged-in-a-monolog in Omaha