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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (175872)	11/26/2005 9:06:36 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

But how much oil is in that finite ball? Do you know? If you do, you are te only person on earth who does. The one thing you can be sure about about oil reserves is everyone is lying- -nations and oil companies. Why and in which direction vary. DOes incresing the price of oil increase the supply and reserves? In 1973 OPEC though the answer to that question HAD TO BE no. THey soon found out differenet. The greatly increased price got drillers going to places they hadn't before- -like the North Sea and the North Slope. Soon the planet was drowning in oil and its price plummeted. OPEC learned to be much more careful about price increases as a result of that. Why AREN'T oil sands counted as part of reserves? At $10/bbl, extraction may not be economical. At $100/bbl? $200/bbl? What else becomes pratical at that price? Synthetic oil production? Here you can see the historical price of oil with inflation adjustment. inflationdata.com You may be looking at the wrong short term and intermediate term constraint in any case: Crude oil production has been rising faster than refining capacity over the past decade. A continuation of this trend would soon make lack of refining capacity the binding constraint on growth in oil use. This may already be happening in certain grades, given the growing mismatch between the heavier and more sour content of world crude oil production and the rising world demand for lighter, sweeter petroleum products. federalreserve.gov

To: bentway who wrote (175872)	11/26/2005 9:43:31 PM
From: mistermj	Respond to of 281500

Innovation is infinite. Fill 'er Up with Oil Sands! >>Oil sands in a single Venezuelan deposit contain an estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of petroleum, with 1.7 trillion in a single Canadian deposit. In all, about 70 countries (including the U.S.), have oil sand deposits although technology hasn't yet made them economical for exploitation. Of Canada's reserves alone, over 300 billion barrels (more than the entire proved oil reserves of Saudi Arabia) is currently considered recoverable. And recovering it they are.<< >>We've only scratched the surface in terms of discovering and exploiting oil sand deposits, along with deposits of oil-containing rocks called oil shale. Still the amount, however huge, is necessarily finite. By one estimate, we may only have about more 500 years of energy from oils sands at current usage rates. Just five centuries till the spigot runs dry! Where are the doomsayers when you need them? << fumento.com