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Gold/Mining/Energy : PEAK OIL - The New Y2K or The Beginning of the Real End? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: I_C_Deadpeople who wrote (1091)	7/27/2006 12:56:05 AM
From: Don Earl	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1183

RE: "Any proof of that statement over the past 10-15 years?" I don't have a link handy, but yes, there's plenty of proof. Do a quick Internet search on oil reserves with historic charts and you'll get the picture. In spite of all the oil we use, the reserves grow and grow and grow, year after year after year. That's been the pattern for the last 40 years. The part of the equation the oil peekers always leave out is that it costs a lot of money to do surveys and to drill exploratory wells. As close as I can tell, the oil companies tend to throw enough money at exploration to keep a 10-15 year supply of proven reserves on tap. And, as close as I can tell, for the past 4 decades, the oil peekers have been yelling the sky is falling because there are only 10-15 years worth of proven reserves available. They were saying it in the 60s and they're still saying it today, but the simple fact of the matter is that whenever the oil companies get around to digging another hole in the ground, they find more oil. One of the most interesting facts to me is all the stories about reserves thought to have been pumped dry which fill back up with oil over a period of time. There's a point where the theory that oil is made out of used dinosaurs stops making sense. For starters, I have a bit of trouble with the idea dinosaurs were ever plentiful enough that we can burn 80 million barrels a day worth of old dinosaur fat and not have run out a very long time ago. I have even more trouble with the idea that life as we know it, voracious as it is, would allow much of anything to get past the top 4 inches of top soil - let alone miles deep in the ground - before being gobbled up by something else. The peak oil theories assume a biological origin for oil. If that were true, why wouldn't rain forests be better places to find oil than Middle Eastern deserts or polar ice caps? Wouldn't the best prospects be in regions rich with life rather than the most barren wastelands on the face of the planet? I'm no kind of expert on the topic, but I've found the subject interesting enough to do a little research on both sides of the debate. From what I've read, I find the arguments and evidence supporting a non biological origin for oil a lot more convincing than the used dinosaur theory. If you chuck the used dinosaur theory, the peak oil theory goes out the window with it. Of course if you like conspiracy theories, who has the most to gain from wide spread acceptance of a theory that oil is in short supply? Would oil traders pay $70 a barrel if they knew they were sitting on top of a ten thousand year supply of the stuff?