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

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (240058)	8/28/2007 1:50:13 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I see where you have gone wrong. "Peak liquids" is different from what I was quoting which was "Peak oil". Ethanol from Brazil for example would be included in your peak liquids figure. I have seen plenty of predictions and arm-waving rules of thumb. My all-time favourite was the projection by the NZ government in about 1982 of the future of oil prices. They had a very scientifically design graph with upper and lower bounds of what prices would do. In fact, the line ended up zooming almost immediately below their projection and stayed plunging down. They were wrong by a country mile. Similarly, what you quoted was tendentious = wanting to show how fields are running out, big ones have been found, etc. It wasn't dispassionate. In terms of breaching the laws of physics, in fact that can be done; QUALCOMM did it. A Stanford professor explained how CDMA breaches the laws of physics and couldn't work. But it does and you are almost certainly one of my customers. A friend is an exploration and production manager [having been the reservoir engineer for years]. They have amazing production systems now. They have dug an offshore well from on-shore. Very tricky and production rates are high because the well goes horizontally through the field, meaning drainage into the pipe is very easy. The rate of extraction is a function of the extraction techniques. Drilling more holes can increase production. So can CO2 injection and other tricks. That's all beside the point. We are discussing how much is coming out of the ground in total and how much will. BP's figures, which are considered very reliable, are what I'll go with thanks. The peak is not in. Even with the very high prices we have, consumption is increasing. A booming global economy means people will pay the price. But they'll be going flat out on alternatives and more production too, to cash in. Eventually, alternatives will win at current prices because there are so many of them, but it takes time for them to be brought on-stream. The price of oil will then fall as producers try to maintain their customers and keep selling to get more money. Customers will then swing back towards oil if they haven't gone to nuclear or insulation. Even with free oil, people won't turn off their nuclear reactors, insulation and windmills. So prices will fall a lot. You are making countervailing arguments - on the one hand, we are all doomed because of CO2, but on the other, we are running out of oil. If we are running out, we don't have to worry about CO2. I suppose you think that before we run out, we'll have filled the atmosphere so much that we'll have a problem. We'll die of heat and deeper oceans just as the last oil is used and the SUVs, power stations, and airliners come to a halt. If we have Peak Oil due to running out of oil and it's next week, that won't worry me. It might even alleviate some of the traffic jams I have to contend with [though I avoid them through various strategies and rarely get involved with one]. Anyway, the BP figures are quite clear and reliable. We haven't seen peak oil yet [unless it's today]. Mqurice