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Pastimes : Triffin's Market Diary -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Triffin who wrote (375)	7/14/2010 2:14:49 PM
From: Triffin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 868

BC: PEAK OIL DENIER MANTRA .. .. .. .. .. . .. . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . What Most Peak Oil Believers are Failing to Consider The points in this article have been argued over and over again. To claim that peak oil believers are failing to consider them it the height of ignorance. But just to point out a few of them: 1. Most of the world is not produced by publicly owned oil companies but by national oil companies. And we peak oil believers were not aware of this? Give me a break! But the argument is that these national oil companies spend money on their economies instead of their oil fields so they are only getting a fraction of what they could get with more investment and expertise. This is somewhat true for Mexico, Venezuela and a couple of other nations but not for most. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and even China and Russia know exactly what they are doing. The argument that these nations could dramatically increase production with more investment and expertise is just silly. 2. Peak oil is more an economic and political phenomenon than it is a geological phenomenon. Well, no doubt economics has a lot to do with it. A bad economy keeps demand low and prices low. A long term recession may extend the plateau for several years but the rest is entirely geology. More money cannot create more oil in the ground. Also, peak oilers have been aware of this fact for years. 3. There are technologies, as an example, miscible CO2 flooding to recover oil from allegedly depleted oil fields. Allegedly depleted oil fields? Prudhoe Bay is only allegedly depleted? Texas is only allegedly depleted? And how the North Sea. Even Saudi’s old fields are not depleted, where hundreds of new horizontal wells have slowed the decline rate of 8 percent down to almost 2 percent, (as of 2006) are only declining because they have not injected CO2 into them yet? I sure am glad we peak oilers were informed of this fact. 4. If prices are high, but oil is plentiful, either the world will move on to cheaper forms of energy and fuel, or technology will be spurred by higher prices to achieve more efficient economies of production in the more difficult oil (and oil equivalent) fields. Cheaper forms of energy? Cheaper than oil? Just what form of energy would that be? As was pointed out in a thread a few days ago, It's not just the scale of the task but its nature. Energy-dense liquids are valuable, and oil is uniquely valuable in its combination of density, ease of storage and transport, and, believe it or not, safety. Every alternative is worse on all metrics... There are no cheaper forms of energy. More money and better technology will pull the oil out of the ground a lot faster but it will increase the percentage of oil recovered by only a tiny percentage. And, the fact that all those new horizontal MRC wells pull the oil right off the top of the reservoir, it will make the decline much steeper when it does arrive. These are things that peak oil deniers are failing to consider.