Peak Oil

I just read an interesting site saying that the world will start running out of oil in just a few years. Oil production would peak and then fall, basically creating chaos for industrialized nations such as the USA.

It states some pretty solid proof and when I googled the subject, many sites seem to support it. Maybe it explains the increasingly higher gas prices? Its rumured around here that prices in PA will go up to like $3/gal from ~$1.6/gal. Democrats say its to persuade people to buy economy/hybrid cars and not buy SUVS.

Some of it may be exagerated but overall, it appears to be true. Here's the site: :)
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

EDIT: I read somewhere else that the war in Iraq (among other less important issues) was due to Iraq changing its oil currency to euros to sell to France. That change secures oil for France and makes it real expensive to USA considering that Iraq has 11% of the world's oil supply. These two theories support each other.

A couple of months there was a good program on NPR about this topic. The guests there said that, by the numbers, oil should run out in about 500 years or so...but in reality once we see that we are, indeed, running out of it - we will stop the massive consumption of it and in reality it will be more like 800 years.

I'm trying to find the program online right now so I have some proof for you guys.

*Runs around like a chicken with it's head cut off*
The sky is falling the sky is falling

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Originally posted by axon
A couple of months there was a good program on NPR about this topic. The guests there said that, by the numbers, oil should run out in about 500 years or so...but in reality once we see that we are, indeed, running out of it - we will stop the massive consumption of it and in reality it will be more like 800 years.

I'm trying to find the program online right now so I have some proof for you guys.

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Hopefully in the next 500 years or so we can significantly reduce our dependency on it.

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Nah.

>>oil should run out in about 500 years or so<<

I think you are confusing oil with coal. Coal is plentiful in some locations, but it is extremely dirty(and you can't run your average jet liner on it).

Many experts are predicting oil production to peak in less than 10 years. Oil discovery peaked 40 years ago and has been declining ever since. It now runs at less than a quarter of production.

Already, demand is rising much faster than supply. Unfortuantely, this largely hits developing countries. We whinge about oil prices up a few cents, while the rest of the world goes hungry.

Many oil reserves are thought to be massively inflated. Shell, the world's second largest oil company, recently wrote down its reserves by one fifth.

One way to reduce oil consumption would be to remove the massive subsidies. Instead of funding oil wars and puppet dictatorships with taxes, taxes would be lowered and the costs incorporated into oil prices. This would also make renewables much more competitive as they wouldn't be competing against a massively subsidised product.

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• Total world oil production reached 68 million barrels per day in 2003, according to a count by the Oil and Gas Journal. That's not much above the 66.7 million barrels per day in 2001. Oil reserves estimated at 1.266 trillion are up only a bit from 1.213 trillion a year earlier.
• Production has peaked for more than 50 oil-producing nations, including the US (1970) and Britain (1999). China, second to the US in the consumption of oil, was a net exporter of oil until 5 years ago.
• The Department of Energy predicts world demand will reach 119 million bpd in 2025, with huge increases in China, India, and other developing nations.
• In 2002, the world used four times as much oil as was newly found.
• The rate of discovery of worldwide oil reserves, after declining for 40 years, has slowed to a trickle. In 2000, there were 16 large discoveries of oil, 8 in 2001, 3 in 2002, and none last year, notes James Meyer, director of the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre in London.
• All the giant fields, such as those in the Middle East, have already been discovered, some experts say. These giants are relatively easy to find. The last major oil field, Cantarell, off Mexico's shore, was discovered in 1976.

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http://geopubs.wr.usgs.gov/open-file...0/of00-320.pdf
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994216
http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/environment/oil_crash.htm

it's a pretty scary thought considering how dependent we are on it, and that the rate of demand is increasing, and as is noted the rate that it's being found is decreasing.

I wonder what will be more difficult: finding a new plentiful energy source, or changing our life styles to accomodate those new energy sources (i.e new vehicles, or heaters for homes, etc)

Just because we're not finding any new supplies doesn't mean the supply at the current reserves is running out. Obviously it will, but they haven't said jack about the current reserves.

Who's they? The government? The media?

We can synthesise oil; when South Africa was in apartheid the got their oil trade blocked... so they synthesised their own.

The raw materials most commonly used are derived from coal which is still a fossil fuel but i think there are other alternatives that are bio derived though i may be mistaken on that.

and need not forget that conversion process that is being perfected that can convert garbage into usable resources, and make diesel fuel from most organic life.

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We can synthesise oil; when South Africa was in apartheid the got their oil trade blocked... so they synthesised their own.

The raw materials most commonly used are derived from coal which is still a fossil fuel but i think there are other alternatives that are bio derived though i may be mistaken on that.

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I thought this required vast amounts of energy anyway. we were talking in school about one of the major benefits from fusion, and the thing that my teacher mentioned was that we wouldn't have to change our vehicles because we could synthesize oil and gasoline, because the energy from fusion could conceivably allow us to do anything we wanted with almost any of the elements (i.e break them down, force chemical reactions, etc).

I'm fairly sure the synthesis is not endothermic, its not as economical as digging the stuff out of the ground though.

In terms of chemistry the only area where i can see our supply of energy as a limiting factor is electrochemistry which is a small subset and not really a major source of syntheticlaly usefull compounds.

Would you like fries with that?

I'm sorry I just don't really know what you're talking about, except for the endothermic part, I think :)
I sucked at chemistry

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Would you like fries with that?

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Yes please.

So...........................IN CONCLUSION....for all those non chemistry expert like me, are we or are we not screwed?

We are screwed. In 7996 years, all date values will no longer be printable in those 4 letter arrays and computers will crash our infrastructure, Fusion Power generators developed by then will explode in huge pink fireballs and earth will be history. Thank god we had a poodle on Mars when that happened.

:rolleyes: :p :D

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are we or are we not screwed?

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We are not doomed but there are good reasons for cutting down on use of fossil fuels regardless.

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We are screwed. In 7996 years, all date values will no longer be printable in those 4 letter arrays and computers will crash our infrastructure,

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hahaha :D


>>>>>We are not doomed but there are good reasons for cutting down on use of fossil fuels regardless.

what about Solar power? But then again the sun WILL also burn out....................................right?

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Originally posted by incognito
what about Solar power? But then again the sun WILL also burn out....................................right?

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Well wehn the sun burns out the earth wont exist.. unless we have colonies else where.. may in in another solar system..

Ah, I'm packing up, moving south and running my car on coconut oil, haha! :cool: