Oil in the news..

[Skogen]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/04/25/bush.saudi/index.html

and we a looking to the saudis as a crutch again! Lets not forget, the Ghawar is probably peaking..

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... Apr20.html

ANWR is almost open for business!


EDIT: oh and also

Conservative Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, Chairman of the Projection Forces Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee, gave an hour long presentation on Peak Oil to the US Congress. Full text at website below, but some quotes follow.

"What now? Where do we go now? One observer, Matt Savinar, who has thoroughly researched the options, and this is not the most optimistic assessment, by the way, but may be somewhat realistic, he starts out by saying, Dear Readers, civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. I hope not. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse Bible sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is a scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon known as global peak oil."

The Senators statement regarding renewable energy.
"At some point, you pass the point of no return where there is not enough readily available high-quality fossil fuels to support our present economy while we make the investment we have got to make to transition to these renewables. And then we come to true renewables: solar, wind, geothermal, ocean energy. All of these suffer."

He also said...
"What can we do to avert the kind of a catastrophe that he hints at with those words? We must not squander an opportunity. One is always reminded of Malthus. I am sure you have heard of him. He was looking at the increase in world population and he looked at our ability to produce food and he says, gosh, those two curves are going to cross because the world population was increasing faster than our ability to produce food and we are going to have mass starvation. That did not happen. The reason that did not happen was because Malthus could not have anticipated the green revolution, which, by the way, was made possible almost entirely, well, the plant science had a lot to do with it but better plants and better genes without the fertilizer to make them grow is not going to do you much good, so the green revolution was very largely the result of our intensive use of oil. Most people do not know it, but all of our nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. You may have observed that when you have a thunderstorm in the summertime, your lawn is greener than when you have watered it.
That is because of what is known as poor man's fertilizer. The lightning combines some of the nitrogen so they can be carried down by the water and one's lawn is, in fact, greener after a thunderstorm than it is when they water it. We have kind of learned how to mimic lightning, and we now know how to make nitrogen fertilizer from gas. By the way, before we knew how to do that, the only sources of nitrogen fertilizer were barnyard manurers. If one is on the Eastern Shore with a lot of chickens, one could go a long way with that now in agriculture, could one not? But barnyard manurers would fertilize only a tiny percentage of the nitrogen needs of our plants."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Those are just some of the details spelt out by a courageous Senator, risking "nutter" status. My closing comment is to question whether or not I have done the right thing to campaign about Peak Oil at all? Why let everyone know about this? I should be on a farm somewhere. The more people that know, the more competition I will have in buying a farm. After all, it takes roughly 2.5 acres to feed a human being through permaculture principles.

Full text of speech below.

http://www.energybulletin.net/4733.html

[Skogen]

bah! all you sons a bitches are ignoring peak oil?!

In the immortal words of eric cartman"

"WELL SCREW YOU TOO!!"

[Chmee]

"One is always reminded of Malthus"

Yep, one in a long line of doom sayers who got it wrong.

[Hoarmurath]

I was just thinking about this the other day, and this is what I thought was rather interesting: Some time the distant future, there will be history books (or whatever humans use instead of "books") and the period of time when the world "had oil" will be nothing more than a 200 or 300 year blip. Kind of depressing, I thought.

[Voronwë]

as tempting as it is to believe that the Dark Ages are upon us again in 50 years, there is so much wealth to be lost and so much genetic advantage to be lost, that there is such a "potential energy" in terms of market incentive to produce viable alternatives when the time is truly here when oil no longer is cost effective.

now in the mean time, we might see the middle class in America take a monstrous lifestyle hit, simply from the additional cost of heating their homes and fueling their cars. but if you are on the "right side of the tracks", you probably won't notice much of anything, unless you insist on investing in oil commodities when that is no longer somethng smart to do.

[Voronwë]

By the way, BP announced quarterly profits today.

$6.67Billion Net profit from Q1.

That is a 35% increase from a year ago.

Oil Drilling, Refining, and Production (as a profit center) is UP 53%.

The stock market as a whole is about at ZERO percent from a year ago (maybe 1-2% negative)

Remember, Exxon-Mobile posted the largest profits of any company EVER, in Q4 2004.

in the oil companies defense, the price of oil is determined by the market. But the current market conditions are obviously favoring them greatly.

[Skogen]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0322-31.htm

Profits in and of themselves don't mean jack about the future outlook. Look at production, how much money is spent on exploration, and how much is actually discovered.

[Voronwë]

i wasnt presenting the profits as a statment on long term viability of oil at all.

we may truly be at "the peak", and if so, it would make sense that dollar bills are raining from the sky for the companies. i'm merely presenting the information that I did because I thought it was interesting and it fit into the broader topic of the oil industry which you have interestingly raised here =).

i'm trying to generate traffic on your thread!

[Skogen]

ok my bad!

If anything these huge profits that the major oil companies are gleaming are a sign of demand outstripping supply to "tip over" levels. It's going to be interesting to see if the Saudis can make good on there promise of keeping up with world demand....which is doubtful

I posted this link before I think:

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/ghawar.htm

It's about the state of Ghawar, the worlds largest oil field.

Not like I am any exert on any of this shit, but what is scarey is the people who are ringing the alarm bells on this.

Moreover, the bell is being rung the loudest by a company called "Petroconsultants" a geneva based company that maintains a huge private database of Oil reserve numbers for countries throughout the world.....and who is the #1 client of Petroconsultants?
The CIA!

[Voronwë]

the Saudi promise to increase demand yesterday, was nothing more than PR for Bush.

[Nick]

Sadly, there are several billion more people who don't sit on the 'right side of the fence' including about 80% of the Developed world.

There is a stick your head in the sand mentality about this and most other environmental issues and it's pretty alarming.

Whether Peak Oil hits in 10 or 1000 years, the fact we are aware of it should be more than enough to prompt us to seriously consider not raping our one and only source of life (The Earth).

And it makes me wonder.....