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Champion
 
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Andy, that does sound fairly unlikely. Why would oil companies spend money unnecessarily while tarnishing their reputation at the same time? Obviously oil companies still look for new oil reserves, but at present they're only discovering oil at about a sixth of the rate that it is being pumped.
------
PD - Machupa Kivull - Sandy coloured great-coated Gnoll
Shards/Ascendancy - Crew
FOIP is short for 'torture me for more info'
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Wag
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Shven (5/13/2008)
The reason I am saying that tar sands are not a viable replacement for more conventional methods is the speed at which they can be extracted. The issue of peak oil is not one of how much oil is left, but of how much oil we can produce.
How much oil we can produce is significantly linked to how much oil is left. In the case of tar sands it turns out to be more oil than we can imagine, pretty much. I would be surprised however if the increasing commercial viability of tar sands oil (see wikipedia and many others) didn't drive the technology forwards in terms of extraction techniques. Surprised because that would largely fly in the face of the regular experience of human history. As far as I can see, most of the peak oil theories seem to be driven by a determination to prove that the world is going to go wrong and that we're all going to die by any means possible, generally by doing things like insisting that current unprofitable untapped oil reserves will remain so even as the world dies of petrol starvation. A sort of burning your cake and not baking it kind of approach.
As production decreases and demand increases we can expect prices to continue to rise until alot of things that we take for granted could potentially be no longer economically viable.
Or, as demand increases, it drives up production by increasing economic viability of currently non-viable resources while choking off demand by quelling growth due to inflated costs. As per any rational economic model.
In simple terms, the enhanced fuel price is excellent because it drives forward the invention and adaption of new alternative energy sources. There is a company in Birmingham looking to make electric taxis and I saw a company on tv the other day bought a hundred electric lorries as part of their fleet overhaul. Obviously electric vehicles simply moves the energy cost somewhere else, but greater use of renewable energy sources is possible if we're committed enough to it. (And there is nothing like a $200 a barrel price for oil for helping motivate people to get committed). It's deeply unfortunate that it will cause massive social disruption for many people in the developing countries especially but that is the nature of life sadly.
What we should do is encourage our government to take sensible action to continue to promote increases in the cost of oil based products. I'd like to see duty significantly raised on petrol, and the removal of red diesel and "air" diesel. The more we tax these things, the more enticing public services become and the more money goes into researching alternatives to petrol based transportation. All of which will pay off, but only when the price of petrol gets high and stays sustainably high. Our problem isn't that oil is running out, any commodity will run out if you use too much of it, our problem is that we have too much oil. It's so cheap we burn it off without looking at alternatives because oil is cheap. Plentiful and cheap (or it was before the recent improvements in the price of a barrel).
Personally I think we in the west will benefit enormously in the long term from a decade of oil at $200 a barrel. It might make carpeting your bedroom expensive (most carpets are made from oil), but the quality of air in our towns and cities will be vastly improved when we're all driving round in electric cars. We'll be much poorer but our quality of life will be significantly improved. Yay for the oil peak!
A breakdown of each countries oil production and when a peak in their production happened or is predicted to happen is available at http://www.lastoilshock.com/map.html - from this you will notice that the only countries not expected to hit the peak of their production within the next fifteen years are in fact Canada and Venezuela - both with peak production rates of around 6 and 3.75 million barrels per day - a far cry from the 78 million barrels a day produced in 2005.
Like I said, having read the material and watched the news regularly I'm largely unconcerned. Free markets will achieve what weak politicians and green doom-sayers cannot, namely gradual energy diversification away from oil. While it may not be orderly I see no evidence at all for catastrophic collapse in the first world (god help the third world mind you).
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Prodigal
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| While I'm prepared to accept that Greenpeace are going to be somewhat partisan, they are generally pretty careful about making statements (having to convince people who don't want to know and would rather think your mad can have that effect on an organisation). As to why an Oil company would do such a thing- well you've bought it and you're someone who thinks about these things, most people don't actually give a stuff Misdirection is just another from of advertising, as is propaganda- in this case if we (the public) think that oil is short we'll turn a blind eye to the destruction, pursuing an innefficient line of research suggests desperation which supports the illusion of shortage. At the end of the day Shven you've only got their word for it. e.g We went to war with Iraq, on the basis of some WoMD which we suspected they had. Presumably these were the nerve agents we sold them to use against Iran,which were then used against Iraqi Kurds. So not only did we know they didn't have them any more, we sold them to Iraq in the first place, and yet the gov't's of the free world rallied around and attacked Iraq overthrowing it's lawful (if dodgy) gov't, and in all that furor no-one really noticed western oil companies taking over control of the Iraqi oil industry. If they can do that, there's no limit to what an oil company will do!!
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Wag
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Andy Rimmer (5/13/2008)
We went to war with Iraq, on the basis of some WoMD which we suspected they had. Presumably these were the nerve agents we sold them to use against Iran,which were then used against Iraqi Kurds.
So not only did we know they didn't have them any more, we sold them to Iraq in the first place, and yet the gov't's of the free world rallied around and attacked Iraq overthrowing it's lawful (if dodgy) gov't, and in all that furor no-one really noticed western oil companies taking over control of the Iraqi oil industry.
If they can do that, there's no limit to what an oil company will do!!
Unfortunately all you've done here is prove that governments, specifically Tony Blair, will lie. Bush and the Americans were pretty clear originally that regime change in Iraq had nothing to do with WMD and was about a neocon agenda to transform the middle east into democracies to better enable American foreign policy in the region. Bush gave lots of very honest speeches about how he wanted regime change. After world diplomat Blair got all girly about the fact that this would be utterly illegal under the UN charter and was going to be dreadfully unpopular back home the Americans agreed to tie the whole thing to the WMD. If Blair hadn't forced Bush to lie about his intention to invade Iraq to change the regime it could even have been an honest (albeit illegal) invasion.
They chose to lie about their reasons because they were pretty sure that the regime had WMD, since we had the receipts for when we sold them to him. The numbers used against Iran and the Kurds were significantly less than the numbers we sold him, so he ought to have had a shit pile of them left. Hugely ironically it appears he actually really did destroy the weapons to avoid them being found by the weapons inspectors sent into Iraq in the decade running up to that, but realistically, there was hardly anyway that Blair or Bush could have known that, other than by looking for evidence that they might have been wrong, not something either individual ever seemed to show much interest in. So less corruption, more incompetence, in my book.
My real point however is that you can follow a pretty clear line from start to finish through the whole turgid mess, starting with the American desire to change the Baghdad regime and ending with the American desire to change the Baghdad regime. It's easy to look for clever conspiracies here, but Bush was always very open about what he was doing and the Neocons were always open about why. When someone says "We're planning an illegal invasion of a sovereign country because we think replacing their government will aid our foreign policy in the region in the long term" then I'm inclined to believe them personally. To tie it all to oil is simply too simplistic. Sure oil is the reason for the interest in the area, that's why America cares about the Middle east and not Middle Africa, but the war was about bringing the region more reliably within American influence not simply grabbing oil.
In the case you've quoted, you need to establish a line of profit in the matter for the oil companies. These companies are not controlled by evil Dr No style bond villains out to destroy the world. They're oil companies and they're out to make money by removing oil from the ground and selling it to people. Proving that democractic governments lie about their intentions and their plans does not prove that oil companies are irrational. Unless you can explain why oil companies are doing what you claim they are doing, then I'm not inclined to believe what Greenpeace says about them. As for Greenpeace's scientific record, I'm afraid my experience of being an oceanographer for a few years was that most environmental movements scientific knowledge was even less credible and reliable and had less integrity than that of the big oil and tobacco companies. Ned Ludd must be very proud of his children. (I give money every month to Greenpeace, just because I trust them even less than BP and Shell, doesn't mean I don't think they're a necessary evil).
In this instance however Greenpeace could be well correct. Why? Because the share price of the oil companies is significantly correlated with their declared levels of oil reserves. They may have 50 or more years of oil reserves, but if they find and claim more oil then it drives their share price up. So they are financially motivated to engage in expensive oil exploration in sensitive areas. It's also in their interests to play up fears about oil shortages, because this a) drives oil prices up and b) reduces support for environmental controls to limit oil drilling.
In practice there are all different kinds of oil reserves depending on how economically feasible the extraction of the oil is. Saying oil companies have massive reserves is much easier if you pretend that all the reserves are the same. In which case we have more than enough oil to last us for the next millenium. They're not of course, some are "low grade" meaning they're not really viable at this time to exploit, so companies engage in further exploration and research in the hope of adding to their most precious reserves ("proved") either by finding new reserves or using new technology to improve unproven reserves.
In the end though if everyone was convinced there was "too much" oil, then further research and exploration by the oil companies would be wasteful and they'd stop doing it. It's the fact that making the Alberta sands viable brings new reserves into operation increasing profits and share prices that motivates Shell to do it.
History is an important source for LRP. Along with other works of fiction.
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Initiate
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Shven (5/13/2008)
In response to tidal technology, yes, certainly. Great. But it hasn't been developed yet. And even with massive worldwide investment in renewables we couldn't generate the energy to use as much as we do now.
Andy: I'm not following your point about messy geological surveys at all I'm afraid.
Ummm yse it has, I would even give a handy link but it was a follow up report on working lunch a couple of months ago based on the original report from 2 or 3 years previously.
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Wag
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This is all very nice, but do I still get to have a steam powered airship?
_____________________________________________________
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Curved core weaponry and bespoke stuff.
ShelfordFX
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Initiate
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Shelford (5/14/2008)
This is all very nice, but do I still get to have a steam powered airship?
Only if your very good and eat all your greens.
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Prodigal
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Sorry Matt, my mistake- I forgot that Bush was far too honest to let his families Oil interests influence his decision making and that multinational companies sponsor politics, without expecting any payback at all. We're just helping out over there.
I expect he'll be moving to Calcutta to continue his charity work after Christmas- which is of course where Mr Blair has vanished to .
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