Originally Posted by Mahasattva
I wrote: What is dumb is not placing things into context and not looking behind the numbers. A small 2% decline in world production (The share of global supply from the Africa, Asia and the FSU grew in 2007, meanwhile, Middle East, North America, Latin America and Europe lost share), due to human mismanagement, bad maintenance (Iran, Venezuela, Russia), politics (OPEC, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela), environmentalists (America), terrorist attacks (Iraq, some of the African nations), criminal activity (some of the African nations), war, or natural disasters is not evidence of a real loss of oil in the world.

We see declines caused by human factors all of the time, though usually they don't effect yearly production levels. If things continue as they have we will continue to see declines in production in Iran. We will also see declines in Russia and now Georgia, the first due to mismanagement and bad maintenance, the latter due to politics and war. In the past we have seen falls in production due to human factors in Angola, Congo, Iraq, Kuwait, Nigeria, Syria, and Venezuela.

And, of course, we have seen a decline in production in the United States due to human factors. For us it has been because of environmentalist litigation and restrictions placed on exploration, drilling, and the building of new refiners by the government.

We tend to forget that crude oil is needed for manufacturing all our plastics and only focus on its use as an energy source. Sure without oil our planes, trains, and automobiles will stop moving, we will be unable to heat our homes or light them, BUT without oil we will not be able to make bicycle helmets, children car seats, fire safety gear for our first responders, or many of the medical devices that save hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

tashi deleks,

M

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Quite correct, but now they are effecting world production. Of course, the only way to know for certain if we've hit peak yet is to continue to watch world production and see if the current trend continues, worsens, reverses, or forms a plateau. My hunch is that production will maintain a plateau for the next 3-5 years, perhaps longer, after which it will slide off into permanent decline, gradual at first, becoming precipitous after 10-20 years, unless an extremely large percentage of current demand is killed off.

Oh, and if you think deepwater drilling offers some promise, you may want to contact the oil majors and tell to get off their fat asses and place orders for new rigs, as there is a decided shortage at present. Not that it'll make much of a difference, but given our voracious appetite, we're going to need every drop we can get our greedy little hands on.

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Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush?

--Hunter S. Thompson

While I disagree with the hunch (guess) of your timeline, I agree with with the basic steps you lay out that will lead to decreasing returns. We really have no idea how long our oil will last. It could be 50 years or two hundred or 10,000. It all depends how we use it (for energy or for plastic). We do know that we have, I believe, almost 400 to 1,000 years worth of reserves of natural gas, again depending on how we use it and demand.

As oil becomes more expensive it will become worth the expense to invest in deepwater drilling. As it will become worth investing in extracting oil from coal and other methods. Ethanol is not worth it and I doubt it ever will be. Turning food into fuel is dumb. While I disagree with nearly every thing Andrewl has to say, I love his ironic sig. about ethanol.

As some complain about Big Oil today, in the future they will complain about Big Solar, Big Microwave, and Big Fusion.

tashi deleks,

M

__________________
"They haven't got Brains, any of them, only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think." -- Eeyore, The House At Pooh Corner

Sit like a mountain,
Breathe like the wind,
Mind like the Sky.

When all the Gods are crazy, who do you pray to?