PEAK OIL A HOAX

Mayor oil companies like TOTAL have publicly stated that they have supplied less oil in 2007 than in 2006! Peak oil is about supply, not about demand or price. At this state of affairs nobody can predict how demand will go, and hence nobody can predict how the price will evolve and how many years of supply we have left. But supply has peaked: it is not a theory, it is not hoax, it is a fact!

Do your own observing. How many oil fields have been abandon in California? In Texas, In Oklahoma? How much oil comes from the fields in Pennsylvania? If those fields were still producing, why would we have drilled offshore for much more expensive oil? I live in New Mexico and when I go up towards Farmington from Albuquerque, I see many pumps standing idle while others nearby are pumping. I see small storage tanks here and there that have no pump anywhere near them. It is apparent that the big oil field up there is shutting down gradually. Ordinary common sense tells you that no oil field can last forever and therefore must have a half life.

 

Why is Mexico exporting less and less oil to us when they are in financial straits? Could it be because they are running out of oil? Chris's stats are easy enough to verify on the web. Why is Canada developing its tar sands if it still has lots of oil to pump in its ordinary oil fields? No business develops more expensive ways to do business unless it has no alternative. Even if there is some oil left in the many fields around, just the fact that more expensive alternatives are being and have been developed tells you that extraction has become so costly that other alternatives offer a better return. If you think that peak oil is a hoax, then go buy yourself a couple of Hummers and celebrate. As for me, I am convinced just on the evidence of my own observations, and I was even before I took the Crash Course.

 

pwoody

 I really hope it is true, in fact totally true. I have posted on here many times how I detest our total dependence on oil. But considering that Brazil just found a pretty large offshore oil field, and we don't have the technology for ultra deep oil drilling at sea, as well as the fact of undiscovered land based oil, or ultra deep land drilling, Peak Oil may have some arguments.

 

 

Peak Oil IS a hoax - just like the CO2 scare.

There is oil enough for the whole world and for hundreds of years. For a fuller explanation and in order to start your surfing, go to

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/Geopolitics___Eurasia/Peak_Oil___Russia/peak_oil___russia.html

 

I find it fascinating that people are ready to disagree with the enormous weight of evidence produced by independent scientists all over the world which supports the reality of both peak oil and climate change because of an article or two they find on the internet.  

On the Six Stages of Awareness that Chris posted a while back, this type of argument is just another form of denial.  I believe that the people who advance these unproven theories (i.e. that CO2 is not responsible for climate change and that peak oil is a myth) are causing serious harm by offering people yet another reason to sit back and do nothing.  That's the last thing we need.

Abiotic oil is a theory that has very little support outside of Russia.  Failing to take action on peak oil because of a belief that oil supply is limitless is analogous to smoking three packs a day because you read a few studies on the internet demonstrating that tobacco isn't carcinogenic. 

Likewise, the vast majority of serious scientists (more than 95%) around the world believe climate change is being accelerated by human activity - specifically, by the release of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere. 

If you wish to disagree with this consensus and the overwhelming amount of evidence behind it, please provide enough legitimate, peer-reviewed evidence to support your claim if you want to be taken seriously. Otherwise it's just more internet noise.

 

 

Very well stated, mainecooncat.  Thanks for elaborating on my rather terse response.

Yet another point I would add to your excellent analysis: even if oil was abiotic, and even if we could design a way to extract it faster than we use it, where will the money and energy come from to build, operate and maintain such machinery? Regardless of what you think about abiotic oil, we are very close to a peak (if not past it) in "conventional" oil production. And since oil is what we'd need to use to build and run the machines to access and process the mythical abiotic oil, this presents a serious problem.

The other rather significant challenge to this plan is the fact that the economy is imploding around us and companies just aren't in the multi-trillion dollar investing mood right now.  There are numerous recovery projects that are much less ambitious than those that would be required to access abiotic oil that have already been stalled due to lack of credit and the low price of oil.  

In short, forget about abiotic oil.  It's a worthless dead-end. 

Switters, where did you get this information? Also it's a logical fallacy to say that because a large number of people believe something to be true, it is true. From my experience it usually is the majority that are wrong and the minority that are right about a given issue.

"Likewise, the vast majority of serious scientists (more than 95%) around the world believe climate change is being accelerated by human activity - specifically, by the release of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere. "

"If you wish to disagree with this consensus and the overwhelming amount of evidence behind it, please provide enough legitimate, peer-reviewed evidence to support your claim if you want to be taken seriously. Otherwise it's just more internet noise."

Here's a couple days worth of info for you to look through. BTW there is no such thing as a scientific concensus.

http://z4.invisionfree.com/Popular_Technology/index.php?showtopic=2050

"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus..."
- Michael Crichton, A.B. Anthropology, M.D. Harvard

Peak Oil and Man Made Global Warming are two completely different things, oil is a finite resource that if continued to be used  will run out some day, hence Peak Oil at some point in time is a fact. I have seen much more evidence that the Sun is responsible for the temperture on the Earth than I have that man is responsible, take away the Sun and the Earth is a block of ice.

Some perspective...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/07/some-planetary-perspective/

John Michael Greer, author of The Long Descent, just published an excellent post on his blog called "Arguments from Ignorance".  I think it is relevant to this discussion.  Here's an excerpt:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/10/arguments-from-ignorance.html

[quote] I had a cogent reminder of this over the past week, when three efforts of mine to spark collective discussion about these issues – my book The Long Descent, a reading and booksigning at a local bookstore here in southern Oregon, and the most recent post here – fielded three responses that used very different arguments to make a common claim. A reader of my book emailed me to tell me he thought I was refusing to give proper weight to the possibility that new technology would save our civilization from the impact of peak oil; a serious young man who attended the reading came up afterwards to ask me what I thought about the possibility that the current crisis would drive humanity to achieve a new stage of spiritual evolution, after which we will easily replace fossil fuels with currently unimaginable resources; a new reader of this blog sent in a comment insisting that peak oil was an illusion manufactured by sinister elites who were suppressing inventions that would allow everyone to have all the energy they wanted.

Mind you, I’d encountered every one of these assertions before. Ever since this blog first started suggesting that the end of the age of cheap abundant energy was the natural and inevitable result of a human ecology hopelessly out of step with the realities of life on a finite planet, I’ve fielded a great many emails and comments insisting, basically, that it just ain’t so – that one way or another, for one reason or another, humanity could have its abundant energy resources and burn them too, and can reasonably expect more of the same forever. The three responses I’ve just cited by no means exhaust the full spectrum of arguments advanced to back this curious claim, but they’re good representative samples of the type.

 

Now it’s possible to dispute each of these claims on their own terms, and I’ve done that more than once on this blog and elsewhere, but there’s a very real extent to which this is a waste of breath. Each of them is what the old logicians used to call argumentia ad ignorantem, arguments from ignorance. They insist on the presence of a factor that isn't actually present for examination and can’t be proved or disproved – a technological advance that hasn’t happened yet, an imminent spiritual transformation that has to be taken on blind faith, or a conspiracy so secret and pervasive that it can manipulate everything we think we know about the world – to insist that we don’t actually have to do anything about peak oil.

 

Such arguments prove nothing, of course; they're the precise equivalent of using the phrase "then a miracle happens" to get from one step of a cookbook recipe or a mathematical equation to the next. Their only virtue is that they’re impossible to disprove. I’ve come to think that this last detail is why they’re so popular. It’s a very charming social habit, dating back to the 18th century Enlightenment, to profess the belief that people come to decisions about the world by sitting down with the relevant facts, assessing them calmly, and then making a decision on that basis. I think most of us are aware, though, that few decisions are actually made this way; much more often, people start from the conclusion that appeals to their emotions and intuition, and then go looking for logical reasons to support the belief they’ve already chosen. [/quote]

Read the entire post here: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/10/arguments-from-ignorance.html 

Oh, and one more thing. There are thousands of sites on the web that disagree with CO2 being the cause of global warming.

So what?  The web's full of bullshit too.....  you need a bullshit filter!

Mike 

 

The sad thing about Peak Oil denial is that the people that refuse to accept or undertake the required investigation into the peak oil problem are robbing themselves of the limited time left in which to prepare for the imminent and worsening problems associated with energy decent.

 Sure, you can prepare for a recession or a depression however if you understand and accept peak oil then you will know that you have to prepare for a new way of living rather than a temporary situation which most associate with recessions and depressions.

This current crises was triggered by peak oil.  In 2005 the global production rate of oil started a plateau which has hovered around the same production rate till this date.  Whilst at the same time the global economy was growing and wanted more oil. Thus supply did not meet demand and the price tripled very quickly.  The first section of the global society to feel the pinch (in the 1st world anyway) were the subprime mortgagees whom where already doing it tough and then oil prices tripled which raised the price of everything so these subprime mortgagees defaulted enmass.

The global economic system was always going to fail just like building a house of cards however it turned out that liquid energy was the trigger/tipping point.  If it wasnt oil it would likely be phosphorous or someother peaked out limited resourse!

By understanding peak oil, we can realise that what "we" are doing is fundamentally unsustainable and so we should use our intellegence to choose a lifestyle and economic system that does not rely on growth but TRUE sustainability.

However, without getting too deep into what "we" should do, first we have to survive the coming "transition period".

 Good luck all.

 

 

 MiK

"Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. (a red pill is shown in his other hand) You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."

There is indeed enough oil to meet our needs for hundreds of years.

But sadly, Peak Oil has nothing to do with how much oil there is in the world, ie the reserves, they just tell you when the oil will run out.

Peak oil is not about oil running out.

Anybody that uses the reserves as a reason why peak oil won't happen doesn't understand peak oil.

Peak oil is about the flow rates of oil that is affordable to consume and profitable to produce when used as a source of energy. Not all the oil in the world meets these exacting criteria so in reality our needs will have to shrink not grow.

Peak oil is not an energy problem, it is primarily a transport problem for the ~10% of the world's population that uses cars and aeroplanes as an integral part of their daily lives. It is an especially big problem for countries that import most of their oil.

10,000 scientists would disagree with you.

[quote=gregroberts]

"10,000 scientists would disagree with you."

 10,000 scientists on the Global Warming dole would I'm sure

 BTW- That is not an argument, 10,000,000 Germans voted for Hitler, does that make right?

[/quote]

Of course not.  As Anatole France said, even if 50 million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that the conclusion reached by 10,000 scientists from around the world looking at the same data can be easily dismissed by a few comments on internet forums.  Show me the data that conclusively disproves the theory that climate change has been accelerated by humans.  I haven't seen it. 

MOSCOW, October 29 (RIA Novosti) - Russia will decrease its oil production by
1-1.5% next year, the vice president of LUKoil, Russia's independent oil
producer, said Wednesday.

"Next year knowing in view of companies' plans, production will decline 1-1.5%,"
Leonid Fedun told a UBS conference in Moscow.

Fedun also said Russia could join the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries.

"Cooperation has started between Russia and OPEC. Maybe we are even talking
about Russia joining OPEC. LUKoil and Rosneft heads are due to take part in the
next OPEC session in December," he said.

Fedun said LUKoil believes capital investment by Russian companies needs to
reach $100 billion annually for Russia to maintain its current levels of oil
production.

The Russian Energy Ministry forecasts in 2008 oil production in Russia will drop
1 million tons, or 0.3-0.4% to 490 million tons against last year.

Earlier Fedun said that LUKoil planned to increase oil production by 1.5% with
gas output rising by 3-4% in 2009.

However, Fedun said that the global financial crisis could force the company to
cut investment in 2009 which would affect its drilling program and plans to
modernize oil refineries.
http://en.rian.ru/business/20081029/118019151.html

  BTW- That is not an argument, 10,000,000 Germans voted for Hitler, does that make right?

And how many voted for Bush...?

There's no accounting for stupidity, I'll grant you that, but I'll bet virtually not one of those scientists would have voted for either Hitler or Bush.....