Report Blasts "Peak Oil" Theory

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(priusenvy @ Nov 15 2006, 08:14 PM) [snapback]349877[/snapback]</div>

This is an advertisement. The link is to a summary of their report, and offers to let you download the full report for a $1,000. I chose not to spend the $1,000, but there was then essentially nothing in the summary that would provide adequate information for making an informed judgement about their conclusions. Or even to see whether they have anything new to say.

A graph in the report summary makes it look like their conclusions rely heavily on unconventional oil, of which the Alberta tar sands (oil sands) would be an example. As Tripp as repeatedly pointed out, technically speaking, we can gasify coal. We have craploads of that. Problem is that it costs a bundle and requires blowing a lot of carbon out of the fuel to make it into an oil-like substance. That's a problem with most of the unconventional sources, I think. But if you chose to, my understanding is that above about $85 a barrel or so, you could make a profit converting coal to gasoline, right now, with current technology. So, if the main point of this is that, at a high enough money and environmental cost, we can convert a lot of stuff to oil-like fuels, then, yes, that's well known. And my reading of the intelligent "peak oil" discussion is exactly that -- that we'll run out of the cheap oil, the stuff with the high net free energy content. If they have more to say than that, well, I'll never know because I'm not going to spend $1K to find out. That'd buy me gas for the next 2 years.



<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(priusenvy @ Nov 15 2006, 08:14 PM) [snapback]349877[/snapback]</div>

This is an advertisement. The link is to a summary of their report, and offers to let you download the full report for a $1,000. I chose not to spend the $1,000, but there was then essentially nothing in the summary that would provide adequate information for making an informed judgement about their conclusions. Or even to see whether they have anything new to say.

A graph in the report summary makes it look like their conclusions rely heavily on unconventional oil, of which the Alberta tar sands (oil sands) would be an example. As Tripp as repeatedly pointed out, technically speaking, we can gasify coal. We have craploads of that. Problem is that it costs a bundle and requires blowing a lot of carbon out of the fuel to make it into an oil-like substance. That's a problem with most of the unconventional sources, I think. But if you chose to, my understanding is that above about $85 a barrel or so, you could make a profit converting coal to gasoline, right now, with current technology. So, if the main point of this is that, at a high enough money and environmental cost, we can convert a lot of stuff to oil-like fuels, then, yes, that's well known. And my reading of the intelligent "peak oil" discussion is exactly that -- that we'll run out of the cheap oil, the stuff with the high net free energy content. If they have more to say than that, well, I'll never know because I'm not going to spend $1K to find out. That'd buy me gas for the next 2 years.

 

Well, as always it's difficult to tell. A large part of their claim is that there is still a LOT of undiscovered oil (660 billion barrels recoverable). They don't say how they arrive at that number. They just sorta pull it out of the air. It's true that technology has allowed for an increase in reserves and it's also true that "oil reserves" doesn't usually include things like oil shale and oil/tar sands.

I think that this is a reasonable statement. From a US perspective this is really already the case. There may be large amount of oil out there, but most of it ain't here. From a security standpoint the amount of oil is inconsequential. We need to develope domestic alternatives and not loose sight of the hidden (or not so hidden) costs of imported oil.

There's also the climate change issue that this report doesn't address. Many of the sources in their chart title "Global Resources, Conventional and Unconventional, CERA Projection" are pretty carbon intensive. Oil Shale and Oil sands are and these processes also consume large amounts of water. Furthermore, they list the sources as USGS, World Petroleum Assesment 2000, National Energy Board Canada, and CERA but they don't indicate who contributed what. That seems spurious to me but I don't know enough about global petroleum issues to really comment. What I did find interesting was that if you subtract out oil shale and EOC reserves from both US and Global production you end up with US reserves accounting for 12% of global reserves. My understanding was that we have far less than that.

 

Looks like I wasn't the only one having trouble posting to this thread. Nice to see you around chogan.

The $1000 is also a fair amount of beer. Good beer. Interesting that we posted so close together. I had to try for an age to get that post uploaded. Glad to see that I didn't put it up here 15 times.

If anyone's interested in the use of Coal in synthetic fuels this is a good place to start.

 

The nameservers for "cera.com" are under "information handling
services" out of Colorado, aka -- get this -- PETRONET21.COM ...
.
_H*