Political Crossfire Forums

[mathurin]

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2174rank.html

world oil consumption as of 2003
80,100,000


http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2178rank.html
proved reserves of oil for the world
1,349,000,000,000


80 million current usage
1.349 trillion proved reserves

80 million a year shows 16,841.5 years

i remember somewhere i read a claim that we would run out of oil in 100 years
they must have factored in some heavy heavy increases in usage


am i missing anything, or do we still have plenty of oil?

[Wolverine]

Has ownage been acquired? :tu:

[Kindred]

Well, if you want the other end of the nut-job spectrum (your analysis being the end of another :-D ), read here:

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

[mathurin]

i assume you mean if you WANT the other end of the nut job spectrum
that guy is pretty nuts


i never said this was a really meritous, i just cannot see how someone can crunch these numbers and come up with 100 years of oil left
not to mention that these are just PROVED reserves, there is more out there, we just need to find it



i say the oil crisis is a lie to let the oligopoly of oil companies raise prices without us demanding their breakup, we are expected to say "of course fuel is expensive, we are running out"

all lies

[sgtshortness]

It says 80m/day. Not year.

Comes out to 40 years, not factoring in consumption increase and new technology.

[ieatfood]

Saudi Arabia alone has over 80 known
fields and exploits only nine. Of course, there are many more
fields, known and unknown.


The amount of "proven reserves" is just a tiny fraction of the amount of oil in the earth.

There is a lot more than 1.349 trillion barrels of oil out there. That number is meaningless.

[sgtshortness]

How much more though? And hwo do we know there are mroe fields?

[mathurin]

i knew i missed something



how do we know there is more oil, cause we keep finding more, keep finding new ways to find it and new methods to tap what we havent been able to


i just think the alarmists are funny, if annoying, everytime someone yells "we are running out of oil!!" oil prices go up, and everything else follows, except the stock market, which goes down whenever someone whispers "we are running out of oil"

its getting on my nerves when anybody can crunch these numbers and know we have enough for some time, this is just what is proven


nobody thinks there is really a perpetual source, so i dont have a problem with efforts to help society become more efficient, but this alarmist crap is getting old, i guess you have to manufacture a crisis to get what you want

[micfranklin]

No offense, but I always knew that we were running out of oil. Drilling up Alaska only shows our desperation for oil.

[mathurin]

see, it is even within people, without any factual knowledge you "know" that we are running out of oil

we definitly have a finite amount, but stating we are running out is premature


we are drilling alaska because opec wont expand their operations, its a political problem, perhaps an economic one, but not an indicator that the world is low on the resource

[ieatfood]

sgtshortness wrote: How much more though? And hwo do we know there are mroe fields?

we know there are more fields because we can see them

look at it this way:

lets say there is about 1000 units of land in the world that you can explore for oil

we have explored only 100 units. after exploring, we find we have enough oil for everyone. so we stop exploring.

now the alarmists are saying--look--so far, we have only found enough oil to sustain us for the next 20 years!! We are going to run out!!!

But that's baloney. Becuase we have only explored such a small fraction of what's out there.

[ieatfood]

mathurin wrote:


we are drilling alaska because opec wont expand their operations, its a political problem, perhaps an economic one, but not an indicator that the world is low on the resource

actually, we are drilling in alaska because it will create jobs
it has nothing to do with oil supply
alaska doesnt have any significant reserves of oil

[David]

ieatfood wrote: mathurin wrote:


we are drilling alaska because opec wont expand their operations, its a political problem, perhaps an economic one, but not an indicator that the world is low on the resource

actually, we are drilling in alaska because it will create jobs
it has nothing to do with oil supply
alaska doesnt have any significant reserves of oil

1.69 to 14.77 billion barrels in Anwar alone isn't significant?

http://www.american.edu/TED/alaska.htm

[ieatfood]

David wrote: ieatfood wrote: mathurin wrote:


we are drilling alaska because opec wont expand their operations, its a political problem, perhaps an economic one, but not an indicator that the world is low on the resource

actually, we are drilling in alaska because it will create jobs
it has nothing to do with oil supply
alaska doesnt have any significant reserves of oil

1.69 to 14.77 billion barrels in Anwar alone isn't significant?

http://www.american.edu/TED/alaska.htm

nope
compare it to the number of barrels that are produced in the world each year

remember--the only thing that the US is concerned with is the world price of oil because that is the price we pay

anwar will not change the world price of oil

but it will increase the total income of the US, since the US can now take this ANWAR oil and export it and make money from that.

[sgtshortness]

US uses about 80b/ year I think. So another 16b won't make that much of a difference when you factor in how much it costs to get equipment up there.

[Selfish_Meme]

100% of Oil in the world

90% of Oil is easy to find and tap (generous estimate)

10% of Oil is difficult to find and hard to extract

It is not because we havn't looked for oil that we havn't found it, its just that it is harder to get to and maybe economically not feasible.

The oil will run out, it probably won't cause the collapse of society everyone goes on about. Though I do think there will be a few million starving muslims.

[bob.appleyard]

mathurin wrote: i never said this was a really meritous, i just cannot see how someone can crunch these numbers and come up with 100 years of oil left not to mention that these are just PROVED reserves, there is more out there, we just need to find it

Actually it means there is less. OPEC revised their figures in the 80s purely for political reasons.

[bob.appleyard]

Oilfield discovery peaked in 1965, so far fitting the bell curve rather well

The problem is not that oil will run out, just good quality oil that is easy to access and cheap to refine. There's a long history of oil use left in the world, but not at the current rate of consumption, and there is debate about how long that will last; this is what is scaring company bosses silly, I imagine, because pretty much all business plans are made on this assumption.

[bob.appleyard]

mathurin wrote: i say the oil crisis is a lie to let the oligopoly of oil companies raise prices without us demanding their breakup, we are expected to say "of course fuel is expensive, we are running out"

Corporate buyouts, political interference and other protections from market which the oil companies have been desperately seeking for the past decade in your ocuntry and others... are these the signs of a healthy industry, or one cacking its pants?

[perdidochas]

Research Eugene Island, Lousiana.