Political Crossfire Forums

[Preechr]

ieatfood wrote: please pay attention!!!
my argument is that the selling price of proven in-ground reserves hasnt risen
ieatfood wrote: This is not about reserves--this is about oil that has yet to be found
Once again covering the bases.

[ieatfood]

Preechr wrote: ieatfood wrote: please pay attention!!!
my argument is that the selling price of proven in-ground reserves hasnt risen
ieatfood wrote: This is not about reserves--this is about oil that has yet to be found
Once again covering the bases.

ugh--fine take everything i say out of context--see what i care

i look at in ground reserve selling prices as an insight into whether unfound oil is getting any harder to find

as for the second statement, I was talking about the current amount of reserves. the actual amount of reserves is irrelevant. But the selling price of in-ground reserves is not.
Once again--pay attention!!
I understand that social has no idea what is going on. But I expected a little more from you...

[ieatfood]

Preechr wrote: The chart you are pointing to is a combination of production costs and finding costs. If you want to isolate the costs of finding and developing new reserves, see the page I linked to previously. The only reason you could be motivated for going from a chart showing the pure relevant statistic to the combo chart that waters down the data you don’t like is that you can’t deal with the results and aren’t a big enough person to admit that you’re wrong.
uh, no
i'm not trying to isolate finding costs
i care only about the combined production and finding costs
because that is the total cost of extracting an additional previously undiscovered barrel of oil from the land
If oil is indeed becoming geologically scarce, it would affect both exploration costs and production costs so it is important to look at both
but the problem with the chart that it is a combination of GAS and OIL costs
this is invalid, as per the article I sent you



ieatfood wrote: This one, stopping in 2001, is even more out of date than your last one. Let me guess: Everything including 2006 data ruins your ridiculous concept of the way things are and so you refuse to see it. If you really, really, really want to argue the world didn’t hit peak oil in 2001, I’ll let you have that one.

i take the best data i can get
the aggregate oil+gas data are certainly newer
but if they are invalid, then they might as well be 100 years old

[social]

ieatfood wrote: social wrote: ieatfood wrote: dude, i never said that geologists arent good at extracting oil--they are!
i said that they suck at predicing oil prices and oil shortages
and if you look at their track record, it is abysmal.

and i am not lauding any economic models
there are no models involved
it is simply the observation that it is not getting any harder to find oil and thus there is no evidence of an imminent shortage

thats common sense, whether you want to put it under the blanket of "economics" or not.

No economic models involved? You've based your analysis on the theory of supply and demand for Christ's sake! I can't remember whether it's in this thread or in the other, but at some point in our debate you've definately suggested that oil can't be running out because oil prices haven't risen (which of course they have, but lets forget that for the time being).

The new argument you've come up with is hardly any better. To suggest that oil cannot be running out becuase it is now being extracted at a greater rate than ever before is foolish, since, for the last time, oil is not being produced as fast as we are consuming it! Therefore, oil is running out! Whatever you say is not going to change that. Whatever model you use or however much "common sense" you appeal to will not stop oil running out! It is running out! Accept it. Move on.

i NEVER said that oil isn't running out because oil prices havent risen
and I NEVER argued that oil is being extracted at a greater rate

please pay attention!!!
my argument is that the selling price of proven in-ground reserves hasnt risen
that means that finding a new barrel of oil is just as easy today as it was 15-20 years ago.
thus, there is no reason to believe that oil is geologically scarce.

now, you are free to disagree with this, but you need to find some logical reason for your disagreement
your idea of logic seems to be yelling: "its running out, its running out, accept it!!!"

personally, I don't find that logic very convincing.

I admire you ability to consistently tweek and adjust your argument so as to avoid logical err. For example, you began this thread with the statement: "Oil will never run out". This is of course ridiculous. Not only is it ridiculous, it's actually impossible to justify, by your own admission later on: "estimating how much oil is left in the ground is impossible."

Anyway, you then move on to claim, "oil is not running out", presumably because you would then avoid having to justify the first statement. Of course, this is equally ridicilous because, as I'm sure you're now aware, oil is not being produced as fast as we are consuming it. Thus it is running out. Failing to adequately address this issue, you've now suggested that oil is not "geographically scarce". It's not "never going to run out", as you began saying, nor incapable of running out, as you then said, but "not geographically scarce."

For the love of God, accept that oil will run out, ieatfood - or at least that oil is running out! I have no wish to jump through semantic hoops with you any longer!

[ieatfood]

social wrote:

I admire you ability to consistently tweek and adjust your argument so as to avoid logical err. For example, you began this thread with the statement: "Oil will never run out". This is of course ridiculous. Not only is it ridiculous, it's actually impossible to justify, by your own admission: "estimating how much oil is left in the ground is impossible."

Anyway, you then move on to claim, "oil is not running out", presumably because you would then avoid having to justify the first statement. Of course, this is equally ridicilous because, as I'm sure you're now aware, oil is not being produced as fast as we are consuming it. Thus it is running out. Failing to adequately address this issue, you've now suggested that oil is "geographically scarce". It's not "never going to run out", as you began saying, nor incapable of running out, as you then said, but "geographically scarce."

For the love of God, accept that oil will run out - or at least that oil is running out! I have no wish to jump through semantic hoops any longer with you!

you obviously have nothing more to add to this discussion, since you obviously dont understand what i am talking about

i have already addressed the issues you mentioned

[social]

Yes I recall. A half-baked argument that oil feilds that we don't yet know about are just waiting to be found, and something about semantics. Hardly a counter-argument.

[Preechr]

ieatfood wrote: Preechr wrote: This one, stopping in 2001, is even more out of date than your last one. Let me guess: Everything including 2006 data ruins your ridiculous concept of the way things are and so you refuse to see it. If you really, really, really want to argue the world didn’t hit peak oil in 2001, I’ll let you have that one.

i take the best data i can get
the aggregate oil+gas data are certainly newer
but if they are invalid, then they might as well be 100 years old

If you even read the whole article you linked to, I don't think you understood it. All three methods of combining gas and oil data used in that article indicated the exact same trends, the numbers just differed a little. The article made the case that using a divisa index was a better than using a fixed conversion. While your article didn’t go into why a variable exchange rate was superior to a fixed one, it’s because oil is easily imported while natural gas is not. Because shortages in oil in the US can be easily made up by increasing imports, oil is less sensitive to shortages. The variable divisa index rate better takes into account the disparity caused by the varying scarcity along the timeline.

In your first article, they started in 1982, ended in 2002, and used a binary method where the compared the sale prices of proved reserves in 1982 and 2002.

In your second article, they started in 1982, ended in 2001, and combined oil data with gas data using a divisa index.

By either method, they came to the same conclusion: buying proved reserves in 1982 cost you more than they did 20 years later. The reason proved reserves were less expensive in 2001 than they were in 1982 is because the price of proved reserves is based on the price of oil and oil was much less expensive in 2001 than it was in 1982. If you want to argue that then you truly didn't read the second article, because it touched on it and gave a nice little conversion formula. In the end, they found that the sale price of a barrel of in-situ proved reserves were 22% of the wellhead per barrel price.

By any method you want, your argument has a fatal flaw. Price is not an effect of true supply and demand, but rather it is a product of perceived supply and demand. If Saudi Arabia confirmed today that they were in terminal decline, oil would jump 10% in price. The true supply picture isn’t any different than it was yesterday, but because people now perceive a shortage in supply, the price goes up. What you are really arguing is that people in 1982 were more concerned with supply than people in 2001. In abandoning everything except market pricing between 1982 and 2001, you are not even attempting to address reality, only public perception, and outdated public perception at that.

If you really want to understand the folly in using costs, I do have an article that explains it in detail. It’s not short and will require some effort on your part. The things to remember when reading this article is that everyone making your argument stops their data in 2001 or 2002, oil prices have curved upward dramatically in the last 4 years, and OPEC nations are very secretive thus imparting a lot of uncertainty into the market.

http://www.oilcrisis.com/reynolds/MineralEconomy.htm