by ian807 » Mon 04 Feb 2013, 19:34:41
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('meemoe_uk', 'T')he " we're squeezing a few drops of tar out of a stone quarry " story is another myth cooked up by PO doomers when they were confronted with the fact that peak oil wasn't happening. .... No its all good plentiful, cheap high quality oil for the next few years.
World’s average crude oil is becoming lighter and sweeterOK, so, you think energy return from crude oil is going to get
better over time? How do you see that happening, exactly?
As for the article you referenced by Mr. Thomas, the quantities of lighter, sweeter, oil are stated to run to about 1 million barrels a day, or about 1/80th of global supply. While this might affect some local refineries in the USA, the situation in the rest of the world remains unchanged.
Look, we have about 1.3 trillion barrels of conventional left. If the USGS figures aren't political fakery, then energetically, we have more than that in natural gas. Natural gas isn't going to replace petroleum, but it's far from useless either. The conventional oil should last about 40 years if net energy wasn't an issue. In reality, the energy represented by the remaining oil is considerably less than that, but we can probably backfill with natural gas and coals for a few decades. More, if clathrate mining ever succeeds.
So what's your timeframe? Even you have to understand that a finite resource, is well... finite. Eventually it's gone. The numbers are available if you'd care to look them up. It looks like about 40 years for usable conventional oil, about the same for natural gas and if we're lucky, maybe 30 for clathrate gas although that last one is very indefinite. Coal? Well we're past the energetic peak, just as we are for oil, but at least we'll have some for quite a while, even if we can't run a large scale industrial civilization on it alone. If we're being really optimistic, that would mean we might pull another 110 years of hydrocarbon energy out of the planet.
Is that enough? Got any kids, nieces, nephews?
And it's not like it's going to be the same price all the way down, or that there won't be use spikes due to wars, or resource nationalism as supplies get scarce. It's not like somebody one day rings a bell and there's no more energy. Powerdown promises to be prolonged and unpleasant most likely, quite bumpy.