[MonteQuest]

'Peak oil' spells cataclysm for U.S., oil theorist warns

"$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Deffeyes', 'I')t's the five-year time scale that I'm really scared about." History has demonstrated that the fear of a coming oil shortage, justified or not, can be a powerful determinant of events. U.S. oil experts predicted a "gasoline famine" just after World War I, prompting Britain to combine three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire into a new, oil-rich country that was to remain friendly to England.

It was named Iraq.

[Specop_007]

Can we get rid of California? Please?

[MicroHydro]

Interesting. Ken comes off as somewhat optimistic in his latest book regarding the availability of uranium, implying that a shift to fission power is possible. Now he is talking more like a doomer.

[I_Like_Plants]

SpecOp you're being premature writing off California. California had right-wing policies in place in the 1920s and 1930s that inspired Hitler. California is home to the European-American Issues Forum, www.eaif.org which is fighting for your rights. California may have voted for Kerry-Kohn as a state, but a good half of us are right-wingers, I feel old horse-face only got the vote through fraud.

I don't agree with you on everything, but I know you'd have my back if things got tight and I'd have yours.

[UIUCstudent01]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MicroHydro', 'I')nteresting. Ken comes off as somewhat optimistic in his latest book regarding the availability of uranium, implying that a shift to fission power is possible. Now he is talking more like a doomer.

[BitterSweetCrude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'S')pecOp you're being premature writing off California. California had right-wing policies in place in the 1920s and 1930s that inspired Hitler. California is home to the European-American Issues Forum, www.eaif.org which is fighting for your rights. California may have voted for Kerry-Kohn as a state, but a good half of us are right-wingers, I feel old horse-face only got the vote through fraud.

I don't agree with you on everything, but I know you'd have my back if things got tight and I'd have yours.

[I_Like_Plants]

Bah if Kosher Kerry won, we'd be in Iran and having our goyish asses kicked mightily. And old horse-face keeping the family jet warmed up to head off to Switzerland.

[brentmeister]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('advancedatheist', 'A')part from the excellent content, I found his way of speaking a bit off-putting. He sounds like Thurston Howell III from Gilligan's Island.

[BabyPeanut]

Hey Monte, read the current events forum much?

*threads merged*

[BabyPeanut]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('brentmeister', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('advancedatheist', 'A')part from the excellent content, I found his way of speaking a bit off-putting. He sounds like Thurston Howell III from Gilligan's Island.

[katesisco]

[B]
Ive read K Deffeyes Beyond Hubbert's Peak and enjoyed both his knowledge and his writing style!

Now consider: he says he likes Moores theories about the Nevada uplift and I like this also because it ties in with !Gasp! my pet theory of catastrophe. In an interchange of electro plasma in which the continental crust was ripped away to create the Moon and leave the Pacific basin, such uplift off the surrounding area is exactly what would have happened. Milton and DeGrazia's Solaria Binaria (1984) makes even more sense today now that the electric sun theory is being taken seriously. Big problem: the time scale. Anomalies that exist fit such a recent catastrophism but the current radiocarbon dating does not support it. If electricity on a scale relating to charged bodies in space and the resulting discharges when in contact is a very real possibility, then wouldn't the result disturb the carbon dating?

[rockdoc123]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')f electricity on a scale relating to charged bodies in space and the resulting discharges when in contact is a very real possibility, then wouldn't the result disturb the carbon dating?

[Cynus]

Deffeyes updated his site:
http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/current-events.html
I found this rather funny:
"I’m starting an honor roll of names and the dates when they announced that the peak is here. The list is also known as the "Cornucopian Cemetery." James Medlin earned a spot on the honor roll by circulating a long interesting paper along with a note saying that oil had already peaked before Hurricane Katrina. T. Boone Pickens and Matt Simmons are already on board. And I have plots reserved for Daniel Yergin, Michael Lynch, and Thomas Ahlbrandt. They can sign up anytime that they are ready to admit that the peak has arrived."

[Leanan]

There was some discussion about this in the "Happy Peak Oil Day" thread:

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic15081-15.html

And yeah, that "Cornucopians Cemetery" thing was pretty funny.

[Revi]

Deffeyes is sticking with his hanksgiving 2005 prediction. It could be right. It feels like we're at peak. I think he may be right. Thanks for all we've had. Now on to a low energy world.

[EnergySpin]

Deffeyes references an article which appeared last week in Science.

Let me C&P one or two paras from that article
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')If more than half of the world's oil production is going to peak within a decade, "that has real implications for countries requiring huge imports to keep their economies running," says Rodgers. "Frankly, I think it's dangerous for the U.S. to bank on OPEC always being there to fill the gap." Just how dangerous a looming reliance on OPEC is depends on how soon you think OPEC's, and thus the world's, oil production is going to max out
........
Other analysts, perhaps most analysts, are more sanguine about OPEC's oil bounty. They generally argue that OPEC countries have not been exploiting their oil riches the way Americans have theirs, so OPEC production needn't behave like that of the United States. Ahlbrandt of USGS points out that, unlike North America, the Middle East is seriously underexplored. There are only 7000 wells in the whole region, he notes, a number equaled by the total wells in a few counties in a single U.S. oil basin. The 2000 USGS study he headed finds abundant OPEC oil--oil known to exist in reserves, likely to be found in and around existing fields, and likely to be discovered in new fields. Peakists, however, argue that some reserves are not as large as claimed and that additions to reserves from known fields will not be as large as they have been.
....

Far-future OPEC production is where politics and economics may prevail over geologic endowment. In its long-term projections, the U.S. EIA simply assumes that because OPEC countries have the oil, they will pump enough of it to fill the gap between future demand and non-OPEC capacity. In the case of Iraq, the latest EIA outlook has the Iraqi oil industry--now struggling to produce 2 million barrels a day--tripling its current production and achieving twice its highest previous production by 2025. At the same time, EIA concedes that OPEC countries would make more money in the long run by producing less than consuming countries demand but selling it at a higher price.
.....
Too late already?
"We know a peak is coming," Robert Hirsch of SAIC Inc. in Arlington, Virginia, said at the academies workshop, "but we really don't know when." A peak a quarter-century away, however, would be uncomfortably soon for Hirsch. Peaks tend to sneak up on analysts, he notes. Even if a consensus on peak timing develops, "there will be no quick fixes," Hirsch found in a study he did for the U.S. Department of Energy this year.

Hirsch considered technologies for replacing crude oil that are ready or nearly ready for commercial use. He assumed 3 to 5 years to get crash programs up and going and optimistic rates of expansion of each program. Still, unless the crash programs were begun 20 years before the peak, short-ages would occur. If they weren't begun until the peak arrived, "major shortages persisted a very long period of time," said Hirsch. "The downside of the optimists being wrong is dire."

[clv101]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', 'D')effeyes is sticking with his hanksgiving 2005 prediction. It could be right. It feels like we're at peak. I think he may be right. Thanks for all we've had. Now on to a low energy world.

[EnviroEngr]

I love this 'peakist' moniker -
Reminds me for some reason of, oh, say "Buffy the Peakist Slayer" or something like that. Leading peakist, Head peakist, minion peakist. The whole hierarchy. We're just a coven, aren't we?

Here's the meat and potatoes:

Says Richard A. Kerr in

News Focus
ENERGY SUPPLIES:
Bumpy Road Ahead for World's Oil

Science 18 November 2005:
Vol. 310. no. 5751, pp. 1106 - 1108
DOI: 10.1126/science.310.5751.1106

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('R.Kerr', 'P')eakists see the world oil peak coming within the next decade or so. The late M. King Hubbert of USGS observed that production of natural resources seems to reach a maximum when about half of all the resource that could ever be extracted has been produced. He then nailed the timing of the lower-48 peak 15 years before it occurred. Armed with production records and an estimate of the world's so-called ultimate recoverable resource, geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, finds that the world peak will come before 2009. Leading peakist and retired oil company geologist Colin Campbell of Ballydehob in County Cork, Ireland, puts it before the end of this decade. Others say certainly by 2015 or 2020. The differences arise in part from the way different analysts emulate Hubbert's methods, but most stem from different numbers for the world's ultimate recoverable resource.

[EnergySpin]

Peakist rhymes with Prickist

[EnviroEngr]

Would that be:
Biggist Prickist?

... after failing to contain the snickering...

Centurian, thwow him to the fwoowr!