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PeakOil is You

PeakOil is You

Reality - You will NEVER know how much oil exists!

What's on your mind?
General interest discussions, not necessarily related to depletion.

Do you agree?

yes
18
No votes
no
5
No votes
I will explain with a reply.
2
No votes
 
Total votes : 25

Re: Reality - You will NEVER know how much oil exists!

Unread postby lawnchair » Tue 01 Jan 2008, 13:33:50

It is quite uncertain even after drilling and extraction starts.

I'm from an oil- and gas-producing county in central Kansas. It's been analyzed a thousand ways over the last 70 years. No one will say there's X barrels of oil in the ground. We can't even say for certain how much oil will eventually be extracted (we're still getting oil out of the ground now). But, I can tell you that with millions of dollars in slant bottlebrush drilling, advanced seismic surveys, and tertiary recovery, we're producing about a tenth of what we were in the 50s and 60s when we just poked holes in the ground and oil shot 100 feet in the air. Production keeps going down, year-on-year. I have no reason to believe the planet works particularly differently, on some scale and some timeframe. So, yes, there will be some oil. There will not be continual growth forever on this assuredly finite planet.
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Re: Reality - You will NEVER know how much oil exists!

Unread postby eastbay » Tue 01 Jan 2008, 14:03:07

Give it up.
Got Dharma?

Everything is Impermanent. Shakyamuni Buddha
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Re: Reality - You will NEVER know how much oil exists!

Unread postby Twilight » Tue 01 Jan 2008, 15:32:57

Take a province, plot cumulative discovery against cumulative exploration wells and take the asymptote. That should give you a fair idea.
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Re: Reality - You will NEVER know how much oil exists!

Unread postby lawnchair » Tue 01 Jan 2008, 17:56:05

No idea. Since such earthquakes/tsunami are common throughout the geologic records (plus human oral history, and even relatively recent written history), it doesn't seem particularly necessary (to me) to attribute a new and unique cause to one particular instance.

Very deep seismic surveys are generally nothing more than listening, anyway. Shallow seismic, you drive a truck out that basically hammers the ground. You can't make a large enough shake to be reflected deep subsurface, short of nuclear weapons. Instead, you analyze reflections from already occurring earthquakes.
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Re: Reality - You will NEVER know how much oil exists!

Unread postby Opies » Wed 02 Jan 2008, 02:15:56

Greenshine, I know you are trying to debunk peak oil, but really, you have not taken into account my post in your last thread. The mathimatical probability of a peak is 1. (100%)
The amount in the ground doesn't matter.
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