Clifford Talking About Big Oil Profit
I encouraneg ever one to read the "Twilight in the Desert", a must read book by an authoritative figure in the industry, Matthew Simmons. Also see Princeton professor Kenneth Deffeyes. He predicted the world wide petroleum production peak around Thanksgiving 2005 and sticked to his prediction. I believe he was wrong by a year or so. The actual peak occured in April of 2004. We were not able to see a production per day as high as the April 2004 figure.
Much worse than oil is the situation of natural gas. While you see gasoline price going from $1.50 to $3.00, the natural price has actually gone from $2 to a peak of $17 right before Christmass 2005. (The price is measured per thousand cubic feet). Just one year ago it was still no more than $7.
Most people have the perception that as long as there is oil underground, we can pump it out at any production speed we want, until last drop is drawn, and then it suddenly stops. That is not the case! Due to geological reasons oil can only be pumped out at no faster than a certain speed, or the oil field will collapse and not produce any more. Therefore, even though there is still one half oil stored underground, the daily production rate has peaked and can not go up any further, and it will decline year by year. That's the Peak Oil phenomena. The majority of oil production countries have seen their production peaked and then enter an ever declining phase, including the USA. Sandi is the only major oil producer which has not yet officially peaked, but people speculate that it indeed has.
A big question looms that as it becomes ever more clear that the world's oil is becoming depleted, is there any reason to believe that oil producing nations will not at some point decide to "go slow" and leave some for their future generations, instead of continuously pumping it at all speed and sell it cheap to other nations? If OPEC countries decide to hold back their oil in this fashion, it's going to be a world wide chaos. But I see no reason why oil producers will not do it, it just seem so logical!
posted by Quantoken @ 12:21 AM
2 Comments:
Dear Cosmic Variance,
I'm glad Clifford at old Cosmic Variance is listening to some of the problems on the oil crisis that is looming up.
Clifford is the best of a bad bunch of loonies, he seems the sanest guy on the old "cosmic variance" blog.
However, he is still basically politically-expedient mainstream, out to make a good guy reputation without having the guys to have any really unorthodox arguments.
Others on that old cosmic variance blog, like JoAnne and Sean, are even worse. They are out to censor anything non-mainstream, to make jokes of others.
I'm actually happy about the looming oil crisis in some ways. It is running out, but they are covering this up because the stock markets don't like bad news. When there is a sudden panic, prices soar and the economy is affected.
When this happens it will be the beginning of the end of the internal combustion engine and civilisation in many ways. However, technology will enable people to survive (electric cars etc.). Because of the internet, lots more people in future will work from home by computer, not needing to travel to work regularly, just once a week or even perhaps just once a month.
In the long term, the end of oil will be a good thing. In the short term, when the crisis really breaks, there will be panic and people will die and suffer from lack of heating, loads of business which rely on petrol and diesel powered delivery lorries will close, and there will be mass unemployment and poverty for a few years.
But eventually, things will get back together again. Petrol stations will be replaced by electric battery exchange stations, and life will go on.
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