Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

[stickdog99]

Prediction: Any oil reserve estimates that delay our inevitable looming oilpocalypse more than a few years will be dismissed as wildly inaccurate.

[wintler2]

While I'm busy learning google, maybe you could learn about this new cool thing called hypertext linking?

Oops, sorry! they don't show up well on my RI screen. okay, 330 billion. Lets even go stephens 400 billion.

If S.Arabia's supposed 260bil.barrels have enabled it to produce up to 10 mil.barrels/day, lets suppose that Iraqs potential from 400bil.b is 20mbd. And i'll chuck in, lets suppose that Iraqs production to date has had no impact on its reserves, so 20mbd is what it could produce as soon as conflict vanishes and infrastructure materialises.

Thats a bit less than a quarter of global consumption, 87mbd in 2010.

And if we take a conservative decline rate for existing fields of 4% (rather than IEA's feared 9%), meaning global production declines at 4% of annual production per year, .. that would eat up all of Iraqs supposed potential production in 7 years. And then where will you be?

If that production doesn't arrive within 7 years, it wont even change the date of global peak (somewhere 2005-08 depending on which oil & who's data etc).

So, if all those supposes come true, it'll change nothing except slope of the decline curve.

Next.

[wintler2]

I found a claim of 500bil.barrels
http://www.investorsiraq.com/showthread ... s-official
Theres some passionate expressions of heartfelt greed there, all well milked by now i'll bet, since pump'n'dump is the core business of many 'financial news' websites.

Lets pretend its a trillion barrels - production will still peak, no matter which humans are pointing guns at which.

[JackRiddler]

The main hoax on this thread is the uninformed and baseless insistence by several of you that the oil companies are the ones claiming a current or imminent decline in the annual maximum output of conventionally extracted hydrocarbon energy stores, and thus an inability to meet growing demand and a significant decline in hydrocarbon EROEI (a set of concepts that are commonly given in abbreviated form as “peak oil”).

I haven't seen anyone claim that. What, you think unreliable information is suddenly believable if it comes from someone other than an oil company? What sort of argument is that?

Due respect compels me to inform you that you are a fucking idiot.

If you could be bothered to read, and I assume you can: Clearly the above bit from me that you have quoted says that a bunch of other fucking idiots on this thread have claimed that "peak oil" is a propaganda invention of the oil companies. Not me. I answered by saying, no, hydrocarbon depletion is not a propaganda invention of the oil companies -- the oil companies say the opposite, they talk just like you! -- although the things they and their allies in hydrocarbon extraction are currently doing demonstrate that they are aware of hydrocarbon depletion. Your question would be a dumbfuck's misunderstanding, that is, if you were even making the effort to reach the dumbfuck level.

Ultimately, of course, it all come down to the Hubbert curve...

No it doesn't. But as I explained it in the very post you are so rigorously not getting, just fuck off and die.

Otherwise, the bizzaro logic continues. If you think it's urgent to replace hydrocarbons with renewables, then you're the slave of the hydrocarbon extractors, whereas if you agree with them that hydrocarbons are forever, then you're courageously resisting them!

You guys can't even get your fallacies straight. The main one you're using is argument from consequence: I reject certain facts, not on factual grounds, but because the consequences are terrible (i.e., I think they help the evil oil companies). However, you can't even get it straight which consequences the facts you don't like would actually have, or for that matter, who is promoting which facts and why. Final hint: The hydrocarbon companies are not promoting peak oil, although they are acting as though it is happening, since it's not their choice. The hydrocarbon companies are promoting drill-baby-drill: from the ocean floor to the mountain-top, in your watershed, below the crust (if we believe the claims this is what Russia is "successfully" doing), in countries on the list of those yet-to-be-conquered, at the North Pole and on the fucking moon. (Which certain people should now take a rolling fuck at.) The government backs them up in these suicidal endavors with hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending and diplomatic maneuvering, also subsidizing some agribusiness via the criminal biofuels scam, while "subsidizing" renewables and transport conversion measures with pocket change -- loudly jangled.

.

[JackRiddler]

^^^this is a real jet. It determines the shape of the oil market.

It is fiendishly clever of the genocidal bastards if you think about it. If low EROEI sources like deep sea and tar sands are the long term future, you would want to create this kind of short term artificial scarcity in order to make your long term prospects viable during the transition. This kind of artificial manipulation would definitely extend the bumpy plateau as well as ease the backside of the curve ... and make your remaining high EROEI sources extremely profitable. I'm going to chew on that a while.

On edit: Iraq is the ultimate strategic reserve.

I think this is definitely a factor. Of course, on logic it suggests a strategic concern with, um, peak oil, doesn't it now?

However, it's also very 2003, neocons in the saddle actually believing their own PNAC dreams about forever dominating the full military spectrum everwhere. My sense is that the US mission has failed, and this will become obvious in the next few years. They may still be able to stop oil from Iraq, in an essentially destructive way, but they will not be able to direct where it goes. The strategic reserve they have created by reducing Iraqi production artificially by war for more than 20 years will not, in the end, be an American reserve.

.

[Stephen Morgan]

The main hoax on this thread is the uninformed and baseless insistence by several of you that the oil companies are the ones claiming a current or imminent decline in the annual maximum output of conventionally extracted hydrocarbon energy stores, and thus an inability to meet growing demand and a significant decline in hydrocarbon EROEI (a set of concepts that are commonly given in abbreviated form as “peak oil”).

I haven't seen anyone claim that. What, you think unreliable information is suddenly believable if it comes from someone other than an oil company? What sort of argument is that?

Due respect compels me to inform you that you are a fucking idiot.

If you could be bothered to read, and I assume you can: Clearly the above bit from me that you have quoted says that a bunch of other fucking idiots on this thread have claimed that "peak oil" is a propaganda invention of the oil companies. Not me.

I was presenting the straw man position you lot have attributed to me and those some would have you believe to be my sockpuppets on this side of the debate, and pointing out its absurdity. I was not intending to attribute that argument to you as your own position.

I answered by saying, no, hydrocarbon depletion is not a propaganda invention of the oil companies -- the oil companies say the opposite, they talk just like you! -- although the things they and their allies in hydrocarbon extraction are currently doing demonstrate that they are aware of hydrocarbon depletion. Your question would be a dumbfuck's misunderstanding, that is, if you were even making the effort to reach the dumbfuck level.

Ultimately, of course, it all come down to the Hubbert curve...

No it doesn't. But as I explained it in the very post you are so rigorously not getting, just fuck off and die.

Your ineluctable process of logic shames me. Before such irreducable argumentation I am rendered speechless and without pretence.

Otherwise, the bizzaro logic continues. If you think it's urgent to replace hydrocarbons with renewables, then you're the slave of the hydrocarbon extractors, whereas if you agree with them that hydrocarbons are forever, then you're courageously resisting them!

No-one, abiotic chap aside, has suggested that the oil will last forever. Similarly your side, JR, wintler, Nordic, &c., have conspicuously failed to call for an urgent switch away from hydro-carbons, see for example wintler's attempts to debunk solar power, or see previous threads where he attempted to ream me on the subject of geothermal power. Your side of this debate is not accurately characterised as "think[ing] it's urgent to replace hydrocarbons with renewables", but rather as a despairing shriek about our impending doom at the imminent oil collapse and the current alleged total reliance of our civilisation on the big oil companies.

You guys can't even get your fallacies straight. The main one you're using is argument from consequence: I reject certain facts, not on factual grounds, but because the consequences are terrible (i.e., I think they help the evil oil companies).

Weren't you just dismissing our arguments on those grounds? Anyway, for me myself, I don't see pronouncements from oil companies as inherently trust-worthy statements, and I do see oil companies as reliably working in their own self-interest at the expense of the rest of us. Misrepresent that as above if you please.

However, you can't even get it straight which consequences the facts you don't like would actually have, or for that matter, who is promoting which facts and why.

Yes, there are several of us, and we don't all march in lockstep to the Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy marching band playing the tune of the big oil companies.

Some people are servile, inherently submissive to established power, and react to challenges to their comforting beliefs and beloved slave-handlers with cries of "fuck off and die", some of us think for ourselves and therefore end up as a more heterogeneous group.

Final hint: The hydrocarbon companies are not promoting peak oil, although they are acting as though it is happening, since it's not their choice. The hydrocarbon companies are promoting drill-baby-drill: from the ocean floor to the mountain-top, in your watershed, below the crust (if we believe the claims this is what Russia is "successfully" doing), in countries on the list of those yet-to-be-conquered, at the North Pole and on the fucking moon. (Which certain people should now take a rolling fuck at.) The government backs them up in these suicidal endavors with hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending and diplomatic maneuvering, also subsidizing some agribusiness via the criminal biofuels scam, while "subsidizing" renewables and transport conversion measures with pocket change -- loudly jangled.

Or, to put it another way, oil companies are continuing their generations long attempt to seize control of the entire world's energy reserves and markets, while consciously refusing to access some of the greatest and while refusing to invest in those technologies which would hold the promise of inevitable massive profits if the oil collapse was truly imminent.

There's no oil on the moon. There has never been life on the moon (freemasons don't count) and there are no sufficient geothermal processes.

[lupercal]

The main hoax on this thread is the uninformed and baseless insistence by several of you that the oil companies are the ones claiming ... “peak oil.”

Typical that you would pick the spook connection to stir up a little trouble over. Anyway I'll be happy to explain briefly how I personally arrived at this conclusion:

1) Hubbert was in the employ of an oil research lab in Houston when he pulled his bell curve out of his butt in 1956. The idea is ridiculous on its face because US production of oil -- or anything else, let's say toys or TVs -- is controlled not by some providential cosmic bell-curve force of nature but by the frikkin TV and toy companies, who will make their crap in Vietnam or China if they can bust a union, fork over an uncooperative pol, get a regulation axed etc etc, see WalMart.

2) Peak Oil as we know it, i.e. the Bush-Cheney marketing bonanza currently enjoying a revival here at RI, is a creature of ASPO, which was chartered less than a month after Bush-Cheney hoisted themselves into the oval office:

On December 7th in the year 2000, I was privileged to give a talk on oil depletion at the ancient university of Clausthal in the Harz Mountains. The idea of forming an institution, or network of scientists concerned about the subject, developed. Next day, I took the idea to Professor Wellmer, the head of the BGR in Hannover, who gave it his support. The Norwegians were the next to join, followed by the Swedes. Today, ASPO is represented in almost all European countries.

-- Colin Campbell, "About ASPO," http://www.peakoil.net/about-aspo

3) Who pays for ASPO, its cushy conferences, propaganda networks, academic sinecures, assorted bribes and other nefarious activities? Apparently it's abiotic and funds itself because its site doesn't say and it doesn't ask for donations. That leaves the oil companies, whose execs could directly or indirectly support it any number of perfectly legal ways (membership dues, tax-deductable donations etc) but, being oil companies, they probably prefer to let us taxpaying schlubs pay for it, meaning in all likelihood it's another spook show, just like wikileaks and those heroic democracy-promoting NGOs we like to get misty-eyed about.

And that in my opinion is how Big Oil manages a discrete degree of separation between itself and this particular propaganda effort.

[Nordic]

Similarly your side, JR, wintler, Nordic, &c., have conspicuously failed to call for an urgent switch away from hydro-carbons, see for example wintler's attempts to debunk solar power, or see previous threads where he attempted to ream me on the subject of geothermal power. Your side of this debate is not accurately characterised as "think[ing] it's urgent to replace hydrocarbons with renewables", but rather as a despairing shriek about our impending doom at the imminent oil collapse and the current alleged total reliance of our civilisation on the big oil companies.

THAT, sir, is simply a BALDFACED LIE.

And you are a goddamn liar for saying it.

State in one place, anywhere, at any time in my life, where I said ANY SUCH THING.

I have promoted, FWIW, the replacement of hydrocarbons with renewable resources since I was 18 years old when I first learned about this nonsense.

And for you to state otherwise is the most vile of insults.

If you actually believe these lies you're espousing, then you are fucking SCHIZOPHRENIC. Because you're believing what can only be described as a DELUSION.

So you're either insane, or just a lying asshole.

Which is it?

[stickdog99]

While I'm busy learning google, maybe you could learn about this new cool thing called hypertext linking?

Oops, sorry! they don't show up well on my RI screen. okay, 330 billion. Lets even go stephens 400 billion.

If S.Arabia's supposed 260bil.barrels have enabled it to produce up to 10 mil.barrels/day, lets suppose that Iraqs potential from 400bil.b is 20mbd. And i'll chuck in, lets suppose that Iraqs production to date has had no impact on its reserves, so 20mbd is what it could produce as soon as conflict vanishes and infrastructure materialises.

Thats a bit less than a quarter of global consumption, 87mbd in 2010.

And if we take a conservative decline rate for existing fields of 4% (rather than IEA's feared 9%), meaning global production declines at 4% of annual production per year, .. that would eat up all of Iraqs supposed potential production in 7 years. And then where will you be?

If that production doesn't arrive within 7 years, it wont even change the date of global peak (somewhere 2005-08 depending on which oil & who's data etc).

So, if all those supposes come true, it'll change nothing except slope of the decline curve.

Next.

400 billion barrels is enough to supply the current annual demand for oil, by itself, for over 12 years. But an unexploited 12 year supply of oil sitting beneath less than 0.1% of the earth's surface area would change nothing whatsoever in your mind about your righteous dreams of a looming oilpocalypse? I simply don't get you. You believe that current oil prices are the result of supply and demand, right? If so, why won't steeply increased oil prices force your S&D controlled free market to make wholesale substitutions, either with conservation or alternative power sources?

We all agree that would we stop burning so much oil for a myriad of reasons starting yesterday. So if higher oil prices force current oil consumption levels to be offset by conservation or alternative power sources, why is "peak oil" anything to worry about?

I have stipulated many times that there will almost certainly come a time in the currently indeterminant future when world oil production levels diminish (even if producers are trying their best to liberate that oil). And we will surely exhaust our supply of oil someday unless we cut our current consumption levels. But we should stop burning so much oil long before the date of peak potential oil production ever arrives, and if we do, then why does the fact that this date will inevitably come to pass even matter?

[stickdog99]

[The hydrocarbon companies are not promoting peak oil, although they are acting as though it is happening, since it's not their choice. The hydrocarbon companies are promoting drill-baby-drill: from the ocean floor to the mountain-top, in your watershed, below the crust (if we believe the claims this is what Russia is "successfully" doing), in countries on the list of those yet-to-be-conquered, at the North Pole and on the fucking moon. (Which certain people should now take a rolling fuck at.) The government backs them up in these suicidal endavors with hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending and diplomatic maneuvering, also subsidizing some agribusiness via the criminal biofuels scam, while "subsidizing" renewables and transport conversion measures with pocket change -- loudly jangled.

And what else is new, JR? LOL

How many fucking years has this been going on now?

[stickdog99]

^^^this is a real jet. It determines the shape of the oil market.

It is fiendishly clever of the genocidal bastards if you think about it. If low EROEI sources like deep sea and tar sands are the long term future, you would want to create this kind of short term artificial scarcity in order to make your long term prospects viable during the transition. This kind of artificial manipulation would definitely extend the bumpy plateau as well as ease the backside of the curve ... and make your remaining high EROEI sources extremely profitable. I'm going to chew on that a while.

On edit: Iraq is the ultimate strategic reserve.

I think this is definitely a factor. Of course, on logic it suggests a strategic concern with, um, peak oil, doesn't it now?

Because wars were never fought to secure oil before this century. Right? No elites would ever launch an invasion to secure something they could sell for more than 100 times the cost of pulling it out of the ground unless that oil, gold or silver were about to run out!

[stickdog99]

Differences aside, does anybody on the other side of the peak oil aisle agree that our current oil/gas prices give us a unique opportunity to agitate for decentralized, renewable power sources? Does anybody on the other side of the aisle agree with me that the decentralization and democratization of these replacement power sources is even more important than their carbon neutrality?

[Nordic]

o lupercal, you delusional person you, you might want to check out the bell shaped curves of every other finite resource that's extracted from the earth. including u.s. oil production.

but i'm sure like all delusional schiphrenics you'll have an "answer" for that, too.

btw, thanks jack, for having the patience to actually address this silliness. i don't have the patience for it. doesn't seem to do much good, and the lunatics are taking over the asylum.

[eyeno]

They are acting as though it already happened, however. There is no other reasonable explanation for Saudi offshore drilling, BP ocean drilling at a mile's depth, fracking, tar sands extraction, mountain-top bombing and the other observable indicators that do not require statistics to understand. Most of the hydrocarbon fat has been sucked out and burned up, and now they’re tapping the bone marrow.

An astute observation jackriddler. I equate this situation (sort of) to the cancer industry. If there were cures for cancer why would there be a trillion dollar industry grown up around it? If there were cures for cancer we would simply cure cancer and do away with the trillion dollar industry right? The big pools have not been sucked dry and bigger pools await tapping. Bigger pools than any previously tapped.

There are many cures for cancer and this has been proven. But since there are thousands of ways to profit from cancer we have a trillion dollar cancer industry because the cancer cure 'spigot' is being controlled.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.166-7), Hamlet to Horatio

Yes indeed. There are a thousand ways to profit from manufactured scarcity.

It is fiendishly clever of the genocidal bastards if you think about it. If low EROEI sources like deep sea and tar sands are the long term future, you would want to create this kind of short term artificial scarcity in order to make your long term prospects viable during the transition. This kind of artificial manipulation would definitely extend the bumpy plateau as well as ease the backside of the curve ... and make your remaining high EROEI sources extremely profitable. I'm going to chew on that a while.

Bingo. Case in point. My best friend was the Vice President of Marketing for BP Oil for many years. After he quit BP he designed a device that allows enchanced retrieval of oil from oil sands. This increases production. His device specializes in extracting more oil from soil that is difficult to extract oil from. He recently sold 60% of this fledgling 5 year old company for 50 million dollars. He was able to do this even though there are free flowing oil wells on the earth.

His philosophy was to quote him "each deal must stand on its own. it does not matter if there are more efficient methods. if this one deal will produce money at the current price per barrel of oil then it is viable as a money making deal."

My friend is not even a big player. He is a teeny tiny player in a huge market. He is but a pimple on the butt of the oil industry.

Manufactured scarcity has created a thousand different ways to become a millionaire in the oil industry. Manufactured scarcity of cancer cures has created a thousand ways to profit from cancer.

The people that control the oil market with F16 fighter jets are making billions in thousands of small ways. They refuse to allow free market supply and demand into the oil market.

NOTICE: I did not say that oil is not a finite resource. I did not say the big pools will not be sucked dry some day because eventually they will. What I am saying is that the Hubbert time frame does not apply because the time frame is being manipulated by assholes. My rich friend knows the oil market is being manipulated into a state of manufactured scarcity and he told me he believes it to be true. He also believes that some day the big pools will be sucked dry. He says we have so much oil on hand that at the very least it will take many centuries to suck them dry.

He also said that what lies beneath Prudhoe Bay, Alaska DWARFS all big pool discoveries on earth at the present time. He also says that what lies beneath Prudhoe Bay probably dwarfs ALL BIG KNOWN OIL POOLS COMBINED.

So for the present time oil is not scarce. Oil is being controlled into manufactured scarcity. Will the big pools eventually be sucked dry? Of course they will. But for the time being Peak Oil is being used to control prices according to him and I can assure you that he is in a position to know.

[wintler2]

Differences aside, does anybody on the other side of the peak oil aisle agree that our current oil/gas prices give us a unique opportunity to agitate for decentralized, renewable power sources? Does anybody on the other side of the aisle agree with me that the decentralization and democratization of these replacement power sources is even more important than their carbon neutrality?

If you'd showed an ounce of goodwill at any point i'd be happy to wander off topic with you. But you haven't, you've been insulting and empty of content, so i wont.