Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

[Hammer of Los]

...

Hehe.

Rory's dishin' the dirt on the less than gorgeous george.

Nice one Rors.

...

[winston smith]

Thanks Rory for the stuff on Monbiots background which i didnt know.

[Ben D]

Fwiw,..perhaps hyped for stock market gouging..

Trillions of dollars worth of oil found in Australian outback

Up to 233 billion barrels of oil has been discovered in the Australian outback that could be worth trillions of dollars, in a find that could turn the region into a new Saudi Arabia

Telegraph. By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney2:30PM GMT 24 Jan 2012

The discovery in central Australia was reported by Linc Energy to the stock exchange and was based on two consultants reports, though it is not yet known how commercially viable it will be to access the oil.

The reports estimated the company’s 16 million acres of land in the Arckaringa Basin in South Australia contain between 133 billion and 233 billion barrels of shale oil trapped in the region’s rocks.

It is likely however that just 3.5 billion barrels, worth almost $359 billion (£227 billion) at today’s oil price, will be able to be recovered.
The find was likened to the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale oil projects in the US, which have resulted in massive outflows and have led to predictions that the US could overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer as soon as this year.

Peter Bond, Linc Energy’s chief executive, said the find could transform the world’s oil industry but noted that it would cost about £200 million to enable production in the area.

Shale oil is more costly to extract than conventional crude oil and involves the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking.

This involves introducing cracks in rock formations by forcing through a mixture of water, sand at chemicals at high pressure.

“If you took the 233 billion, well, you’re talking Saudi Arabia numbers,” Mr Bond told ABC News.

“It is massive, it is just huge If the Arckaringa plays out the way we hope it will, and the way our independent reports have shown, it’s one of the key prospective territories in the world at the moment.

"If you stress test it right down and you only took the very sweetest spots in the absolute known areas and you do nothing else, it is about 3.5 billion [barrels] and that’s sort of worse-case scenario.”

[justdrew]

well, that'll cover 3-8 years of global oil use

[MacCruiskeen]

Shale. Fracking.

it is not yet known how commercially viable it will be to access the oil.

That depends, of course, on how expensive actual oil is when they get around to turning those millions of tons of what is really just rock into actual oil. EROEI. (These newspaper headlines can be really misleading.)

Record high temperatures in central Australia might also conceivably affect the final calculation. It's a thrilling race between Peak Oil and global climate chaos.

[wintler2]

The SA find is an "unrisked prospective resource", lowest of all classes of resource..

In laypersons terms, in order of certainty it goes something like this:
1. Production (we’re pretty sure how much we’ve used to date)
2. Reserves (we’re pretty sure how much is in the ground and readily accessible / recoverable / marketable)
3. Contingent resources (stuff we’re pretty sure is there, and we could technically get access to it, but it’s not currently commercially viable to do so)
4. Prospective resources (stuff we think might be there, and might be technically recoverable)

Probably theres some, but nobody will guarantee how much. Since there is a desperate lack of water there, essential for fracking, we may never know.

The Telegraph article is misleadingly cornucopian, how unsurprising: US' shale fracking bubble has resulted in not much new oil, 1mbd?, hardly "massive flows" by anyones standard. But gotta push the greed button, thats how all cons work.

[MacCruiskeen]

Reality check for Linc '$20 trillion' find
BusinessDay.au, January 25, 2013

INVESTORS continue to push up Linc Energy stock despite widespread scepticism about reports it has found $20 trillion worth of oil in South Australia's Arckaringa Basin.

Linc shares surged again yesterday ...

[...]

Media outlets, including News Ltd's Adelaide Advertiser, appear to have multiplied the resource estimate by the prevailing oil price to arrive at the exorbitant sum.

Advertisement But Linc chief executive Peter Bond told BusinessDay: ''That's not our valuation. I don't know who did that but someone's got a calculator out and come up with that number … but we wouldn't put a valuation on it at this stage.

''Obviously if you want to stand up there and come up with $100 times 100 billion barrels, you'll come up with a big number. That's not how you value oil resources anyway.''

Petroleum resources are classified into booked reserves - proven, probable and possible - or resources which may be contingent or prospective.

The estimates released by Linc on Wednesday were classified by the consultants as unrisked prospective resources because of their ''lack of commerciality or sufficient drilling''.

As the consultants wrote: ''There is no certainty that any portion of the prospective resources estimated herein will be discovered. If discovered, there is no certainty that it will be commercially viable to produce any portion of the resources.''

[...]

http://www.businessday.com.au/business/ ... 2d9mj.html

[wintler2]

Court Overturns E.P.A.’s Biofuels Mandate
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court threw out a federal rule on renewable fuels on Friday, saying that a quota set by the Environmental Protection Agency for incorporating liquids made from woody crops and wastes into car and truck fuels was based on wishful thinking rather than realistic estimates of what could be achieved.

The ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia involved a case brought by the American Petroleum Institute, whose members were bound by the 2012 cellulosic biofuels quota being challenged.

But production of the “cellulosic” fuel, made from woody material, has been slow to start up, making it virtually impossible to come by. That has presented the refiners, the ones required to buy the cellulosic fuel, with a quandary.

From 2010 through 2012, the E.P.A. has required gradually higher levels of cellulosic fuel to be incorporated into motor fuel each year, for a total of 20 million gallons to date.

But actual production has been near zero. ..

So cellulosic ethanol, often touted as the solution to crude oil depletion, can't be got for ready money backed by government fiat. What happened to all those "promising discoveries"/sales pitches? Those promises were vapourware, mere human babble to do with movement of money tokens and deckchair placement. Undue faith in technology is a prescription for extinction.

[JackRiddler]

Ditto.

[drstrangelove]

So this whole discussion is way before my time, and even more so beyond my knowledge. However, I remember a section in Michael Ruppert's book Crossing the Rubicon that touched on this peak oil theory. It's not in that book, but if I remember right, his prediction for when we would start to see the effects of an energy crises due to peak oil was literally 2020. This may have been from the Collapse documentary. I never read any of his other books.

Anyway, no doubt if he were still alive he'd be likely pointing to the pandemic and its measures as a means of reducing energy consumption.
- global supply chains have been halted.
- there are product shortages.
- restrictions on energy based transportation.

Coincidence or not, I'd love see what any true peak oil believers have to say about this. Or is the movement completely dead? As this thread would suggest. It never really seemed to be that unbelievable to me.

[thrulookingglass]

All here stems from war. Once the combustion engine replaced the horse it was inevitable that crude oil become a (fought over) commodity. I don't think we know the truth about the genesis of crude oil. I think organic molten material cooked by the earth's intense core temperatures over and over again until it turned into molasses doesn't jive with me. I'm no earth scientist though. Haven't spent years studying geology. I lean a lot (too much?) on what Fletcher Prouty had to say. Major league balls on that guy. He sure didn't seem wrong about Kennedy. Bad shit that warfare. Energy companies bad shit too. Enron, P,G&E, Exxon/Mobil, BP, rape the planet for temporary "gain"? No blood for oil. Anyone remember that slogan? Drugs, Crude, and Guns...just another day of trading in...

Hey! Cheer up! God done it.
*wipes hands clean*

Its all energy. Its how you make use of it that matters.
Bet there's a way we could have SHARED in the resource that is oil and provided safe, reliable transportation for all without so much worrisome pollution.
Money, life's most antiquated societal control mechanism since the use of violence and torture.

"While 5-star generals of the free world weep in the oil choked tide"
Invest in Zapata Off Shore
while I'm waiting for the great leap forward.

[MacCruiskeen]

This is one of 38 RI threads with the term "Peak Oil" in the title. It was started in 2006 and last commented on in 2013. Wasn't sure which thread to bump, so I chose this one, as it's one of the oldest and longest.

The topic keeps coming up recently, for reasons that aren't hard to discern. If anyone has news of any significant developments in the last half-decade, please post it here. Have the "abiotic oil" proponents come up with any convincing evidence that oil wells replenish themselves on a timescale shorter than millennia? If Hugo Farnsworth, wintler2 and smiths still look in here, it would be good to hear from them.

Resource depletion and resource wars seem like more pertinent topics than ever as we enter the third year of COUPVID with whole populations immobilised, inflation rampant, supply chains under strain, Gates gloating at the prospect of new "pandemics", the newly "green" global ruling class going all Greta on our asses, the US & NATO encircling Russia and moving to strangle Nord Stream II at birth, and Boris Johnson making comparisons between the Ukraine stand-off and WW2. Great Reset indeed.

See also: 'Collapse': Chris Smith's new film about Michael Ruppert, a 12-page thread from 2009. I haven't re-watched the film, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone feeling fragile right now, but it is viewable for free at archive.org and elsewhere online: https://archive.org/details/collapse.2009

[Agent Orange Cooper]

I wonder if any of the Peak Oil proponents back in 2007 (when I was hearing all about it, and terrified) would have predicted that, almost 15 years later in 2020, the price of oil would actually go negative (if only briefly).

[MacCruiskeen]

Oil prices are climbing on fears that the Ukraine-Russia crisis will disrupt supplies across the world.

The price of Brent crude, an international benchmark, reached a seven-year high of $97.76 (£72) a barrel on Tuesday.

[...] Maike Currie, an investment director at Fidelity International, said oil could go above $100 per barrel due to a combination of the Ukraine crisis, a cold winter in the US, and a lack of investment in oil and gas supplies around the world.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60473233

If it's true that there's been a lack of investment, then that indicates reduced expectations of profit from fresh drilling.

[Hugo Farnsworth]

If it's true that there's been a lack of investment, then that indicates reduced expectations of profit from fresh drilling.

Yes. This was predicted by the better contributors on peak oil sites 12 or more years ago when shale oil was the big deal. We could use the condition of the TAP (Trans Alaska) as a metric for global investment. Other than a friend still in the exploration service business, I am completely out of the industry buzz now.

Several of the contributors predicted a supply disruption caused by lack of investment creating a cycle of glut/shortage and with the corresponding price fluctuations. I think renewables and BEV for urban use has sharpened the drivers for this cycle.

During the seventies, my friends and I would wonder if we would run out of air or oil first. That question has been settled. More concerning to us was the fact that we were overshooting our environment with non-renewable resources. It seemed (and still seems) suicidal.