59aec99d9323de5ff3e0…

Understood. Seriously, I’ll live next door to a Nuke plant first. I know the safety and reliability of Nuke plants. But living next door to a hydrogen bomb, that will go off about as often as a gas station fire occurs?

Um, I don’t think my insurance will cover that. Heck my life insurance policy will probably try to call it suicide if I intentionally lived in such a condition.

This sounds like as good an idea as the LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) Tankers. One of those takes a bad turn and you can lose a major port city in a hurry.

You mean we aren’t there yet? Somebody has been consistently and pervasively wrong on this issue for 30+ years. Lets see what they have to say now.

Hey, they say we’re at the “peak” of peak oil, and civilization will collapse unless we change our energy usage today.

Odd, thats exactly what they’ve said every year for the past 30. Maybe its a recording…

drilling more wells is not the problem/answer.
we,the US, hasn’t built a new refinery in 30+ years. the ones we have operate at about 98% capicaty. more barrels of oil won’t increase production.

marlin007 on April 15, 2008 at 8:10 AM

And whose fault is that??? The Eco-Fascists and lilly-livered politicians who won’t allow a new refinery to be built. This is the same crowd which is causing the nuclear fuel storage problem by blocking implementation of nuclear fuel recycling technology developed in the US nearly four decades ago (and now in use in Europe)!!!

Our main problem is self-destructive ignorance…not lack of oil. All we have to do is force our politicians to stop obstructing energy production and we will have U.S. energy independence for many centuries.

Kinda like Intelligent Design.

The combustion engine is not the problem. As an energy transmission method, it is acceptable and has predictable and manageable side effects. The problem is that the expense of developing these newly found resources is large enough to stall development while the profits are high. For that matter, there are so many development efforts that they are causing their own market scarcities while trying to alleviate market scarcities.

Hydrogen is not a power source, it is a transmission method. Hydrogen is not something we are finding in an energetic medium, it is something we are developing into an energetic medium for transmission elsewhere. The water engine is a fantasy.

Electricity needs wires, oil needs pipelines and tankers. Coal needs rail cars. If people want energy in their houses and places of business, and portable uses of energy to take them from one to another, then there is going to be continued demand for multiple forms of energy.

Here in California, there has been much talk about hydrogen-fueled vehicles — which have gone, basically, nowhere because hydrogen fueling stations are not as ubiquitous as gas stations. Liquid fuels, by contrast, have a large advantage in handling when it comes to portable energy use, and the infrastructure is pretty much built out. Much as environmentalists hate them, the liquid-hydrocarbon-fueled automobile is probably the last place I would expect to see changes.

Here are a couple of links that I found that are interesting: http://water4gas.com/2books.htm?hop=sdcowboy

and http://www.sdcowboy.com/buylessoil.html

This is the crap that I was taught in grade school oh so many years ago.

I had never heard of the biotic oil theory until now, and that sure makes more sense than the idea of fossil fuels.

Will Peak Oil eventually arrive? Presumably; crude oil is not a renewable resource.

Maybe, maybe not.

http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html

I don’t know much about this, but I ran across something similar on Planet Gore a while back and it piqued my interest.

Hypocrites, all of ‘em. Social treason FTW!

We have enough discovered reserves to last a couple of hundred years. Who cares. We will never use it. It will become like coal as wood did before that.

Probably within your lifetime, assuming you are under thirty, there will be a new cheaper fuel source that takes over. The combustion engine will go the way of the buggy whip and Saudis princes will once again disappear as they did 1500 years ago when the Frankincense market collapsed.

Right now a kid in a garage somewhere is working out the details…..

i like the idea of using up everyone else’s first, but that theory, like most trutherisms, requires far more competence than our gubmint has so far displayed.

Will Peak Oil eventually arrive? Presumably; crude oil is not a renewable resource.

Don’t be so sure. I’ve come across theories that the Earth is continually making oil.

tgharris on April 15, 2008 at 10:49 AM

BTW, all these capital expenditures to increase/improve our energy supply were brought to you by those of us working for “Evil Big Oil”, lol.

Right now there is a 7 billion dollar expansion underway in Port Arthur Texas to handle the high sulfur crude most of the new deep water wells produce.

It is a Saudi/Shell joint owned existing refinery and when finished by 2010 it will produce 600,000 BPD.

CommentGuy on April 15, 2008 at 8:22 AM

Conoco-Phillips is working on a multi-billion $$$ expansion of their Roxana, IL refinery to handle the Canadian Oil sands product. This is supposed to increase product at that location to about 400,000 BPD.

Or they think we’re all going to bicycle to work. Ain’t gonna happen.
fleiter on April 15, 2008 at 8:55 AM

Bicycling, like fuel from corn, is highly inefficient. The human body is quite inefficient in comparison to the internal combustion engine and consumes a large amount of energy intensive fuel. There are benefits to biking to work, but fuel conservation is not one of them. When I commuted into Seattle accross the I-90 bridge, I always got a kick whenever it rained because there would be 8 lanes of cars stopped in traffic, but I always had an entire lane several miles long all to myself in the bike lane. Apparently no sacrifice is to great to Gaia.

Also, the 200 billion of shale oil turned out to be just 4 billion.

I think THomas Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory is right, oil isn’t a “fossil fuel” and limited, but rather being produced in the core of the earth and gradually bubbling up to crust. Which also explains alot of anamolies in which they find oil in parts of world were there aren’t any fossils, or tap out Oil wells then go back years later and there is more oil there, etc.

jp on April 15, 2008 at 10:32 AM

I have seen some interesting examples of this, but at this time it cannot be proven. It could be that the rock surrounding the wellbore was depleted by the well, and then over several years more remote oil in the same pool re-saturated the rock near the wellbore. Also, a big issue most folks don’t realize is that a given well only produces 20-30% of the known oil. With each passing year, technology improves to get more and more percentage of oil out, so many wells that have been capped can be re-entered, and using the newer technology, more oil produced.

On the other hand, the abiotic, or Russian model postulates that the formation of gas and oil deposits is a naturally occurring, ongoing process, through which existing, ongoing processes in the earth’s crust are constantly transforming quasi-organic chemical compounds into oil and gas. While there currently is no data, or even estimates, of what this production level might be, practical application of the theory has revealed oil deposits in locations that should have been empty, following the biotic model.

The indications that sway one to the abiotic model include the continual discovery of ‘new’ pockets of petroleum, and the actual prevalence of petroleum pockets worldwide. And if you look at a graphic of the distribution, it becomes obvious there’s quite a few areas that we haven’t looked at with an ‘abiotic eye’. The indications also include evidence from other locations in the solar system – both the Jovian moons and particularly Titan at Saturn contain naturally occurring hydrocarbon compunds – in abundance. So, unless someone wants to make the case that Dino the Dinosaur and his fern forests were either intrepid space-farers, or that their very distant cousins once roamed these bodies…

A friend of mine mentioned something which sounds almost trooferish on its face, but kinda makes sense if you think about it – that although there may not be an official, announced policy by the government or the oil companies, the true US strategy is to use everyone else’s oil first, and only seriously tap into our own when we’re the only ones still producing any. He cited as his evidence the fact that most midwestern US and Texas fields are currently capped (not dry, just not producing), the reluctance to open ANWAR, and the decidedly low-key response and downplay of the Bakken formation in North Dakota. A ‘grand conspiracy’ does sound extremely far-fetched, but one would have to study the effect of $100/barrel prices on the decisions of individual well owners overall to produce. It’s likely the data would show less than a unanimous front on the issue.

Regardless, there still seems to be quite a lot of area of the planet that has NOT been completely probed and evaluated for the actual presence of petroleum. The mid-sea Pacific areas, (gasp) Antarctica, swaths of the Indian Ocean, underneath the Arctic (where the Russians have recently been maneuvering to lay economic claim to vast tracks of sea floor area, btw). A planetary model with any sort of quasi-uniform distribution to it seems like it would virtually guarantee that there is oil out there that has yet to be discovered.

And until the day comes that everyone, and I mean everyone – finally agree that a complete survey of the planet is finished, and that every single oil deposit in existence has been identified, located, and mapped – well, then, if it turns out that oil is a constantly naturally produced item, we’d then be faced with determining what that level of production was, and adjust accordingly, which the free market will probably be very, very useful in doing. On the other hand, if it isn’t being naturally produced, and it truly is a finite resource, once we reached the actual, no BS ‘we found it all’ point, the oil that currently makes up our ‘strategic reserve’ stockpile will provide us with from 10 to 12 years of oil, at rates of consumption that would likely decrease dramatically should gasoline eventually climb to $6, $7, or even $10/gallon in todays dollars. Despite 10 to 12 years not really sounding like a lot of time, it is a sufficient space for a market-driven, viable replacement system of energy distribution for transportation, electrical generation, and heating to grow to maturation.

But perhaps I’m just living in la-la land, and the chicken littles are right. We’re all gonna die, cold, hungry, homeless, and alone, with nothing but nature’s contempt for the foolish humans…

It is going to be just too costly to rely on dictators and unstable regimes for a any substantial portion of our energy needs.

Think_b4_speaking on April 15, 2008 at 10:24 AM