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DAMN! this sucks, we have to leave our greasy black fingers all over this damned country.
CNNWASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. Interior Department on Friday gave final approval to a plan by ConocoPhillips and partner Anadarko Petroleum Corp. to develop five tracts around the oil-rich Alpine field on Alaska's North Slope.
The department's Bureau of Land Management authorized the first commercial development of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, allowing the companies to go forward with developing the tracts, which are located in the northeastern corner of the reserve.
Production from these fields, which together hold more than 330 million barrels of oil, will start by 2006, according to the BLM. They will supplement production from the Alpine fields, which hold 429 million barrels and have a daily oil output of about 100,000 barrels.
<snip>
The petroleum reserve, the size of Indiana, was set aside in 1923 for its energy potential, but until recently it has been ignored in favor of the region to the east, around the giant Prudhoe Bay field. The Bush administration believes the new Congress next year will approve oil drilling in the separate Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which may hold up to 16 billion barrels of crude.
Next ANWR?
95 percent of the Arctic coastline (map) is already open to oil drilling and exploration. Consider this: current operations in Alaska's North Slope at Prudhoe Bay are run under the strictest environmental standards, yet there is more than one spill per day of crude oil, refined oil products, or hazardous substances. In 1999, these spills released 45,000 gallons of crude oil, diesel fuel, propane, and ethylene glycol, among other substances.
DAMN! this sucks, we have to leave our greasy black fingers all over this damned country.
Oh Jeeze!
Has the Health Dept. been by Saltgrass to check your greasy fingers?
We're going to drill in all these places, it's just a matter of time.
Still won't keep us from running out someday.
Okay, before you chain yourself to an iceberg off the coast of ANWR (because there's absolutely nothing to chain yourself to IN the refuge), be advised that drilling will be conducted on less than .01%, that's right 1/100 of a percent, of the total area that comprises the refuge. That's like whining about the amount of space Nbadanallah takes up at when he strolls through Hemisphere Plaza. It's a distasteful thought but, inconsequential.
^^^
So when Kerry was trumpeting this a few weeks ago it was a great idea, now it's an earthen outrage?
Pot, kettle.
Thanks for missing the point yet again, dip s. You notice I never said please don't do it. It's going to be done -- it's human nature. And since it's such a miniscule amount (of course you left out all the clearing etc, needed to simply have access to the drill sites) it will make absolutely no difference to actual supply or the timeline for running out of oil.Okay, before you chain yourself to an iceberg off the coast of ANWR (because there's absolutely nothing to chain yourself to IN the refuge), be advised that drilling will be conducted on less than .01%, that's right 1/100 of a percent, of the total area that comprises the refuge. That's like whining about the amount of space Nbadanallah takes up at when he strolls through Hemisphere Plaza. It's a distasteful thought but, inconsequential.
Okay, the supply has been going to run out in 20 years for the past 60.
Nah, most of us will be dead when it runs out completely.Okay, the supply has been going to run out in 20 years for the past 60.
But it will run out.
Provided a host of assumptions hold, to say the least.
Which ones?Provided a host of assumptions hold, to say the least.
That we keep using a lot of oil?
That China continues to develop?
I'm not betting against these things. Are you?
Let's start with the assumptions that reserves are finite and non-renewable (refilling reserves in the Gulf of Mexico seem to contradict that) and that all reserves have been located, (it's a big planet).
Then, let's move into the assumption that humans are incapable of devising alternatives when they become necessary; that we've not come this far on our innovative nature and ability to invent.
Finally, let's not forget the assumption that there may be a yet to be discovered alternative.
Refilled with what? You do know how long it takes an oil deposit to form, don't you?Let's start with the assumptions that reserves are finite and non-renewable (refilling reserves in the Gulf of Mexico seem to contradict that) and that all reserves have been located, (it's a big planet).The sooner the better; we're complacent in this particular case.Then, let's move into the assumption that humans are incapable of devising alternatives when they become necessary; that we've not come this far on our innovative nature and ability to invent.So ifs and buts are indeed candy and nuts.Finally, let's not forget the assumption that there may be a yet to be discovered alternative.
As I said, we don't have to worry for ourselves, save the idle ing about $2.00 gas and the occasional war. So nothing will get done.
Assuming that petroleum is even used as an energy source 50 years from now, for starters.
Assuming that refining processes as well as other production processes do not change in their efficiency so as to prolong the useful life of known and undiscovered reserves.
And so on and so forth.
Last edited by Marcus Bryant; 11-15-2004 at 09:49 PM.
How about taking all the funding that is going into this project and diverting it towards fuel-cell research?? THAT way we dont have to kill the local fauna and flora in order to get to the oil, AND we dont have to be so dependant on oil, this seems to be a win win situation to me, I fail to see the downside.
P.S. I am against this no matter who suggested it.
Of course it won't.Assuming that petroleum is even used as an energy source 50 years from now, for starters.
We'll be out.
Source? Put up or shut up.
You seem to be assuming that proven reserves are the only petroleum left on the planet.
What's yours?
Put up or shut up.
It's all speculation.
You can find support for any argument.
Please stick to the "we'll find some other energy source" argument or formally announce a flip-flop to the "we'll never run out" angle.You seem to be assuming that proven reserves are the only petroleum left on the planet.
So you have no source. All I had to do was provide some assumptions. You, on the other hand, need to come with something other than your usual delightful bluster.
You are full of , per usual.
To get you up to speed, here you go:
http://www.economist.com/displaystor...tory_id=497454
Will the oil run out?
Feb 8th 2001
The Economist
Eventually, yes; but by then it might no longer matter
A SHIMMERING pleasure palace rises up out of the sands outside Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. It is surrounded by manicured gardens and extensive grounds in which hundreds of exquisitely groomed camels disport themselves. In this overprivileged spot, the owner, a favourite prince of the ruling family, recently threw a sumptuous banquet for foreign dignitaries. The guest of honour was the custodian of the gooey gold that makes such opulence possible: Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s minister of petroleum. Even Bill Richardson, then America’s energy minister, took the trouble to attend.
But how long will that black gold continue to ensure such prosperity? Mr Naimi has his answer ready. “I am not in the business of forecasting or dreaming,” he says with a wry smile, “but I am certain of one thing: hydrocarbons will remain the fuel of choice for the 21st century.”
That puts him at odds with the growing chorus of those (including the best-known of his predecessors, Sheikh Zaki Yamani) who say that oil’s grip on energy markets may soon start to weaken. The prospective scarcity of oil, the argument goes, combined with the instability of undemocratic Arab regimes, will cause a steep rise in hydrocarbons prices over the next two decades. The voracious demand for oil in the developing world will make things even worse. All this will speed the transition to cleaner alternatives.
Doomsters have been predicting dry wells since the 1970s, but so far the oil is still gushing. Vast sums have been spent and professional reputations staked on trying to guess what proportion of the total amount of conventional oil in the ground mankind has already consumed. The extreme pessimists among leading geologists, such as Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère, argue that depletion is now close to the psychologically important half-way mark. The extreme optimists, such as the experts at America’s Geological Survey, argue that this turning point is still decades away. Most take up a position somewhere in-between. S ’s Ged Davis expects the half-way mark to be reached some time between 2015 and 2030. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which represents the big energy-consuming nations, agrees that many oil fields outside the Middle East will soon mature, but does not expect a global supply crunch in the next 20 years.
In the past, pundits have rarely got their oil forecasts right. Nearly all the predictions made in the wake of the 1970s oil shocks for oil prices in 2000 were way off the mark. America’s Department of Energy, for example, thought that oil at the turn of the century would reach $250 a barrel (at 2000 prices). Planners at Exxon predicted a price of $100, which was still way out, but at least their forecast for oil demand in 2000 was spot on.
One of the best forecasting records is that of Morris Adelman, a professor at MIT. He has long insisted that oil is not only plentiful, but also that it is a “fungible, global commodity” that will find its way to markets regardless of politics, making nonsense of all the talk about energy security and independence. “Back in 1973, I predicted in The Economist that if the Arabs don’t sell us oil, somebody else will,” he recalls. One reason for his optimism has been the poor quality of information about reserves in most parts of the world. It turns out that there is much more oil hidden away under the earth’s surface than most people imagined back in the 1970s.
Even Exxon says it has learned one crucial lesson from earlier forecasting mistakes: it greatly underestimated the power of technology. Thanks to advances in exploration and production technology, the amount of oil available has increased enormously. Even hitherto uneconomic hydrocarbons such as tar sands are becoming more attractive. S ’s Mr Moody-Stuart says that such “non-traditional oil will eventually behave like non-OPEC oil or marginal fields do today: if OPEC raises prices too much, these sources will help regulate the price.”
But can this pace of innovation continue? “You must be kidding: we’re just getting started,” says Euan Baird, the boss of Schlumberger, a giant oil-services firm. Mr Adelman, too, accepts that tomorrow’s oil-exploration technology is bound to be better than today’s. That is why he dismisses the idea of an oil crisis in the short to medium term. “Scarcity is still assumed even by reasonable men and middle-of-the-road forecasters, but that is wrong. For the next 25 to 50 years, the oil available to the market is for all intents and purposes infinite.”
Looking for a quiet life
But scarcity is not the only reason why the world might move away from oil. The unnerving volatility of oil prices, together with growing concern about the environmental impact of hydrocarbons, is already spurring the search for alternatives. In time, such investments might well produce innovations that will break oil’s near-monopoly on the global transport market. A quote now making the rounds in the energy business sums up the argument: “The stone age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”
The past few years have provided a useful reminder that price gyrations impose real pain on economies, at both extremes. When oil prices collapsed to around $10 a barrel in early 1999, many producer countries got into dire straits. When prices soared above $30 a barrel last year, consumer economies got squeezed in turn. The worst-hit were newly industrialised countries such as Thailand and South Korea which, unlike the OECD countries, have become far more reliant on oil over the past 20 years.
There have been political repercussions, too. Several West European economies nearly ground to a halt last September as lorry drivers, farmers and other heavy petrol users revolted against high prices at the pump. America’s politicians faced similar fury over heating oil last autumn, just before the elections, prompting the president to release some oil from the government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Yet volatile energy prices, however irksome, are clearly here to stay. The world had been lulled into a false sense of security by the decade-long period of low and stable prices following the collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s (except for a brief e surrounding the Gulf war). Taking a longer view, however, volatility and unpredictability in oil prices appear to be the norm, as they are for every other commodity. Indeed, they seem worse under the fractious and ill-disciplined OPEC oil cartel than they would be either in a free market or in a strong monopoly. What is more, changes in the oil business in the past few years have had the effect of increasing volatility. According to Michael Lynch of WEFA, an economic consultancy, the decade of stable oil prices that consumers enjoyed until recently was due chiefly to a prolonged glut in production capacity. But that came to an end as demand soared and investment by OPEC producers failed to keep pace. Today only Saudi Arabia has significant spare capacity. And there has been a lot of cost-cutting in the industry recently that has left the oil market with smaller stocks and therefore much more exposed to price es. If the world’s thirst for oil is to be met, CERA reckons that oil supply must increase by a quarter over the next ten years, to at least 100m barrels per day. But it calculates that world production capacity today is 6m barrels per day lower than it would have been had there been no price collapse two years ago.
Mr West, the consultant, worries about bottlenecks in the refining and pipelines system. He points out that in America no one has built a new refinery in 20 years, despite strong growth in demand. This is because a combination of low margins, red tape, ever tougher environmental regulations and the NIMBY (not in my back yard) syndrome have conspired to make this part of the oil business thoroughly unattractive.
The green imperative
Asked about their biggest worry for the future, however, most industry bosses will say greenery. At the global level, their main headache is climate change. The clearest sign of change is the progress, albeit in fits and starts, of the Kyoto Protocol, a pact among industrial countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. For years the industry tried to ridicule the sandals-and-beards brigade and dismiss any scientific evidence suggesting that burning fossil fuels might contribute to global warming. Now it has softened its stance.
A summit last November to discuss the Kyoto treaty ended in failure, but many energy firms now accept that national restraints on carbon emissions are likely to be introduced in the medium term. Indeed, a growing band of companies, led by BP and S , are already preparing for the day when the price of carbon emissions is no longer zero. Mr Moody-Stuart thinks the Kyoto pact is crucial because it forces businesses to “put their best and sharpest minds on the task” of reducing carbon emissions. Other firms, notably Exxon, publicly scoff about global warming, but are quietly investing huge sums in carbon-related technology.
If oilmen are getting headaches over global warming, they are suffering migraines over local air pollution. Concerns about the environmental harm, and especially the effect on human health, of burning fossil fuels have risen to the top of the agenda in many countries. The rich world is imposing ever stricter emissions standards on refineries and power-generation plants, as well as tightening the requirements to reduce pollutants in petrol. And poorer countries too, as they gradually become better off, are putting pressure on energy companies to clean up. “Concern over the environment will not be linear, but it will be an extremely significant and irreversible force over the longer term, especially in developing countries,” says BP’s John Browne. Like its rival S , BP has made a big shift towards natural gas, and placed hedging bets on renewable energy and hydrogen fuel cells as well.
Drowning in oil—and loving it
So are the doomsayers right in predicting oil’s demise, even if they are wrong about the causes? Perhaps, but it might be a long wait. As the old lags of the energy business like to say, “The best subs ute for gasoline is gasoline,” and it seems pretty plain that oil will be dislodged only by something that is equally cheap, easy to use and efficient—and less polluting. Even if such a thing can be found, oil could be around for decades yet, so great are the sunk investments in infrastructure, so strong the power of in bency, so impressive the advances in fossil-fuel technology—and, quite possibly, so vast the remaining deposits.
If still in doubt, visit Al-Shaybah. Flying over the inhospitable expanses of Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, you will see nothing but a desolate stretch of desert, larger than France; yet tucked away under the striking red sand dunes is one of the world’s largest oil fields. Aramco, the government oil company controlled by Mr Naimi, had to invest a total of $2.5 billion to bring the Shaybah field on stream, but since it opened in 1999, its vast output of over 600,000 barrels a day has already repaid that investment. For the next 100 years, everything it produces will be undiluted profit. And as you stare down on Shaybah, consider that Saudi Arabia could develop another dozen fields of the same size without beginning to make a dent in its proven reserves. Oil may not be tomorrow’s fuel, but today could go on for an awfully long time.
I'll argue what I like you hard up . Small wonder you live alone.Please stick to the "we'll find some other energy source" argument or formally announce a flip-flop to the "we'll never run out" angle.
My live-in girlfriend is laughing at you.http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4287300/site/newsweek/Crude Awakening
A prominent physicist warns in a new book that the world is running out of oil and we’re not doing anything to stave off the coming crisis
IMG: offshore drilling
Michael A. Mariant / AP
Oil platforms drill for what’s left of the oil off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek
Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET Feb. 17, 2004
Feb. 17 - Remember 1973? If you do, there are plenty of reasons to wish you didn’t. Chief among them (right after leisure suits) would be the oil crisis that began in October. The Middle Eastern OPEC nations stopped exports to the United States and other Western nations just as stateside oil production was peaking. The artificial shortage that followed had devastating effects: The price of gas quadrupled in the United States, climbing from 25 cents to more than a dollar, in a matter of months. The American Automobile Association reported that in one isolated week up to 20 percent of the country’s gas stations had no fuel; in some places motorists were forced to wait in line for two to three hours to gas up. The number of homes built with gas heat dropped.
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But that was the 1970s and this is now, right? Not according to David Goodstein. Saudi princes and SUV drivers may do well to read his new book, “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil” (W.W. Norton), in which Goodstein argues that our oil-dependent civilization is in for a crude awakening when the world’s oil supply really begins to run out—possibly within a few decades. “As we learned in 1973, the effects of an oil shortage can be immediate and drastic, while it may take years, perhaps decades, to replace the vast infrastructure that supports the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of the products of the 20 million barrels of oil we Americans alone gobble up each day,” he writes.
Goodstein’s book is not a happy read, but an important one. In layman’s terms, he explains the science behind his prediction and why other fossil fuels might not do the trick when the wells run dry. Goodstein, a physicist and vice-provost at the California Ins ute of Technology, recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about the fundamental principles of oil supply and demand, and whether civilization can survive without fossil fuels. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: This is scary stuff. You’re saying that oil production will soon peak.
IMG: David Goodstein
Neil France
David Goodstein says facing up to the coming oil crisis is ‘hard and we’re not trying’
David Goodstein: The prediction that it will peak—that is to say the crisis will come when we reach a peak when half the oil has been used up—that prediction quan atively is unquestionably true. But the quan ative question of when the peak will occur depends on extremely undependable numbers. The so-called proven oil reserves as reported by various countries and companies around the world are often just guesses and they’re often not even honest guesses. Among those who would analyze those figures, some have predicted that it will come as early as this year; others, within this decade. It could possibly be in the next decade. But I think that’s about as far as you can push it.
Let’s start at the beginning. What is oil and what do we use it for?
Oil is hydrocarbons that grew up in the earth when source rock full of organic inclusions sank to just the right depth—not too little and not too much—and got cooked over the ages. It took hundreds of millions of years for the world’s supply of oil to be created. The oil is used to make gasoline obviously, but also home heating oil, diesel fuel but also 90 percent of all the organic chemicals that we use. That includes pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, plastics, fabrics and so on. They are petrochemicals, meaning they originate as oil.
So our demand, regardless of supply, is unlikely to decrease anytime soon.
Well, the need for those hydrocarbon materials has been increasing for 150 years and will go on increasing especially because the world’s population is increasing. The poorer parts of the world want to increase their standard of living, which inevitably means using more energy. Fossil fuels are our principal source of energy.
You used an interesting word: “need.” Do we need the oil or is it something that we have just become dependent on?
We have certainly become dependent on it. This is a habit that will be very, very difficult to break.
Knowing human behavior and how hard the habit is to break, we probably won't, in all likelihood, break it.
I think we will not. One of the reasons I wrote the book was in the hope that enough people will become aware of the problem and we will be a little better prepared.
How do you suggest people prepare now?
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Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil by David Goodstein
Right now we don’t have the kind of leadership that would take us in the direction that would make major changes. As individuals we can do things; I drive a hybrid car, for example. But as a society we have to redesign cities so that people live close to where they work. There are all kinds of measures. We are so profligate in the use of energy that even with the smallest effort we can reduce the rate at which we use energy very significantly, as Californians showed after the last energy crisis. But what we really need is massive infusion of research on all of the possible ways of ameliorating this problem.
You’re talking about researching fusion and fuel cells and —
Fusion, fuel cells, biomass. There are all kinds of possibilities, but none of them are worth a thing unless you’ve shown that it actually works. You’ve got to prototype it; you’ve got to show that it can be scaled up, that it can be done on a large scale. And so on.
You write that the crisis doesn’t happen when we run out of oil, it happens when we reach the peak, the halfway point. Explain that.
We had a peak once before—it was in 1973. The production in North American had reached its peak in 1970 and was declining. Supplies were not available in North America and the Arab countries embargoed the oil; they shut down the pipeline. We had an immediate, instantaneous panic, mile-long lines at gas stations and fear for the future of our way of life. That was an artificial, temporary peak. And it’s just a slight foretaste of what will happen when we reach the real [global] peak and supplies start to decline and continue to decline forever.
So what happens then? Do we revert to coal?
It’s possible for us to revert either to natural gas or to coal or both. Among consequences are the increasing global climate change. But another consequence is, let us suppose you tried to subs ute coal for oil. Natural gas is a good subs ute and it will last for a while but it will have its own peak one or two decades after oil, so it’s only a temporary solution. If you turn to coal, we’re now using twice as much energy from oil as we are from coal. So if you want to liquefy coal as a subs ute for oil in transportation—which is its most important application—you would have to mine coal at a rate that’s many, many times at the rate of what we’re doing now. But the conversion process is very inefficient. So you’d have to mine much more than that. If you put that together with the growing world population and the fact that the rest of the world wants to increase its standard of living, you realize that the estimates that say we have hundreds of years worth of coal in the ground are wrong by a factor of ten or more. So we will run out of all fossil fuels. Coal will peak just like any natural resource. We will reach the peak for all fossil fuels by the end of the century.
You mentioned transportation as one of oil’s greatest uses. Doesn’t alternative technology already exist?
Not exactly, no. We tried electric cars and that was sort of more or less withdrawn from the market. I think there was plenty of demand. But when I tried to buy an EV1 some years ago, they said that the car had a range of 50 to 100 miles, but there was an onboard computer that always told you what your range was and when it was freshly charged, it had a range of about 30 miles. And they only sold them in California and Arizona because they were useless in colder climates. So that’s not the solution. There are advanced batteries—the kind of batteries that we use now in our cell phones and laptops are lithium ion batteries and they have about five times the energy density of the old lead acid batteries. So if you could imagine something like an EV1 with five times the range, that starts to become believable. But nobody is showing that you can scale up the lithium ion batteries to use in transportation.
And another alternative is nuclear.
Nuclear is an alternative, but remember you’re not going to have any nuclear cars and nuclear airplanes. Nuclear is not a subs ute for oil. There’s a lot of talk about hydrogen because of the president’s initiative—the governor of California has also announced an initiative. I think what people don’t understand about hydrogen is that it is not a source of energy. You have to use energy to make hydrogen—it’s just a way of storing and transporting energy. And with today’s economics and today’s technology, it takes the equivalent of six gallons of gasoline to make enough hydrogen to replace one gallon of gasoline.
How do we know that all the oil that will be discovered has been discovered?
We don’t know that all the oil that will be discovered has been discovered, and this is a somewhat controversial subject. But we do know that the peak in oil discovery occurred decades ago. The rate at which we’ve been discovering new oil has been declining for decades. That’s one of the arguments that the peak in oil supply must be coming soon because the supply curve follows the discovery curve by a few decades. The United States Geological Survey conducted an exhaustive study between 1995 and 2000 and gave out a statistical output in which they said that the amount of oil that we started with, we could be 95 percent certain, was at least 2 trillion barrels. But they also thought there was a 50 percent chance that there was 2.7 trillion barrels. The difference between those two is 700 billion barrels of oil—that’s the entire reserves of the Middle East. They were predicting discovering the Middle East all over again. That’s pretty implausible. But if you really did add 700 billion barrels to the world’s oil supply, it would delay the peak by about a decade. So we’re not talking about really something that does away with the problem.
And opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in Alaska?
It makes no dent at all. It isn’t even worth talking about.
Is there a silver lining here?
I really don’t think so. If the peak comes and we can’t get our act together fast enough to make up for it, you will end up with people all over the world burning coal as fast as they can just for the space heating and primitive industry. And if you do that the effect on the climate is completely unpredictable.
What about solar energy?
Solar energy will be an important component, an important part of the solution. If you want to gather enough solar energy to replace the fossil fuel that we’re burning today—and remember we’re going to need more fossil fuel in the future- using current technology, then you would have to cover something like 220,000 square kilometers with solar cells. That’s far more than all the rooftops in the country. It would be a piece of land about 300 miles on a side, which is big but not unthinkable. But making that area of solar cells one heck of a challenge because all of the solar cells every made probably wouldn’t cover more than 10 square kilometers. This is not impossible. It’s just difficult. It’s hard and we’re not trying.
You’re a physicist by training.
This is not my research field. I do research in a completely different field. I just thought that this was such an important problem that somebody ought to write a book about it. I am not an expert—there is no subject covered in that book about which I know more than anybody else. If you want to know about superfluid helium or certain kinds of phase transitions I may know more than anybody else in the world. I just thought I should lend my pen to this cause.
Have people been calling you an alarmist? A doomsayer?
What people have been saying is ‘listen to what he’s saying. He’s not an alarmist.’
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
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