Peak Oil redux

[Darthwing Teorist]

"Surplus oil production capacity could disappear by 2012 a report from US Joint Forces Command, says."

2012? The end of an epoch.

Time to stock up on ammunition.

[RobP2]

It's on the way....

[Dmitri]

I'll be hitching a ride on a Vogon ship.

[qiphlow]

shit. looks like gas is gonna get more expensive.
i guess "big oil" hasn't realized the profit they wanted out of the middle east invasions, so it must be time to raise gas prices.

[I-mon]

Have any of you guys read "The Long Descent", or anything else by John Michael Greer?


He's got an excellent blog: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

from this week's entry:

The Twilight of the Machine
The end of the age of cheap abundant energy, as last week’s Archdruid Report argued, brings with it an unavoidable reshaping of our most basic ideas about economics and, in particular, economic development. For the last three centuries or so, the effective meaning of this phrase has centered on the replacement of human labor by machines. All the other measures of development – and of course plenty of them have been offered down through the years – either reflect or presuppose that basic economic shift.

The replacement of labor with mechanical energy has even come to play a potent role in the popular imagination. From the machine-assisted living of The Jetsons to the darker image of reality itself as a machine-created illusion in The Matrix, the future has come to be defined as a place where people do even less work with their own muscles than they do today. All this is the product of what an earlier post called the logic of abundance: the notion, rooted right down in the core of the contemporary worldview of industrial society, that there will always be enough resources to let people have whatever it is that they think they want....

it's good reading.

[gosao]

geez if true this is gonna suck... they'd better get this tech going sooner than later looks like...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/22/bloom-energy-boxes/

[Darth Rock&Roll]

Oil is so necessary to our society that it would cease to function without it.

Your mind would pop out your ass if you knew the products that we make out of petroleum distillates and oil.
Your mind would then pop further if you knew the extent to which all our machinations depend on it.

If there was no oil left, we would truly be fucked. even after we stop using it for cars and power supply.

what about gears, wheels, coolants? lubricants.
oil is part and parcel to virtually every machine in existence.

Anyway, it won't run out.
Fossil fuel is a term coined in the 1700's.
Oil isn't actually from fossils. It is not know what the process is that creates the oil that we drill for and suck out of the ground.
There is research material as far back as the 50's by some russian science folks who believe the entire process whereby oil is produced in the earth is abiotic!

Also, don't believe anything the pentagon says, they just want to blow your ass up and take your oil and poppies.

[chud]

There is research material as far back as the 50's by some russian science folks who believe the entire process whereby oil is produced in the earth is abiotic!

Yes, I have been intrigued by the abiotic oil theory. My brother, who is an energy industry guy doesn't buy it, he believes in Peak Oil, and he may be right. But as an engineer I find the abiotic oil theory interesting; the idea is that the earth's core is always churning and the magma generates gases like hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and others which vent to the surface and combine with carbon in the earth's crust to make hydrocarbons that bake into long chains and make petroleum. I think this theory is possible because of the depths that we are now finding oil at, depths that are far too deep to be explained by dinosaur fossils because we're finding new petroluem far below sedimentary deposits.

[Steve James]

It could be that petroleum is produced by various mechanisms, including fossil decay.

[Chris Fleming]

I wonder how much of this "peak oil" is real. It would make sense to me, but then again, there are lots of stories and studies about how there are all kinds of big oil deposits that aren't being developed to make a false scarcity ceiling. Big money for oil companies and the Middle East that way. Who knows. You can find a scientist to support any position you want. Same result either way. Preparation in any way you can for an oil shock is a good idea.

[qiphlow]

...false scarcity ceiling. Big money for oil companies...

yup.

[Steve James]

Personally, I think all utilities should be nationalized ... yep, that's right, they should belong to the people, and we should get the profits. Right now, the oil companies are in a no lose situation. More oil, more profit... less oil, more research needed, so they charge more. We're screwed either way.