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Here's my proposal, take that $100M and find a Saudi/Venezuela oil well operator. Give him the $100M in exchange for not pumping $100M worth of oil out of the g
by wedn3sday 5y ago
Here's my proposal, take that $100M and find a Saudi/Venezuela oil well operator. Give him the $100M in exchange for not pumping $100M worth of oil out of the ground.
- knodi123 5y agoI can not-pump 100M of oil in my own back yard. And you wouldn't believe the rate I can not pump it at! But seriously, this is harder than it sounds. Unless you pay him to permanently sequester $100M of oil, I don't see how it would make a difference.
- lostlogin 5y agoI’ve seen this happen with farm subsidies in the UK where farmers were paid to leave the land alone. However the farmers would choose the crappiest sections to leave alone and production would be unchanged. Profit.
- AlexCoventry 5y agoHow would you cost-effectively enforce that commitment?
- BitwiseFool 5y agoBut in the next 20 or 30 years when there is another energy crisis they'll just start pumping again under the pretext of an emergency.
- vladTheInhaler 5y agoI wonder if there is a way to poison an oil well, so that it becomes un-economical to purify. Chemical separation is obviously what the whole petrochemical industry is about, so maybe something like injecting radioactive material. Then you pay the well owner to poison and seal off their well.
- thereisnospork 5y agoAt 50$/BBl that's 2 million barrels, or one quarter of one day's worth of oil production for Saudi Arabia alone [0]. A new technology could do far more than just 'disappearing' 100 million dollars worth of oil. [0]https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/oil/061021-saudi-arabia-reports-may-crude-oil-production-of-8544-mil-bd-above-target https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
- thinkcontext 5y agoYou wouldn't pay the market price. Its costs money to extract oil, less than $10 per barrel in Saudi Arabia, in the $20s in the US. http://graphics.wsj.com/oil-barrel-breakdown/ http://graphics.wsj.com/oil-barrel-breakdown/
- jazzyjackson 5y agoOK but if I can sell 10 million barrels of oil for $750M why would I accept $100M to keep it in the ground?
- thinkcontext 5y agoYou would if your extraction costs were greater than $650M. But that's not what the comment I replied to was suggesting, they were suggesting offering $750M to keep it in the ground.
- oezi 5y agoHow about just buying the oil and putting it into storage somewhere (maybe just buy oil ships with oil in them). This will drive up price of oil for everyone which is the most effective way to accelerate the adoption of renewables. The world spends 6-9bn USD per day on oil (100m barrels at 60-90 USD), maybe we start with spending 1bn per day. Edit: Fixed calculation.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoBuying oil incentivizes producing more oil
- oezi 5y agoWe will pump the earth empty anyway, right?
- input_sh 5y agoYeah with oil reserves we know of today, most estimates put it around 50 years before we run out of it (that's with the current consumption, it doesn't take into account a completely possible increase in consumption). That doesn't mean that a) we should extract all of it, and b) we won't find more of it.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoOnly if we don’t develop cheaper energy sources. If something else is cheaper, nobody is going to bother looking for expensive oil.
- idolaspecus 5y agoFWIW 100m * 100 = 10bn
- oezi 5y agoThx
- knodi123 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- imaginenore 5y ago$100M is a rounding error for the oil well operators at a country scale. And if you magically manage to convince one, there are others - Russia, USA, Canada, Norway, China, Iraq, etc.
- nightcracker 5y agoAh yes, the thing that will solve our climate issues is to provide more capital to those groups/individuals responsible for it. Supply side Jesus would be proud.
- mustafa_pasi 5y agoThat's basically carbon cap and trade. One of the problems is how do you ensure that the oil well remains blocked off forever? The risk of fraud is pretty high, especially when you consider that the involved parties are these huge practically untouchable corporations.
- SuchAnonMuchWow 5y agoBurn it at the site of extraction. That way, nobody will be able to use it !
- mvanaltvorst 5y agoIf you have $100M worth of carbon captured from the air stored somewhere under the ground, how do you make sure nobody takes advantage of this vast supply of energy? You will have to deal with this problem either way, going straight to the Saudi Arabian oil operator just skips the middleman.
- jandrese 5y agoEnd result: Price of oil goes up, more tar sands are extracted.
- deelowe 5y agoThat would just artificially constrain supply, driving prices up and making other mining options more viable.
- jeffbee 5y agoHow about paying a $1m/head bounty for every dead oilman the local militia can bring me? Seems more economical.
- knodi123 5y agoA modest proposal indeed. I often wonder if, once the effects of climate change rack up a few million more dead, whether the people directly affected with nothing left to lose might go all Rambo on whatever responsible target of opportunity happens to be at hand. It certainly wouldn't take a $1m bounty. I suspect $1k would be just as effective in a couple of decades.
- GloriousKoji 5y agoOil is about $75 per barrel and world wide we consume about 35 billion barrels per year. Reducing $100M worth of oil barely makes a dent.
- PeterisP 5y agoReducing oil consumption by $100m worth of oil saves less than 1 million tons of CO2. We need - and the x-prize requests - solutions that can approach 10 Gt CO2 reduction per year. A one time reduction of 0.001 Gt CO2 is simply insignificant.