7 ms·

What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

• ebbv 13y ago
  I get so tired of this totally incorrect narrative about the US being beholden to Iran or Iraq or whatever for our oil supply. Everybody should know by now that we only get 12.9% of our oil from the middle east TOTAL, let alone from any one country. See: http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-america-get-oil-you-may-be-surprised http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-america-g...
• losethos 13y ago
  God says... 20:15 Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A man child is born unto thee; making him very glad. 20:16 And let that man be as the cities which the LORD overthrew, and repented not: and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the shouting at noontide; 20:17 Because he slew me not from the womb; or that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always great with me. 20:18 Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame? 21:1 The word which came unto Jeremiah from the LORD, when king Zedekiah sent unto him Pashur the son of Melchiah, and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, saying, 21:2 Enquire, I pray thee, of the LORD for us; for Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon maketh war against us; if so be that the LORD will deal with us according to all his wondrous works, that he may go up from us. ---- If churchhill wished oil had never been born.
• michaelochurch 13y ago
  Running out of oil is not what should scare us. It's very easy to make the stuff, and we have tons of it, even now. What we're losing is the cheap energy that came with the easy-to-exploit stuff that's dwindling. (Making oil, as any physicist would intuit as per entropy, will generally cost more than it's worth.) The energy ROI on Pennsylvania surface-level oil was 30:1 and up. That stuff's gone. So-called "peak oil" (which we are probably at) isn't about "running out". It's a behavioral effect (peak production) insofar as we have some choice (as a collective) in how much we produce. The Hubbert model says that "peak" occurs at the 50-percent point. Based on what I've read, I'd guess that (a) we are at peak production and will be at-or-near this plateau of 80-85Mb/day for ~20 years, but (b) decline will be slow and some of that will be the good kind (alternatives), and (c) we've used less than 50% of the world supply (meaning the symmetry of the Hubbert model isn't the case). Either way, we need to start working on alternatives. Global warming is a lot scarier than "peak oil". Markets work, and the bad case of "peak oil" that I consider credible is that our standard-of-living becomes like that of Eastern Europe (say, Hungary) for ~20 years. I've been there. It's not that bad. You have to hang-dry your clothes; you get used to that stuff. Climate change could kill off the species. That's much scarier. Personally, I'm a fan of modern nuclear technologies, as a bridge until we're all-green. Most of the anti-nuclear prejudice in the US comes from known design flaws in plants that are over 30 years old that were built before people knew what they were doing. Modern, passive-safety nuclear plants just don't have those TMI/Fukushima/Chernobyl risks. There are dangers (perfectly safe energy production does not exist) but they're much less severe.
  • LatvjuAvs 13y ago
    How else can we make people pay more money out of they pocket? Lets scare them with global warming bullshit, everyone will have to pay! Ideal!
  • dualogy 13y ago
    > What we're losing is the cheap energy that came with the easy-to-exploit stuff that's dwindling. Pff, just buy the expensive stuff on credit like everything else these days and let the next generation deal with it.. ;)
    • jvzr 13y ago
      Why hang your clothes when you can buy new ones? ;-) Totally agree with OP.
      • lloeki 13y ago
        Some clothes — if taken care of properly when worn — actually barely need any washing but merely being swapped regularly and ventilated. In fact washing and drying them can dramatically reduce their lifetime. Unless I end up soaked one way or another (rain, running...) I don't wash hoodies and jean's trousers as much as I did.
        • nsxwolf 13y ago
          You may not realize this, but you smell.
          • lloeki 13y ago
            Of course I don't do the smell test myself, to be absolutely sure not to be a nuisance to anyone. Besides, sweat is absorbed by underwear like t-shirts, which I obviously change and wash much more frequently. In any case, use your best judgement and be respectful to others.
  • andyking 13y ago
• h2s 13y ago
  From http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/energy-production/frozen-fuel4.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/en...: "Many geologists suspect that gas hydrates play an important role in stabilizing the seafloor. Drilling in these oceanic deposits could destabilize the seabed, causing vast swaths of sediment to slide for miles down the continental slope. Evidence suggests that such underwater landslides have occurred in the past, with devastating consequences. The movement of so much sediment would certainly trigger massive tsunamis similar to those seen in the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004." Sounds dodgy to me :(
  • arethuza 13y ago
    Gas hydrates are possibly one of the mechanisms involved in the Storegga Slide - which resulted in a large tsunami in the North Sea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
• drcube 13y ago
  We never ran out of whale oil, but does anyone think we should go back to using that as our main source of fuel? It isn't about running out, it's about cost and sustainability. Oil is getting more expensive and it isn't sustainable.
• amac 13y ago
  Excellent article - 'Energy 101' - and confirmation that Technology and Energy are the worlds two most important industries.
• nazka 13y ago
  We already are able to create artificial oil by ourself.[1] And the chemical formula is even better than turning lead into gold because it is turning CO2 into high quality oil! It is fun to see how this is not talk in the media... [1] http://www.biopetroleo.com/english/ http://www.biopetroleo.com/english/
• Derbasti 13y ago
  What if we never run out of oil? What if there is no global warming? What if nuclear power plants never exploded? I guess we are officially in denial now. Jokes aside though, higher prices for fossil fuels are a reality and regardless of the size of future reserves, we do have to deal with that at least. The same goes for global warming. Regardless of whether we are the cause of it or not, we have to deal with the consequences. The same goes for nuclear energy. Regardless of whether more modern reactors are safe or not, neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima are solved problems and they won't get solved for another few thousand years. Hence, my take is that we need to progress to a culture of perpetual sustainability and independence of as many external variables as possible.
• codeulike 13y ago
  The opening paragraphs about Churchill are fascinating
• saejox 13y ago
  Middle east stabilizes.
• Jonhoo 13y ago
  From reading these comments it seems most people only read the headline. Such a shame, because it was a really well researched, thought through and written article.
• fvox13 13y ago
  I've always sort of envisioned that oil would become "motorcycle / classic car fuel" and whatever ugly cars normal people end up buying in the next 20 years would run on electricity generated by a combination of some sort of next-gen nuclear, wind, and solar. There's enough petrolheads that will gladly pay $20/gallon to take their Camaro to the track on weekends.
  • drbawb 13y ago
    I'm waiting to see what the used market is going to look like for EVs. I could easily squeak by w/ current electric car tech. I only need 40 miles a day to cover my routine. The problem is that I can afford $500-$5000 used cars -- I can't justify spending $20,000+ on a new car. That being said: I'd like an EV as soon as I can fit it in my budget -- I'm a petrolhead, and I need to do my part to ensure there's fuel left for my hobbyist vehicles and all the supercars I know and love.
• DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  The best part of this rather traditionally long-winded article (not a jab, just the truth) from The Atlantic was the observation that the availability of energy to the individual almost exactly correlates with economic growth. It makes me wonder if we are not completely misunderstanding the role of energy, making it into some kind of threat or something to fear instead of a huge enabler of human progress. Perhaps if we want flying cars and jet packs, if we want burgeoning economies with more employment and GDP, we should be doing anything physically possible to reduce the cost and increase the availability of energy to the average person. You're free to solve that in any way you want -- nuclear makes the most sense to me -- but if we have our heads on backwards, then we have a lot of well-meaning people who are actively trying to destroy our future by preaching conservation. Without knowing it. Energy very well may be the 20th century's internet. The more everybody has it, the better off we all are.
  • davi 13y ago
    the availability of energy to the individual almost exactly correlates with economic growth A corollary might be that the more energy available per capita, the greater the environmental footprint of per capita. E.g. the McMansions of the megasprawl: rolling hills of former farmland are graded and leveled off, enormous balloon-like, energy inefficient stick frame houses pop up, and twice a day their inhabitants wait in lines of SUVs on the clogged roads between the exurbs and the suburban office parks. The entire enterprise is completely dependent on vast quantities of energy being available to participants in the system. People are comfortable in their SUVs and McMansions, and aspire to this lifestyle. But the environmental footprint per capita is enormous. Without some penalty for the external costs (which are long latency and hard to measure), there is nothing to slow the spread of this pattern of economic development. In this light, when you say: Energy very well may be the 20th century's internet. The more everybody has it, the better off we all are. I suspect it is more like an upside-down U-shaped curve. People are indeed better off when we have sufficient energy per capita, but when we have a massive superabundance of energy, we negatively affect our environment to the point that real consequences start to kick in. Unfortunately, it is hard to know where we are on that upside-down U, and it is hard (impossible?) to distinguish overwrought hand-wringing about impending environmental doom from the real thing, until the real thing has started to have obvious, severe, and sustained effects.
• iSnow 13y ago
  >Brownouts will ripple across the landscape; control centers will call up big companies and beg them to turn off the lights; managers of ultrasensitive modern control centers will watch in horror as voltage drops lead to factory shutdowns. (Germany, a leader in renewable-energy use, is already facing this situation. Kraut here. I have yet to experience this or read about it in the news, I think the author is either exaggerating or misinformed. What is true is that renewables already are putting a lot of strain on the net and there are plans to invest in a lot of new power lines and switches to better stabilize the grid, but the tone of the article is just ridiculous.
• DennisP 13y ago
  > [Natural gas] has already reduced U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions to their lowest levels since Newt Gingrich’s heyday. That's true if you just look at CO2, but if you take methane leakage into account things aren't so pretty. Several studies have claimed that the overall greenhouse effect of fracked methane is as bad as coal's. The gas companies dispute that, saying the data is poor. They're right about that, and the reason is that those same companies refuse to install monitoring equipment.