BP's shares seem to be drfting downwards in New York and London as do Chevron's.
The real story seems to lie here
uk.biz.yahoo.com/060905/323/gla46.html
Which to me suggests that the reserve found in 2004 has been "tapped".
Hurricane season again though.
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uk.biz.yahoo.com/060905/323/gla46.html
Ah. Thanks PU
So this monster new oil field holds between 7 months and three years supply for the USA.
Worth having, but it's allow only a short delay in the rush to find alternatives to oil.
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Enough until the next US Election then - that's been in the news today although well buried in the UK by the demise of the Dear Leader.
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There's plenty of oil still under the North Sea from previously expolited wells (some wells have only had 15% of their reserves removed), but has has been alluded to it currently costs more to extract it than the product can be sold for. As oil becomes more scarce and prices rise it will become economically viable to reopen the old wells.
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I expect a lot of the closed coal pits will reopen one day, hopefully without Arthur Scargill though.
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Yes, this was discussed on Radio 4 recently. The technology exists to capture the carbon dioxide from coal fired power stations, and pump it into rocks deep underground. As with everything else though it comes down to money.
They're burning gas in a lot of power stations now, which is a criminal waste.
Cheers
DP
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I genuinely think that was the plan you know........... keep our coal whilst we used up all the cheap foreign stuff.
Having difficulty keeping this motoring though, so maybe i'll regulate myself.
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I expect a lot of the closed coal pits will reopen one day, hopefully without Arthur Scargill though.
er arthur was for keeping them open rather than having to import oil for power stations that one day might power electric cars,the govt shut them because of coal dust claims (my father was one of them ) and the fact that imports of coal were cheaper at the time
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As oil becomes more scarce and prices rise it will become economically viable to reopen the old wells.
In other words, prices will stay high, and may get higher, while curve of diminishing supply slopes more gently.
I'm sure that for many decades to come, there will still be a lot of oil available. But the extraction costs will be increasingly high, the extraction rates may be low, so the gap between demand and supply will widen.
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the problem will be that the generations to come wont want to work down coal mines, open cast, or in the north sea, we have lost the the 'hard' people that are willing to do this (apart from the few )
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There are still considerable quantitites of oil around the world available - the problem lies with actually getting at it due to the area, terrain and other logistical difficulties as current supplies begin to run out in the future.
We will still continue to rely on the Middle East for the bulk of oil supplies.
There are other factors. Iraq, for instance:
tinyurl.com/jklt2
Oil extraction difficulties:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5305950.stm
tinyurl.com/jp7au
lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Let's hope we don't have to rely too much on the Middle East. There's ever growing rumours that Saudi Arabia is, or are approaching peak production, much like the North Sea did in 1999. SA even had to import some oil for domestic consumption recently, a unique event for the world's largest (till recently) oil producer.
See: tinyurl.com/erqz6
BTW, I wouldn't recommend anyone spend too long at Llife after the oil crash, it's the most extreme doom point of view there is. Well apart from one other site that I can think of but won't mention.
For more balanced, well sourced information there's sites like:
www.grinzo.com/energy/
and
www.energybulletin.net/
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>>But the extraction costs will be increasingly high, the extraction rates may be low, so the gap between demand and supply will widen.
Also as production costs increase and prices rise, then alternative forms of energy might become available or feasible, e.g. hydrogen. If this happens then the rate of depletion of oil will fall and make the supplies last longer.
--
Roger
I read frequently, but only post when I have something useful to say.
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Also as production costs increase and prices rise, then alternative forms of energy might become available or feasible, e.g. hydrogen. If this happens then the rate of depletion of oil will fall and make the supplies last longer.
So far, nobody seems to be planning on using hydrogen as an energy source. The technologies in use so far all seem to be using hydrogen as a means of ernrgy tranmission, just like electricity.
The big question with current hydrogen technologies is not really about the difficulty of storing and distributing the stuff, but the more fundamental question of what form of primary energy generates it. Using fossil-fuel power stations to generate leccy to make hydrogen would be horrenously inefficient.
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The big question with current hydrogen technologies is not really about the difficulty of storing and distributing the stuff, but the more fundamental question of what form of primary energy generates it. Using fossil-fuel power stations to generate leccy to make hydrogen would be horrenously inefficient.
Any method of creating hydrogen is vastly energy consuming. The least energy intensive way to create it is from natural gas, but that moves rather than eliminates the CO2 source. Hydrogen can't be used as an energy source because it does not occur naturally. All it can be is a transport medium and to get the same kind of range we get from our petrol and diesel cars we'd need a tank at immense pressures the size of a petrol tanker. Hardly safe, energy efficient or practical.
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Hydrogen? Don't even go there...
Did you see the latest Hydrogen car in AutoExpress? It was a Mazda RX8 with a huge tank, dreadful range and pitiful performance. Not to mention the fact that the preferred method for creating hydrogen is from natural gas, something that's not exactly abundant either.
Don't hold your breath for that one!
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Lets say they were hydrogen powered, wouldn't we have a problem when they crashed?
(Assuming of course that we don't get speed limiters which will stop all crashes)
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Lets say they were hydrogen powered, wouldn't we have a problem when they crashed?
Would a tank of hydrogen be any worse than a tank of petrol? (Not being sarky, I dunno the answer, and hope someone does!)
(Assuming of course that we don't get speed limiters which will stop all crashes)
Yawn. Any device only offers some help. Airbags don't prevent all injuries, but doesn't make them a bad idea.
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US has also worked out that they have enough coal to turn into oil to last them for 20 years! Problem is that it involves open cast mining the whole state of Montana! Not popular!
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US has also worked out that they have enough coal to turn into oil to last them for 20 years! Problem is that it involves open cast mining the whole state of Montana! Not popular!
Its very popular in all the other states. The scary thing is they are looking seriously at this proposal.
------------------------------
TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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TVM - thanks for posting. I don't recall the facts, do you? They might have said 50 years supply, not 20!
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>>Would a tank of hydrogen be any worse than a tank of petrol? (Not being sarky, I dunno the answer, and hope someone does!)<<
No idea - petrol drips onto the floor in a crash whereas if the hydrogen tank ruptures, it would be all around. I wouldn't really want to be sitting around either.
>>Yawn.<<
I'm doing that a lot myself recently.
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We've been here before and I usually get in to an argument with NW about oil reserves but the bottom line is that there is enough oil in Saudi Arabia alone to last the world 50+ years (marginal cost of production US$2 by the way). There is more oil in Canada than in Saudi Arabia but its mostly heavy oil and only economic above about US$25 a barrel. There are vast reserves in Siberia that dwarf even these.
Oil prices at present (maybe always) are being driven by politics rather than any other factor and reflect the fact that most reserves are in politically sensitive areas.
The arabs have used oil as a political weapon for years. Someone above stated that we ran out of oil in 1973, we did no such thing, OPEC announced that it would embargo any state that supported Israel in the ongoing Yom Kippor War. This did result in a quadrupling of oil prices but no real embargo as the USA stared at the Saudis really hard and the Saudis blinked first.
Russia is using oil and gas supplies as a political weapon to try and control the former USSR states and also re-establish itself as a player on the world stage.
Venezuela is also using oil supplies as a political weapon.
However the high oil price is driving technological change and I believe in 50 years time we will see step changes in both battery and nuclear technologies that will render oil irrelevant much as horses were rendered largely irrelevant by the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Of course virtually unlimited cheap energy brings issues of its own...
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Thommo, my one question is this: do you accept that individual countries oil production will rise, peak and then decline?
The North Sea peak (followed by steep decline) happened in 1999. The USA in 1970.
If it can happen in the North Sea and the USA (and others), will it not eventually happen to the worlds collective production?
If so, then talking about Saudi reserves for X number of years or vast amounts of Canadian tar sands (most of which will never leave the ground, the rest requiring vast amounts of natural gas and freshwater to extract, both in increasingly short supply) is neither here nor there.
To put it another way, yes there is plently of oil in SA to power the *current* demand for oil for X number of years. But the geological reality is that only a certain amount of oil can be produced daily without damaging those oil wells. You can have all the oil you want in the ground, but there's only so much you can pull out at any one time. You might have a trillion barrels of oil in reserves, but if you can only pull out a few hundred thousand barrels a day, it won't help much when current demand is 85 million barrels each and every day, and increasing.
It is those limitations in production and our constant thirst for more oil that will cause the problems. We will, for all intents and purposes, never run out of oil. But can world production match world demand?
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If production from this area, which is economic at today's oil prices, was stepped up to match that of SA the sands would last for 40 years, maybe longer if recovery techniques were improved.
www.answers.com/topic/athabasca-oil-sands
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What you must understand in talking about oil reserves is there are TWO numbers:
Gross reserves: what is physically under the ground.
Recoverable Reserves: what can be economically extracted.
The Recoverable rate varies but usually ranges between 20 and 50% of Gross.
So you can extract some oil but not all of it.
And when you extract oil from a field, the space created is usually filled by water : water injection into fields is a away of getting more oil (done in Saudi) as is the much more costly steam injection (used for heavy viscous oil).
So there are LOTS of deliberately confusing articles claiming billions of barrels of reserves. They are usually GROSS figures and meaningless. The Recoverable figures are all important and the only meaningful measure.
And once a field is worke dout it may be reworkable IF the structure has not been damaged. If it is emptied too quickly then it may be irreparably damaged. Many large N Sea fields have been pumped as fast as possible to maximise returns in a very expensive and hostile environment.
madf
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Yes that is covered in the link I posted. They are talking about 20% recovery, perhaps rising to 60% when/if techniques improve. Knowing *** all about oil wells I still think that it would be hard to damage several square miles, several feet deep, of tarry sand!
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Knowing *** all about oil wells I still think that it would be hard to damage several square miles, several feet deep, of tarry sand!
Believe it or not, it is very easy to damage an oil well by over production. That may not make much sense to a lay person, but the oil industry are well aware of this issue, hence why some oil producers refrain from maximising production if possible - even when oil prices are very high.
Basically, the problem stems from water injection used to keep internal well pressure up. I won't go into details, because it's a very complex and quite boring subject, suffice to say that if you pump too quick, the injected water (and the natural gas also present in the well) forms a cap over the remaining oil which prevents any more oil being retrieved.
This doesn't happen overnight. It starts off as a small percentage of water cut, and increases over time until you're pretty much pumping water out of the ground with a small amount of oil mixed in.
Google oil production water cut and water/gas gap for more.
Also, this site has lots of technical info on oil wells and production issues:
www.theoildrum.com
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So there are LOTS of deliberately confusing articles claiming billions of barrels of reserves. They are usually GROSS figures and meaningless. The Recoverable figures are all important and the only meaningful measure.
From what I have read of the peak oil school of thought, one of their arguments is that while recovery rates have tended to rise, estimates of extractable reserves have been inflated by assuming an ever-increasing recovery rate ... and that these (allegedly rather generous) assumed increases are often not borne out in the oil fields concerned. This is alleged to be particularly applicable in Saudi.
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The Saudi and OPEC situation is further complicated by some political moves in the 1980s.
OPEC decided that each countries production quota would be directly related to the size of the remaining reserves.
Lo and behold, Saudi Arabia suddenly posted a huge increase in estimated reserves (without finding any more oil in the ground) enabling production rates to be increased and more dollars collected to pay for the huge social security experiment of the KSA. Unsurprisingly, the rest of OPEC soon followed suit.
Kuwait was one of the countries playing this game and have now admitted that their reserves could be much lower, in fact in-line with the original reserves estimates before the upward revisions.
So, what we have been told may or may not be in the ground and what really remains in the ground are two quite different things.
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