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COMMENTS:
When the oil goes they will sell hydrogen or something else or make that natural diessel from wheat fields.
Yes I understand that but it's not a matter of whether we have a different fuel or not, it's a matter of the oil companies going belly up. Oil companies are by far the LARGEST part of the world economy and the effects of them collapsing would probably bring the world economy to a standstill if not causing it to completely crash. Every business in the capitalist world depends on every other business in some way; if the largest business goes, under the effects could be unimaginable.
There is also no known viable fuel source available that can replace oil. Hydrogen is negative energy; it takes more energy to produce it than you get out of it. Nuclear power would only keep the world going for about 25 years if all known uranium was used.
At a certain point it will become unprofitable for companies to just sell oil. They know this. They also understand that a more economically viable business strategy than waiting to declare bankruptcy is to pursue, research, develop, and market alternative/renewable sources of energy. Even if they did wait to squeeze out the last drop, then take the money and run, the public outcry at prohibitively expensive gas/oil prices would happen long before we reached that point - prompting massive and necessary change in our energy policies.
Furthermore, the idea of cold fusion is not totally outside the realm of possibility. I take gas/electric hybrid cars, and hydrogen fuel cells as good signs. If there's one thing we can count on, it's the advancement of technology. (assuming we don't blow ourselves up with it first)
Applerod - Spot on. Evidence of this can be seen in BP. They have been increasing their spending on research into renewable energy sources for years. Increased use of solar panels and renewable energies in places like China are forcing this. If a Chinese company was to suddenly find a cheaper way of producing energy then the oil companies would be fucked, and China would be selling the majority of the worlds energy.
Jigsaw - Not sure where you got the 35 - 60 years for oil reserves to run dry. More like 60 - 120 yrs, and we keep finding more! But thats beside the point anyway. I rekon the oil companies will do anything to stay in control of the energy market. Energy demand and consumption is at an all time high, and will continue to rise. They will use their multi billions when it is necessary to remain the soul surpliers of energy. They might make alot less money from selling it, but the fact that it will be environmentally friendly to use, will cause even greater increases in demand and usage. Energy should still be one of the most profitable businesses to be in.
Only difference will be that we're going to love them for being so environ. friendly, rather than hating them for all of the destruction, pollution and damage to the earth they presently cause.
Guest_b5cc8 - dunno. Do you?
I know that there are easier ways of producing energy, but until it is economically the best thing to do, we will stick with oil.
What I really meant was that if another company or country decides to go full throttle in to renewable energies, then the oil companies are going to have to follow. This is why they are heavily researching energy sources now. They will want to have the most efficient and most importantly, profitable method of production before doing anything. And as far as they are concerned they will want to carry on selling the highly profitable oil until they are forced to change by an outside source.
Guest_b5cc8 - The sentance you just analysed was a bit sloppy, not what I meant to say.
"Many inventors over the years have made working water powered engines. All you have to do is pass an electric current across some water and burn the hydrogen. The exhaust gas is oxygen. Why do you think it never took off?"
Where is the electricity supposed to come from to do this? You can make an 'engine' out of anything, but it defeats the purpose if you have to use more energy to get it to work than you get out of it. It's already a well known fact that hydrogen gives off a lot of energy. But in order to create it you need to apply even more energy. This makes it negative energy.
Kiss it all goodbye, it's going down the tubes! Life as we know it is being burned up for convenience sake.
"Jigsaw - Not sure where you got the 35 - 60 years for oil reserves to run dry. More like 60 - 120 yrs, and we keep finding more!"
It's just an estimate, there are many estimates out there and that one seems to be the most popular one from what I've seen. As for new oil, there hasn't really been any significan't oil patches discovered since the beginining of the 1990's. That's why the USA is considering tapping into supplies in Alaska as a last ditch effort to get more oil and bring the prices down for the time being.
That's why the USA is considering tapping into supplies in Alaska as a last ditch effort to get more oil and bring the prices down for the time being.
by Jigsaw on Apr 02, 2004
No they aren't. I don't know where you got that from, but the oil in Alaska doesn't have anything to do with gas prices. It is not a pure enough blend to burn. It will burn, but it puts to many toxins into the air and congress passed a bill to make it ileagle to use in the U.S. Unless you're talking about what we sell to other countries, and even then we wouldn't be doing anything new. WE already sell it to others.
We
Guest_404d9: Oil is believed to be from a small pinhead sized organism called a diatom, which is an algae/plant type of lifeform that traps energy from the sun using photosynthesis. They live in water (oceans) and when they die they collect on the bottom of the ocean in the sand. This is why most oil is discovered in sandstone or sand. After long periods of time, pressure and heat the stored energy from the sun left over from these decaying organisms turns into oil. Humans go through a LOT of fossil fuel. We use it for plastics, fertilizers, paints, home heating, electricity, vehicles, airplanes, pretty well everything we have and do consumes fossil fuel in some way. We also haven't had any major oilfields discovered in about 15 years now, after a period where they seemed to pop up everywhere. So to answer your question, yes I know where oil comes from. And these estimates of oil shortage aren't my own; they come from MANY independant sources all around the world. Oil is only renewable if you wait around for millions and millions of years for a new batch to form.
Toxacated: Yes, the Bush administration wants to tap into an area in Alaska in and around the Teskekpuk Lake region that was set aside 80 years ago by the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska as an energy storehouse for the U.S. military.
Isn't that what I said? A diatom is plantlife. And oil can only come from plant life that would be in an environment where it wouldn't decay quickly, such as the ocean. Diatoms, algae, etc. This is also why most oil is found in sand or sandstone.
Jigsaw: You state that hydrogen is a negative energy fuel. That is true if it obtained cleanly, through water electrolysis or similar means. What the Bush folks are looking at is obtaining H2 through extraction from coal -- an incredibly dirty process. But, the US has some big coal deposits and coal had fallen out of favor for many decades, now ...
404d9: er ... he's right. Youmay want to contest whether teh sources' theories are correct, but there are many people who have suggested this. Jigsaw is not making it up, nor is he searching for obscure fringe studies. Do a Google search ... you'll find plenty.
Rense.comSustainable Oil? WorldNetDaily.comAbout 80 miles off of the coast of Louisiana lies a mostly submerged mountain, the top of which is known as Eugene Island. The portion underwater is an eerie-looking, sloping tower jutting up from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, with deep fissures and perpendicular faults which spontaneously spew natural gas. A significant reservoir of crude oil was discovered nearby in the late'60s, and by 1970, a platform named Eugene 330 was busily producing about 15,000 barrels a day of high-quality crude oil.By the late'80s, the platform's production had slipped to less than 4,000 barrels per day, and was considered pumped out. Done. Suddenly, in 1990, production soared back to 15,000 barrels a day, and the reserves which had been estimated at 60 million barrels in the '70s, were recalculated at 400 million barrels. Interestingly, the measured geological age of the new oil was quantifiably different than the oil pumped in the'70s.Analysis of seismic recordings revealed the presence of a "deep fault" at the base of the Eugene Island reservoir which was gushing up a river of oil from some deeper and previously unknown source.Similar results were seen at other Gulf of Mexico oil wells. Similar results were found in the Cook Inlet oil fields in Alaska. Similar results were found in oil fields in Uzbekistan. Similarly in the Middle East, where oil exploration and extraction have been underway for at least the last 20 years, known reserves have doubled. Currently there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 680 billion barrels of Middle East reserve oil.Creating that much oil would take a big pile of dead dinosaurs and fermenting prehistoric plants. Could there be another source for crude oil?An intriguing theory now permeating oil company research staffs suggests that crude oil may actually be a natural inorganic product, not a stepchild of unfathomable time and organic
degradation. The theory suggests there may be huge,yet-to-be-discovered reserves of oil at depths that dwarf current world estimates.The theory is simple: Crude oil forms as a natural inorganic process which occurs between the mantle and the crust, somewhere between 5 and 20 miles deep. The proposed mechanism is as follows:Methane (CH4) is a common molecule found in quantity throughout our solar system - huge concentrations exist at great depth in the Earth.At the mantle-crust interface, roughly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, rapidly rising streams of compressed methane-based gasses hit pockets of high temperature causing the condensation of heavier hydrocarbons. The product of this condensation is commonly known as crude oil.Some compressed methane-based gasses migrate into pockets and reservoirs we extract as "natural gas."In the geologically "cooler," more tectonically stable regions around the globe, the crude oil pools into reservoirs.In the hotter, more volcanic and tectonically active areas, the oil and natural gas continue to condense and eventually to oxidize, producing carbon dioxide and steam, which exits from active volcanoes.Periodically, depending on variations of geology and Earth movement, oil seeps to the surface in quantity, creating the vast oil-sand deposits of Canada and Venezuela, or the continual seeps found beneath the Gulf of Mexico and Uzbekistan.Periodically, depending on variations of geology, the vast, deep pools of oil break free and replenish existing known reserves of oil.There are a number of observations across the oil-producing regions of the globe that support this theory, and the list of proponents begins with Mendelev (who created the periodic table of elements) and includes Dr.Thomas Gold (founding director of Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research) and Dr. J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corporations, Houston, Texas.In his 1999 book, "The Deep Hot Biosphere," Dr. Gold presents compelling evidence for inorganic oil formation. He notes that geologic structures where oil is found all correspond to "deep earth" formations, not the haphazard depositions we find with sedimentary rock, associated fossils or even current surface life.He also notes that oil extracted from varying depths from the same oil field have the same chemistry - oil chemistry does not vary as fossils vary with increasing depth. Also interesting is the fact that oil is found in huge quantities among geographic formations where assays of prehistoric life are not sufficient to produce the existing reservoirs of oil. Where then did it come from?Another interesting fact is that every oil field throughout the world has outgassing helium. Helium is so often present in oil fields that helium detectors are used as oil-prospecting tools. Helium is an inert gas known to be a fundamental product of the radiological decay or uranium and thorium, identified in quantity at great depths below the surface of the earth, 200 and more miles below. It is not found in meaningful quantities in areas that are not producing methane, oil or natural gas. It is not a member of the dozen or so common elements associated with life. It is found throughout the solar system as a thoroughly inorganic product.Even more intriguing is evidence that several oil reservoirs around the globe are refilling themselves, such as the Eugene Island reservoir - not from the sides, as would be expected from cocurrent organic reservoirs, but from the bottom up.Dr. Gold strongly believes that oil is a "renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures. As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating back to the dinosaurs."Smaller oil companies and innovative teams are using this theory to justify deep oil drilling in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, among other locations, with some success. Dr. Kenney is on record predicting that parts of Siberia contain a deep reservoir of oil equal to or exceeding that already discovered in the Middle East.Could this be true?In August 2002, in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US)," Dr. Kenney published a paper, which had a partial title of "The genesis of hydrocarbons and the origin of petroleum." Dr. Kenney and three Russian coauthors conclude:The Hydrogen-Carbon system does not spontaneously evolve hydrocarbons at pressures less than 30 Kbar, even in the most favorable environment. The H-C system evolves hydrocarbons under pressures found in the mantle of the Earth and at temperatures consistent with that environment.He was quoted as stating that "competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological materials since the last quarter of the 19th century."Deeply entrenched in our culture is the belief that at some point in the relatively near future we will see the last working pump on the last functioning oil well screech and rattle, and that will be that. The end of the Age of Oil. And unless we find another source of cheap energy, the world will rapidly become a much darker and dangerous place.If Dr. Gold and Dr. Kenney are correct, this "the end of the world as we know it" scenario simply won't happen. Think about it ... while not inexhaustible, deep Earth reserves of inorganic crude oil and commercially feasible extraction would provide the world with generations of low-cost fuel. Dr. Gold has been quoted saying that current worldwide reserves of crude oil could be off by a factor of over 100.A Hedberg Conference, sponsored by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, was scheduled to discuss and publicly debate this issue. Papers were solicited from interested academics and professionals. The conference was scheduled to begin June 9, 2003, but was canceled at the last minute. A new date has yet to be set.Chris Bennett manages an environmental enineering division for a West Coast technology firm. He and his wife of 26 years make their home on the San Francisco Bay.© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
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