MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Thu, 19 Oct 2006

Ya know, I'm not a geologist, but I have got a brain, and I think it's pretty safe to say that is nonsense.

"The most common question I get is, 'When are we going to run out of oil.' The correct response is, 'Never,'" said Eric Cheney. "It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon."

"Never" is a long time, you idiot.

The Earth is not making more oil or natural gas or coal. Those are products of biological processes, and it no longer has the correct ecosystem to create them. Given that the Earth is a finite body, there's a finite amount of oil available for extraction at any price - and a lesser amount available for extraction at an economic price people are willing to pay.

Furthermore, those mineral resources that are not products of biological processes were all present in the Earth at it's formation - they're not just generated willy-nilly on planets, they're made from the lighter elements in the nuclear furnaces we call stars. So unless he's discovered a hidden fusion engine that creates new gold, iron, silver and other minerals deep in the Earth, we're going to be running out of those as well.

We will run out of oil. And other mineral resources. All of them, That's not geology, nor is it the whining shill of a oil company hack - it's simple common sense. The only real question is when.

The foremost myth about resource geology is that the world is running out of oil, a University of Washington geologist says, and he wants to dispel that and other false notions about mineral resources.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

/Technology | 4 writebacks | permanent link

On 10/19/2006 17:23:24
Walter Jeffries wrote

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold Even if they are right that is no excuse to waste the resource or pollute.

On 10/20/2006 07:00:53
Arwin wrote

A technicality

Never is a long time, but zero is a really small number. Also oil can be synthetically produced.... but not efficiently with current technology. Who knows if a synthetic route can efficiently turn organic waste to a fuel source oil or alcohol or hydrogen. We have plenty of organic waste. Leaving some oil deposits unrecovered will occur when the natural supply is so hard to recover the market won't support the price. I think what this guy is actually saying is oil will eventually be priced so high it will no longer be a viable source of energy and some will be left unrecovered. The time when it is more expensive to recover this oil than the market will bear is further away than most folks expect due to advances in recovery technology. However the on the face of it never is a really long time.

On 10/20/2006 14:16:59
Ben Waggoner wrote

Here's the thing. . . I think he's *technically* right -- we'll never run out of oil, for the same reason that you never manage to slurp up every last molecule of a milkshake out of the glass, or wring out a sopping wet washcloth to absolute dryness. In fact, the last time I read up on this (and I'm not a petroleum geologist but got this off of Wikipedia, so take this with a grain of salt), even with our best extractive technology we're only able to get about 50% of the existing petroleum out of any given field. . . so oil is still there. But from a practical point of view, what we *are* running out of is oil that's practical to extract. Very rough analogy: Imagine that in ten years we extract half the earth's available oil. . . and in ten more years we extract half of what's left. . . and in ten more we extract half of what remains. . . and so on. Mathematically, in such a situation we'd never truly run out of oil -- the series converges to zero but never quite gets there -- but we'd get closer and closer to running out, and for all practical purposes we'd be out of oil fairly quickly. The real-world math isn't nearly that simple, but I suspect that we'll end up with that sort of diminishing returns. -- Ben

On 10/21/2006 13:41:21
wrote

Good news, bad news

Imagine the president addressing the nation.... My fellow Americans I come to you tonight with good news and bad news. The good news is our research efforts have finally paid off and our scientists have found an alternative fuel source for fossil fuels. The bad news is the process requires sand and camel shit.

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