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Invictus754 -> RE: Animal Rights (3/21/2007 8:42:50 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Tristan
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Umm...calling bullshit again. No one knows what the 'maximum oil output' for the world is and if we are near it. Do you count the oil sands of Canada (estimated to hold the same amount of oil as Saudia Arabia) in your calculations?
I've not seen anything to indicate you can get more energy out of the oil sands than you put into them. If I remember correctly, the Canadians are using natural gas to extract the oil from the oil sands, and they are putting more energy into them than they get out. This only works when the price of natural gas is low and the price of oil is high.
Your right that no one knows exactly when peak oil production will occur. However, BP a few years ago was predicting peak oil output to occur in 2010. Most estimates seem to indicate we are very close. New technology and higher oil prices might delay peak output. However, demand is increasing at such a fast pace that we are probably looking at years rather than decades until peak output.
People have been saying we will run out of oil / we are at maximum output for 100 years. Why believe it now?
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Energy analyst and historian Daniel Yergin has heard these arguments before. He counts five different periods when the world feared it was running out of oil. The first was in the 1880s. Such fears usually gain traction when oil prices are high. But each time, Yergin says, the dire warnings have proved premature.
"The last time before this time was in the 1970s, when people thought we were going to fall off the oil mountain and live in an age of permanent shortage. Since then, world supplies have increased 60 percent. I don't see why we're at the end of technology now, or why it would be finished now," Yergin says.
Yergin's company, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, has done a field-by-field analysis of oil deposits around the world. He expects producers can keep pumping more oil for the next 20 to 30 years.
That's not to say it will be easy to produce that much oil, Yergin says. But wars, hurricanes and a shortage of trained engineers pose a bigger challenge than how much oil is in the ground.
"There are ample supplies beneath the surface of the planet to have significant growth in oil supply for quite a number of years," Yergin says. "The technology is there, the resources are there. But the real question is what happens above ground."
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