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Mr Grufty Jim Sir !!
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grufty jim
grufty jim
1978 posts

Re: Paranoid
Dec 06, 2001, 03:13
i'm often accused of being a pessimist. essentially this is because my reading on the issue of oil depletion has led to a lot of unsettling revelations that haven't yet begun to filter into the media (indeed an energy mailing list i'm on that keeps track of such things heralded the first segment to cover oil depletion on the US Public Radio Network just last week).

i feel too often like a crazy doomsayer at worst, or the bearer of extremely bad and unwelcome news at best, which is why i've considered writing a book and then shutting up about it - let people who want to know read the book, the rest can find out at their own pace.

on the specific point you raised, however, regarding the Alaskan reserves; it might be natural to assume that the USA has been keeping quiet about a massive oil reservoir so it can outlast the rest of the world. but that's just not the case.

Alaska isn't even another North Sea, let alone a new Saudi Arabia. besides which, globalisation has a nasty sting in the tail for US-led market capitalism... if the rest of the world goes tits-up, America can no longer expect to isolate itself and survive. we've all become too inter-dependent these days.

the planet is a sphere. a solid shape with spatially defined boundaries. that means, clearly, that it can't hold an infinite amount of anything... granite, iron, uranium, cheese or oil. articles in The Economist which discuss oil reserves make the strange assumption that we can simply increase oil production whenever we want by investing in more wells. essentially, the entire world is running on the belief that we can make oil out of money.

this is just madness. so rather than ask economists how much oil we have left, i asked a few geologists (figuratively speaking... i read a lot... though i have lately entered email correspondence with a couple of petroleum geologists who appear to know their stuff). unsurprisingly they tend not to agree with the assessment that there'll always be oil so long as we're prepared to pay for it in cash.

so opening new areas to production; be it the Caspian, Alaska or the South China Sea (which will probably be the last great oil rush) is simply delaying the inevitable. what i admit to finding scary and very surprising is just how soon "the inevitable" is predicted to arrive, and just how little effect new fields will have on the decline in production... simply put, when the Middle East production peaks, then the world's production peaks (and begins declining). cos they make up such a huge proportion of the total. Alaska or no Alaska.

i'd be glad to discuss this at greater length with anyone who wants to email me privately (you should be able to link from my name, above), and recommend "further reading". but i'll not get all rhetorical and ranty here in public, as i do so hate to fulfill the "apocalyptic freak" archetype in too blatant a manner.

groove on.
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