Deepwater Horizon Blowout: This is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like

[profgoose]

A couple of adages from the old-timers are worth quoting: “Cut corners all you want, but never downhole,” and, “There’s fast, there’s cheap, and there’s right, and you get to pick two.”

There will be plenty of blame to go around, as events leading up to the fatal rig explosion are sorted out. Even if efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed sooner rather than later, the damage to the Gulf environment and to the economy of the region will be incalculable and will linger for years if not decades.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6510

[Ozymanithrax]

1. This is more than an oil age, the entire world is an oil civilization...

It is civilization based on the intense use of oil. It is the first civilization to be truly global, encompassing every country in the world and more than 95% of the human population.

In just one instance, we used oil to create the green revolution that allows humans to exceed the carrying capacity of the planet. Unless there is another resource that is cheap, plentiful, and replaces oil in its billion and one uses, the civilization attached to the use of petrochemicals will collapse, as the bronze age civilizations collapsed and the classic Maya civilization collapsed.

That is something to think about.