Peak oil gets pepper sprayed

[robertpaulsen]

Peak oil gets pepper sprayed

By Erik Curren November 22, 2011

The Pepper Spraying Cop has now come for peak oil. It's time for honest experts to occupy the public conversation on energy.

http://transitionvoice.com/2010/11/great-white-shale/">How many Saudi Arabias did you say that was?

It’s hard to keep up these days with claims by oil and gas drillers about how many Saudi Arabias of tar sands oil/shale oil/deepwater oil/hydrofracked gas that North America is now allegedly able to access due to the smarts of petroleum geologists and the tenacity of oilmen.

“Because of better technology, notably breakthroughs in drilling, the US all of a sudden realizes it is sitting on a century’s worth of gas supply,” writes http://www.ft.com/cms/s/a307107c-1364-11e1-9562-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fa307107c-1364-11e1-9562-00144feabdc0.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Ftransitionvoice.com%2F2011%2F11%2Fpeak-oil-gets-pepper-sprayed%2F#ixzz1eMOwfNdm">Edward Luce in the Financial Times. “When Mr Obama came to office, the country faced projections of rising natural gas imports from places like Qatar.”

But now, if you believe what the industry says, the picture’s really brightening up:

The same technology has unlocked ever-growing estimates of once inaccessible “tight” oil lurking beneath America’s rocks. In its immediate neighborhood, Alberta’s huge expanse of “tar sands” contains oil reserves that rank Canada second only to Saudi Arabia. In Brazil, recent advances in offshore oil drilling will relegate Venezuela into second place in the region.

Without any real input from Washington, windfalls just keep dropping into America’s lap. Welcome to a new age of plenty.

While this new cornucopia is bad news for climate change — nations are scrambling to get at Arctic oil ironically made accessible by melting ice caps — it’s great news for US energy independence. “A new era of fossil fuel appears to be upon us and nobody saw it coming,” concludes Luce.

more...

http://transitionvoice.com/2011/11/peak-oil-gets-pepper-sprayed/

[bhikkhu]

1. Not all Saudi Arabias are created equal

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_FeyfD5e2XDc/SwqPfjj1LYI/AAAAAAAAAEg/ZJQteL5O-8k/s1600/Graph+-+Marginal+cost+of+Oil+production+ass+a+function+of+source+and+production+rate.png

...one of the things to keep in mind is the cost of an energy source tends to reflect the difficulty (cost) of producing it, which reflects to a large extent the energy inputs required to produce it. The effect of the cheap oil of the past on the economy might be looked at as similar to the effect of gasoline poured on a fire - it grows larger in a hurry. Much of what people still think of as the norm of economic growth was possible only because of huge and relatively easy to produce oil discoveries.

Nothing like that is on the horizon now - rather we have an good supply of oil we can produce for $60 per barrel, a better supply of oil we can produce at $80 per barrel, even more if we want to spend $100-120 a barrel, etc. The effect is different, and has more to do with the transfer of our remaining wealth to oil producers than with growing the economy. There will always be someone able to afford it, but not most people.