A Letter From Oil Exploration Insider

The individual who this comes from posted the article anonymously, but the salient facts seem consistent with other reports. Certainly worthy of consideration.

"I work for a major international oil company, in the exploration area."

"Peak oil is a fact – we are all on the back side of the bell curve."
1) We are drilling rig limited – we are at full capacity world wide in the offshore rig market, and even the small number of new drilling rigs they are building will not improve that appreciably.
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2) We are personnel limited – in 1982 there were 1.6 million Americans working in the Oil & Gas sector, and today there are roughly 500,000.
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3) The notion that we are sitting on “capped wells” of oil or gas is utterly ludicrous. We simply do not drill and sit on reserves – they must be produced to pay for the enormous expenditures we have in drilling them, or shareholders would evaporate as our bottom lines became nonexistent.
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4) We are finished with most of the “second tier” exploration domestically. What we have left in the ground is either uneconomical due to depth, temperature, technology or “other”.
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5) Many people foolishly believe that higher prices will make the oil as valuable as gold is today. What they fail to realize is this: as liquid energy (oil) prices rise, all associated prices rise! Even if oil sells for $100/bbl, everything built with this $100/bbl oil will experience the same price increases, and likely more. This includes all plastics, steel, transportation and chemicals!
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6) For the most part, the biggest fields have been discovered world wide. What remains is technologically prohibitive (water depth, downhole temperature or sheer depth of the deposit). We are all fighting for the scraps as things exist today, with the exception of the African coast.
To read entire article go to:
http://www.energybulletin.net/4466.html

I just ran across this article the other day. The experts are starting to get nervous...

http://solutions.synearth.net/2005/02/21

As oil stubbornly refuses to fall below $45 a barrel, a major market mover has cast a worrying future prediction.

Energy investment banker Matthew Simmons, of Simmons & Co International, has been outspoken in his warnings about peak oil before. His new statement is his strongest yet, "we may have already passed peak oil".

The subject of peak oil, the point at which the world's finite supply of oil begins to decline, is a hot topic in the industry. Arguments are commonplace over whether it will happen at all, when it will happen or whether it has already happened. Simmons, a Republican adviser to the Bush-Cheney energy plan, believes it "is the world's number one problem, far more serious than global warming".

From www.endofsuburbia.com :

Since World War II North Americans have invested much of their newfound wealth in suburbia. It has promised a sense of space, affordability, family life and upward mobility. As the population of suburban sprawl has exploded in the past 50 years, so too the suburban way of life has become embedded in the American consciousness.

Suburbia, and all it promises, has become the American Dream.

But as we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge about the sustainability of this way of life. With brutal honesty and a touch of irony, The End of Suburbia explores the American Way of Life and its prospects as the planet approaches a critical era, as global demand for fossil fuels begins to outstrip supply. World Oil Peak and the inevitable decline of fossil fuels are upon us now, some scientists and policy makers argue in this documentary.

You can see some excerpts from the video here (Apple Quick Time):

http://911busters.com/video/IQ1_20_END_OF_SUBURBIA_VIDEO_24.2_.mov

The video can be purchased from www.endofsuburbia.com , or it can also be rented at Netflix: www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?trkid=73&movieid=70022083

A listing of upcoming public screenings worldwide is available here:

http://www.endofsuburbia.com/screenings.htm

even if the infrastructure needs to be replaced at great cost, that preventative cost would be nothing compared to the world market COLLAPSING when oil wells run dry. then it'd be game over.

hydrogen looks interesting, ethanol looks feasible, electric would be great if they can extend the life of batteries, nuclear is dangerous and not the cleanest, but it would be useful for transition...fusion would be awesome, but it seems beyond our technology. solar and biomass and thermal are all viable options, just need to be cultivated. and wind turbines would be a great technique where there is any amount of flat spaces, or just a lot of wind.

all in all, there's a lot of choices; the thing that holds us back is the oil companies and the "oil oligarchy" that we have in control right now.

and Big Oil and the Big Three have wasted money on law suits, and lobbying, and "Prototypes" which they have no intention of ever building, just to placate CARB.

I would divide the blame between "Big Oil" and the "Big Three" - equally culpable.

we've wasted the last 30/40 years on oil, when we could have had working systems by now. some of the technologies were only prototypical then, true; but diligent work could have fixed that. since the 70's, they've (the oil oligarchy) only been worried about making more and more cars that use a finite amount of fossil fuels. we've hit the wall. it's almost too late to start coming up with something now.

Whatever is burnt or used to generate the electricity and hydrogen is the fuel source. Yes, of course, the transportation matters, and bring greater efficiency. It's still important not to confuse an energy source, such as coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, solar, and hydroelectric, with a mechanism for transporting energy, such as electricity, hydrogen, and flywheels.

i'm not a physicist or materials scientist, or an expert in alternative fuels/power...just an enthusiast.

question: how is hydrogen not a "fuel?" from what i've seen of it, it's certainly used as a combusted fuel (although it actually emits water vapor as a by product)...bc the hydrogen is used as a combustible, and the machine it operates does the work of transportation.

The problem is that there aren't any reserves of hydrogen sitting around for us to use as energy, excepting of course that huge fusion reactor in the sky that is the ultimate source for all our energy. Here on earth, hydrogen has to be generated. That is done either by electrolyzing water, the electricity for which must be generated from some other energy source, or by conversion from natural gas, which supplies the energy for its own conversion. In either case, the energy we get out of the hydrogen when it is eventually used to fuel a car or fuel cell is less than the energy we put into generating the hydrogen. And that energy came from some energy source, such as oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, geothermal, hydroelectric, etc.

Let me be clear. I full well realize that how we transport and use energy is an equally important part of the equation. But in thinking about energy issues, it is important to recognize what role different technologies serve. Hydrogen is a way to transport energy. It is not an energy source, for the simple reason that there are no pools of it sitting around for us to use.

i'm just saying that it sounds like a matter of semantics. for the general public, many of whom might not get the difference, we need to show things in a more simplified manner. calling hydrogen an alternative fuel is probably more effective than calling it a method of transporting energy. just as it's easier and probably more effective to call electric an alternative to fossil fuels, it's easier to say "hydrogen" powered engines, even if it's not technically accurate.

A "heat engine" is just inefficient compared to an electric motor. (that was a fairly standard homework assignment I gave in my TA days).

Additionally, without getting into heavy "gear head" stuff - an IC engine can be designed for two paradigms:

1. Run at very very low emissions and very very high miles/gallon over a very very narrow and unique single rpm/mixture/timing range. This was an original theory for hybrids.

2. Run at "acceptable" emissions and "acceptable" miles/gallon over a wider rpm/mixture/timing range. This can be tweaked by creative engineering. This is where the industry has gone.

If one is going to compare say "electric" or "hybrid" to "IC" your base has to be crude sitting under the sand -- and you have to account for refining (which eats up about 30%-40% of the "energy" in the C-C and C-H bonds just to distill and crack the crude). (This was also a fairly standard homework assignment I gave in my TA days).

The IC comes out behind the EV (battery), the fuel cell, and the hybrid.

And that is a very important side of the equation to address. I think in coming decades, more and more people will realize how important.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80C89E7E-1DE9-42BC-920B-91E5850FB067.htm

Very very bad.

If you haven't yet seen the documentary, End of Surburbia, I'd suggest you rent it or buy it and get on track. This effects way more than driving your car daily.

legalize hemp and solve at least half of these problems.

Oh and while we are at it, instead of blowing a billion a week in Iraq, maybe we should support programs like the New Apollo Project instead?

It takes oil to make everything and we're running out of (cheap) oil.

You really need to see End of Suburbia to get a better understanding of this all.

At $55/bbl synthane, syngas, and ethanol become viable. All are technologically viable. Synthane was technologically viable when I was an undergrad (and I'm a retiree now). There are a bunch of PhD candidates at Champagne-Urbana who are working on poultry processing waste as a feed stock -- technologically viable.

We are now at the point where, for many drivers, the $3000 extra cost of a hybrid is economically viable.

"Not Viable' is the motto of Roger Smith, the CEO of GM who was immortalized in Michael Moore's "Roger and Me." And we see what he did to GM.

If you can make it - it is technologically viable. Economic viability is determined by the price of what it substitutes for. (Chem.E. Econ 101, right out of "Perry's Chemical Engineers Handbook")

fucking SUV or high mileage car