I've been reading some fascinating articles about oil reserves and how long it will be before they run out. One piece ends by saying Another starts off: Nevertheless, BP is cautious in defining oil reserves. At the top of an introductory web page on the subject, the company states baldly: “Nobody knows or can know how much oil exists under the earth's surface or how much it will be possible to produce in the future.” That to me sounds like nobody has a clue
It is in a company's interest via share prices to be seen to have big reserves, and since it's a grey area it is hard to challenge - one certainty is that it is a finite resource, and many analysts believe we have already reached peak oil.. ....
Cant give the stuff away at the moment - I think the price fell as low as $28per barrel, probably less than you could buy a barrel of mineral water for. I must confess I do not know the real reason for the decline in Oil price, I understand that opec have refused to limit production in the usual way to regulate price but there is more to it and I am unsure what the end plan is. It is suggested it is about Russia and the recognition that as long as oil remains high there is very little else can be done to put pressure on the Russian economy and Putin himself, hence Saudi Arabia has been recruited in on a plan to keep prices artificially low to keep pressure on Russia's budget, inflation and the rouble. It is also suggested that there is nothing of the sort happening and it is actually Saudi Arabia working against the US in an effort to derail the fracking industry that becomes unprofitable due to cost of extraction at anything under about $50. I am just happy it has stopped Nicola Salmon going on about how wealthy Scotland would be outside of the UK. How things would have looked had they voted for independence is frightening. The budget would have need to be slashed, the jobs around Faislane would have been lost due to Trident, no currency and applying for membership of a deeply fractured EU club which is beset with problems.
The global slowdowns are part and parcel of our economic lives, they always have been, and always will be. And while there might be a hint of truth to what you've found in your reading Blue, I don't thing anyone has purposely flattened the world's economies. It's a far too big a price to pay for those who are are supposedly driving the train. " I'd best take us off the rails, so I can stick it up that guy seated in row nine of carriage number five."
We all need to think about how we can use less energy. It is such a precious commodity yet we have no respect for it. Leaving lights on, appliances on standby, taking the car instead of walking. Stop doing those things and become intelligent consumers is how the energy crisis can be resolved.
Oddly, it's not our problem mate, it's the next generations problem. The disposable generation I call them and in my experiences in the main they don't appear to give a ****!
Agreed - the generation which has been robbed of the ability to think and communicate by the advent of smart phones
Crude oil prices are yet to return to the levels seen for much of the 1985 to 1998 period: often in the $15-20 range. When they went above $50 in late 2005 everyone thought it was going to be a disaster. Funny old world.
Back in the 90's oil needed to be above $25 a barrel to make the North Sea oil production cost effective for further exploration as you say Bustino "funny old world indeed"
When oil was trading at around US$50 last year, I read an article where somebody had calculated that if Scotland had gone off on its own, Alex Salmond’s Independence Manifesto commitments would be facing an £8 billion black hole (although presumably that would be in Euros) because they were calculated on an assumption that oil would be at least US$100 a barrel. Scotland did recently overtake England in terms of the median earnings per capita, so a case can be made that they are wealthier; however, Scotland’s demographic plight is much worse than South of The Border and they would have lost the substantial tax revenues of the Edinburgh-based banks as they would have re-registered in London the morning after a ‘Yes’ vote.
I can remember thirty years ago reading that experts believed that financially viable reserves of oil would be exhausted by 2050. Of course at that time we were all driving gas guzzlers with no concerns about climate change or the environment and the Chinese were hardly using any oil because their industrial economy was not really developing. I can remember when I went to the USA in the mid 2000s the lead story on all the news channels was about the possibility of ‘gas’ going above US$4 a gallon. At the exchange rate at the time, that equated to about £2.30 a gallon whilst we were paying that for less than half a gallon (because of all the tax). It might be useful for us all to remember that we do not refine oil just to produce fuel. There are some very interesting petrochemical by-products that we all rely upon to make things like plastics and pharmaceuticals.
Guess I was 'in' on North Sea exploration right from the start (1965, based Fish Quay, Hartlepool. The oil company I worked for had the 5th jack-up rig out ever to drill offshore UK - we were looking for Gas in those day, and then Aberdeen 1972-1974, early days too for Oil exploration in the north NS). Won't pretend I know anything about reservoir engineering or whether or not the per barrel price is economical or not, but I'm sure that $25 a barrel for Brent Crude, for example, was ever a high-enough price to make North Sea oil viable? It is an expensive product to drill for and then get it away from the Wellhead. However, one good thing, it is basically a sweet crude, and therefore does not take a huge amount of refining like, for example, some of the sour (high sulphur content) crudes produced in, say, offshore Abu Dhabi? QMII makes a good point above in his last paragraph. Much of the products, other than fuel, made from crude oils are from the 'heavy' variety. It is the 'light' sweet crudes that are more suitable for refining into fuel oils, of course. Again, I'm getting into things I know little or nothing about, I was just a peon helping to look for the bloody stuff!
Asphalt Asphalt-based products are an important byproduct of heavy crudes too, and are also extracted from the bituminous sands around the world, especially Canada. The latter is a mining technique, and a very messy business!
I'm not too worried about the lack of fuel. With a bit of practice we'll all get by. please log in to view this image
