I heard this from Kudlow last week. An interesting tidbit. If this pans out, it's because we did NOT do something dumb like putting on price caps, or "winfall profits" taxes. That would have taken the incentive away from the explorers to invest in the further research and production. Letting the free market work always works out to be the most efficient method.

it's all Bush's fault...whatever it is, unless it's good, so there.

ok enough cspan, can someone tell me how to tune this tin-foil hat to get the naked channels?

Where is the additional research and production? OPEC is at full production capacity, we have hit a plateau at roughly 84 million barrels a day.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ipsr/t14.xls

There is more supplies on the market, because we have stepped back our consumption, 3 dollar a gallon prices tend to do that. LOL

Once oil goes back down, the speculating will ramp back up, once the consumption rises at the first hint of falling prices...it's a sick little game.

'There's this dude, and he has a car that runs on water...'

'There's this dude, and he has a car that runs on water...'

LOL!!! There really is such a dude

In fact, there are a number of them. Google "water + fuel + car". Where do I sign up?

Meanwhile, back in the real world -- gas in Northeastern Indiana has gone from $2.69 to $2.99 a gallon in the last few days. I finally broke down and got one of those Chase/Marathon MasterCards that gives you 10% rebate on gas for the first 60 days and 5% after that.

Seriously, if someone could come up with an economical-to-produce-and-purchase vehicle that runs on something besides liquid hydrocarbon, not only would that person be the richest person on the planet, but the major source (petro dollars) of funding for global terrorism would dry up as well.

We need more refining capacity here in the states. As a stable oil supply is in the national interest. I wonder what could be done to accomplish this so at least 5% of the fuel supply is created and controlled by the American people to smooth out fluctuations in the supply. It would seem this approach has no real downside. Any other opinions?

IMO, we have a bad hand; we can't get into hydrogen quite yet, not until we can figure out how to mitigate the inherent loss of efficiency for seting up nation-wide infrastructures for it, we can't keep hoping oil productions isn't obviously hitting it's peak, o rplateau, or whatever you wanna call it, and we can't go back to donkey-power...so it seems to me that the only viable choice is a mix of electric and Ethynol, but i would warn that Ethynol isn't an answer, only a band-aid, the oil required to fertilize and cultivate the sugar/corn is going to land us right back into a petro-problem in the future, so I would say use it for 10 years, in the meantime, institute a 'New-Deal-Type' building project for hydrogen infrastructure, and incubate bio-deisel, ehtynol, electric, and more adventurous geo-thermal housing options, set a goal for us, Americans work well under pressure, it's our hallmark.

in the meantime, institute a 'New-Deal-Type' building project for hydrogen infrastructure, and incubate bio-deisel, ehtynol, electric, and more adventurous geo-thermal housing options....

Well TEO, I guess even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while. One of the most intelligent post I've ever seen from you, and I doubt that you will get much disagreement from most who comment here, regardless of political persuasion.

I had a solar assisted, closed loop geothermal heating/cooling system on my previous house from 1981 to 1997, when I built a new house with an open loop geothermal(WaterFurnace)system. The open loop is more efficient and virutally trouble free (1 minor repair in 9 years). I live on a small, private drive where all 5 homes use geothermal.

I hope the price of oil does not come down as many are predicting (Newsmax has been saying this for weeks), because that will just delay the time when we can convert to something else.

There are three things I'd really like to see before I die - Ted Kennedy and Fidel Castro assume room temperature and affordable cars that run on something besides gasoline.

Spook,

I guess i'll take that as a compliement?

I totally agree with you, I hope oil goes to 200 dollars a barrel in 10 years, let the Chinese and Indians figure out what to do with themselves, the sooner we get to coming up with a non-polluting, 100% renewable energy source, the sooner we can stop worrying about the ME, and let them get to killing eachother off, or making friends...

Geez, TEO, this is getting scary -- 2 posts in a row that I agree with, and, yes, it was a compliment, albeit in a sort of back-handed way. I apologize. I'm sometimes too snarky for my own good. I think, in the end, most people really do want the same thing out of life -- to leave this world a better place than when we came into it. It's always amazed me how much disagreement there is on the best way to achieve that.

Smoke and mirrors my friends. We will never see that price again. Simple supply and demand. Increasing demand vs flat to decreasing production capacity = no end, ever. Even the US military is looking at alternate fuels. Try reading this report prepared for DOE:

http://www.oilcrashmovie.com/media/the_hirsch_report.pdf

And as usual, the best is yet to come.

Here's another interesting one, as if anyone here really cares. A presentation at the Dept of Defense on June 20 in Alexandria, VA.

http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Energy%20Conversation.pdf

TEO and Spook,

So, we're all in agreement on getting off of oil...meanwhile, though, there actually is more oil in the world than the world knows quite what to do with...I think half the price of a barrel of oil these days is just speculative idiocy feeding upon itself.

Mark, do me a favor, please read the above posts if you really think we have more than enough oil. These are not wack job people, the first is a govt sponsered study and the second was written by a guy who was on Cheney's famous energy task force.

Mark,

There is tons of oil, but its all in oil-sand and shale, First off it will take 30 years to figure out how to extract that oil, in the meantime we are facing an obvious plateau in productions, and some say in supplies, but only OPEC knows that.

Secondly, who cares if there is another 1000 years worth of oil down there, if we have to cut our consumption by a fifth in ten years to facilitate the transfer to totally renewable energy, i'll walk more, and take fewer road trips, ill buy less plastics, and break the thermostat off at 72; all this government has to do is ask Americans to tighten their belts, and we will, and I bet it brings a lof of us closer together, but instead it seems that our elected offcicials are scared to look like pansies by telling their constituents they may have to suck it up for the good of the nation, they may have to consume a little less so their kids get a better deal than we were left with...I think that is pretty spineless

TMY, I couldn't get either of your URL's to come up. Could be that my old dial-up modem doesn't like big PDF files.

I did Google "known oil reserves" and came up with 1,230,000 matches. Think there might be a little disagreement there? The switch to other technologies, IMO, is going to be driven by, as Mark notes, speculators driving the price of oil past a tipping point, not by the world running out of oil. My 8th grade science teacher (in 1958) predicted that the internal combustion engine would be a thing of the past by the late 70's (replaced by either electric or gas turbines) and the world would run out of oil before the end of the century (20th century, that is). I hope he didn't bet much money on those predictions.

Spook,

it's not a matter of "known" reserves, its a matter of having the technology to extract them; as I said there is tons of oil out there, but its in oil-sands and shale, which right now we dont have the technology to get at without incuring HUGE costs, which would make it more expensive than biodeisel to refine.

Spook,

Yea, they are rather large but should come through anyway. I really suggest you take the time. The bottom line of both of these is that it will take roughly 20 years to transition from oil. If we are at or near the production peak, this will mean 20 years of fairly dramatic shortages. TEO seems to think we can just cut back in times of shortage but he fails to realize just how dependent we are. Everything from heat to food to medicine to life itself. I don't know if you saw this but there was a study done recently that said if gas hits $4/gal for any length of time, it would result in chaos and riots in almost all urban areas. We're not far from that now. Only one hurricane or terror hit away.

If you want a primer website(slow isp) you can try

http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Some of it's rather dark and scary but they have alot of good info from all over regarding where we are, how much we have and what some solutions look like. The alternative fuels that everyone thinks we can just start using are frankly decades away and some don't even yield any net positive from the energy input. By the way, this is the site referenced by Roscoe Bartlett(R-MD) in some of those C-SPAN evening sessions.

Regarding your question about disagreement, there are really only three main sources of proven reserves estimates. The most optimistic puts the peak at 20-30 years out. The middle puts it at 2006-2012(I think). And the most pessimistic says we already hit it in 2005. One problem with the 20-30 yr estimate is that it takes the Saudi numbers at face value. Funny, the Saudi's doubled their estimates after OPEC was formed and won't let anyone audit them. That guy Matt Simmons, Cheney's man, apparently went to SA in ~2003 and was so scared by what he saw he started writing and trying to warn everyone about this. His basic point is well taken, that when Saudi production starts to fall, so does the world.

Try this one, it's only 1.7MB

http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Texas%20Alliance%20of%20Energy%20Partners.pdf

Anyway, there are a lot of folks saying this is crap just like the main post says but, some of these folks can't simply be dismissed.

which would make it more expensive than biodeisel (sic) to refine.

I don't disagree (geez, 3 times in one day), but then biodiesel will become more in demand. The change to other technologies is still going to be driven by the price of oil, and for the foreseeable future, the price of oil is going to be driven by global demand and futures speculators, not by how much of it is left in the ground, no matter what form it's in.

Spook,

Check-up on the technological limitations to retrieving the shale and sands, its enormous, we don't know how to do it right now, without basically "strip mining" areas, I dont think the western state governments or Canada are going to allow that to happen.

On your point about speculations, totally, I agree, its silly we are held hostage to day-traders (snark), but if that is what wakes Americans up to getting on the ball, tightening our belts and asking for option C, then so be it, I would applaud Bush if he came out tomorrow and made a Kennedy-like appeal to the American spirit of technological advancement for the betterment of us all.

We have the infrastructure to distribute and produce biodiesel, it wouldn't be a hard jump; I think if we rolled back some of these silly tax cuts, and put them towards gasoline engine retrofitting, and diesel car write-offs, we could not add to our debt, and still urge the market to react in a positive way.

Biodiesel production is really ramping up, and there is corollary investigation into dryland crops that can produce enough vegetable oil to be refined. With current technology and equipment it is profitable with prices at about $2.70 a gallon---as with everything else, technology will be driven by demand, so there is a good chance the costs will go down as technology decides this is a profitable area and we also get more experience.

One thing about biodiesel is that it can be burned as B-100 in warm climates, and it's a natural for cruise ships, as they sail in warmer waters and the potential pollution from biodiesel is much less than from petro-diesel. The difference in emissions is also a big plus.

Work is still being done on extracting pure light crude from many sources. The easiest source to access is animal byproduct---the headline was something like Oil From Turkey Guts, and ConAgra had a test plant next to a slaughterhouse for beef and turkeys. They are very closed-mouthed, so I don't know how that is going, but a few years back they were consistently getting this product, just in small batches. When and if this reaches a technological breakthrough, the waste material we generate in this country in one year, which now has to go to landfills, would produce as much crude as we import every year.

It's not as if nothing is going on, regarding research into becoming free of dependence on either oil or Middle East oil. If we could eliminate our oil imports by recycling our waste materials, we would cut off the Middle East at the knees, and solve two of our biggest problems at once. Not bad.

Add biodiesel to that mix, for trucks and tractors and locomotives and so on, plus the large number of diesel-powered personal vehicles out there right now, and it's a nice picture.

Note: This is being done by private enterprise, not the government. This is a product of the capitalist, free-market, system. A little boost from the feds, in the way of tax incentives or something similar, has been and will be helping it along, but this is for the most part and should remain in the private sector.

The only diesel engines that can't run biodiesel right now are the older ones, containing rubber parts. The newer ones, with synthetic gaskets and so on, are just fine with i.

Biodiesel is a very strong solvent, so when run in engines previously run on petrodiesel it tends to scrub out the crud and sediment left behind, but a couple of filter changes usually solves that problem.

Ford is revamping some of its plants to produce highly efficient diesel engines, probably within the next couple of years.

Diesel engines are a big deal right now, and are gaining fast on gasoline engines. Add the prospect of using biodiesl to that and it is quite a movement. If the gelling aspect of biodiesel could be solved, it could be used all over the country without mixing it. I drive trucks, all diesel, being a rancher, but my brother has a Jetta diesel that gets no less than 40 MPG, more under some conditions. And it is stronger and safer than the tin-can hybrids, and without the downside of future battery replacement and disposal.

Decided to do some checking around, because I remember we were told that we'd run out of oil by 1990 or something like that back in the 1970's...

A curious thing - the US is third largest producer of oil in the world...in 2004, about 8.7 million barrels a day. Of course, we use about 20 million barrels a day.

The top ten proven oil reserves in the world total out at a bit more than a trillion barrels of oil...but proven doesn't necessarily mean "recoverable"...I've read that in South America there are an estimated 4 trillion barrels of oil not totalled up in "proven" but very strongly believed to be there (my guess is that the geology is right for oil).

But, at any rate, I wasn't talking about long term - I'm talking about right now; we've got far more oil out of the ground than we can use...and that is what will almost certainly cause a crash in oil prices.