Peak Oil -- don't believe the hype quite yet

Okay, I'm not a scientist or a geologist, or an oil executive.

And I don't think that, what with the earth heating up, we can go on using fossil fuels for all of our energy.

But I don't believe most of the hype about peak oil. First off, this con has been played before. George H. W. Bush, when he was leaving his job as head of the CIA back in 1976, left a report on incoming President Carter's desk saying that the Soviet Union was about to run out of oil. If you know anything about the CIA, it has historically been wedded to the oil industry. Agents and executives have historically passed back and forth. If there had been an official wedding of the CIA and the oil industry George H. W. Bush would have been the little plastic groom on top of the wedding cake.

Since JFK was gunned down in Dallas in 1963 our foreign policy has been all about oil. I'm still not sure how Vietnam fits into all this, but I suspect that someday soon there will be huge deposits announced in the area. Professor Peter Dale Scott identified four coups in 1964 that were backed by the U.S., and they all had something to do with oil. That is, there was oil, the American oil industry wanted it, and the locals were getting uppity.

Well, oil and drugs.

So this is what I know about the oil industry.

When I was back east last fall visiting my 80 year-old mother, one of our tasks was to close an old safety deposit box she'd kept in a bank in the town where she used to live. There wasn't much of value in the box, but there was a letter to my mother from her parents in Mississippi right after the birth of my older sister. This was 1948. My mom's father had sold the oil rights for a piece of property and an oil company had put in a well. In return my mother and her brothers  and sisters would share in royalties for any oil pumped from the property.

Well, for most of the rest of the century that well was capped. Figure fifty years that oil was just sitting there. Then a few years ago they started pumping. And they are pumping a lot now.

I know it's one well, one person's observation. But there was always oil there. It was just time to uncap the well and start getting the stuff out of the earth.

We know there are oil deposits all over the place. As I write there are plans for extracting oil out of huge deposits of gunky sand up in western Canada. Back in the 1930s the Germans and the Standard Oil swapped different patents with the Germans ending up with the coal gassification patent. In fact, the Germans did produce quite a bit of their fuel from coal during WWII. So there's a lot of oil that isn't even oil. There's all sorts of processes for making diesel-grade fuel from carbon-based organic garbage. So there's oil in stuff that isn't even oil.

And they keep finding oil. Just last week they announced a big oil find in, believe it or not, Afghanistan! My guess is that you can find oil just about any place around the globe where you find American soldiers.

So what does it mean that much of Iraq's oil production has been offline since the first Gulf War? What does it mean that a war with Iran might shut down the entire region's oil supply? It means that every barrel is that much more expensive. Just imagine them capping all those wells for future pumping.

Remember, Exxon and the other oil companies don't pay for the bills that the U.S. armed forces are racking up. American taxpayers do, or more accurately, their children and grandchildren will. Oil companies may just have another country's army working for them when all the bills come due.

And then they can uncap all those wells that have been sitting around for fifty years or so.

Comments

[greensmile]

Bob:
I love the way you turn the phrase [and turn the knife] in your comment on Rox Populi:
"The whole theme of conservative thought for the last fifty years has been that government can't solve the individual's problems. Now that conservatives are in full control, why should anyone expect them to go against their beliefs and actually solve problems."

But on the peak oil thing, you have to do a lot more homework.

There are way too many people who spotted the problem before any CIA memos covered it. The basic math of over extraction was figured out by M King Hubbert back in the 50's and while it has seen slight theoretical improvements and enjoys vastly better seismology, and computing, it is still telling the same story Hubbert tolds his bosses as Royal Dutch Shell 50 years ago. The majority of groups and websites such as dieoff that have been sounding the alarms for years [http://dieoff.org/] wouldn't have a civil word for the CIA.

There are more good geophysicists on the peak oil bandwagon than the CIA could buy off. you are a little right about Viet Nam [which surprised me] their peak output in 2015 will be 1/5 the least amount Saudi Arabia ever pumped, 1/50 of the Saudi peak expected around 2012. [http://dieoff.org/42Countries/42Countries.htm]

The conspiracy theory, if you must have one, is not the hype about peak oil but the attempts to cover it up. Look into the bio of Jan Lundberg,
http://www.suesupriano.com/article.php?&id=63
and his dad and then try to figure out why he went all hippie
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php
and started bike-trailering vegetables to a farmers market.
Peak oil is real as hell and will be a real hell for all that

To be sure, the Exxons and Halliburtons exacerbate the problems, especially since they have such disproportional influence on the current administration but there many ways to reckon the price of oil. What if you added the cost of the war in Iraq to the cost of oil?
Try $120/bbl.
http://www.theoildrum.com/classic/2005/08/jan-lundberg-on-peak-oil.html
[you are dead on the money about our grandchildren paying for todays cheap oil but connect all the dots.]
Your anecdotal evidence that there is plenty of oil is not in line with ANY inventory of proven reserves. Only a tiny fraction of the planet where its possible to drill remains unexplored. The existence of a barrel of oil in the ground that costs you about a barrel of oil to extract is effectively zilch contribution to reserves...we already cherry picked the good fields and burnt it up in our hummers and explorers. were screwed.