Peak OIL My memories of a peak oil doco I saw recently.
70% of an average barrell of oil is used in transportation.. 90% of transportation is oil based.. There have been no elephant oil field since the sixties.. USA was the Middle East of the 20th century USA had peak production in the early 70's just as the middle east was coming into significant production. At that time Asia Africa & South America were not significant consumers of oil...(compared to US & EU), since that time......... everyone !! now has cars & an oil based economy..... The middle east (and the rest of OPEC) has not changed its reserves since the mid eighties when production quotas were linked to reserves..... at that time all OPEC members doubled their reserves, "overnight", in order to maintain their relative production quotas (aka one doubled so they all doubled)... the true state of reserves is unknown...... the oil fields of the middle east have been running for 40years without any announcement of new elephant fields....... OPEC members reserves have not decreased significantly since the mid eighties quota system in spite of being in production..... (the line from them is that they prove up enough reserves to cover their production)....... IMHO... BLUFFING. If all cars/trucks were converted to super efficient hybrids overnight we'd gain two years before consumption due to the increase in fleet size increased consumption to said magic conversion. To replace the sheer amount of gigawatts (or similar BTU's etc etc) of oil with nuclear would require the construction of 20 thousand of the largest existing nuclear powerplants and on current reserves we'd have depleted U within 30 to 50 years....
IMHO
Oil is NOT a significant power generation feedstock..... coal is.... no doubt peak oil will increase the costs and alter the dynamics of power generation,.......... but ........ it's as nothing compared to the effect of peak oil on transportation....The world has heaps of coal...... we might 'burn' our gas more efficiently in a distributed fuel cell system but the real opportunities lay elsewher in peak oil.
CFU Price at posting:
17.3¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
