The current difference between supply and demand is less than the amount of capacity Saudi Arabia has and isn’t pumping. The same applies to a couple of other states (Kuwait and Quatar IIRC).
A lot of the current price hike is due to the fall in the value of the dollar, with oil traditionally being traded in dollars.
The 40 years of reserves is 40 years of reserves we know are there for definate, and can extract using commercially viable techniques (ones that probably break even at about $50/bbl given that the value of known reserves doesn’t change rapidly and investment decisions that big are made using very conservative assumptions). It doesn’t include any oil that is currently commercially non-viable, or other sources such as tar sands or coal->oil processes like Fischer-Tropsch.
There is a LOT of price speculation going on in oil at the moment. OPEC as good as came out today and said that there are speculators trying to push oil up to $250/bbl, and that this is an artificial bubble they don’t want to play with.
The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stone, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil. Instead other sources of energy will become increasingly competitive, and oil will simply become commercially non-viable. Electric vehicles becoming a commercially sensible decision for some companies like TNT, and as oil becomes scarcer this will become a more common occurrence.
That might be true, though it’s rather a “has but not yet tapped”. But we’re not far from the doesn’t have anymore scenario. There will never be 100mbpd all liquids production. That’s why the prices are already rising. In all the past decades there was always an actual swing capacity of at least 5 mbpd. This is definatly not the case anymore.
20% for the euro since last year. Oilprice doubled.
The range is irrelevant, what matters is the daily throughput. That’s why I said it’s a misleading figure. 86mbpd is an unbelievable amount of oil. The alternatives can never scale up to that once we’re post peak and in actual decline. Remember we tried fischer tropsch over here and today the US consumes the entire german wartime production in about 2 weeks. EREOI will also haunt you there. Oil is mostly used in transportation, but nevertheless, if we need that much more energy to produce a certain lost oil quantum it will not be available elsewhere. Up until today it’s energetically not very expensive to extract oil, but tar sands and those other alternatives are. So we’re kind of in a trap, we can of course produce liquids, but we’d need to ramp up production of other power sources. These commodities face kind of the same problems, there’s plenty of coal, but the daily capacity is somewhat limited, as china currently experiences. For more production you need more big trucks and earthmovers, which need oil. It’s a kind of a cat bites her tail scenario.
I actually cross my fingers, that bussard hit the jackpot with his IEC fusion before his death and it even scales to p-B11 fusion. If he did, then we’re overnight a type 1 civilization and with that kind of dirt cheap energy we could even synthezise our liquid fuel needs out of thin air and water. But if not, we’re in for some rough decades.
Do you really expect OPEC ever to admit: “No we can’t produce anymore”.
This stone age sentence is the most stupid sentence ever said in that context, and I believe you know that. Of course we’ll try to adopt as we always did, but the question is, if we can manage this in the given timeframe on overall declining ressources. We’re a global society now and overpopulated like the easter islands were. They had limited ressources and their civilization died because of that, we now face the same problem on a much larger scale, we’ll see how that plays out.
I heard that gasoline in Dubai is like a nickel a litre and same for all them welathy Arab states…maybe we should move there:)…Gas went up to $1.35 litre this morning in Toronto…(it always seems to go up when the weekend comes)
Gasoline joke:
When I got home last night, my wife demanded that I take her someplace expensive…
so, I took her to a gas station…
And then the fight started…
