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Oil Reserves
I have lost track of how many times in my life some panel of experts has given us 5 or 7 years till the wells run dry.
They were certainly going to have nothing but air in them by 1975, as I recall.
I can't believe all of them were lying or pushing some political agenda, although certainly some had ulterior motives.
So what is going on? How come the Alaskan pipeline was supposed to pump the North Slope dry in 7 to 10 years and it is still going strong ?
I believe that the creation of oil in the earth in not a static process. The old thinking was that oil was created in folds and pockets of the earth a bazillion years ago and somehow the process stopped and the oil just sat there waiting for us to discover it and pump it out.
When it was gone, it was gone.
But now it is becoming more apparent that the creation of oil is an on-going process and we are nowhere near exhausting our "reserves".
There are wells in Long Beach CA and many other places that have been in continuous daily production for over 70 years.
Even the most extreme wacko's, the kind who would gladly kill you if you don't conform to their environmental gospel, now recognize that they can no longer scare us with the prospect of running out of oil.
Instead they scream and foam at the mouth about global warming and greenhouse gasses and how we Americans are using more than our share of the worlds resources.
The new enemy is the SUV and somehow my pick-up is the ultimate evil in the universe while their Yugo's are a badge of good citizenship in the global economy.
They compare me to someone squatting next to a mud hut in some backwater third-world dictatorship sh--pot and scream that I use more energy resources than he does.
Really?
Who would have guessed?
That mud hut squatter would have died of starvation long ago if not for the "excesses" of the American culture.
Not one of these accusers will go live in that "environmentally friendly" mud hut and drink water out of a river that the people upstream use for a sewer.
No, they are quite content to live out their existence right here, in some religiously motivated lifestyle of energy constraint, where they can criticize everything and do nothing, except eat granola and try to legislate my pick-up out of existence for fear that it will squish them and their tiny car in an accident.
No, I don't think we are running out of oil.
And I don't even think that we are using it as fast as the earth is producing it.
But I am running out of patience with the rest of the world while they eat the food we produced, transported on ships and planes we built, cooked in pots we gave them, and all the while blaming US for all that is wrong and evil in the world.
OK. That is my rant for the month.
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Oil Reserves
So?
No new magma either?
Someday some volcano will squirt the last of the ancient lava and then volcano's as we know them will pass into history?
Just checking.
I would sign this "the carbon fairy" but I don't want you guys to get the wrong idea and don't want to start a stampede from a nearby California coastal city.
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Oil Reserves
Did you have to break out your slide rule for this one? That is pretty impressive.
My brother worked on the North Slope (of Alaska) for a drilling outfit. He would find stuff that the drill would bring up from thousands of feet below the surface. Impressions of palm fonds and ferns in what looked like coal, even little fossilized critters.
I will not argue your numbers and your calculations, because quite frankly, I don't have the training to do so.
But I do have to wonder how subduction measured in fractions of an inch per year caught trees and animals in its grasp.
I think there is an untold, mind staggering volume of organic material, already in transit for a millennium, on its way down to that "pressure cooker" a mile or more beneath us where heat, pressure and bacteria will transform it into tomorrows oil.
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Thank you Randy. Accidents, by definition, bring with them disruption and chaos, not organization and life.
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