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Oil Reserves
What would all of our machines be worth without oil? Did you ever think of this when purchasing a new truck,car,tractor,lawn mower etc? Do the governments offer any predictions on how long our worlds reserves will last?100 years? 50 years? 25 years? Or don't they want us to know or they have no idea? When we see the traffic every day in our cities, it's hard to imagine the fuel that is consumed and the size of these underground reserves! How big are the underground oil fields of Saudi Arabia-the size of the great lakes? I read somewhere that the U.S.is about 3% of the worlds population and uses about 30% of it's energy!On another note,what is the average cost of a gallon of regular gas in your area presently?(approx.$1.69 in western NY)
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Oil Reserves
Regular unleaded, $1.38 in southeast Oklahoma.
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Glenn,I've never liked that feeling either thar we are at the mercy of unknown reserves mostly owned by other countrys. I'm probably a little one sided on this issue being I'm a farmer, but even tho an auto mechanic friend of mine told me when ethanol blend gas came out that it would ruin the fuel system in cars, I've used it exclusively in every car, gas tractor, lawn mower etc., and never spent a dollar on a problem ethanol caused. Last spring after Deere aproved using Soydiesel, I've ran it in everything, again no problems. I've heard of some places where they harvest methane out of the garbage dumps then blend it in the natural gas, I don't know much about it, but we've got to start somewhere to replace a reserve that will run out someday.
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Glenn, Sorry I forgot to respond to your question on gas prices. I havent paid that close attention in the last few days, but I think Ethanol blend is around 1.38 and straight gasoline 1.40, and the high test or whatever they call it now is allways about a dime higher, but only the bigger stations seem to have that. I'm in Eastern Iowa.
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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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Mark,
You need your own radio show.
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Oil Reserves
Yes Mark, Radio show. You have experience talking on the Radio  )
David
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The truth is is that the American farmer grows everything that is needed to keep our carbon guzzlers running indefinitely. Soydiesel is here to stay with no problems for use in any diesel. In fact small rise in power is observed along with much cleaner emmisions. Several Metro areas are using Soy in their busses. With slightly increased costs. Ethanol has not had quite the breakthrough development of Soydiesel even though it has been around long as moonshiners have run out of gas in run cars. I think that oil companies have prevented the complete substitution for petrol based products. I know mileage and power problems exists but additives can be made to make it work. As far as engine oil and those related issues go, Synthetics are still largely petroleum based but development and research has been done on vegetabler based oils. John Deere has experimented, though with mixed results, with vegetable based hydraulic oil. Further R&D is being done by many state U's.
Watch the Disc Channel enough and you'll sooner or later see those people running their Mercedes SW or old P/U off of used cooking oil.
They have always said neccessity is the mother of invention. And they also have said that the surest road to success is the highway of failure. We have the technology. WE can build it. Do we have the ambition and patience?
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I read something in the newspaper the other day that said in 1900 there were all kinds of dire predictions that we would run out of oil, food etc. So what happened? People live better than they ever have (at least in the US) and generally enjoy longer, healthier lives. Even the poorest people in the US enjoy comforts that royalty could only dream about 200 years ago.
We keep finding more oil because the technology keeps getting better. Also, as the price increases, oil that may have been costly to extract becomes economically feasible.
OPEC and other rational oil producers are smart enough to realize there is a balancing act with price. If they set it too high, their will be incentives to develop alternative sources. There is enough shale in the mid west to run our cars for hundreds of years. The problem is that to convert shale to oil would end up costing about $3 a gallon.
I don't think there is much to worry about although disruptions from current supplies could cause hardships in the short run - that is unti the switch is made to an alternative - shale oil, soy diesel, etc.
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soy diesel and ethanol are not a solution to our energy needs. Currently the US produces almost 10 billion bushels of corn each year and we do not hav surpluses. If we make more ethanol then corn will be in short supply and the price higher thus higher food prics. The same thing applies to soybeans and soy diesel. The solution is more efficient hydrocarbon vehicles such as diesel electric, fuel cells etc.
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