Peak Oil - Doom and gloom for Ireland

What I don't understand is why the futures market isn't buying oil like crazy now if the experts are predicting $100 or even $200 a barrel within a matter of years. Anyone know the answer?
 
The December crude oil contract for physical delivery in 2015 (the furthest out contract currently traded, albeit very thinly) currently trades on the Nymex for $71 (see . So the simplest explanation is that the market doesn't believe the doom mongers.

That doesn't necessarily mean the market is right of course.

Some more discussion on the future direction of oil prices in this thread

http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=54046
 
Having worked in the offshore oil industry most of my life, I can tell you there's still plenty down there!
Platforms which should have closed down years ago are predicting another 10 years+. And I've been on many a rig which has drilled successful wells that haven't been tapped yet - west of scotland had some great results, for one.
It's not in the oil companies interests to over-produce, it'd only bring the price down.
I don't think this generation has too much to worry about, but programmes like this one seldom let the real facts get in the way of a good story.
 
[FONT=&quot]I've been keenly interested in peak oil and it's consequences since learning about it over a year ago. One of the most startling facts I've come across is how our utilization of energy in our environment has sparked the exponential growth of the human population.

[/FONT]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...tion_curve.svg/550px-Population_curve.svg.png

[FONT=&quot]This phenomenal growth in the human race exactly corresponds to the availability of cheap energy. By "cheap" I mean energy that requires very little energy input to extract a large amount of energy output. This exponential expansion unfortunately ends in a crash when the underlying resource that allowed it to happen begins to disappear. This little story is very relevant;

[/FONT]



Just as this example above shows we are using up a resource that takes millennia to form.

When will this happen? I don't know. But even if it's 2 centuries away (and I seriously doubt that it is) we should still be trying to preserve oil for future generations. An organic chemist I know once quipped that oil is so precious that the last thing we should be doing is burning it.
 
I would have thought the growth in human population corresponded with cheap food, not cheap energy - before their current prosperity, China and India were very small consumers of oil?


 
[/FONT]

Markjbloggs said:
I would have thought the growth in human population corresponded with cheap food, not cheap energy - before their current prosperity, China and India were very small consumers of oil?
Click to expand...

Even now, India has an approximate annual per capita oil consumption of 0.8 barrels. The UK, by comparison uses 11.0 barrels per person annually. We in Ireland use 16.2! (Source: CIA World Factbook, [broken link removed])

So, India, with one of the largest populations in the world, consumes per capita less than one twentieth of the amount of oil we do. Yet Ireland's population is about 3 million below its pre-industrial level. If there is a correlation, it doesn't seem very strong to me . . .
 
Coal & nukes... yawn.

Let's stick with the sun, solar power has suddenly become cheap and efficient:

"Taking Nature's Cue For Cheaper Solar Power"

Solar cell technology developed by Massey University’s Nanomaterials Research Centre will enable New Zealanders to generate electricity from sunlight at a 10th of the cost of current silicon-based photo-electric solar cells.

Dr Wayne Campbell and researchers in the centre have developed a range of coloured dyes for use in dye-sensitised solar cells.

The synthetic dyes are made from simple organic compounds closely related to those found in nature. The green dye Dr Campbell (pictured) is synthetic chlorophyll derived from the light-harvesting pigment plants use for photosynthesis.

Other dyes being tested in the cells are based on haemoglobin, the compound that give blood its colour.
 
Peak oil will arrive eventually and we will need to start preparing now for it. My fear is there are many things perhaps we in Ireland will not be prepared to do even though it maybe for the "greater good"

> Walking or cycling those short trips instead of using the car.
> Significant investment of our taxes in a comprehensive rail infrastructure
> Nuclear power
> Waste incineration

How we will ever overcome these challenges is a worry, when we can’t even route a road without an endless stream of objections.
 

Meh, Irish people will walk, cycle and use trains when cars return to being not economically viable.

Nuke power might be necessary in countries without a coastline for generating tidal power and spare land for growing wood to fuel wood-burning plants (every tree you burn is balanced against 10 growing trees absorbing the carbon).

Ireland's future should be Europe's primary renewable energy producer, exporting electricity to the UK and the continent.
 
The key thing not mentioned above is the rate of rise in demand, which rubbishes estimates about how long finite resources last. Take this extreme example.

11am.. theres 2 maggots in a jar.
Every minute they double their numbers.
at 12 o' clock the jar is full.

Q. How full is it at 11.59am
A. Half

So the rising demand brought about by an exploding consumer class in places like india and china multiplies the requirement for oil as illustrated in a previous post.

Heres another example that unfortunately is not extreme, but imminent; The population of the world is now 6 billion, it will be 9 billion within 40-50 years.

And another; demand for oil will increase in China by 8 million barrels per day by 2020 - thats increase, not total. Total capacity now is 24 million barrels per day, and does'nt seem to be increasing
 
Alot of the problems we are now facing stem from the levels of human population and the increasing demands of that population on the earths resources. Nobody is really asking the question yet but it will be asked in the not too distant future, How do we acieve an orderly stabilisation in the worlds population and maybe a gradual reduction. Its all very well talking about renewable energy and recycling in order to reduce our footprint on the earth, but it is the number of footprints on the earth that is also a fundamental issue
 

The whole capitalist system appears to be built on continuous growth.

A change from this would be very profound and I would think almost impossible to implement globally . what effect would it have on investors and the capital markets ?
 
I saw something on British TV (I think it was an ad) that if everybody used concentrated washing powder instead of the diluted stuff, 14000 trucks would be taken off British roads. Thats just one example of where we can accept fundamental change if it is forced on us.

As oil gets expensive and scarce we will adapt.
 
"How do we acieve an orderly stabilisation in the worlds population and maybe a gradual reduction."

Is population not already starting to decline in many of the 'developed' nations? Was the greying of France and Italy predicted by anybody 30 years ago? It may well be the case that the world population will continue to expand, but the truth is that we are relying on a large helping of research plus an inevitable element of guesswork.
 

I'm no expert, but isn't this similar to the Malthusian view on population, which isn't very popular these days?
 

I take the opposite view and am convinced a sparsely populated world will emit greater pollution. As Sheldon Richman of the Cato Institute puts it:


Not a view you'll hear the Green Party ever express but pointed out elsewhere, they seem to be the anti-human development party as much as anything else.
 
MrKeane said:
I saw something on British TV (I think it was an ad) that if everybody used concentrated washing powder instead of the diluted stuff, 14000 trucks would be taken off British roads.
Click to expand...

This doesn't appear to make sense. A population of roughly 55 million people in Britain should equate more or less to 20 million households. If the switch from diluted to concentrated powder reduces the powder volume by half, the above theory would imply that 28,000 trucks on British roads are solely used to transport washing powder. Or in other words, for every 717 households, one truck is used solely, day-in-day-out, all year round, to transport washing powder. If you assume that on average each household goes through a box of washing powder per month, this would equate to each truck only carrying 8,604 boxes of washing powder per year, or 34 per working day. Even if you double these figures on the basis of one box per home per fortnight, you end up with each truck carrying only 78 boxes per day. It doesn't really add up.

ps I wonder did the ad/feature refer to "14,000 truck journeys" rather than 14,000 trucks? This would be more credible, but sadly would only get rid of 56 trucks (based on 1 journey per truck per day for 250 working days per year). Just shows the power of advertising and PR...
 
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