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Peak Oil
- Thread starter Derec
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That's because most tourists are not driving a car. A city built for cars has the residential areas scattered over too large an area for efficient mass transit. We have made it impossible to design a system which serves the people who actually live there. The car culture is so intrinsic to everything we do, we can't even see it anymore.
Derec
Contributor
Only if you are day trading and had to sell right then.
Not familiar with Ruy's (Lopez I presume) "three tranche". What is it?
I think the prices can't stay this low for long due to fundamentals. Too much production is dependent on higher prices.
Derec
Contributor
There is only so high the price can go. As price increases economically recoverable supplies also increase as the demand decreases resulting in a negative feedback loop. Same goes for when the price falls, as it did recently - demand increases because the product is cheaper and higher cost producers slow down production reducing supply. That is why I do not think prices will go much lower than they are now. Neither will we ever see $200/bbl oil but we will likely be as high as $100 by Summer 2016 at the latest.
Your article has this chart.
It caught just the beginning of the recent increase in US oil production due to the shale revolution. Right now US produces about as much oil as it did at 1971 peak. That is not supposed to happen under Peak Oil theories - once peak is passed the oil production irreversibly declines. But higher prices and technological advances thwarted that.
Furthermore, from your link:
The "drill baby drill" refers mostly to opening areas for oil exploration that have been closed for political reasons - to wit US offshore everywhere except western Gulf of Mexico or ANWR. If these areas were opened a couple million bbl/day of production capacity could be added.
Prothero continues on ANWR:
There are several whoppers in this paragraph. First, 16 Gbbl would not be "1% of the total world oil consumption each year" - it would be more than a half actually since world uses about 25 Gbbl/year. Don't know how he came up with "1%".
Second, his way of looking at the amount of oil in a field is very weird (although I have come across it before by opponents). Even at half the number cited here ANWR would be bigger than all but perhaps two dozen fields ever discovered. And most oil fields would be much smaller, especially these days when new giant fields are a rarity. You simply do not take recoverable reserves of a field and divide it by total oil consumption and decide that it's not very long so why bother. No oil producing region, no oil company on the face of the Earth ever used such a calculation to determine whether an oil field is worthwhile to extract. I think Prothero should stick to dinosaurs.
Cheap is relative. In the 90s oil in the $40s looked very expensive. Now, it looks very cheap. We adjusted to the higher price levels relatively well. Yes, the era of cheap oil is over. We will never again see oil in $20s or even $30s but that hasn't spelled a "Collapse" of modern societies.
I don't see it.
While it is clear that oil, being a finite resource, cannot grow in production indefinitely I think that Hubbert's concept of an identifiable peak after which production inevitably declines is a rather simplistic one, as can be seen in US reaching the old peak again, 40+ years later. And that with wide swaths of possible production artificially closed off.
Fertilizers (more accurately fixing nitrogen through the Haber-Bosch process) actually uses natural gas rather than oil. But in general various fuels account for vast majority of oil used. More than half is used for gasoline alone.
If oil were not needed to burn as fuels the very small amount used for other things could be easily met.
I agree. They are a boondoggle, at least as practiced today. Blame the Iowa caucuses I guess. Using waste biomass is a much more sensible idea.
It is also a fact that the cost for this German program are very high. Electricity in Germany costs three times of the US price. Germany never made much economic sense as a pioneer solar country given their low insolation.
As to electric cars, they may not be a big competition for ICE cars, but that is changing. Electric cars are definitely coming of age with the latest generation of electric vehicles like Tesla and Nissan Leaf (which I see all the time on Atlanta roads lately). Other manufacturers are bringing their own products as well. Just the other day I saw an all electric Focus at the park I walk my dog at.
Bullmoose Too
Member
When oil is no longer profitable they will switch to something else. Until then oil will be milked for all its worth.
The future is now.
Medicine Man
Member
....'Cause the high-roller$ (in Houston) are STILL trying to convince China that Keystone XL is....
"With oil prices plummeting by more than 50 percent since June, the gleeful mood of recent years has turned glum here in West Texas as the frenzy of shale oil drilling has come to a screeching halt.
Every day, oil companies are decommissioning rigs and announcing layoffs. Small companies that lease equipment have fallen behind in their payments.
In response, businesses and workers are bracing for the worst. A Mexican restaurant has started a Sunday brunch to expand its revenues beyond dinner. A Mercedes dealer, anticipating reduced demand, is prepared to emphasize repairs and sales of used cars. And some well-off oil company managers are cutting back at home, rethinking their vacation plans and cutting the hours of their housemaids and gardeners."
Medicine Man
Member
lpetrich
Contributor
Self-driving cars? I'll believe it when I see it. In good part from what that video described: it's very easy for present-day automatic-driving systems to get confused by various road features that human drivers have no trouble with.
As to the end of manual driving, that reminds me of Isaac Asimov's short story "Sally", collected in Nightfall and Other Stories. In that story's world, outlawing manual driving provoked a lot of outrage, even though it made driving much safer.
As to the end of manual driving, that reminds me of Isaac Asimov's short story "Sally", collected in Nightfall and Other Stories. In that story's world, outlawing manual driving provoked a lot of outrage, even though it made driving much safer.
A good idea does not always yield a good experience.
It is sort of an analogy of the current infrastructure paradox. We need personal vehicles because our infrastructure is tailored to cars. Mass transit can't compete for individual convenience because there isn't enough. We are now at the point where we don't have room for more cars and we can't afford the mass transit system we need, as long as we keep supporting the car infrastructure.
Self driving cars are a great concept, but mixing autonomous cars and people driven cars is the problem. Is a self driven car to be a dedicated SDC, or will it have a parallel control system which allows the driver to take control whenever desired? Just as we can't afford to have a convenient mass transit system and individual cars at the same time, can we afford the dual control car? Will the expense be worth the utility we receive.
Derec
Contributor
Western European countries tend to have excellent mass transit system and they still love their cars. For one, those systems are excellent in cities, and much more sparse the further out you go. Second, individual mobility is convenient even if you have a great mass transit system as an alternative.
I would say that the early models will surely have manual controls as well. Later on, who knows? It is possible that insurance companies, given how they tend to ruin everything, will penalize manual-enabled cars in a few decades which would be a great shame.
Of course we can. Utility of individual motorized mobility exists even when there exists a convenient mass transit system. Germany tends to have a very good mass transit system and yet the car is called "des Deutschen liebstes Kind" (the German's favorite child). Besides, mass transit works well only in sufficiently dense areas, i.e. cities. Even countries with excellent mass transit do not offer good coverage in rural or semirural areas.
I do not think the cost will be that much higher.
Derec
Contributor
I am sure you do. That's why the car-plane car and the car-boat were so successful.
Derec
Contributor
Keystone XL has nothing to do with China. Have you looked at a map recently?
The purpose of Keystone XL is to move heavy oil sands to Gulf refineries equipped to handle such oil and to move it through existing product pipelines to millions of customers served by these product pipelines.
If there is export, it will be export of the surplus (and what would be wrong with that?) and it's not very likely to go to China.
Screeching halt? Hardly.Ny Times said:
From the same article:
While halving the number of drilling rigs (not producing wells mind you!) would be significant it's not a "screeching halt" exactly.
Derec
Contributor
Adding some manual controls (steering wheel and gas and brake pedals) is much simpler (and cheaper) thing than making a car watertight and redirecting propulsion to a propeller instead of wheels (or having a dedicated engine like the one below). And an amphibious car is orders of magnitude simpler than a flying one.
But even amphibious cars can be made relatively cheaply. I think the lack of success is due to lack of demand than anything else.
Not to mention, rig activity tumbling due to low prices cause by oversupply is a bit contrary to religious teachings of Peakoilism
Adding some manual controls (steering wheel and gas and brake pedals) is much simpler (and cheaper) thing than making a car watertight and redirecting propulsion to a propeller instead of wheels (or having a dedicated engine like the one below). And an amphibious car is orders of magnitude simpler than a flying one.
But even amphibious cars can be made relatively cheaply. I think the lack of success is due to lack of demand than anything else.
A picture of an outboard pickup truck is irrefutable evidence.
I could go into the system engineering of a complete drive by wire automobile, along with the actuators, redundant position sensors, and required onboard computers to run thing, but you have solved the problem by adding some manual controls.
It's not a matter of whether it can be done or not. It's a matter of will it be worth the expense to create a system which accommodates self driven cars and human driven cars on the same road. It will be very expensive.
Derec
Contributor
It is just illustrating that the main reason more people don't have amphibious cars is not so much the expense but lack of desire to have one rather than prohibitive cost.
I do not see the problem. Some cars (obviously not self driving) already have drive-by-wire technology. Having a system where electronic commands to steering, braking etc. actuators come from human operated controls or a computer vs. one where they only come from a computer is not very difficult or expensive. I can definitely see the steering wheel and a set of pedals being sold as a $1000-$2000 option on a new self-driving car, depending on how fancy the actual car is.
You are mixing two things here. Additional cost of the car where you can choose manual or automatic driving vs. the whole system populated by a mixture of self-driving and manual cars vs. roads only being populated by self-driving cars.
As I said before, the first is not as big an expense as you think. As far as the second, I can see some benefits having only self-driving cars on the roads. However, that would only be possible to even think about if self-driving cars have sufficient market penetration. First self-driving cars will by necessity share the roads with mostly regular cars (whether or not these self-driving cars have manual controls or not) and it will take decades after that to achieve sufficient market penetration to even contemplate banning manual driving.
Derec
Contributor
Exactly. That oil is not going anywhere and neither is the technology and thus will be ready for renewed drilling as soon as prices pick up. Some companies may fold in the meantime but the resources will still be here.
Also people pretend that places like Saudi Arabia do not depend on advanced technology like horizontal drilling and even fracking to maintain output of their geriatric giant and supergiant fields.