Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kosh on May 27, 2008, 05:01:11 am
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is a myth and one of the worst possible jokes ever played on the american people (http://www.energybulletin.net/44870.html)
Hopefully this article will debunk the mythology once and for all.
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I honestly have never heard anyone use the phrase "vast untapped wealth," at least with not any degree of seriousness. People have talked about untapped resources, yes, but never as any sort of gamebreaker. Did I somehow miss the "joke," or is this just as much journalistic hyperbole as the sources it criticizes?
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I honestly have never heard anyone use the phrase "vast untapped wealth,"...
They do.
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is a myth and one of the worst possible jokes ever played on the american people (http://www.energybulletin.net/44870.html)
Hopefully this article will debunk the mythology once and for all.
Huh? Is oil measured in Megabits?
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Probably Megabarrels, since they use Gb elsewhere in the article, and I'm assuming that is Gigabarrels :)
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i think they mean millions of barrels
ah **** beat me to it
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I honestly have never heard anyone use the phrase "vast untapped wealth," at least with not any degree of seriousness.
Deepspace9er has said something like "all the oil we need" several times on the forum, and I have heard others, many others, when I was in the US who seriously believed it.
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America's vast untapped oil wealth.......
...Is in Canada, waiting to be conquered... :nervous:
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I honestly have never heard anyone use the phrase "vast untapped wealth," at least with not any degree of seriousness.
Deepspace9er has said something like "all the oil we need" several times on the forum, and I have heard others, many others, when I was in the US who seriously believed it.
Well, there's no accounting for idiots, but anyone with a few functioning brain cells banging around should be capable of sorting out the bull. :p
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It was estimated some time ago that at our current trend of usage and demand, there is enough heavy crude oil in the world to support us for well over 1000 years.
The problem is extraction and refining... We have the resources to do it now, but nobody wants to spend any money on a newer method of production.
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is a myth and one of the worst possible jokes ever played on the american people (http://www.energybulletin.net/44870.html)
Hopefully this article will debunk the mythology once and for all.
Only if people read it on a large enough scale unfortunately :blah:
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It was estimated some time ago that at our current trend of usage and demand, there is enough heavy crude oil in the world to support us for well over 1000 years.
By who?
The problem is extraction and refining... We have the resources to do it now, but nobody wants to spend any money on a newer method of production
Why?
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Hell if I can recall, it was back in 2000 or something like that... So probably before India and China became industrialized. Also, it didn't say it would be economically feasible to do so, just that it would be enough to last that long, and we'd have a different fuel source long before we expended our heavy crude.
As for problems extracting and refining heavy crude, it's because of the high sulfuric content, as well as the very rich viscosity. The oil might need to be extracted manually, as it may be too heavy to extract through normal pressure means. Black sand is another very difficult thing to process, as it too is quite dense.
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True. There are a lot of high viscosity deposits or deposits where the formation pressure is insufficient to force the hydrocarbons into the well. There are any number of ways we currently deal with this problem if the deposit is large enough to justify the expense. Water-flood is kind of an entry-level approach. You drill multiple wells in your field. Some you use to produce. Others, you inject water into the formation. The water forces the oil / gas / whatever to come into the producing wells.
Another trick is CO2 flood. That apparently works on some formations, but I'm not really sure what its advantage is over water-flood. My personal favorite is fire-flood. Same basic set-up, but now you are injecting oxygen. The key in this is to make dadgum certain your injector wells are dry. NO WATER must be present or the corrosion will eat your casing alive. But the oxygen will basically ignite downhole. You keep on pumping O2. The flame front moves into the formation, heating everything up ungodly hot and forcing any fluids out ahead of it; towards your producing well(s) if you designed your field right. You can handle very high viscosity fields in this manner. Refining what you produce from a fire-flood field is usually quite painful because it is essentially tar, and the extreme heat will drive the mineral solubility way up until it gets to the surface, cools off, and everything gets all sticky again.
Huff-and-puff steam injectors are another flavor. But all this is really to say, yes, there are methods and procedures we can and do employ to get at difficult-to-recover oil. But it is difficult and very expensive. It is also much less effective on relatively small or diffuse deposits. There is also a difficult-to-quantify ecological cost to consider.
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I always wonder at this general belief that the Oil Companies, by changing their names to Energy companies, somehow find the fact they are a massive, in demand and phenomenally short-term profit making industry worrying for some reason. There's no impetus whatsoever for companies such as these to develop a replacement fuel source, no matter what they claim. The current board of directors will be happily retired, and probably living on private islands by the time energy problem starts to bite. I've heard people saying 'Ah, but Esso are working on this, or Shell are working on that', but it does make you wonder how hard they really are working on it.
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I always wonder at this general belief that the Oil Companies, by changing their names to Energy companies, somehow find the fact they are a massive, in demand and phenomenally short-term profit making industry worrying for some reason. There's no impetus whatsoever for companies such as these to develop a replacement fuel source, no matter what they claim. The current board of directors will be happily retired, and probably living on private islands by the time energy problem starts to bite. I've heard people saying 'Ah, but Esso are working on this, or Shell are working on that', but it does make you wonder how hard they really are working on it.
"Who Killed the Electric Car?" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F)
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After a quick look at the article I thought "Hmmm, interesting. Perhaps there isn't as much oil in the U.S as I had previously thought." After carefully reading the article, I'm a little surprised. Surprised because the guy that wrote it doesn't exactly seem to know what he's talking about. Not to bash on him, but this guy isn't exactly an expert, which explains a few things: "Roger Blanchard is Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Lake Superior State University" Its simply an opinion article. And a pretty misleading one at that.
Is U.S. oil production slowing because those oil reserves don't exist?
#1: The U.S. has the #1 highest (or second highest - I forget which place we are in at the moment) corporate tax rate in the world. It also has BY FAR the strictest regulations and laws surrounding oil drilling and oil companies (i.e. - about 80% of the U.S.'s own shores are completely off-limits to drilling, while in many cases countries like Cuba and China are setting up operations there unhindered). "Evil big oil companies" have been taxed and regulated the hell out of. Less profits = less expansion / less innovation / less production.
#2: In the U.S., no new oil refineries have been built in over 35 years.
#3: While it is true some areas in Alaska have been opened to drilling, dramatically more and larger areas of the U.S. have actually been closed in the past decade to oil drilling/exploration than have been opened.
Is there "vast untapped oil wealth" still available in the U.S.? To be honest I don't know. I haven't gone out there and done the research myself. This article however, presents no evidence towards the contrary, only that domestic oil production in the U.S. has slowed. Untapped oil in the U.S. that still exists a myth? Not even close.
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I actually know several farmers that are paid, by the government, NOT to pump oil from their land. I've been under the impression that the U.S. is determined to run everyone else out of oil before it starts using its own.