Posted on 05/13/2024 7:25:17 PM PDT by bitt
When are we going to run out of energy?
You don’t hear that as much as you used to, since Those Who Know Best are working to plug up all our energy sources anyway.
Most energy sources put out carbon dioxide, and that’s going to make all the plants grow and devour us all, or it will heat the planet up and make Minneapolis a desert — and we’ll all fry.
Or something.
But we don’t hear much any more about running out of energy.
What do the experts say about it?
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) International Energy Outlook 2023 (IEO2023), the global supply of crude oil, other liquid hydrocarbons, and biofuels is expected to be adequate to meet the world’s demand for liquid fuels through 2050,” a U.S. Energy Information web site stated.
Ah, but the site also gave itself an out regarding its predicted bleak future: “There is substantial uncertainty about the levels of future liquid fuels supply and demand.”
That’s another way of saying — “We don’t really know.”
And what they’re not saying, but what we know they believe is, “It doesn’t really make any difference when we’ll run out of energy since we want you all in 15-minute cities in your electric cars and on mass transit; just don’t ask us where the energy for that will come from.”
Or something.
And for sure, they’re not putting forth what seems to be the increasingly anti-human agenda of wanting us to freeze in the dark and starve.
But are there other experts besides the U.S. government (the people who four years ago gave us those wonderful lessons on public health)?
Indeed there are. And they give us an entirely different picture of energy supplies.
(Excerpt) Read more at westernjournal.com ...
“We should have 227 years of available oil, 130 years of gas, and almost 500 years of coal.
Those are predictions from the Institute for Energy Research, an energy-focused think tank based upon free market principles.”
I’ve always said there is a correlation between Co2 and population. We gotta feed’em...more people = need more Co2.
America has far more than that, if you considerate methyl hydrates in the ocean. Thousands of years worth of fuel.
We will run out if lithium for batteries long before we run out of fuel to heat homes, run cars, etc.
And to your point...we haven't even tapped the oceans on a serious level.
With nuclear in the equation, we have vastly more than enough to get to the next energy discovery.
First of all, that organization is not prominent. Second of all, they are quoting North American oil, not US oil, and that means Canada’s oil sands which has big numbers and leans pretty hard towards heavy constituents — asphalt and diesel, not gasoline.
Including all shale sources projected, US reserves are 68 Billion barrels and frankly, natgas is a more worrisome reality. This 68B is way up from 35B pre shale. Note that shale liquids are only marginally “oil”. 30 yrs ago it would be called condensate. Lots of gasoline, not much diesel.)
It’s easy to have your eyes glaze over on this, but oil is a matter of numbers. 68 Billion barrels is the number and the US burns 20 million barrels/day, or 7.3 billion barrels/year. So no, it’s not 100s of years of consumption. That happened by tossing in Canada’s 168 additional million barrels. Still not 100s. People think math is liberal or conservative. It’s not.
You can get this information yourself from BPs annual Statistical Review of World Energy. It’s a spread sheet and for decades has been the Bible of oil (and natgas).
US natgas reserves, incl shale sources, 12.8 Trillion Cubic Meters. Meters not Feet. This matters.
US production (for consumption, or insane export) 978 billion cubic meters. Or 0.978 Trillion cubic meters. And yes, that means 12 years.
Get the data. Understand it. Don’t read things you like to hear and think it is true.
errr additional **Billion** barrels from Canada
It is thought that Alberta has about 1.4 trillion barrels, even though it is heavier than Saudi oil. It’s also thought that Quebec has more, but they won’t touch it until they can engineer their way out of Canada after taking everything they can from Canada.
Climate Scientists on the Left ... Dispensationalists on the Right ... all of them claiming that life on this planet will end within a decade at most.
168B to a max 185B if no economic constraints.
Look, it’s not rocket science. Oil doesn’t exist above certain temperatures. The Hydro carbon chains unlink and become CH4, natural gas. That means the sphere of the planet has a shell and the shell’s depth determines temperature. You will not find oil under about 5 miles down. Not all the way to the core. It’s too hot.
This means a sphere of that thickness a shell. That’s the outright limit, and of course the vast majority of that shell has nothing in it.
It’s not infinite. “It is thought” means nothing. These estimates are by geologists who actually know what they are doing. Maybe “it is thought” that space aliens bring more every few years.
Reserves grow. Mostly via economics. If the price is higher, then more can come up. The entire “shale miracle” was not a miracle. That oil was always known to be there. What wasn’t known is that we would have 0% interest rates for 15 years and money to extract it cost nothing.
A good lesson in all this. NPRA. In Alaska. Not the wildlife refuge. NPRA. Look at its estimate of oil content as of about 1995. Then 15 or 20 yrs later the new estimate after drilling. It reduced 90%. It was found to all be gas, not oil. That was billions of barrels erased.
This stuff doesn’t get coverage because people don’t want to hear it. It’s real. There are limits, unless you think you can fly to Titan to get its CH4 and link those Hydrocarbon chains together . . . somehow.
Okay, in light of your gloom and doom take, what’s the solution?
It is true we have these great reserves left and long before they are gone new technology or rather old technology (Think Nuclear or maybe Fusion but I doubt that) will fill the void.
But we will all be dead due to global warming so do not worry about it. /Sarcasm
CO2 is plant food. The earth today is greener due to increased CO2 and oddly this is not due but a small fraction by man. The earth is warming and the great reserves of CO2 are released from the ocean due to the warming and the solubility of CO2 relative to ocean temperature. This is confirmed by ice cores in antarctic. Due to levels of CO2 in the geologic past that were many times higher than today great beasts roamed the earth due to abundant food as vegetation flourished on earth, they had much food and the dinosaurs flourished.
If what happened in the past happens today the ice caps will melt and we will slowly retreat from the sea as it rises over a few thousands years as it is doing today. However by historical records we are at just about the apex of melting and we may be on the verge of a new glacial ice age. The scientist that are honest do not know.
IOW our oil is going to outlast our Social Security as we know it today.
I don’t do gloom and doom. I do numbers.
If they are what they say they are, why do you think there has to be a solution?
But . . . if you must have one, the answer is reduce consumption, and that need not be uniformly globally. Most likely the way that plays out is by reducing the war’s loser’s population 100s of millions of billions of people.
That would buy some more time. But eventually . . . well, there is a fundamental truth — The Easy Oil Is Gone. A step back in technology via war and you don’t get less extracted from the ground. You get zero. There will still be some down there, but it’s not easy and lower tech can only do easy.
So . . . extinction is possible.
They also add in 1.2 trillion bbls of Oil Shale which is not Shale Oil. Primarily in the Green River formation. This “oil” is not liquid hydrocarbons at all it is solid rock kerogen that has not yet passed 👐 the oil window geologically and might never pass through it. To technically recover it you have to strip mine it like coal and then heat it to 500+C cooking the rock kerogen to a mix of hydrocarbon gasses, condensate, oils and coke. The material swells like popcorn so the volume will never fit back into void it originally came from. The energy to heat this material to 500C means the EROI is barely positive at best. Additionally most of the 1.2 trillion bbl oil equivalent since it’s not light hydrocarbons by definition is too deep to mine. The only way to access it is to use insitu drilling where you drill a grid of wells around the pay zone then put electric or gas fired heaters down bore to heat the whole strata to the needed 500C and then you wait for the reactions to take place then wait again for it to cool.enough to not crack on the way up the production bore into solid coke and gas plugging the bore. Here again the EROI is barely positive. She’ll tried it and gave up it’s hideously energy intensive and the production rates were low. So don’t count on those 1.2 trillion bbl eq it’s barely technically recoverable. That said if you had huge amounts of off peak wind or nuclear power to pump down the well bores for months at a time 8 to 12 hours a day the thermal.inertia is so high cycling the heaters like that would turn the earth into a giant gigawatt scale heat and electricity sink. This would be the only way to do it burning one for one in BTU to heat the kerogen vs recovery is never going to fly even without CO2 limits.
Additionally, Oil Shale should be viewed as the last source of petrochemicals that we have. Not a single bbl should be burnt to the sky. Every drop should be reserved for only plastics, petrochemicals, medications, lubricants and fertilizers. This is what out grandchildren and there children will need to use for those things. Boomers need to keep their hands off it they burnt in a single generation more than all humans before then since the beginning of our species. There are four generations already after them that will soon as in less than 40 years face a world without liquid hydrocarbons being easy, cheap or even readily available.
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