Debate centers on oil reserves

[bemildred]

SAN FRANCISCO -- The subject was oil: how much of it is left and when the world's supply will run out.

And when a panel of experts sought to explore the topic at the normally low-key meeting of the American Geophysical Union here, the message became ominous and the discussion heated.

The experts, including Caltech's V ice P rovost David Goodstein, often disagreed with one another's claims, sometimes even contradicting each other.

Goodstein, who recently authored "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil,' Ken Deffeyes of Cornell University and Amos Nur of Stanford University argued that oil and other fossil fuels are finite resources that will eventually run out, most likely within the next quarter century.

Pasadean Star Snooze

[jeffvail]

1. When will prices skyrocket?

The real question, in my mind, isn't "when will it run out", but when, in the fragile equillibrium of supply and demand, will prices skyrocket? Let's talk numbers here: If you fix demand-levels as they are at the current price, how much below current supply will oil production have to drop to see oil reach $100/barrel?

I'm no good at the math side of Econ... any help?

~Jeff
http://www.jeffvail.net/

[Tempest]

2. Articles on the Peak Oil debate

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22peak+oil%22

[NNadir]

3. Oil prices will stabilize at the point at which synthetic alternatives

become competitive. This is not all that much higher than the present price of oil, but for the investment in infrastructure to be realized, the price of oil will have to remain significantly high for an extended period.

This is NOT probably good news, since the cheapest way to make synthetic oil if - as is our international habit - we simply dump the external costs into peoples lungs and their atmosphere. Under these conditions, the synthetic alternative will be generated from coal as opposed to the more environmentally sustainable and cheaper (from a fully loaded cost perspective) options of nuclear energy and biomass.

Such considerations should lead us to recognize that fossil fuels are highly subsidized in many many ways.

The huge environmental advantage of high oil prices is that they encourage conservation. This is a good thing.

We've been through this before, in the 1970's. Jimmy Carter's syn fuels program, which I think put the "fear of God" into OPEC, was nothing more than a coal based oil synthesis program. If the prices had remained high enough, it would have worked perfectly well, ignoring the huge environmental costs, of course.