Increasing Oil Reserves

I also agree with you on the nuclear power..take a look at France and Japan. Most of France's electricity flows from Nuclear power plant. Not only has this saved $ but pollutes a heck of alot less!

France also proves that nuclear power is safe.

— Homer008 (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 12:49:33 AM | | Votes: 1   

France also proves that when you're sitting on piles of nuclear fuel and nuclear waste, then you can't go around starting wars in foreign countries -- you've got to keep your military protecting your nuclear sites.

Until nuclear power is both safe AND doesn't result in radioactive wastes that must be guarded to prevent dirty bomb manufacture, then maybe it will be cost effective. But it isn't. Believe it or not, it's more expensive than solar or wind power.

— moto (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 1:06:39 AM | | Votes: 3   

Note also that not all published reserves are equally believable. OPEC is notoriously unreliable in posting its volume of proven reserves.


EnnNorak -- the massive lobbying that is trying to convince people that tar sands are an attractive source of energy is disgraceful. You might as well try to extract oil from the aphalt on your roads. Tar sands need so much energy to separate the useable oil that only massive government subsidies would make it economically feasible to proceed. And this doesn't even count the environmental cleanup costs (which are either ignored or passed on to consumers).

If you want to subsidize energy, please subsidize renewable energies that don't cause such pollution.

— moto (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 1:15:33 AM | | Votes: 4   

http://www.payvand.com/news/06/oct/Shah-Nuclear-Plants.jpg

— Wallerstein (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 4:19:47 AM | | Votes: 2   

Moto,

Im surprised we actually have intelligent people posting actual facts instead of lucid speculative scenarios on this website. Congratulations, Keep it up.

— w209w114 (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 2:35:03 PM | | Votes: 3   

Jagexpert,

That is actually a very important point, and one that I had neglected to even mention. There are prroportedly immense reserves of gas hydrates in the oceans. I am very lucky in this respect, because one fo the moderators for my honors class as a freshman was Dr. Sloan- THE world expert on gas hydrates. It is exceptonally rare to find something on the subject in which he is not cited as a reference. The biggest problem with it, from my understanding, is that it is difficult, but not impossible, to actually obtain in a stable fashion.

— cdoke (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 9:42:18 PM | | Votes: 1   

Of course, you can always go with the old fashioned, but increasingly harder, way to increase reserves-find new economic reserviors.

— cdoke (View Profile)

Posted on 6/30/2007 10:36:25 PM | | Votes: 2   

You're also aware that technology to extract the oil from shale, on a mass level, is 10-20 years out, and even then, it might still be an expensive process which will have to be recouped somehow, i.e...there won't be a huge reduction in the price of oil.

— Bmw8ter (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 8:07:27 AM | | Votes: 1   

Having attended the Colorado Oil Shale Symposium: Yes and no in a way. We can extract it now but it is exceptionally inefficient- and they are still really in the development stage. Oil has been extracted from the oil shales, though. Shell has an exceptionally odd process when they drill tight offset wells and freeze the wellbores and the formation in order to hydraulically isolate a section, then inject steam at HPHT.

Exxon has a method that at the moment seems more practical to me. They call it "Electrofrac". This method really is not difficult to implement as it is primarily current technologies.

I stated this in my message: Yes, if the final cost to utilize these technologies exceeds the current price [which I have no doubt it will] the price must remain structurally high to support sustained production from them. I never said there would be a price reduction due to the shales- you may reach a price plateau however. Prices will continue to trend upward overall barrign something radical going on, but cyclicly. Perhaps I did not explain that well.

— cdoke (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 12:15:58 PM | | Votes: 3   

With respect to renewable energy sources, solar cells and wind mill farms require an ungodly amount of space to be able to produce the same amount of energy that 'one' Nuclear Plant produces.

— Bmw8ter (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 7:55:06 AM | | Votes: 2   

You have obviously never been to places like Palm Springs or Palm Desert area of California! Your perspective on not having amount of space might change once you realize how much of vast open desert is available with sunlight shining down 365 days out of the year! Wind Mill farms has been successfully integrated into the small countries like Holland and you'll never them complaining about not having enough space. Meat and potato of the matter is that solar and wind and wave powers are infinite FREE source of energy that'll last forever. It does not Pollute. There are no adverse danger of any sort. It pays off itself in time.

If, a Internation Space Station can collect enough solar rays to convert for electricity from outer space, I don't see how some of you can't fathom that it is very posible back here on earth with little more inginuity.

— Homer008 (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 12:55:03 PM | | Votes: 1   

Nicehomer,

All reserve numbers are estimates. In the Petroleum Industry we have certain ways of dealing with uncertainty and certain SEC rules about what is called "reserves" and a further breakdown of that. There are 1.5 Billion BBLS of oil in the Oil Shales. The actual reserves may be 1.2 they may be 1.8 but for such an immense structure- it does not matter. The Department of Energy published a paper on this matter I don't rmember how long ago which stated that the felt we could produce 200,000 barrels a day from oil shale by 2011, 2 million barrels a day by 2020, and ultimately 10 million barrels a day. This I think is almost lunacy. Maybe they know something I don't.

They are trying to get it so they can produce from the Oil Shales at a cost of $40 per BBL. Personally I don't think that is going to happen. More power to them if they think they can do it.

Let me say this about Hubbert's Peak. Hubbert's Peak was created by generating a chart of cumulative production (Q) Vs. Annual production divided by the cumulative production P/Q. In the near term the data is linear, however, the early time data is not. The linear trend is one assumption and has the basic form P=a(1-Q/Qt)Q. There is another more implicit assumption that the number of new discoveries is a linear function of the number of fields still left to be discovered. That is an assumption that really does not stand up well to the data. If you want to read more about this there is a book "Beyond Oil- the view from Hubbert's Peak" written by Deffeyes a graduate of my department, a bit of a fool, and now a professor at Princeton [the only reason he is there is that he wrote another book in 2001 basically predicting the peak of oil in 2002. Didn't happen that is why he wrote the above book.

Let me say this Hubbertians have been predicting the Peak of world oil consistently since 1998. Each year, when it does not happen, they move the prediction back a year. That really is not a credit to the theory. Further, the assumption of linearity is just wrong- for the world the chart does not become even close to linear until 1983.

I support anything that would loosen the demand. Be that as it may different energy generation techniques aren't really going to do a lot. 3.0% was from fuel oil. Gas was almost 20% and it would be more advantageous to focus on removing that from the generation mix. Windmills and solar power aren't going to do much about the oil situation. Oil will contine to become more expensive as a function of time- although I freely admit that this is not, adjusted for inflation, the highest prices we have ever seen, but there are certain circumstances around that. With high enough prices and little enough domestic demand, we can undo the trade deficit time 10 by exporting oil.

— cdoke (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 1:08:13 PM | | Votes: 1   

nicehomer...I understand where you're going, but how is a windmill farm or solar cell farm in the desert beneficial to say, someone in Miami? Different locations will require a different approach. You can't put a windmill farm near a city of 5 million. They only produce a fraction of the energy that a nuclear or fossil fuel plant produces. Plus, solar panels have a relatively short lifespan and are expensive and the energy source for the windmills pretty much comes and goes "like the wind".

As far as pollution goes, coal fire power plants use scrubbers to dramatically cut down on emissions, and coal is one of the most abundant resources in the world; why not burn it to create power. Nuclear power is extremely safe and clean, but as far as the waste goes....oh well. The benefit outweighs the associated risks. Considering that technology advances by roughly 2 years for every 1 year past, I'm sure someone will figure out what to do with nuclear waste.

— Bmw8ter (View Profile)

Posted on 7/1/2007 11:48:35 PM | | Votes: 0   

I don't teach- I'm only 24 [ONLY I say...goodness]. I am a graduate student and no grad students actually teach in my department. I will have my Master's degree in Petroleum Engineering in December [only took a year].

My department is the department of Petroleum Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Most have probably never heard of CSM but it has many nicknames such as "the Harvard of Engineering", "MIT of the West" et cetera.

My department is one of if not the best petroleum engineering department in the world. We were paid by Abu Dhabi to establish and run Abu Dhabi Petroleum Institute. Egypt has approached my department with the desire to establish a branch of it there in Egypt where graduates will receive School of Mines diplomas.

...That Diploma by the way, is THE coolest one you can get in the engineering world. Go to Google and type "Silver Diploma"

— cdoke (View Profile)

Posted on 7/2/2007 3:54:02 PM | | Votes: 2