I haven't posted on AD for a while now, I've been busy. But I'm glad to see that the debates are still going and intelligent, well thought out commentary is still flying on every topic. 'xcept maybe the one...

I'm not sure how many of you are familar with the concept of 'peak oil.' Here are a few primers to sum up the issue:

Energy Bulletin's Primer
Wikipedia

To sum up in my own words, essentially oil production at individual wells follows a known cycle: production begins, increases, plataus and then declines. So goes the well so goes the country. Overall a country's oil production curve should therefor be bell shaped. This production pattern is well known and documented. For instance. Production in the USA has been following such a curve for a while and US production peaked in 1971.
IMAGE
like that.

The thinking goes... it's only a matter of time until world production begins to peak.

The question is therefor:
When and how do we prepare for a peak in global oil production?


Edited to remove image in accordance with forum Rules.

We discussed Peak Oil several times over the past year. Here for instance. Opinions ranged from those like me who take the issue very seriously and are changing their living arrangements accordingly, to those who think there will always be more oil, to those who think there is always a technological solution.

A couple of other places where I, and others, discussed Peak Oil can be found are Here and Here.

Oil is replenished from below the earth's mantle. It's not from decayed organic matter. Russia does the ultra-deep wells and have shown that anyone can get oil anywhere if they have the money to drill deep enough. Case in point: Vietnam's ultra-deep Tiger oil wells. The US oil companies did a "survey" and told the Vietnamese they had no oil below them to help them rebuild what the US destroyed in the war. Then Russia dug the wells and lo and behold they struck oil far below the deepest levels the US oil companies dig. Ergo: 'peak oil' is a lie designed to, well, I'll let you figure that out.

DO you have a link? Oil is an organic compound. The earth is mainly metals and silicas.

Where did you learn this?

A once again Truthmarch shows up with the 'any conspiracy theory in a storm' motif.

In this case it is the Thomas Gold Abiotic oil theory. I call it the Thoms Gold theory because it started when this man published a book about it, and pretty much nobody in the world's scientific community except him believes it. Well, Gold and Truthmarch.

The problems with the theory are replete, not the least of which is that crude oil is composed of organic compounds, and even Gold could not hazard a guess about how an inorganic process could produce organic compounds. Mind you, if it WERE true, it would certainly set the creationists in a tizzy.

In this case, I fear we are going to have to side with the virtually unanimous planetary scientific consensus that oil is organic remains, and a 2 second internet search will gve you the very reasonable and unsurprising explanations of how organic remains can be found even at great depths. The wacky, one-man theory of abiotic oil will have to remain just another desperate daydream of the modern oil companies...

Vermillion, I wonder if it is fair to put down Thomas Gold's abiotic oil theories as thoroughly as you did. After all, he was a renowned scientist and it happens that abiotic oil theories weren't original with him, having first been proposed by Soviet scientists in the 50s. The theory also explains the presence of organic material within hydrocarbons by postulating that bacteria deep in the earth's crust feed on gases released by the earth. Bacteria at great depths have been independently confirmed. You are correct, however, in saying that his theory is not generally accepted.

The issue for this forum, however, is not how much oil there is, but rather how much oil there is that can be recovered at an acceptable economic and environmental cost. After all, there is lots of oil in heavy crudes, tar sands, and oil shales. The problem is that recovering these hydrocarbons and refining them is both expensive and an environmental nightmare. The per unit increase in carbon release to the atmosphere over conventional oil alone makes a heavy reliance on such sources inadvisable. Oil shale recovery may take as much energy input as is gained in output. Deep oil, if it exists, would have similar constraints. (Also, if my understanding of geology is correct, anything over a certain depth would be converted to gas, not that that is not a valuable fuel).