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Friday, July 20, 2007

OPEC countries ignore West's agenda

"Washington apparently didn't note the recent statement of Saudi oil executive Sadad Al-Husseini: 'There has been a paradigm shift in the energy world whereby oil producers are no longer inclined to rapidly exhaust their resource for the sake of accelerating the misuse of a precious and finite commodity."

[Link: St. Cloud Times Opinion:]

It is hard to fault the logic of the Saudis on this one. If there were a hint of logic in the human race, that would be what we would all be trying to accomplish. Oil has been so undervalued these last 100 years. By using oil for heating and transportation we are going to use all of this precious resource up in the next couple of decades even though both of those uses could be done in other, granted less convenient, ways. In the meantime critical uses such as advanced medicines that are derived from hydrocarbons will be withheld from future generations.

I doubt if OPEC will be able to hold on to that goal when the U. S. starts running short of gasoline. Mr. Bush or those that will follow in his footsteps would never be able to let that happen. We are far too committed to this valuable commodity. We are determined to go down driving.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Accumulating risks' to world energy supply

The world is not running out of crude oil and natural gas but there are "accumulating risks" to securing global supplies through 2030, a high-level board of U.S. oil company executives found in a report obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

Those risks include "political hurdles, infrastructure requirements and availability of trained work force," according to the study by the U.S. National Petroleum Council, conducted at the behest of U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.

[Link: Reuters]

I have seen a lot of these kind of articles lately. Basically they follow a line of logic as follows. We don't really have an oil supply problem. There is plenty of oil out there. Enough to last us for a long time. The only problem is that we are having some difficulty getting to it, or there are political problems barring access to the oil, or there is insufficient funds to provide adequate levels of development of new reserves, or there is a shortage of critically skilled workers to work the fields, or that inadequate technological innovations are being applied to the existing fields, or..... Doesn't it strike you that maybe that is, in fact, exactly what peak oil looks like. When the easy oil is disappearing there are probably uncounted ways that are going to make the rest of the oil hard to get at. Peak oil chroniclers often state that we won't be able to know whether we have reached peak oil until long after the event has actually occurred. The reason for that must at least partly be due to the fact that many of the early manifestations of peak oil just look like another bad day at the office.