PEAK OIL REVISTED

by Murph

I am reasonably sure that everyone that comes to this site is aware of the concept of peak oil, that is, the maximum production of crude oil world wide, and it infers that from that point on, there will be less oil extracted from the ground.

Lately, I have been running into information about peak oil that is casting some question about its validity. I recently had this site sent to me;

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3340274697167011147&hl=en

It is a long movie, around 75 minutes, of a lecture by Lindsy Williams who allegedly spent a number of years at the Alaska oil operations and wrote a book debunking peak oil. This lecture was delivered to The Granada Forum. Williams is a Baptist preacher that spent much of his time as a missionary. I gathered that he was figuring to take the word of God to those poor men working in the oil fields and add their souls to the list of saved. In the lecture, he didn’t mention how successful he was at this. The lecture was concerned with what he learned from the few years he was there. He says that he learned that there is enough oil in Alaska to supply the U.S. for 200 years at our present rate of usage. He says that the oil find has been squelched by the government because if they started pumping oil that the price would drop dramatically and cause the immediate collapse of the American economy. He further maintains that the cost of extraction alone domestically is $3 per barrel and the cost of extraction alone in Arab oil fields is $5 per barrel. He also maintains that the high price of oil enabled the World Bank and the IMF to forgive the 3^rd world countries their debt by having us pay for it through this high price. He also says that the World Bank owns the entire Amazon basin, where they have oil. Williams quotes a lot of other statistics but the whole emphasis was that there is a whole lot more oil available for domestic production than the government will admit to, namely that the oil available in Alaska exceed the size of the Arab oil fields.

Williams delivers his lecture in the style of a Baptist preacher and the whole thing could have been condensed down to 30 minutes. If you sit down and think about what he said and hopefully took some notes on it, there are a bunch of questions he never talks about. Give it a listen and see what you think. He claims that he was taken into the confidence of the big oil executives and they told him all of this stuff. Does that make sense to you?

Richard Heinberg has a post up concerning abiotic oil that is interesting.

http://www.energybulletin.net/2423.html

In this article he contends that the abiotic oil people simply have not proven their case, and sites a lot of data to warrant his attack.

I also found an interesting article on the genesis of oil.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47448

Here is another article concerning abiotic oil

http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=45838

Here is an article by John Hofmeister oil executive who says Matt Simmons is dead wrong about peak oil.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=59502

Among the problems facing this tired old world, I for one have no desire to spend time being concerned with something that is not true. But, this whole peak oil controversy is a mute point in my view. Even if there is 500 years of oil available, so what? The PTB seemingly are restricting the availability of the stuff and it might as well be peak oil in fact. I presume you are aware of the current prices for gas and the downward statitics for extraction and the loss of refineries in this country. Down from over 300 in the 80’s to less than 150 today. Another point; unless abiotic oil is for real, it is still a finite resource and to continue the escalating usage of it to build an empire means that when we do run out of extractable oil, it will just be that much worse in the future.

I have the view that the worst thing that could happen for this world is the finding of large quantities of crude oil that could be extracted easily. Do we really want to continue destroying the environment and peoples lives with the stuff? It most assuredly appears to me that as long as oil is plentiful that is exactly what will happen and the world’s population will just keep on increasing. Of course, this is not even beginning to talk about peak everything else either. 500 years of oil will not provide fresh water for agriculture. So many of the world’s populations seem to think that humans can live in an entirely self contained sterile world and the environment and all it contains be damned. But oh what the hell, two alternatives here. Use up everything on this earth trying to raise everybody to the same living standards of the U.S. and Europe or depress everybody to third world living standards or below with the elites in charge of it all.

You will notice that none of the presidential candidates seem willing to address these kinds of problems. It’s still business as usual for all of them. We are doomed either way I tell you, doomed!!