Saudi Arabia's Oil Reserves
- Thread starter Scottty
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PsihoKekec
Swashbuckling Accountant
There has been talk of them lying about their reserves for years and given their gluttony I'd reckon the talk is true. It's possible old oil reserves estimates are a bit low, but their own are certainly way overblown and they know it.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
9 is hard to believe. Like, what is the plan there? Cut 73 in half and that's more like the timeline where nations like to ignore future problems. And hey, if the west even partially weans itself off of oil that will stretch out much further.
posh-goofiness
Well-known member
Hey? You remember Peak Oil? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
That's not remotely funny peak oil was only postponed due to the discovery of fracking that doesnt mean it wont be a huge problem eventually or that it's any less of an approaching problem.
Simonbob
Well-known member
So do I.
The main reason "Peak Oil" was crap was both fracking and improved tech for exploiting existing finds. As I recall, the ways to get oil 50+ years ago couldn't get any more than 40-50% of what was there. Improvements in tech since have upped that percentage.
Between fracking and that better tech, there's vastly more oil than was claimed. Will we run out? Sure, in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
Same's true of uranium for nuke, too.
Eh, that prediction was made before a lot of modern remote/seismic sensing was widely available, and we are still finding new oil fields as people go back over old maps and survey new areas.
Israel for example found a massive field off their coast which was never part of those calcs, along with some new untapped fields off Central America, and even some of the Texas fields which had been very poor for a while have seen an bit of a 'refill' from the source rocks.
Peak oil is meme to help push a lot of the less sane radical environmental bits, and ignores ongoing geological discoveries.
Simonbob
Well-known member
Now, there's somebody who should be suplexed out a window.
And the fact that people have been talking about peak oil since we started drilling for it. No joke peak oil was talked about all the way back in the 1800's, and a lot of the same people (politicians, beaurocrats, etc..) were the ones talking about and pushing it then.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
To be fair, we really did hit peak whale oil.
Simonbob
Well-known member
Nah, you just need to let the whales breed, then there'll be more.
Whales are a proper renewable energy source.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
Pretty sure it was incredibly unsustainable at the pace it was being harvested back then, but if people really wanted to figure out how to farm whales maybe the throughput could be made that big sustainably. Obviously it's renewable at some level or other.
Simonbob
Well-known member
Honestly, its a silly idea. If you're going to farm for energy, you want vegetation. It won't swim away.
Maybe genetically modified bacteria in vats.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
But how long before you hit the ceiling of peak vats?
Also, found the book.
The reviews are worth a read, if you want a good laugh at seeing it torn apart. Dudes endlessly praises China, claim human misery is directly correlated with having children, and use Malthusian economic theory. They claim nuclear power can't be used as a solution because we need New solutions and nuclear isn't New so it doesn't count (Their ludicrous mental gymnastics are a hoot).
Fortunately, they know of a hip new power source that has never been exploited by humans before and isn't old news like nuclear: Wind.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
I, too, remember the post-Roman centuries of the "Great Eurasian Desert", during which no trees existed, and mankind existed only as a few straggling bands of nomads.
On topic, though: no way the "nine years" claim about Saudi oil are accurate, but their own claims aren't accurate, either. Or, to put it more accurately: there's probably enough oil for all of that, but getting it out would be prohibitively expensive, to the point that even using wind-mills (without subsidies) would ultimately become more cost-efficient.
That's the reality of "peak [x]". Not that we'll literally run out, but that as you use up the easily-available reserves, only the (increasingly) harder-to-exploit ones remain. This inflates cost (exponentially, over time), which means alternatives -- even ones that are currently more expensive -- will ultimately be cheaper in comparison.
(Anyway, this also proves that "peak wood" is a ridiculous bullshit claim. There were trees all over the place. Although it may be argued that "peak wood" was reached in certain regions at certain time in Antiquity. Notably Phoenicia, where they used so many trees for ship-building that they significantly increased desertification in the region, which meant that the remaining trees were more valuable if kept in the ground -- where they could help prevent agriculture-ruining erosion. Which naturally harmed their ship-building capacity, and ultimately contributed to their decline. Resources do matter. But "we will literally RUN OUT!" has almost never been true, in history.)
Agent23
Ни шагу назад!
I own something scarce, it turns out it is even more scarce.
Wouldn't I want the potential customers to know that, after all that would just drive the price up?
IMHO Saudi might have even more oil than what they tell us they have, it might just be more expensive to drill the new wells and exploit the new fields and the like.
If I own something that people have to buy I have very little interest in exploiting it too fast and flooding the market to where the price collapses or my revenues dip.
Wouldn't I want the potential customers to know that, after all that would just drive the price up?
IMHO Saudi might have even more oil than what they tell us they have, it might just be more expensive to drill the new wells and exploit the new fields and the like.
If I own something that people have to buy I have very little interest in exploiting it too fast and flooding the market to where the price collapses or my revenues dip.
stephen the barbarian
Well-known member
the problem is that they've used the size of their reserves to gain a controlling stake in opec. if those reserves are too small to maintain the status quo it could cost them dearly, and they don't have anything to replace their oil revenue