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TALLRITE BLOG
You can write to me at blog2-at-tallrite-dot-com |
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| February 2005 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISSUE #94 - 13th February 2005 [250+397 = 647]
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When Will the Oil
Run Out?
I am quite often asked this question by people who are unfamiliar with the oil industry, and it's not an easy one to answer, for reasons perhaps this post will make clear. According to published sources, the world has something like one trillion barrels of oil reserves (that is, 1012) and consumes around 84 million (106) barrels a day. Therefore we will run out of oil in 1,000,000 / 84 = 11,905 days = 32.6 years, ie in 2037 or thereabouts. That's within the lifetime of most of us (well, not me, obviously), so panic about a coming oil drought is entirely appropriate. Right ? Wrong. So wrong. For the equation assumes stasis, yet its two key components, reserves and consumption, are wildly dynamic and uncertain. Take CONSUMPTION. It is dictated by demand, but this in turn is driven
So if there is one thing you can be certain of between now and 2037, it is that consumption is not going to remain at 84 million bbl/day or any simple multiplicator of this. Then there's the RESERVES question, which is even trickier. Start by asking, what are reserves ? The reserves of a given oilfield are someone's best estimate of how much oil can be economically produced at today's prices and using today's technology. But reserves can't be measured like liquid in a swimming pool, because oil sits in countless tiny voids (eg the space between two grains of sand) within rock several kilometres downstairs and typically between a million and a billion cubic metres in size. So you have to estimate
On the last point, Recovery Factors for given oilfields range typically from 15% to 60%, with a global average of about 40%, meaning the other 60% doesn't appear in reserves estimates. The above is what you need to know, but all you can measure is a few metrics that will yield
So with this limited, spaced-out information, covering only a very small percentage of the rock, you nevertheless have to interpolate and extrapolate what it means for all of the rock. It is not hard to see, therefore, that if two engineers get together to agree on a reserves estimate, they come up with at least three different solutions. And that's not even to talk about human factors, such as
But even all this is only part of the story. Technology is changing all the time in a manner that in effect continuously increases reserves, as new ways emerge
And don't forget the direct effect of oil price.
Published reserves of the world's oil represents the sum of millions of estimates that take into account all the above factors. They are performed every day all over the globe by hundreds of thousands of engineers and geologists, competent and incompetent, honest and flaky, checked and not checked. So when you see a figure like one trillion barrels of reserves, know that it is no more than a best estimate as of a certain moment in time, and certainly wrong, and that it's changing all the time. Know also that less conventional energy alternatives - wind, solar, hydrogen, tidal - are developing fast, their costs are dropping and before long they will be able to displace significant oil volumes (in the process making oil reserves last longer). Above all, know and trust that there is no limit to human ingenuity. Indeed it is said that oil is found not in the ground but in that unfathomable, inexhaustible resource that is the human brain, prompted it must be said by the driving force of benign human greed that so fascinated the Scottish economist Adam Smith, spiritual father of capitalism. The limitless human mind will always ensure there is sufficient oil to meet humankind's needs until well after our grandchildren have died of old age. And then there's politics and oil. Ahh, but that's a story for another day.
Late Note: Later Note (29th February 2008) Who would have thought
it?
These fields alone would keep the whole world going for 1½ years! That “limitless human mind” is still working its magic. Every cloud has a silver lining. The chart below chart illustrates how the monstrously high oil prices of mid-2008 (approaching $150/bbl) can liberate vast quantities of additional untapped oil, to be measured in the trillions of barrels. All the oil ever produced to date amounts to just one trillion barrels. It comes from a paper entitled “A Systematic Approach to Hostile Environments”, by Ashok Belani, Schlumberger's Chief Technology Officer and Steve Orr, its President of Artificial Lift. The paper appears in the July 2008 issue of the prestigious Journal of Petroleum Technology, July 2008.
Well, Flight International magazine has now run the story, though it concentrates solely on what transpired within the Airbus A300 B4, to the exclusion of other angles. Nonetheless, its tale of three skilled crewmembers battling for 25 nail-biting minutes to save their aircraft and their own lives is a rattling good yarn of derring-do, which someone should surely turn into a movie. Since the article is subscription-only, I've transcripted it; just click on the flight-path thumbnail above. Especially if you're a film-maker.
Blair Should Apologise to Edward It's been a season of apologies. First, Ireland's President Mary MacAleese showed how to apologise after she likened Ulster's protestants to Nazis, and Protestants then showed how to accept an apology gracefully. Last week, the Irish Times' humorous, right-leaning columnist Kevin Myers spent an entire column being “very, very sorry” for repeatedly referring in a previous column to the children of unmarried parents as bastards and causing a storm of outrage. Both columns are transcripted here. (It is an irony, incidentally, that it is seemingly perfectly acceptable to procreate “bastards” but not to describe them as “bastards”). And Britain's Tony Blair issued a formal apology to the so-called Guildford Four and Maguire Seven for the gross miscarriage of justice that resulted in their having been wrongly imprisoned for 14 years for IRA bombings in 1974 in Guilford and Woolwich that killed seven people. All three apologies were gracefully received. Now we hear that Prince Charles is going to marry, with the blessing of both the State and the divorce-forbidding Church of England which he will one day head. The lucky girl is his mistress of 35 years, some divorcée called Camilla Parker Bowles, who still carries the surname of her cuckolded, discarded ex-husband. She is also (whisper it quietly, a Catholic, albeit non-practicing and probably by now a convert to some other faith). Yet despite all this (and widespread hostility on the part of the British public), Charles will apparently remain eligible for kingship. He should be ineligible for two reasons.
So if His Toniness is going to give Charles his seal of approval, then on behalf of the State, he should also issue a posthumous apology to King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson for the shabby way they were treated 68 years ago. Apologising is all the range and Mr Blair has shown he knows how to do it. Oh, and technically he needs an Act of Parliament to let a Catholic in the door. But he's hoping no-one (else) will notice. More on the love travails of Margaret, Charles and
Edward,
Freedom Institute Blog Awards Obviously Wrong-Footed I go incommunicado in Hungary for ten days and what happens. I suddenly find that during my absence, the otherwise excellent Freedom Institute has the temerity to make no fewer than five awards for Irish Liberty Blogging and a further one for an international blog. This apparently is to foster high-quality online political commentary and discussion.
Now the fact that the Tallrite Blog is conspicuous by its inexplicable absence from this list in no way leads me down the path of green-eyed-monsterism. I am the last to begrudge anyone winning anything, least of all the above worthy bloggers, all of whom I heartily congratulate and now hold in the highest (grrr) esteem. However, who dreamed up such boring categories ? The contest would have been far livelier, and thus the winner(s) even more worthy, had it been judged on criteria that are undoubtedly much closer to surfers' hearts and minds. For example, whose blog
There. I knew you'd agree with me. Looking forward to a slightly more enlightened FI awards process in 2006.
For full details and photos, click here.
Quote : “Three spooks and a lord” Gerry
Adams, president of Sinn Féin,
___________ Quote : “We had already taken the resolute action of pulling out of the (Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) and have manufactured nukes for self-defence to cope with the Bush administration's evermore undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the DPRK” The laughingly named Democratic People's Republic of
Korea
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Now, for a little [Light Relief]
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Gift Idea |
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What I'm
N E W ! The book is meticulously researched, magnificently structured, beautifully written - and drips innocent Chinese blood from almost every one of its 971 riveting pages. Moa Tse Tung was obsessed with simply killing as many of his countrymen as he could by whatever means in order to maintain the remainder in such a permanent state of terror that the idea of turning on him would never even cross their wretched minds. He also starved peasants in their hundreds of millions in order to confiscate the food they grew to pay the Soviets for a gargantuan armaments infrastructure. Most terribly, Mao was absolutely right. He proved that terror is the most effective way of retaining power. Too many despots have tried to emulate him, but none with the same single-minded ferocity. Disgustingly, people name restaurants in his honour +++++
In that role, as Hitler's trusted operative, he recounts much derring-do, such as rescuing Mussolini from mountain top captivity, bluffing the then Hungarian strongman into surrendering, wreaking covert havoc on the Allied invasion of France.
Particularly moving is his account, from the German viewpoint, This page-turner of a book concludes with a forecast of the role of Special Forces in future conflicts, which has turned out to be surprisingly prescient. It was written in 1954.
The purpose of this
It
does so, But the book is spoilt by the introduction of a storyline which is sentimental and distracting. Much of it is frankly boring. You might enjoy the sex which is detailed and graphic, but it's unnecessary.
Also, the interminable, repetitive description, going on for over 40
pages, of being About 200 pages should have been edited out. +++++ Other books here |
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After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver, |
