[rockdoc123]

As I understand it, all the world's important onshore wells have been recently redeveloped using SOA secondary and tertiary production methods in order to capture the remaining oil. So the Ghawar oil reservoir is now mostly just a thin film of petroleum floating on an huge water reservoir. The Saudi's was among the first to employee horizontal drilling to skim that oil off. (Yibal field in Oman was actually the first. It's production fell of a cliff.) It now seems Saudi Arabia is in chaos. Perhaps because the truth leaked out

Jesus wept. You have been instructed on this numerous times but you keep wandering back to the same completely incorrect assumptions.

Ghawar is not a thin film of petroleum. The water saturation varies across the entire pool. It is an edge water injection drive which displaces oil in front of it. If you actually read the paper you keep posting pictures from (which you obviously haven't) you would realize this.
The horizontal wells which are called Maximum Reservoir Contact wells were drilled not to "skim the oil off" but rather to avoid water coning from fractured zones that could be found on new seismic as well as reduce reservoir drawdown at the same time increasing total reservoir Kh in contact with the well bores. They are nothing like the short radius horizontal wells that were drilled in Oman way back when, completely different.

Suggesting the power struggle over the crown in Saudi has something to do with oil field issues is probably as stupid as anything else you have surmised.

[onlooker]

I posted this same post on the "Its All Good" thread.
Well I guess then we should all just concede that "doom" is something that is very abstract and in the eyes of the beholder like beauty. I think the principal purpose of some of the posts of us more pessimistic posters is to sound a general alert to those who might hear. I think it is rather glib and short sighted to simply point out that doom happened before and is the normal state of affairs for humanity. That may be right but I happen to think that this particular suite of threats is unlike any our species has ever faced. What makes it interesting is that we are more technological and "modern" than we have ever been. I think this is imbuing many with a false sense of security.
One of the things that initially attracted me to this site was precisely that it was about Energy. Our entire technological edifice rests on availability of energy. It powers our industrial world economy.
But even beyond this is what someone like Montequest a previous poster on this site alluded to in the basic ecological condition of Overshoot of our species. Ibon, is quite familiar with all this given his education and professional background. I am just a student. We are in severe overshoot of our entire planetary environment. Ibon I think has confirmed this. This is a situation that we have never encountered as a species. So, we have no exits available like in past times with the colonization of the New World ie. Western Hemisphere. We stand perched at the height of our powers but ironically we stand at our most vulnerable point because of that. Imagine it as we have now the farthest to fall.
Our principal vulnerability is the same one many past civilizations have encountered. The Environment. The difference is everyone on the planet is to a greater and lesser degree now vulnerable as our overshoot condition is planetary across almost all areas. By overshoot it is not just in numbers but in our lifestyle and how we have come to rely so much on it for our basic survival in the rich countries. Imagine if you will the Electrical grid going down all over the US. Food delivery and other essential deliveries like medicine would stop. Water provisions in many cases would soon stop. Without lights social order could quickly cease. Hospitals would become useless. Can we really grasp what a toll this would take in terms of fatalities. And the longer this situation were to persist the greater the toll presumably. What if it suddenly became permanent. So, in summary, we stand to obliterate each other upon initiation of a Nuclear War, we stand ready to succumb in large numbers to a lethal Pandemic and we stand teetering on a crash of our Financial system that could literally bring to many people around the world this very scenario , I just described with the Electrical grid.

[Newfie]

Onlooker

I tend to side with your assessment. I think Ibon is optimistic on several fronts. I pray he is right.

[rockdoc123]

rockdoc, you are late to the game. The brilliant analysis of SPE data at the oil drum was pretty much settled May 15, 2007 by a dozen oil engineers and geologists, a lot more professional and obviously more competent than you. They would not waste their time with pikers and amateurs like me. Why you bother?

I am just reporting what I read a decade ago. You had nothing to say then, and surely nothing to say to m

You clearly did not understand what it was that was described and you did not read the SPE paper. Dozen engineers and geologists ....horseshit. Maybe 1 or 2 and a bunch of wannabees. It doesn't matter, I've read the paper and it is a simulation not based on actual measurements. It does not say there is a thin layer of oil on water at all and the diagrams that you just posted argue against that. Given you actually, don't understand what it is you are looking at or what you have read I suggest you stop making comments that are clearly incorrect. You can't support them from what was written on the oil drum or from the SPE paper.

[onlooker]

Onlooker

I tend to side with your assessment. I think Ibon is optimistic on several fronts. I pray he is right.

Newf, I also hope he is right and I am wrong

[SeaGypsy]

Why start another thread to discuss a thread in the negative? Weird.

[Plantagenet]

I think Ibon is optimistic on several fronts. I pray he is right.

I think Ibon is basically right. We look set to bumble on for another couple of decades.

Climate change will eventually bring doom, but probably not for a few decades at least.
Ditto for overpopulation----we can probably bumble on for a few more decades feeding the masses.
Peak Oil? We hit conventional peak oil over a decade ago but we're doing OK with unconventional oil. No reason that can't go on another 10-20 years.
Economic crisis? No doubt we'll go into another recession pretty soon, and maybe it will be another "great" recession or even a great depression---but I don't think that means doom.

Then there are the wild cards like nuclear war, or some kind of plague or disease that wipes out huge numbers of people. These might happen tomorrow---or they might not. Lets just put them off for 20 years as well.


The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse aren't ready to ride just yet----give them another 20 years or so.....

[SeaGypsy]

I think Ibon's points are primarily we can do quite well with quite a lot less & that doom is a recurrent constant, each generation contemplating it's own demise & projecting that onto the collective. Uber doomers put the date close & link it to scientific maxims or magical dates, middle of the road doomer put it out in their personal old age, cornies put it way off into the distant future.

[mmasters]

I predict it will bumble on for at least 30 more years. Once the oil can't keep the beast happy it will be Natural Gas that feeds the beast and we've got tons of that.

[Newfie]

Again we stumble over the time frame. Yes we may well strumboenon for 3o years before hitting the wall. So does that make me a doomed or a cornie?

There’s a good chance I’ll be dead before we hit the wall. Doomer or Cornie?

There is little chance m grandchildren will have the life I’ve enjoyed, they will likely live in a world of reducing population? D or C?

[dohboi]

Thanks for the Albrecht Dürer print, P...one of my fav's from waaaay back