[reggieUK]

So there I was, Mr Sceptic, finally convinced by the arguments on here and the by the brlliant, updated intoduction page at LATOC that P.O is indeed on the way, if not here. Well done everyone for convincing me. So then I print stuff off and start going about convincing others and alliances are being formed and groups of self sufficient Ray Mears wannabees are starting up.......but then this morning I turn on my PC, have a look at rense and come across this article:-

http://www.rense.com/general63/astson.htm

© 2005 American Geological Institute. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the express written consent of the American Geological Institute is expressly prohibited.

Source

<edited by Aaron>

so is that once again the end of peak oil?
If not, could someone explain why not?


Reg

[Moderators Note:} Please scroll down to "smileys" post for the truth on this article. The thread title is misleading.

[julianj]

When its in ASPO, or Oil and Gas Journal I'll believe it. Rense.com lacks a tad of credibility - look at the homepage and see, Oh wait, I'll save you the trouble:
He believes in UFOs, He doesn't believe in the Holocaust. If you are a sceptic perhaps your sh*t detector needs new batteries?

[Aaron]

When its in ASPO, or Oil and Gas Journal I'll believe it. Rense.com lacks a tad of credibility - look at the homepage and see, Oh wait, I'll save you the trouble: He believes in UFOs, He doesn't believe in the Holocaust. If you are a sceptic perhaps your sh*t detector needs new batteries?

http://www.geotimes.org/june03/NN_gulf.html

[Kingcoal]

I'm surprised reggie, this is a simple PO argument. How much oil is needed to get the oil? When it's one barrel for one barrel, might as well give up and take up knitting.

[JoeW]

so is that once again the end of peak oil?
If not, could someone explain why not?
Reg

Reggie--
Even if true, all this does is delay the peak. We can't even be certain how many years into the future the peak would be pushed back. However, if peak happens at midpoint of ultimate recovery, my guesstimate is that this could push it back by about 15 years, since recovery of 1000GB means 500GB more oil recovered prior to the midpoint...at our current global consumptions of 30gb/yr, 15 yrs would be 450GB, and if our consumption is growing by a modest amount, the other 50GB is probably eaten up by the growth.

[reggieUK]

When its in ASPO, or Oil and Gas Journal I'll believe it. Rense.com lacks a tad of credibility - look at the homepage and see, Oh wait, I'll save you the trouble: He believes in UFOs, He doesn't believe in the Holocaust. If you are a sceptic perhaps your sh*t detector needs new batteries?

It was actually in geotimes which I imagine has more cred than rense. Rense just copied the article http://www.geotimes.org/june03/NN_gulf.html

[Geology_Guy]

The premise of Hubbert's peak is that about 1/2 of the worlds easily pumped oil has been used up or discovered. This still leaves about 1 trillion ! barrels to find and pump. We are going to need many monster oil finds in the next 50 years to get that trillion barrels of oil.

The study you mention gives more insight into what geologists have known for about 50 years-that the Gulf of Mexico has a lot of oil and gas. The trick is at what price can it be recovered? Matt Simmons says we need $182 dollar a barrel oil to get enough investment in the oil industry to go after these deep oil and gas finds (remember we used up all the shallow oil first). That price might make a lot more oil and gas recoverable for a while, but the consumer will really be yelling about it.

[crude_intentions]

4 questions.

1. If this is from June 2003, why is this new? If they've been working on this from 2003 you think we would have heard something by now.

2. How Much of this energy source could we recover

3. How Expensive will it be both terms of Energy and Money, to recover this source.

4. How long will it delay peak, when you factor into todays exponential growth rates in energy consumption

[smiley]

Reading is difficult. Apparently too difficult for the people at Rense.

original article

This is the original article from Cathles.

What he has been studying is a process called gas washing. His major contribution is that he found out that oil is more mobile than previously thought. It can migrate between different reservoirs, or it can be vented through the sea floor.

Apparently this process is so effective 90% of the hydrocarbons has been vented even before humans have laid their hands on it. When he is speaking about those vast quantities of oil he is not talking about oil that is there (like Rense misunderstood) but about hydrocarbons that were there 10 billion years ago.

Oil chemistry requires the petroleum system in the northern Gulf of Mexico basin to be a flow-through system in which very little hydrocarbon is retained between the source and the surface, and almost all (>90%) the petroleum that escapes its source vents into the ocean. About 30% more hydrocarbons than have been produced and consumed by humans throughout the entire petroleum era have vented into the ocean from the small Corridor. Admittedly, this occurred during a fairly long period of time (about 10 million years), but clearly humans and nature are promoting the same basic process (the venting of hydrocarbons).

The significance of his work is that by understanding migration it becomes easier to identify deeper oil reservoirs.

[Geology_Guy]

Geotimes is a credible publication. If you read the article it says that the area in question may have about 60 billion barrels of recoverable oil. A lot of oil for sure and I know the oil majors are hunting there already. Enough oil that we will see $1 gas again for a while?-not likely.

[reggieUK]

Reggie--
Even if true, all this does is delay the peak. We can't even be certain how many years into the future the peak would be pushed back. However, if peak happens at midpoint of ultimate recovery, my guesstimate is that this could push it back by about 15 years, since recovery of 1000GB means 500GB more oil recovered prior to the midpoint...at our current global consumptions of 30gb/yr, 15 yrs would be 450GB, and if our consumption is growing by a modest amount, the other 50GB is probably eaten up by the growth.

I'll trust your estimates and I wouldn't know whether the article is 'true' but along with other smaller finds etc and if this is part of a bigger discovery and if "petroleum geologists could tap into reserves larger than the North Sea", then peak may be pushed back a lot further. Even assuming 2008 is the accepted peak year that still means 18 years to go and if peak can be pushed back a bit more to 25 years then things will be 'fine' as 25 years is enough time to sort things and I think we all have to concede that governments do know what is going on and indeed are acting on it now albeit not transparently.
I don't know how many who visit this forum who are newish to the whole subject of peak oil have read the updated, (10 days ago) in a nutshell report on the whole peak oil thing - at LATOC - but here's the link
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Introduction.html

Anyway, I think we need to know if this find is indeed 'true' before we all have to be honest with others start telling them to expect and prepare for peak oil.......in 18 years!!

To warn others is great but for anything more than 5 years, never mind 18 simply won't get taken seriously...as it hasn't been. Nobody isgoing to give a flying f*** about 18 years time because we could all be dead by then!

REginald

[Aaron]

The significance of his work is that by understanding migration it becomes easier to identify deeper oil reservoirs.

Yea!

Smiley wins!

[crude_intentions]

I think your forgetting, Peak Oil is'nt about running out of oil, its about running out of CHEAP oil, and the impact that its going to have on todays energy addicted world. If the price of Recovery is $200-300 dollars a Barrel, then your still gonna have problems, and if it takes more energy to extract than you get then it is'nt going to be worth it.

[Geology_Guy]

What Smiley said very well is-you have source, but do you have trap?

In the Gulf of Mexico risk comes from a poor trap.

[aahala]

A new large source of oil has not been discovered. What has been discovered is a new webpage about such a source. The discovery that was made and the discovery that wasn't are subtly different things.

[peaknik]

Just checked the Geotimes article with a geologist, he said that it is well known that just a tiny percentage of all the oil generated in the source rock stays there. The rest just migrates out to the atmosphere in the case of gases or seeps to the surface (known even in the Bible!).

In the sea this oil is spilled into the sea, as the article says.

This is not new, just trying to improve detection methods by following the seepages (he cited ExxonMobil saying that the industry needs to switch to direct detection techniques of the fields... or it will die).

Also, nothing is said about how to turn seepages into "actual barrels" or better, how to extract the base resource that has not migrated yet.

[turn74]

so is that once again the end of peak oil? If not, could someone explain why not?

Reggie--Even if true, all this does is delay the peak

Delaying the peak is the goal at this point. A few more of these discoveries will push it forward 50- 100 years.....

[bobbyald]

reggieUK, I don't know what you really believe but it's good that you argue for the other side. I believe this site needs more like you.
Personally I believe that you will have more joy arguing the consequences of PO rather than trying to disprove PO itself. Unless oil is infinite or being continuously renewed you have few options. Good luck.

[MattSavinar]

The article states this find is equal to 1/3 of the amount we've used since we started using oil.

At current rates of demand growth, we will use as much in the next 25 years (or less) as have since we first started using oil.

This means this new find is enough for 8 years when one accounts for continued demand growth. This means, if we are now in the "petroleum plateau" as seems to be the case, this "HUGE new find" is only enough to push the peak back by 4 years.

Of course, this is assumming there are no problems with the oil find that the article failed to report.

As I'm sure many of you have experienced, there always seems to be later-found-out catch when you find an article that initially seems to satisfy the hope (shared by all of us) that the crisis will be either be significantly abated or put off long into the future.

I reckon if there was no "catch" that the article failed to report, we would have been hearing and reading about this find a lot by now.

On a side note: I rarely check the Rense site (for what should be obvious reasons) but whenever somebody sends me an article about "peak oil is a fake crisis engineered by the evil members of shadowy group X!" or about there being some massive hidden amount of oil some group is caniving to keep from the rest of us, it always seems to have a link to the Rense site, even if the original article came from somewhere else (Geotimes, in this case).

Matt

[Doly]

What the article leaves perfectly unclear is how to extract this oil. Is it easy, hard, impossible? How much of that amount is actually possible to extract?