[AlCzervik]

I just listened to Matt Savinar's interview on a local Phoenix show, which station is an affiliate of Air America. Two crackpot callers claimed that there are massive reserves in the Gobi desert, and one of them gave the old, tired position that these vast reserves are being kept hidden by the big oil companies. Does anyone have any solid numbers to debunk these fools?

[gego]

Seems that you are cuaght up in the details and missing the big point. The big point is the human population is 6.5 billion and 5.5 billion are only here as the result of eating oil.

Second big point is that all the easy to find oil has been found. Even if you believe the conspriacy theory that the big bad oil compainies are putting it to us all by keeping secret astronomical quantities of oil, those secret quantities are nothing that is going to keep this humongous population living.

Forget the low brow, right wing whackos, and look at the logic of the overall situation. Do you really think that oil companies, many of whom have shareholders breating down their necks, and many other little compaines that can't possible afford to hold production off the market are really going to conspire to drive up prices at some undetermined point in the future, when in fact thay can make a fortune sending their barrels to market today?

Leave the conspriacy theories to political intrigue where they are more likely appropriate.

[AlCzervik]

I completely agree on the big picture issue. I just wondered if there are any readily available numbers to explain to those who don't understand peak oil all that well that the estimated reserves in this region they have interest in for whatever reason are a drop in the bucket. But like you say, even if there are Ghawar type reserves, that is absolutely no long term answer to the effects of decline in oil production elsewhere and population growth.

[nero]

The Gobi desert is in Mongolia and China. China really has absolutely no reason not to exploit any oil reserves that they have under the Gobi. They do exploit those reserves under the Tarim basin. Mongolia has no oil production and little evidence of active oil exploration.

[jato]

I just listened to that Pheonix broadcast...some of those callers were worse than the Art Bell Show callers!

[linlithgowoil]

The big point is the human population is 6.5 billion and 5.5 billion are only here as the result of eating oil.

I need to know where these figures come from. As far as i can tell, about 5 billion people on earth barely use up any resources at all, whereas the other billion or so use a massive, massive amount or resources and oil.

How, then, can you say that 6.5 billion people are here as a result of eating oil? There are some people on earth who have probably barely used any oil products in their life and many of these people live on less than $1 per day. There are others who eat and drink oil by the cartload, day after day. How can you say that this consumption couldnt be balanced out and metered in order to allow 6 billion + peolpe to have a reasonable daily diet of around 2000 calories? It could be done easily were it not for corporate entities and 1st world governments preventing it.

[Doly]

Realistically, I don't expect governments and corporations to start sharing oil. But it's very true that, if poor countries can manage with very little oil, so can rich countries, if forced to. And it shouldn't mean a massive dieoff (I'm willing to accept a certain increase in mortality, though).

[ozonehole]

As somebody who has actually been to Mongolia (and spent considerable time there), I have a few things to say about it. The Russians did some test drilling there in the 1950s and managed to produce a single oil well near the booming metropolis of Sainshand (population 14,000). That oil well, Mongolia's first and last, ran dry in 1970. The Sainshand City Museum still has a beaker of crude oil on display - about the sum total of Mongolia's oil reserves.

After the Russians departed in 1992, western oil companies descended upon the place and also found not much of anything.

Mongolia is a very poor country, and if they had any oil, they would love to sell it. Just about the only things that country can produce in abundance are sheep and camels.

There seems to be a popular myth that desert areas must have a lot of oil. That just isn't so - even in the Middle East, only a small proportion of the land area has significant oil deposits. Yet a lot of people think camels=oil. If it were only so simple.