What the hell kind of links are those?
Australia produces 700k barrels per day!? That's a drop in the hat of the global oil production. Nice to see you pick one arbitrary country that is declining and run with it like the world is ending.
Nice try guys, once again, you have nothing.
Poor "Hydro" he won't accept the evidence untill his SUV stalls on the freeway because it's out of gas and all the gas stations are closed untill further notice.
Some more facts-"London Times January 26, 2004 North Sea exploration a loser, say oil experts By Carl
Mortished, International Business Editor
OIL GROUPS face growing pressure to quit the North Sea amid evidence of global failure to find big new oil deposits. The world’s top ten energy companies are failing to find enough new crude to replenish their reserves, according to Wood Mackenzie, the oil consultancy, which sees exploration in the UK North Sea as the industry’s biggest waste of money over the past five years. "
Australia ,United States and the United Kingdom were once EXPORTER of oil, now they must import ever increasing amounts of it.
China's and India growing economies have greatly increased it's imports of OIL."
More facts-"
Gary North's REALITY CHECK
Issue 362 July 20, 2004
IS $30 OIL HISTORY?
Yes, according to T. Boone Pickens, the legendary Texas
investor, who specialized in oil plays. He was interviewed on
"The CBS Evening News" (July 18).
He was careful not to say that he had special information.
He was making a "gut" prediction. The Saudis, he said, are not
in a position to increase their oil output significantly. They
are straining to produce today's output.
He said that he thinks oil is headed to $50/barrel. Thirty
dollar oil is history. Gasoline could hit $3 a gallon before the
end of the year.
~Now, let us turn from geopolitics to energy resources
-- although they are getting so intricately linked
that distinction between the two will soon prove to be
almost impossible. In energy terms, the Middle East's
importance is clearly undergirded by its vast petroleum
reserves -- reserves which clearly dwarf those of
other regions, as the Oil and Gas Journal reminds us
year in and year out.
This is stating the obvious. But sometimes we tend to
overlook the obvious.
It should, however, be borne in mind, that even Middle
Eastern oil reserves are limited. Oman's abrupt output
plunge of 2002-2003 was but the first warning; Syria
has just entered its terminal oil decline; even Yemen
seems to have peaked. Some would argue that these are
only minor producers. Correct. But that doesn't mean
major producers won't some day follow suit. Even that
greatest of all producers, Saudi Arabia, the allegedly
unsinkable "producer for all seasons," has its limits."
And more facts-"Exxon Head: Energy Independence Is a Myth
Tue Jun 8, 8:19 AM ET Add Business - AP to My Yahoo!
By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The idea of American energy independence is a myth and the United States must maintain "constructive relationships" with oil-producing countries for its own prosperity, the head of petroleum giant Exxon Mobil Corp. said Monday night.
"We do not have the resource base to be energy independent," Exxon Mobil chairman Lee R. Raymond said in a speech in which he outlined some of what he called the "hard truths" about global energy markets. "
"Army guard on food if fuel crisis flares
Mark Townsend and Martin Bright
Sunday June 6, 2004
The Observer
Hundreds of troops will be deployed to defend vital supermarket depots in the event of fresh fuel protests in the autumn.
Supermarkets have been told by Home Office officials to expect military assistance as part of draconian government plans to protect Britain's economy from a repeat of the events of 2000 when protesters brought the country to a standstill.
In addition, a series of large-scale rehearsals will be held over the coming month to test how measures to protect vital food and fuel depots would cope if protesters opt to press ahead with a series of blockades later in the year. ~Major retailers have also been assured that the intelligence services are stepping up their monitoring of potential protest ringleaders to ensure any major blockade is thwarted before any disruption is caused.
The secret plans have been agreed between the Home Office and the Food Chain Emergency Group, set up after the 2000 fuel protests and incorporating Britain's biggest supermarkets and food manufacturers. Their plans to safeguard the food and fuel chain from disruption go much further than tactics used by the police to quash previous fuel protests.
News that troops will be involved in any future fuel blockades follows reports that army chiefs had strongly opposed the use of soldiers to guarantee supplies in the event of fuel protests across the country. A network of vital fuel and food depots classified as 'vulnerable' to blockade have been pinpointed by industry experts from the Institute of Grocery Distribution and sent to the Home Office.
Although Chancellor Gordon Brown's decision on whether to risk a rise in fuel duty has been postponed to August, supermarkets have been told to remain on high alert. 'The Home Office has been in close contact and the security services are monitoring the situation, this is not just a police matter,' said a leading industry source. "
"Break out the bicycles
Oil is running out, but the west would rather wage wars than consider other energy sources
George Monbiot
Tuesday June 8, 2004
The Guardian
Some people have wacky ideas," the new Republican campaign ad alleges. "Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry." Cut to a shot of men in suits riding bicycles.
Sadly, the accusation is false. Kerry has been demanding that the price of oil be held down. He wants George Bush to release supplies from the strategic reserve and persuade Saudi Arabia to increase production. He has been warning the American people that if the president doesn't act soon, he and Dick Cheney will have to share a car to work. Men riding bicycles and sharing cars? Is there no end to this madness?
Like the fuel protests that rose and receded in Britain last week, these exchanges are both moronic and entirely rational. The price of oil has been rising because demand for a finite resource is growing faster than supply. Holding the price down means that this resource will be depleted more quickly, with the result that the dreadful prospect of men sharing cars and riding bicycles comes ever closer. Perhaps the presidential candidates will start campaigning next against the passage of time.
But a high oil price means recession and unemployment, which in turn means political failure for the man in charge. The attempt to blame the other man for finity will be one of the defining themes of the politics of the next few decades.
This conflict was exemplified last month by the leader of the British fuel protests of 2000, Brynle Williams. "I'm afraid to say I'm not very proud of what happened three years ago," he admitted in a documentary broadcast on S4C on May 4. "We all want turbo-charged motors now ... but we must remember that it's some poor sod at the other end of the world who ends up paying for it." Five days later, on May 9, he told GMTV that he was ready to start protesting again. Self-awareness and self-interest don't seem to mix very well.
To understand what is going to happen, we must first grasp the core fact of existence. Life is a struggle against entropy. Entropy can be roughly defined as the dispersal of energy. As soon as a system - whether an organism or an economy - runs out of energy, it starts to disintegrate. Its survival depends on seizing new sources of fuel.
Biological evolution is driven by the need to grab the energy for which other organisms are competing. One result is increasing complexity: a tree can take more energy from the sun than the mosses on the forest floor; a tuna can seek out its prey more actively than a jellyfish. But the cost of this complexity is an enhanced requirement for energy. The same goes for our economies.
They evolved in the presence of a source of energy that was both cheap to extract and cheap to use. There is, as yet, no substitute for it. Everything else is either more expensive or harder to use. Without cheap oil the economy would succumb to entropy.
But the age of cheap oil is over. If you doubt this, take a look at the BBC's online report yesterday of a conference run by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. The reporter spoke to the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. "In public, Mr Birol denied that supply would not be able to meet rising demand ... But after his speech he seemed to change his tune: 'For the time being there is no spare capacity. But we expect demand to increase by the fourth quarter by 3m barrels a day. If Saudi does not increase supply by 3m barrels a day by the end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult. We will have difficult times.'" The reporter asked him whether such a growth in supply was possible, or simply wishful thinking. "'You are from the press?' Birol replied. 'This is not for the press.'" So the BBC asked the other delegates what they thought of the prospects of a 30% increase in Saudi production. "The answers were unambiguous: 'absolutely out of the question'; 'completely impossible'; and '3m barrels - never, not even 300,000'. One delegate laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table." And this was before they heard that two BBC journalists had been gunned down in Riyadh.
The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in 2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have yet been scheduled.
The oil industry tells us not to worry: the market will find a way of sorting this out. If the price of energy rises, new sources will come onstream. But new sources of what? Every other option is much more expensive than the cheap oil that made our economic complexity possible.
The new technology designed to extract the dregs from old fields is expensive and doesn't seem to work very well, which is why Shell was forced to downgrade its anticipated reserves (other companies, under pressure from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, will surely follow). Extracting oil from tar sands and shales uses almost as much energy as it yields. The same goes for turning crops such as rape into biodiesel. Nuclear power is viable only if you overlook both the massive costs of decommissioning and the fact that no safe means has yet been discovered of disposing of the waste. We could cover the country with windmills and solar panels, but the electricity they produced would still be an expensive means of running our cars.
Just as the oil supply begins to look uncertain, global demand is rising faster than it has done for 16 years. Yesterday morning, General Motors announced that it is spending $3bn on doubling its production of cars for the Chinese market. Seventy-four minutes later, we saw the first signs of entropy: the International Air Travel Association revealed that the airlines are likely to lose $3bn this year because of high oil prices. The cheap carriers complained that they could be forced out of the market.
If the complexity of our economies is impossible to sustain, our best hope is to start to dismantle them before they collapse. This isn't very likely to happen. Faced with a choice between a bang and a whimper, our governments are likely to choose the bang, waging ever more extravagant wars to keep the show on the road. Terrorists, alert to both the west's rising need and the vulnerability of the pipeline and tanker networks, will respond with their own oil wars.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle," HG Wells wrote, "I no longer despair for the human race." It's a start, but I'd feel even more confident about our chances of survival if I saw George Bush and Dick Cheney sharing a car to work.
· George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order is now published in paperback
www.monbiot.com "
Of course I could go on like this for a very long time, the facts boils down to this, oil and natural gas are a fossil fuel that was "made" over 60 MILLION years ago under very special geological conditions.Those conditions don't exist anymore.
For every 6 barrels of oil we use, we find only ONE.
Shouldn't that tell you something?
Oil wells all over the world are either in decline or at their peak, with decline soon to follow and yet our excessive population and demand for fossil fuels continues to RISE.
Don't you see we have one hell of a problem with energy?
Without oil, the world can support only about 1.5 to 2 billion people.
We have at this point in time over 6.3 BILLION PEOPLE and growing!
I think "hydro" needs to get his head out of the sand.
"Either deal with reality or reality will deal with YOU! "
