[Aaron]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/business/08OIL.html?ei=5062&en=0d37ff17e7cd8a75&ex=1082001600&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

uh oh

Look at the numbers in this article. This is a staggering conformation of what many energy and financial experts have been warning about. There are significant economic incentives for companies and governments to distort the numbers when reporting on oil reserves and exploration activities.

There are many, (and growing) resources examining peak oil. I suggest that you google peak oil first.

Then look here for the basics.

http://www.dieoff.org/

Next read what this guys is saying... he is not selling a book, so that gets my attention right away.

http://www.oildepletion.org/roger/index.htm

This guy is an investment banker...

http://greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_of_rome_revisted.pdf

[Aaron]

Quote from NY Times today (see above post)

"Internal company documents and technical papers show that the Yibal field, Oman's largest, began to decline rapidly in 1997. Yet Sir Philip Watts, Shell's former chairman, said in an upbeat public report in 2000 that "major advances in drilling" were enabling the company "to extract more from such mature fields." The internal Shell documents suggest that the figure for proven oil reserves in Oman was mistakenly increased in 2000, resulting in a 40 percent overstatement."

Now why would Philip say such things? Because investors won't invest in oil companies that can't produce oil. The same thinking applies to other companies and entire countries as well. Admiting to lower reserve estimates is economic and career suicide. It therefore seems likely that this is not an isolated case, but rather a systemic problem for oil and gas interests. This implies that the global oil picture is much less rosey than is commonly acknowleged and lends credibitilty to peak oil predictions.[/b]

[Pops]

Aaron

Exactly, and the Saudis and most of OPEC DOUBLED their reserve estimates in ’85 for no apparent reason other than to increase their output quota, and though pumping away furiosloy ever since, their reserves haven’t EVER gone down!

As Rummy said: “There are things we know, and things we know we don’t know and things we don’t know we don’t know” (or something unintelligible along those lines).

Pops

[Aaron]

Gee... I figured this post would produce more buzz...

The point is that if this is a systemic problem which is industry wide, the figures for all reserves could be greatly overstated. Hopefully, it's just a singular example of corporate greed, but would not other companies and countries have the same motivation to lie?

Complicating this is the dated method used to quantify oil reserves. Look at the USGS website. Here is how it works...

Experts establish 3 separate estimates of a given reserve. F95 F50 & F5 are the categories. F95 means there is a 95% chance of recovering a stated amount of oil. F50 = 50% F5 = 5%. This averaging of estimates is historically accurate and supported by backwards analysis of known trends in oil reserve estimates. They take the F95 and F5 estimates, and average them for the "best guess" on reserve amounts from a given field. This only works on historic data analysis however. Future estimates cannot be accurately calculated in this fashion because the nature of oil production changes over time. The first half of a given reserve follows this F95/F5 model pretty closely, but as fields mature, the much higher F5 guess becomes more unlikely. Look at the F5 number from USGS here:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-060/sum1.html


1,202,168 MMBO seems like fantasy land.

Interesting that the USGS has this little graphic posted on their website

http://geopubs.wr.usgs.gov/open-file/of ... 00-320.pdf

Despite 30+ years of technical advances in oil discovery and production techniques, the ONLY increase in reserve estimates during this time has come from corrections to previous estimates. NO NEW major oil discoveries have occurred since the 1970's despite these technical innovations. Common sense would indicate that the largest and easiest to locate fields would be found first of course. In the light of aggressive oil exploration world-wide, the lack of a major find in more than a generation lends credibility to the idea that we have already found the easy stuff. As I have posted in this forum already, nobody but the whackos think oil will ever run out completely, but will rather decline in quantity over time. So it's a question of timing... Which makes the Oman field story much more significant? If it's a singular example, then ok... But if this is a more wide-spread practice, then current estimates could be very wrong indeed.

Of course alternatives to oil will help ease the burden, but there is no real argument that oil is many times more efficient as an energy source than any known combination of alternatives. If Oman is indeed representative of global reserve estimate practices, it is possible that the global peak has in fact, already occurred.
[/url]

[Kenny]

The co-author of that report, Jeff Gerth, is also the author of the big NYT article in February that compared Saudi's production capacity and mapped it against IEA's projected demand. That was one of the most mainstream pieces to-date questioning our conventional wisdom about the world oil supply.

But Jeff Gerth seems to be sniffing out the peak oil story pretty heavily. I expect we'll be getting some interesting articles from him in the coming months.

[dmtu]

Note the disclaimer lower left.

[Aaron]

If you mean the one from the USGS website... I saw it.

Your point was...?

[dmtu]

That it's not really USGS supported. To some I suppose that would matter.

[Aaron]

I was just surprised they would post it at all

[dmtu]

Me too. Also seems like it was hard to find, like at the bottom of file 13.

[chad]

I just bought a factory new Defiant Vermont Casting wood stove and it is not air tight as it is drawing air in throught the door and ash box. A distributor salesperson verified the problem and can not seem to get a person to fix the imperfections on this expensive stove. It has been over a month and I can not use the stove. What should I do?

[EnviroEngr]

The 'experts' you need for this question are in this area. The other 'Experts' deal with questions pertaining to energy resource depletion more specifically.

Good luck here. By the way, I recommend you keep calling supervisors and managers until you get to the owner of the company. You can then consider filing a damages suit in a Small Claims Court.

[Cool Hand Linc]

Write a letter to them. Explain the problem. Include pictures if possible. Let them know you would like to have a resolution to the problem. Ask them to give you a plan on what or how they intend to resolve this problem.

Keep copy of letter and pictures. Give about 2 weeks for a reply. Then contact the better business bureau. File a complaint. You need as much information as possible to take to the better business bureau.

At least this is how I would handle it.