[Petrocrash]

Hello everyone. Re-newb here.

I am a former member, some of you old-timers here may vaguely remember me. I believe I was here for about about six years, give or take, between 2005 and 2011. Don't know why my username/login info was gone so re-registered. Unfortunately, no going back to my former contributions here to review where was in my knowledge and thinking at the time but I do know that I was aboard the pro-PO (sic) bandwagon right up until I put the issue/topic on the back-burner. From what I can gather, I seem to have been among an exodus of PO-philes at the time, I assume most for the same reasons I bailed: Un-conventional production increases and the shadow-of-doubt.

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with, nor am I educated or professionally associated in any capacity, as to the intricacies, methods, academics or disciplines, nor the technologies that contribute to the production of oil. I was just a mere observer with a lot of time and an intense concern about an alarming phenomenon called 'Peak Oil". I'm sure I followed the same arc as everyone else on the pro-PO side of the debate. I took my position based on my own daily observations and research, not from any form of industry expertise. When I walked away from the debate, I told everyone I had been warning about PO that I would no longer be talking about it (I'm sure to their relief) because some things were happening that were giving me pause and the only way I could see to know for sure one way or the other was to move on with my life and if we were truly in a post-peak scenario, the social, economic, and geopolitical implications would reveal that fact. Now, after a decade, I am for the first time tentatively dipping back in to the issue - but not the debate. Which brings me to today, and back to PO.com.

The reason why I'm dropping back in on the issue is not oil production, which to my dismay, seems to still be growing after 10 years. Looks like a significant drop in Feb 2021's data at EIA - Production. Same as it ever was, the signals that turn out to be mirages. Shrug. Anyway, I'm back to the topic because of what I've seen in the past decade as signals other than production numbers, as mentioned above: social, economic, and geopolitical signals.

One of the signals I am receiving (I'm seeing multiple, which were enumerated as "effects" in the warnings of PO) which, I will admit openly and perhaps sheepishly, seems rather woo-ish, even though it derives from my own observations: the convenience of a global pandemic that is reshaping how we live and work, thereby reshaping the consumption of oil EIA - Consumption. I know, I know...woo-woo! According to projections, consumption is expected to recover. And my thinking requires a conspiracy to create a pandemic. I know! But I can't help it - TPTB to meet occasionally to shape the world economic landscape!

So, anyway, I'm back to get a sense of where we are with regard to PO. I don't know how long I'll be back on the subject, probably until I am driven away again by the doubts and contradictions and the signals that end up as mirages. Your comments and links to resources that will assist me in updating my knowledge of the situation are greatly appreciated. I will be mostly lurking, but may jump in occasionally with a question.

Hope everyone is well and staying safe and to my fellow Americans here, a reflective and contemplative Memorial Day.

[Newfie]

Welcome back.

Things change and stay the same.

I think there is a lot to your observations. The GREAT RESET sounds like a shill game if I ever heard one.

I am not so much into conspiracies as into thinking we are approaching the apex shown in the Limits To Growth charts. As we approach that peak thing should start to get wonky. Oil, fossil fuels, are only one of various resources we are depleting. Water may catch us first. Yet I still think the global financial Ponzi will be the first shoe to drop. People are feeling the unease, that feeds the pandemic.

Time will tell.

[aadbrd]

my thinking requires a conspiracy to create a pandemic.

At least you're a little self-aware.

[jedrider]

my thinking requires a conspiracy to create a pandemic.

At least you're a little self-aware.

Or, during a pandemic, even more conspiracies are created out of sheer imagination.

However, the pandemic has been a good inflection point, but nothing more IMO.

I think real estate has run wild and will be, or is, the next boom-bust cycle.

Peak Oil and Peak Re-estate are closing intertwined IMO.

Short-on-Oil = Short-on-Real-Estate.

However, commercial real-estate has had a run-up in tandem with residential real-estate,
but the two will be disassociated soon IMO. That is my hunch. Peak Oil and Peak Economy
are closely associated. Could be that the pandemic will have propelled this event as well.

[Plantagenet]

my thinking requires a conspiracy to create a pandemic.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity and incompetence.

There was no single vast conspiracy creating this pandemic....but there were a couple of small conspiracies that compounded several incompetent and downright stupid actions.

First....the stupidity.

About 10 years ago Dr. Fauci began to fund research in China to collect samples of the most dangerous covid viruses at the Wuhan institute of technology. This by itself wasn't unreasonable, but it led to programs in Wuhan designed to artificially create more deadly versions of the natural covid viruses. Fauci himself clearly understood this was part of the program from the very beginning because in 2011 Fauci said that programs to artificially modify viruses should be done, even if it led to a global pandemic. Well....thats exactly what happened. Fauci was incredibly stupid not to see the risk of a pandemic resulting from the programs he was funding in China.

anthony-fauci-backed-virus-experiments-despite-pandemic-risk/

And more stupidity....

The Chinese conducted "gain of function" experiments on the deadliest of the natural covid viruses they had collected with funding from Dr. Fauci. There is some evidence US scientists helped them. And some of these experiments were conducted not in the highly secure P4 lab, but in much less secure P2 lads. Stupid stupid stupid.

And more stupidity and incompetence......

The artificial virus we now call COVID19 somehow infected several of the researchers in the lab, causing them to become infected with Covid19 back in the fall of 2019.

u-s-intel-report-identified-3-wuhan-lab-researchers-who-were-hospitalzied

And now the first conspiracy.....by the Chinese CCP leaders.

The covid virus got loose in the city and the Chinese authorities chose to silence doctors and pretend it wasn't loose. Then they lied to the world about it. The gave false information to the WHO and to other medical authorities around the world. They lied and claimed it wasn't airborne. They closed down Wuhan to domestic travel but left the Wuhan international airport open so the virus could spread through the world. Some brave doctors tried to alert people in China but they were forced to confess to phony thought crimes or they were disappeared. Some scientists pointed at the Wuhan lab and called for transparency.

And now the second conspiracy......by Dr. Fauci and his researchers

At the beginning of the pandemic some very prominent scientists around the world said the data showed the virus was artificial. But a small group of scientists proclaimed that it was racist to blame the Chinese and there virus was clearly of natural origin. These scientists organized their fellow scientists and published an open letter proclaiming that they were objective and uninvolved scientists who wanted only the truth, and anyone who said the lab might be involved was a racist and a cad. But they were lying.....the scientists who organized this letter were actually the very same scientists who were being funded by Fauci to work with the Wuhan lab. They lied about not personally involved.....they were deeply personally involved and were just trying to cover up what they had done. And for over a year the coverup worked.

the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan

And now more incompetence.....

The world health organization followed the Chinese line and told the world that there was no transmission through the air. Idiots like Dr. Fauci said the same thing, and advised people not to wear masks. Trump didn't help with his negative statements about masking. And so the virus was loose to spread around the world.....

And its still spreading.....new and more dangerous variants still appear with shocking regularity.

This all could have been stopped right at the beginning if the Chinese and Fauci and his ilk hadn't been so damned stupid in supporting the "gain of function" experiments that created Covid19. And then Chinse scientists were damned incompetent in their lab work to get themselves infected and then to spread it through Wuhan.

And it still could have been stopped if the CCP authorities had tried to stop rather then covering it up.

But now its loose on the world.....and the only to stop it is get everybody vaccinated. And that means supporting Moderna and Pfizer to make as much vaccine as possible and to fund them to design new vaccines to fight the new variants.

But even now we've got more stupidity. This time from Joe Biden who wants to strip the patent protection from Moderna and Pfizer instead of supporting them in their efforts to make more vaccine and new vaccines for all the new variants.

Hopefully at some point we'll get ahead of this....but we aren't there yet.


Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity and incompetence.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

Sounds more like mass stupidity than conspiracy.

I just finished rereading The Big Short, about the 2008 crash. The similarity is that the crash was caused by stupidity, mass stupidity, within the financial systems. People believed what the herd believed, the party line. The very few who figured it out and made fortunes shorting the system were all odd people, not people people. Independent thinkers who looked at data.

Stupidity gets us to go along and get along as self domesticated critters. Its a feature, not a flaw.

[jedrider]

Anyway, Fauci funding virus research in China is NOT a big deal. Mostly, it is to acquire the results of their studies, would be my guess. I don't think that the Chinese need a measly $600K for virus research, but they do need the collaboration IMO. The collaboration seems to be lacking now, but then it was Trump that withdrew American virologists stationed in China. BTW, I do subscribe to the lab leak hypothesis of how Covid-19 came to become a pandemic.

[aadbrd]

This thread should have nothing to do with Fauci. There are plenty of hangouts on the internet for Qanoners to circle-jerk.

[Plantagenet]

There are plenty of hangouts on the internet .....to circle-jerk.

IMHO you should get vaccinated so you can go out and start interacting with real people again.

Cheers!

[mousepad]

There are plenty of hangouts on the internet .....to circle-jerk.

IMHO you should get vaccinated so you can go out and start interacting with real people again.

Cheers!

Bravo, I second that. That self-crowned moderator is certainly also going on my nerves.

[aadbrd]

10 years on, I think it's time to rebrand the site for what it is.

[jedrider]

+10

[Tanada]

10 years on, I think it's time to rebrand the site for what it is.

If you hate this place so much Mos why is it you resubscribe every time you get banned? This is what, your seventh screen name around here?

[nordblom]

Actually, Petrocrash, you weren't wrong. Little early but so was I. Fracking had been around since the 50s but was way too expensive to do so the oil companies let it go. Fracking didn't pay this time either but it gave many a time to rant, to throw dumb comments at PO people. Fracking was just an expensive way to avoid reality. And most of all, a time to scream "ain't we great" which Americans love to do. We slid ever deeper into fantasy, hate, name calling and sheer ignorance. I spent some time working with what we call "addicts" and see the same behaviors in all this. However, it did make the final years of my life more pleasant. In the end, reality always wins.

[AdamB]

Actually, Petrocrash, you weren't wrong. Little early but so was I. Fracking had been around since the 50s but was way too expensive to do so the oil companies let it go.

Since the late 1940's actually. By 1955 it had been utilized 100,000 times. So no, if it was too expensive oil companies would have let it go at about...20. And according to the USGS, circa 2015 something like 2/3's of all hydraulic fracturing has taken place in the 20th century, not the 21st. So no...no one let it go.

Fracking didn't pay this time either but it gave many a time to rant, to throw dumb comments at PO people.

So it didn't pay off in any of the MILLIONS of times it has been done? Boy are those oil company folks stupid!! And what folks throw at PO people is all the times they claimed it was going to happen, was happening, or would happen tomorrow, when it didn't. So who here is dumb? The folks who don't know anything about a oil field completion technique, like you, or the PO'ers who never figured out when PO happened, even when they claimed it had ALREADY happened...and got it wrong anyway?

Fracking was just an expensive way to avoid reality.

Hydraulic fracturing is just a completion technique. All of my multi stage slick water fracks into Devonian aged shales were pretty cheap, how expensive were the completions you supervised? Maybe we can tell war stories? And compare our costs.....

In the end, reality always wins.

Indeed. But the more important question/comment might be, why would a new poster like you ignore the facts of the matter, in order to make fantasy land posts on a topic you obviously know nothing about?

[jato0072]

I will piggyback on this thread.

I am back too after going to sleep ~12 years ago. I could not seem to get into my old account "jato" so I made this new one.

Things seem to be heating up! It appears oil has peaked globally. It is being sold as "Peak Demand" due to "climate change", green new deal, etc. Either way I am back on the prowl trying to figure out WTF is going on!

[Heineken]

Hi Petrocrash. I remember you vaguely. I was away a long time too. I made maybe one comment a year. I've "returned" slightly lately (big deal). I came to the conclusion that PO theory was mostly wrong, and even if was right, it wasn't too important. For me the real issue is GW. I see GW as about 1,000-fold more important than PO. And even more imminent. What we've seen is that there are so many alternatives to oil and gas, and they actually work or can be made to work at levels sufficient to sustain our precious lil civilization. But with GW there is no way out, and the whole nightmare is getting worse every single day. It is our doom.

[Outcast_Searcher]

I will piggyback on this thread.

I am back too after going to sleep ~12 years ago. I could not seem to get into my old account "jato" so I made this new one.

Things seem to be heating up! It appears oil has peaked globally. It is being sold as "Peak Demand" due to "climate change", green new deal, etc. Either way I am back on the prowl trying to figure out WTF is going on!

Even if peak oil is actually here re supply (and we won't know for years), the good news now is that with EV technology growing, there are now actually VIABLE alternatives to run light motor vehicles than spending FAR more money to fight to burn scarce crude oil.

Having good choices HAS to be a good thing for consumers. And given the reality and progression of AGW, it HAS to be a good thing for the biosphere too (though whether humanity will be smart enough to deal with the problem well enough over time is VERY much up in the air, given how expensive and inconvenient that would be. Given humanity's short sightedness, I'm not at all optimistic we'll do enough quickly enough to avoid a LOT of pain, at the minimum.

And of course, depending on what happens to demand as electrification progresses, even if peak supply has passed, was the cause less demand, or that less supply was practical to provide at a reasonable cost (given the reduced demand). It might be hard enough to tell that people could be arguing about that for decades or even centuries.

Thus far, the evidence has been quite consistently that over time, as the economy grows, the higher oil demand ends up getting filled. What's going to be new is that the demand is unlikely to keep growing after, say, 5 more years, even though things like global asphalt demand and global petrochemical demand and perhaps global jet fuel demand might keep on growing, and perhaps very significantly.

[jato0072]

even if peak supply has passed, was the cause less demand, or that less supply was practical

For me the cause of peak oil does not matter. Humans will continue to burn the remaining oil over the next century. Obviously, there will always be oil left in the ground which is not economically exploitable.

I am not personally concerned with "climate change". I am concerned with The Great Reset. Not that Klaus Schwab is in charge of the world, but the WEF, governments and mega-corporations are using the COVID flu to initiate The Great Reset.

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

I just don't see how we are going to keep the electrical grid up and running without fossil fuels (2050?). Forget electric cars. Not that I am against them, but I don't see how we are going to transition to an electric economy and keep business as usual.

[Newfie]

Jato,

I have similar thoughts. I AM worried about climate change but also general resource depletion, pandemics, and the general state of the world economy. I don’t think the WEF is behind the Corona, but are using it and peoples general unease about the future to gain control.

There are rational paths forward; nuclear power up as fast as possible, power down as fast as possible, reduce population as fast as possible.

What I SEE is that we are stumbling forward, like a junkie looking for the next fix. We have not hit our personal bottom.

Yet at some point we will, and how that goes will be interesting.