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Tar sands and shale is also not oil and that hasn't stopped anybody.

Pete in reference to what you just said: "Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed. " Friedrich Nietzsche

ennui2 wrote:Tar sands and shale is also not oil and that hasn't stopped anybody.

Shale first, a lot of conventional oil comes from shale beds, the only thing different now is companies that use hydraulic fracturing produce that same oil much more rapidly. It is still oil just like it always was.

Tar Sands are sand embedded with oil, where most of the lighter fractions have gradually managed to escape into the atmosphere or water table. When you use heavy equipment to mine tar sands you are working on a layer that is hundreds of feet thick.

Methane hydrate clathrates are not, from anything I have ever read, hundreds of feet thick and sitting near the surface where they can be mined and processed.

I have never read much on this but if your description P, is only mildly correct it seems it is evidently not worth the effort to access it.

onlooker wrote:I have never read much on this but if your description P, is only mildly correct it seems it is evidently not worth the effort to access it.

One of those things that appear to be so true today. And yet, as with everything from deep oil, to offshore oil, to shales and oily dirt and extra heavy and Arctic oil and..one day...hydrates...the human desire to burn stuff appears difficult to stop.

Yes particularly stuff that so effectively powers our Industrial civilization.

onlooker wrote:Yes particularly stuff that so effectively powers our Industrial civilization.

It just seems to intuitive, doesn't it? There is this methane, wonderful stuff, that if we don't gather up, generate some power with it, and release it as CO2, Mother Nature would otherwise just...waste? Put it into the atmosphere as methane, give it a few years, and it will become CO2 without so much as a single home heated, iPhone powered or EV fueled...talk about a waste. People won't stand for that so sure...one way or another....we'll go after that fuel sometime, even if it isn't economic today.

pstarr wrote:I too desire to look like Brad Pitt and frolic in the murky waters of Florida Bay with Pamela Anderson. But yeah . . . surely those dreams will never come be mine

A great many feats of technology have been achieved over the years due to a lot of dedicated effort to get from point A to B. If people approached problems with your defeatist attitude, they never would have been achieved. But the fact they did, often in the face of luddite naysayers, indicates that you can never just stand up and say "Alright, progress is over!" It's not over yet. Not until the zombie horde is dragging us back down in the Olduvai gorge, and we're not there yet.

I am not saying we're going to have warp drive and flying cars, but there will be SOME surprises in store for the future. There's really no way to predict what they will be or how it could change the dynamic for fossil fuels, renewables, or whatever.

Your continued implication that we have reached the proverbial end of history and it's only downhill from here is jumping the gun. From my vantage point it is supremely obvious that you are jumping the gun on calling doom, and only in a safe zone like this can you find anyone else to rally to your defense on a near-term civilization crash.

Can just imagine it -- industry coming to a national park near you to capture methane -- oh joy.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... e-gas.html

pstarr wrote:ennui, you started this idiotic thread for no reason other than...

Wrong. I started it because there deserves to be a thread on it and it should not pollute Monte's thread.

pstarr wrote:Turns out we knew since 2005

Kind of like all the predictions that shale or tar sands wouldn't be a thing? The past analysis here is not indicative of future performance.

Your insistence on shutting down discussions on the basis of the case supposedly being closed is annoying in the extreme. This is a valid topic and it deserves to be here.

pstarr wrote:I can't stand your style ennui.

Rest assured, the feeling is mutual.

pstarr wrote:it was clear a decade ago that methane hydrates would never be produced

What does "it was clear" mean? Clear to whom? PO.COM posters? I'm talking about what industry is doing. They're fiddling around with hydrates now, even with low oil prices. It's not case-closed yet by any stretch of the imagination. You can keep stomping your heels and claiming it is, but it isn't. Now corn ethanol, that is more of a clear case of a fad that ran its course and has little legs anymore outside of the corn lobby. Hydrates are still relatively uncharted territory.

pstarr wrote:You know the drill: when the oil-production cost basement (the crude oil price at the terminal necessary to support continuing oil-field production/maintenance) rises to match the refinery-price ceiling (the amount the consumer is willing/able to pay plus the cost of refining and shipping the gas/diesel to pump ) then all production including underseas fizzy candy comes to a halt.

There are still a lot of unknown variables in this narrative.

pstarr wrote: There is no way to bring it up.

Famous last words.

pstarr wrote:See above. The predicament is known.

There are a lot of unknown variables in that narrative. How many times are we going to restate the same position again and again. Stop presenting it as case-closed. The future hasn't happened yet and it will prove one side right and the other wrong.

This thread exists so we can track things over time, and there WILL be interesting developments. Rest assured.

pstarr wrote:There are no unknown variables.

Didn't you say you don't make predictions? That's a prediction.

Be prepared to eat your words later.