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oilmanbob on July 20, 2007 - 11:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

SynchroGENized:

Welcome to The Oil Drum ! I'm very glad that you decided to join us, and hope that you come away with a good feeling about our forum.

Gail The Actuary, who is the author of the keypost at the top of this thread, has written some clear, easy to understand materials-try looking back to early this week and you'll find some excellent material she's writing to serve as a primmer about peak oil. If you have questions about any of the technical stuff on this blog, please ask them. I think you'll find most of the folks who hang out here are knowlegable and happy to explain jargon and provide information.

The whole concept of peak oil is pretty simple. There's a limited amount of oil on the planet-most of the people here think its around 2 trillion barrels. We've used about half of the conventional crude, and we think that production will soon be going down because of geological restraints.We used the cheap, easy to produce oil first because it was the most profitable. Meanwhile, world population and consumption are growing exponentially-There were 2 billion people here in 1950, 6.5 billion now and estimated 9 billion in 2030. And they all want a car and a new house.

So in the future oil is going to cost a whole lot more, and there will be shortages with horrible consequences unless we conserve and switch to alternative fuels.

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step back on July 21, 2007 - 5:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The whole concept of peak oil is pretty simple.

It's simple and it's complicated.

When The Oil Drum (TOD) launched a couple of years ago, the chief editors used to give us amateurs tutorials about the oil industry: What is oil? How does it form? How do you find it (discovery)? How do you drill down to actually get it (boring)? etc., etc.

Many of us have read those tutorials.
We take it as a given that everybody else has also.
My recommendation to you is to first learn how to answer the above basic questions before making up your own mind about the Peak Oil theory.

I'm wondering if anyone kept bookmarks on some of the really old TOD tutorials?

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DIYer on July 21, 2007 - 6:10am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

At the top of the main page is a table with various TOD links. In the lower right corner, find this one:
Tech Talk

It goes to a page linking all, or many, of the industry tutorials which have appeared on these pages.

| The problem will solve itself.
|  But not in a nice way.

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NC on July 22, 2007 - 9:27am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Step Back,

Excellent point! I was also a very early visitor and poster at TOD. I clearly remember asking questions about production, reservoirs, and the like, expecting one of the resident oil experts to provide the answer. Often there were multiple answers and discussion about what the real numbers were and how to assess the validity of the sources. It was a wonderful learning experience for me (and I think others) that has now been relegated to premises - no longer needing discussion.

For me it was the process of verifying the premises that convinced me of the problem facing us. I always read TOD and other sources from the perspective of how all this application of money, technology, war intervention and the like will change the premise 'that the ability to deliver more oil in the future on a daily basis is no longer possible'. That is my testable hypothesis. I am looking for someone or some data to prove it incorrect.

The issue, for me now, is that contained within this simple premise is a very large background of information about things like permeability of rock, the price of drill steel, extraction rate vs oil in place, refining capacity of light sweet vs heavy sour, and a myriad of other tidbits that are required to convert a hydrocarbon deposit in the ground to gasoline in the tank. Without understanding these details it would be easy to convince me that more oil could be produced.

I suggest all new people to the Peak oil issue visiting TOD spend significant time researching these gritty details. They are all stored somewhere on TOD if you can just ferret out the threads. IMHO, TOD is the best place to find the technical answers presented in layman's terms.

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step back on July 23, 2007 - 4:01am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

NC,

One of the "Peak Oil Primers" (by Wolf-at-the-Door) has a Jargon page that may be useful to newcomers:

http://wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/mainpages/jargon.html

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