Good points. This is along the same vein of my concern about the oil industry itself in a high price oil environment. Expensive oil will have a negative impact on our ability to pump oil. Your talking about later on.

I'd say overall your probably right. Actually the worst problems are not crude itself but refineries. Its a huge investment to create and maintain a modern petrochemical refinery and the downstream plants. These do not scale well.

Well you just managed to lower my doomer quota a notch. I think your right. However I've been a big fan of micro scale reactors for chemistry but these make more sense with biofuel to plastic/jet fuel etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microreactor

So believe it or not I'm still optimistic.
Actually on that matter most people think I'm a super doomer I'm actually not. Our current lifestyle is unsustainable and we need to make major changes. In the short term we will have problems but a sane modern lifestyle that is low impact is quite possible and doable. The only sad part is probably at a much lower population level than today.

Even high estimates of sustainable population indicate that billions will probably die so we are looking at more people dying in a short period of time then have ever died in our history even WWII pales in comparison. So on on hand I'm optimistic and think eventually we will live within our plant on the other outside of miracle we are probably facing the darkest period in human history.

So for me the saddest part of our current culture is it has encouraged a unsustainable living pattern throughout the world its not the wealthy man having problems fueling his SUV but the poor farmer who now cannot get goods to market or fertilizer because he became dependent on oil. Everyone is addicted to oil and we will pay the price.

Interesting that you should mention "seldom used tankers", just the other day I read about the richest man in norway (an owner of oil tankers) and his problems regarding alot of spare capacity in the tanker market. Freight rates are apparantly just about as low as they can go without the freighters losing money. The article says they are hoping for OPEC to increase production so they have something to put in their ships. Even more interesting, tankers are being converted to bulk freight already.

took me 20 min to find the article again on account of me thinking it was on na24.no I had read it, but it turned out to have been on e24.no :), but here it is for those of you who read scandinavian.

"Permanent changes will soon hit the downstream segment of the industry. With changes like these, we might see quick, permanent demand distruction that permanently depressed the price of crude. Stuart Staniford was suggesting that this could happen in his post a couple of weeks ago."

A non linear event. As the Power Laws kick in.

To be preceded by and accompanied with "Shock Doctrine"
(Naomi Klein).

Even today, Klein notes, Chile remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. It's shock therapy miracle shifted "wealth to the top and shock(ed) much of the middle class out of existence."

It's the way it works everywhere and a glimpse of the future: "an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling super-profits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population (excluded); out-of-control corruption and cronyism; (decimated) nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; (mass) transfer of (public) wealth (and resources) to private hands (accompanied by) a huge (shift) of private debts into public hands." Inside the Chilean bubble was paradise. Outside was "The Great Depression." Bubble-benefitters reacted with "junkie logic: Where is the next fix?"

Israel attacks Syria's just delivered N Korea
cargo with a message to Iran.

How many times did you see this headline this week:

US Devalues It's Currency

Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens