<Adapting In Place: Whether, Why and Wherefore Ought Thou The Oil Drum DrumBeat: February 6, 2009>

56 comments on Mechanics of Future Oil Price Volatility (A Flubber Cobweb)

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noutram on February 6, 2009 - 8:04am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Well, you learn something everyday.

I've take the graphic from the .pdf and added a bit of annotation to spice things up -the question is: "Are we there yet?"...

With Whalebone, after the initial 'decline' (which was much less % wise than we have seen with oil btw.) the price recovered and never really fell back to its lowest lows after peak production. Roughly the price doubled again within 10 years.

Nick.

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jeffvail on February 6, 2009 - 9:57am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Very interesting! I do think, however, that oil may exhibit even more extreme movement as, at least in my opinion, we have no acceptable alternative to oil use at presetn. I don't know the value of whalebone precisely relative to its replacements, but my impression is that it was replaced (at least eventually) by superior products made of spring steel and plastics--at least for now, we don't have any "superior" replacements to oil...

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noutram on February 6, 2009 - 11:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

your right, we don't have superior substitutes at the current price "oil is it" (if this where not the case then the substitute would already have been substituted I guess!)

The question then becomes: at some higher price point is there a substitute -e.g. ammonia or hydrogen for transport. Of course we then get into issues like timescales for the substitution due to current built stock, etc.

Perhaps we are just heading for a world where we are just using a much greater fraction of our wealth to do a lot less. Alternatively if we can become much more efficient in how we do 'what we do', we might be able to maintain some sense of normalcy in the decades ahead.

Nick.

P.S. Just seen the oil price -dips below $40 seem to be triggering buys...

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GreenEconomist on February 7, 2009 - 7:46am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The difference is that the world economy did not run on whalebone. A whalebone price spkie did not tank the global economy. There was money available from a functioning economy to pay these progressively higher price spikes. Each time oil hits >$90/b the economy tanks, so can real oil prices keep repeating the above pattern for long before a market of $'s for oil ceases to exist?

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RobinPC on February 9, 2009 - 9:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Microhydro:

probably all the way down to EROEI <1. (It might be economical to pump oil for chemical feed stocks)

Is is credible that there will still be a chemical industry pumping anything if(when) we are down to oil EROEI<1? Pumps powered by what exactly? (I don't presume the answer is no, but I wouldn't rule it out.)

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Engineer-Poet on February 11, 2009 - 11:08pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Pumps powered by wind would do nicely.  There are plenty of pumpjacks in Texas up through Kansas with plenty of wind, and excess might even be fed to the grid.

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56 comments on Mechanics of Future Oil Price Volatility (A Flubber Cobweb)

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