Someone probably has better numbers than I do, but in round numbers I think that to convert a gas field to liquid fuel takes about 40% of the energy content of the recoverable gas reserves in the field, while it takes about 20% to deliver the gas to the U.S. via LNG.  

As I outlined elsewhere, fossil fuels can be viewed as a continuum, from natural gas, to NGL's, to condensate, to light sweet crude, to heavy sour crude to bitumen to coal--basically a transition from gas, to liquids to solids.  As Thom Hartmann pointed out, these are all various forms of "Ancient Sunlight."  

Obtaining liquid transportation fuels from light, sweet crude requires the least energy and money.   As light sweet crude becomes increasingly scarce, we will move to the endpoints--toward the light, more gas prone end and toward the heavier, more solid end.   In doing so, we will spend more energy and more money to get the highly desired liquid transportation fuels.

If Iran joins the nuclear weapons club what is it that other states fear? Israel appears to have a good beef in this case since almost all of the highest political figures in Iran want Israel "wiped off the face of the earth" or otherwise destroyed. However, by the same token, China has threatened to nuke Los Angeles, Hawaii, and other US targets multiple times in the last 10 years yet the US government does not treat them as an imminent nuclear threat. Yes, they are a potential threat but not imminent this minute. Thus it is hard to determine what is just political rhetoric from real threat.

Additionally, I am not sure that the US or Europe has any moral authority to deny Iran nuclear weapons. They do, however, have the moral authority to turn the entire state of Iran into glowing radioactive green glass if the idiots there use such weapons first. And frankly, in my opinion, the rest of the world would have the same moral authority against the US if we used such weapons first against Iran.

So maybe the best thing here is to negotiate an inspection system of Iranian nuclear weapons the way that the US did with the USSR? And for other nations to let Iran know that a first use of nuclear weapons means the absolute and total destruction of Iran. That would be my response to Iran - go ahead and build them but if you use them first, your entire nation will be a radioactive dead zone for a thousand years. And yes, that is harsh, but that might be the necessary message to send to the leadership in Iran.

Finally, I simply disagree, light299, with your statement that US nuclear weapons are a greater destabilizing effect than Iranian nuclear weapons would be. US (and USSR) nuclear weapons have given all the great powers considerable pause over the last 61 years and events that might have otherwise burst into full scale warfare have been handled differently. There is simply no way to predict how destabilizing or stabilizing Iranian nuclear weapons would be. I can assure you though that multiple other states in the Middle East, not just Israel, look with great concern at a nuclear armed Iran.

I think the main difficulty is that we have no way of knowing what's coming.  That trumps small details like your age or career choice.  

There are some people who do think society will collapse overnight.  That the whole U.S. will be like New Orleans after Katrina. There are others who think we will transition to solar or nuclear or wind power seamlessly.  Probably most people are somewhere in between.  

So people are doing a lot of different things to prepare, depending on what they expect the future to be like.  Some are learning skills like organic farming or spinning, on the assumption that we'll all be forced to grow our own food or make our own clothes.  Others are investing in alternative energy, expecting to get rich by owning stock in windfarms and such.  Some people are buying farms out in the boonies, others are buying homes in cities along commuter train lines.  Some are investing in gold, some in land, some in solar panels.  Some are just trying to pay off their debt.

Me, I'm keeping my options open.  I don't want to be tied down to a piece of land or to things - not yet.  The future is likely to be very unpredictable.  

Today, the majority of Americans live off the discretionary income of other Americans.  A vast amount of energy is spend on this discretionary spending--think of the millions of Americans driving to and from jobs every day that are related to discretionary spending (e.g., Las Vegas & Orlando).   These jobs will tend to be the first to disappear.  In general, one should focus on employment and investment in industries that are needed--energy; energy conservation; food; clean water; basic shelter; basic transportation; basic health care; repair & maintenance, etc.    

A crucial question in the years ahead will be careers paths for high school students, especially since we are supposed to have a record number of high school graduates around 2008 or so.  I would recommend that parents direct their children toward something related to the above needs.  I would not want to go into debt in order to pay for a degree in Anthropology for example.

I am actually not sure what to think. I think for a while things will deteriorate slowly. However I do think there is a good chance at some point society could suddenly collapse. That point is when everyone looses confidence in the system. When that is I don't know.

If oil is at $100, then how many people will stop buying cars and homes and other stuff. Once they stop, then how many people lose thier jobs? It turns into a cycle. At some point people realize there is no way out of that cycle

My confusion is knowing 'how much to bet' right now. If 'collapse was tomorrow' and I had a bunch of money, I would be buying a nice little piece of land in some remote area and living off the grid. Of course I don't think 'collapse is tomorrow', so how much time to I have? That I think is the big question. I certainly don't want to be living in a major city living the suburban life style when the trouble starts. For now I concentrate on paying off debt, saving money, learning new skills and staying informed.

Slightly off topic, but does anyone know of an ASPO type liquids graph, that instead of stacking Barrel of oil equivalents, does so on a net EROI basis?

Meaning that of the 1 trillion +/- barrels left according to Hubbert methods, that trillion is more sulfurous, deeper, sourer, etc and after extraction/refining might only represent 600gb of the type of oil our system is used to getting?  

Quoting Tess's comment from this thread:
http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1532:

"Oil futures aren't predictive as such. While the futures prices do kinda suggest that the market expects spot prices to be $x in y months, traders dont think of it in these terms. For a trader there is really only one value for oil, and the rest of the futures prices are thought of as differentials to the One True Price. These monthly differentials are affected by criteria such as:

• The cost of holding oil in inventory for x months
  
• A news-driven risk premium (e.g. niggling worries about Iran raise the back of the curve whereas immediate bombs in Nigera raise the front)
  
• The impact of current and future freight costs (if freight is going to be expensive in June due to lack of shipping, you may need to sell your crude more cheaply in June to keep the overall price for moving it around the world stable).
  
• The cost of money (ie interest),
  
• All of which are magnified if inventory is low, or less important if inventory is high.

Therefore there are limits to how much higher the December 06 contract could be relative to February 06. If December rises too high relative to Feb, then ever more crude goes into storage, because it becomes worth waiting to sell later in the year.

In other words, you'd never see Crude oil at $66 today but showing December futures at $100, because all the crude available today would immediately go into storage for the rest of the year, or even be dumped on tankers at anchor, thus causing the prompt price and the Dec futures prices to come much closer together, usually within a few dollars.

So really if traders thought that crude would be $100 in December, the price today would have to be at least $95 due to the economics of storage.

I'm sorry if I'm making no sense. Just trying to give a view of the way traders look at crude oil forward curves. The disappointing thing is you have to have rather a lot of capital on hand to trade futures beyond 2 or 3 months because there's just no liquidity except in the OTC market between the major banks. Inevitably, the easiest place to make money is by trading the spreads between prompt months (eg Feb-06, Mar-06) and more long-dated contracts (Feb-07, Feb-08 etc) (which you and I don't have access to, unless we make a market among ourselves. I may have to set up a website to do that sometime...).

I'm hoping to do my MBA thesis on the trading of crude oil futures so I've been hovering around the crude oil traders at the office recently

This is extremely interesting and I was going to take a flutter, but it looks like the structure of the thing is such that the contracts wouldn't pay out till 2020 when the pkyr20 contract will get judged.  No?  Volume is very thin on some contracts, so the estimates are probably pretty volatile at this point.

It's entirely possible that growing heavy sour crude inventories are masking falling light sweet inventories.  That is certainly what the price spread between light sweet and heavy sour suggests.

And in these modern times, if you can not touch are you then speaking with an image or a person?  Is it view graphs and manipulated images or a real product? How do you know that I exicst? How to you know that anything I refer to excist? How do you ge a feeling for the worth of my promises?

Solve 1% of this problem and you save the world millions of tons of oil.

This is also a proven technique for pig farm waste treatment.   Disadvantage is it still doesn't eliminate the nitrates from the solid residue.  I've modeled a number of scenarios that pay out in 6 to 9 years, depending on the price difference between what you pay for electricity you take from the grid and the price the grid will pay for your sale back of any excess kWH back into the grid.  Many US states have financial assistance programs which may get the payback down to as little as 4 years.