An amusing thread this...
I don't know how many of you actually work in oil & energy. I do and although I am not a geo-physicist (never call them geologist, they will crap all over you), I know several. They are responsible for finding new oil or gas and knows a thing or two about where to look.
I have been on a few lectures with them, and I have tried for a few days now to get a hold of the latest presentation I attended, just to show you guys a little from it.
Granted, there are a lot of factors that need to be in place for our mother earth to create petroleum or crude oil. You need the ingredients, the temperature, the sand filters, the highways and the trap. All of which is needed to produce oil or gas. One of them missing and you get nothing.
But the ingredients are plentiful and a map over the earth where these are found would be prudent at this point. When I get a hold of the presentation I talked about, I might make a thread about it.
Anyway, on this map there are explored areas and unexplored areas. You would see that the unexplored areas are larger than the explored. Oil could be found all over the world. Some areas are easy to extract like Saudi Arabia (you just need to poke a hole in the ground and oil comes out), others need advanced technology to get the black gold out, like Norway.
Yes the current world oil resource, meaning what we know exist in the ground at present and what we can currently forecast, will last around 40-50 years or so. But this is not taking into consideration that we have huge areas where oil could be, but haven't checked yet.
There are 3 factors to consider when it comes to oil and gas in the future.
Personally I don't get why the oil-price is so high.
- New technology will increase the amount of energy we extract from petroleum. Currently only 12% of the energy harvested from petroleum is actually moving the car.
- New technology will increase the extraction percentage of wells and instead of only getting about 30-40% of the oil up to the surface, we can with new technology double that. (giving new life to old wells).
- Unexplored areas, e.g. North in the Barents Sea and on arctic landmass (for Norway), will yield petroleum for many decades in the future.
Why worry now over the shortage of oil, when in truth we don't need to worry about it until 20 years from now.
I think it is a combination of scaremongers like the 14 or so that has answered positive to this poll, low dollar value and the unrest in Iran or Nigeria (yeah some fear that they won't produce as much as they have promised), that cause the price pr barrel to be as high as it is. I won't buy the reason about there being too little oil to go around.
Dollars don't buy as much as it used to and since oil is nearly exclusively sold in dollars, the prices are high to cover the so-called losses.
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