Venezuela oil 'may double Saudi Arabia'
- Thread starter tmarket
- Start date
Time to invade! I'd move down there if it was the 51st state. 
I find sensational headlines of recent oil discoveries annoying. People read them and think all is well, no issue here. Well, it's more complicated than that.
The rush to oil sands, shale oil, deepwater offshore.... are all examples that conventional oil has likely peaked.
Keep in mind that extracting oil from sands like in Alberta is energy intensive and requires a lot of natural gas. It's basically a mining operation. After you dig that sand up and transport it, you have to heat that sand to separate the oil - and that's even before refining it. And that oil is not the low sulphur content, sweet crude that pops out of the ground on it's own pressure in places like the middle east.
Also keep in mind that many unconventional recent discoveries require oil to be at 60-70 a barrel to be profitable.
And a reminder - The Peak Oil view is not that one day oil will disappear - it never will - but that a long process of increasingly commercially challenging oil will replace the cheap easily extracted stuff. This long process could potentially have periods of volatility, depending on demand spikes, and if the rate of production declines accelerate. Canterell, which I believe used to be the second largest oil field in the world, recently peaked at 2 million barrels a day and is now producing 400-500K a day. That's a huge hit for Mexico. Mexico may not be the exporter it once was.
One more thing. Historically, the trend is that when oil is 4% of GDP - we have a recession. Right now, $80 a barrell hits that threshold. If the recent oil discoveries require 60-70 dollars a barrell to be viable, and we are not finding any more easy oil like we used to... well, you don't need to be a rocket scientists to conclude that oil is trending up, and in the midst of the largest credit crisis since the Great Depression - I see little to be optimistic about.
The rush to oil sands, shale oil, deepwater offshore.... are all examples that conventional oil has likely peaked.
Keep in mind that extracting oil from sands like in Alberta is energy intensive and requires a lot of natural gas. It's basically a mining operation. After you dig that sand up and transport it, you have to heat that sand to separate the oil - and that's even before refining it. And that oil is not the low sulphur content, sweet crude that pops out of the ground on it's own pressure in places like the middle east.
Also keep in mind that many unconventional recent discoveries require oil to be at 60-70 a barrel to be profitable.
And a reminder - The Peak Oil view is not that one day oil will disappear - it never will - but that a long process of increasingly commercially challenging oil will replace the cheap easily extracted stuff. This long process could potentially have periods of volatility, depending on demand spikes, and if the rate of production declines accelerate. Canterell, which I believe used to be the second largest oil field in the world, recently peaked at 2 million barrels a day and is now producing 400-500K a day. That's a huge hit for Mexico. Mexico may not be the exporter it once was.
One more thing. Historically, the trend is that when oil is 4% of GDP - we have a recession. Right now, $80 a barrell hits that threshold. If the recent oil discoveries require 60-70 dollars a barrell to be viable, and we are not finding any more easy oil like we used to... well, you don't need to be a rocket scientists to conclude that oil is trending up, and in the midst of the largest credit crisis since the Great Depression - I see little to be optimistic about.
They may start to regret screwing foreign companies out of their profits once they can't find anyone willing to invest the money and technology to extract it. Anyway, before we even need sand oil, we'll be using something else. The stuff is amazingly resource intensive to extract, and is basically the solar energy of alternative energies, if you get what I mean. Takes a whole lot to extract a little. Kind of like the sunflower seed of the nut world. Canada is loaded with the crap by the way.
Before the oil sands are ever developed though, I think the amazing amount of natural gas that is under all of our feet would be harvested first
Before the oil sands are ever developed though, I think the amazing amount of natural gas that is under all of our feet would be harvested first
You make good points - but what's easier to accomplish:
1) using large amounts of natural gas to convert oil sands to gasoline
or
2) Converting thousands of gas stations and millions of vehicles to run on natural gas
That will be an issue in the near future, IMHO. (Near future=10-20 yrs)
That oil belongs to China