Thanks to technology, we’re not going to run out of it.
Nope. “Peak oil” was always a myth. We’ll replace it with something else long before we run out, just as we did with whale oil.
19 thoughts on “Oil”
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Thanks to technology, we’re not going to run out of it.
Nope. “Peak oil” was always a myth. We’ll replace it with something else long before we run out, just as we did with whale oil.
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The hope of many is to offset oil use with natural gas, something else we have in abundance.
No Leland, not natural gas. Oil, light sweet (i.e. low sulfur) crude, that is.
Boy, don’t I now know that. I thought the stuff wasn’t as scarce as the Peak Oilers were claiming but that it would stay expensive owing to the more technologically complicated extraction methods needed to keep up with demand.
Ouch!
Don’t worry, the Saudies won’t keep prices low forever.
At some point, they may have no control over the situation.
That point is now, in fact.
They can’t afford to stop pumping every drop they can, because their state depends on constant petro-income.
And every day they lose what little residual power they have to increased production everywhere else.
We’re a long ways from being at a dead end in terms of improving techniques and extraction costs with technology.
Coal can be converted to octane at a price equivalent of about $60 a barrel. The main loss is the heat to drive the reactions, which comes from the coal itself. If you supplied the heat from a thorium reactor that loss would be avoided and you’d pretty much have direct conversion of coal (carbon) to a hydrocarbon.
We’ve got about 500 billion short tons of coal in the US which would convert to almost 600 billion short tons of gasoline, or 190 trillion gallons. Based on the amount of gasoline the US used in 2014, 137 billion gallons, that would be enough to last about 1,400 years.
Every time a Green opposes a cogeneration plant, a spotted owl weeps at the stupidity.
How would coal to oil conversion compare, on a cost per gallon basis, to a nuclear-driven CO2 + H2O to hydrocarbon conversion? Or is the latter technology not available or insufficiently developed for a meaningful comparison to be made? It would certainly be a big thumb in the eye of the sustainability crowd, carbon-neutral gasoline! 😀
Nuclear would be much more expensive.
Coal’s competition, btw, would be synfuels from natural gas. There are various approaches; the one I find most attractive is production of ethylene from methane by Siluria’s OCM process, followed by oligomerization of ethylene into liquid hydrocarbons.
Moving from “Source A” of energy-rich-hydrocarbon to “Source B” of energy-rich-hydrocarbon is hardly “replacing energy-rich-hydrocarbons”.
And, as George points out: There’s a lot of routes to energy-rich-hydrocarbon.
But even the 1400 year number is problematic. Charcoal is easy enough to make as well.
If Thomas Gold was right, oil is being produced continuously by the Earth itself – the bacteria in it aren’t the progenitors of the oil, but are instead feeding on it. There is good reason to believe he is correct, too. Oil has been found up to 8 km below the surface, far too deep to be biogenic. As well, some old played out fields have been known to refill themselves (I’m thinking specifically of one field in the Gulf of Mexico, but I know I have heard of others).
I once did a blog post comparing known reserves to the estimated natural leakage rate of oil into the oceans. All known reserves should have disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago or have been thousands of times larger in the past or there wouldn’t be hardly any oil left. It’s been a while since I ran the numbers but the reserves versus leakage rate would make a young Earth creationists heart leap with joy. Most of it has to be abiogenic or it shouldn’t still be here.
The Russians have been saying this forever. They have drilled some really insanely deep oil wells
It was a Russian well that I refer to above, 8km deep.
Well, who thinks there could be crude oil on the Moon or Mars?
And/or if crude oil is related plate tectonic activity, and Mars had plate tectonic activity for a few billion years, would Mars have crude oil- and even if Mars has no life?
Titan is a good bet. Seas of solvent.
If you read the Nature article, you will see that the researchers recovered a few milliliters of hydrocarbons from the vicinity of a hydrothermal vent. It was the first time anyone has proven that such hydrocarbons are of abiogenic origin. But it’s a huge extrapolation from there to the notion that all petroleum is abiogenic (coal is emphatically of biological origin, and there has been no doubt of that for many years).
Having said that, I would note that the fact that carbonaceous chondrite meteorites contain kerogen material, including polar, aliphatic, and aromatic hydrocarbons. The anti-abiogenic crowd (which is motivated by wanting us to run out of “fossil fuel”) would have, it seems to me, one stark choice: either declare that there is life elsewhere (which created the “fossil fuels” in carbonaceous chondrites), or that fossil fuels can be made abiogenically – which means that we don’t know what the limits are.
If you read the Nature article, you will see that the researchers recovered a few milliliters of hydrocarbons from the vicinity of a hydrothermal vent. It was the first time anyone has proven that such hydrocarbons are of abiogenic origin.
It doesn’t mean that the oil is abiogenic. Hydrothermal vents are heat pumps with cold water pulled in somewhere, heated up, and expelled elsewhere. There could be considerable biological material in the water that’s going into the system.
Similarly, just because there’s oil 8k down doesn’t mean that it is abiogenic. There’s been a lot of recycling of crust since life began and it may well be that almost all carbon in the upper mantle has spent at least part of its life in some organism somewhere over the past billion years.
What we can say is that there appears to be evidence of deep recharge of oil reservoirs and a variety of means by which oil can be produced today in the crust.