21–30 of 72 posts
Also online distribution, things like books might become prohibitively expensive in the physical form and drive everyone to ebooks, all creative products really.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what do you think triggered the global recession, if not an oil price that spiked to an economy-busting $147/bbl in the two years after production peaked at 85 mbpd?
Ummmm... I kind of thought it was the combination of a US housing bubble in combination with poor risk management in the financial industry particularly respecting mortgates.
No one with any credibility actually believes he can forecast the price of oil. Oil is very inelastic in the short term, which is why small drops in supply lead to massive price increases. The long-term effect of unavailable or expensive oil will be "demand destruction"-- many of those who currently use oil will either move to alternatives or go out of business-- and political fallout with unpredictable results.
a) oil != gasoline http://www.ranken-energy.com/Products%20from%20Petroleum.htm
b) Demand destruction doesn't preclude $500/bbl crude, it just means that when oil hits $500 there won't be nearly as many products that are dependent on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/18636-where-does-that-2nd-b-... Quote: In the early 1860's, when oil production began, there was no standard container for oil, so oil and petroleum products were stored and transported in barrels of all different shapes and sizes (beer barrels, fish barrels, molasses barrels, turpentine barrels, etc.). By the early 1870's, the 42-gallon barrel had been adopted as the standard for oil…
That quote doesn't explain why the abbreviation was used about a hundred years before stabndard oil introduced the blue barrel, as claimed by the wikipedia quote in the comment you ansered to. In fact, your quote just reiterates the claim that wikipedia said was probably false, so to make your argument you should instead show that the citations from the late 1700s are wrong. EDIT: This will be difficult, as it is qui…
Ha! The doubled b in bbl is likely an outmoded typographical convention - as in book citation p437, and also pp495-500. I like such archaisms but agree it's a bit confusing and inconsistent with other conventions - eg we don't talk of $5 bbn to mean five billions.
No one with any credibility actually believes he can forecast the price of oil. Oil is very inelastic in the short term, which is why small drops in supply lead to massive price increases. The long-term effect of unavailable or expensive oil will be "demand destruction"-- many of those who currently use oil will either move to alternatives or go out of business-- and political fallout with unpredictable results.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to guess. Oil production has been flat around 85 million barrels a day for the past four years.
Demand has been lower due to the global recession -- there is no indication that oil production can't go higher than ever before, once demand starts picking back up.
What about the next billion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what do you think triggered the global recession, if not an oil price that spiked to an economy-busting $147/bbl in the two years after production peaked at 85 mbpd?
Ummmm... I kind of thought it was the combination of a US housing bubble in combination with poor risk management in the financial industry particularly respecting mortgates.
I got pretty into peak oil circa 2006, when peak was supposedly already occurring or was going to occur by 2008. It will happen eventually, but I'm not going to get into playing this guessing game again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Market demand for oil collapses (read: recession) long before it gets anywhere close to $500/bbl. Above $80 a barrel, alternative fuels (such as liquid fuels from coal) becomes profitable. I sincerely expect that this will expand extremely rapidly in the next 15 years.
When demand becomes tight, the price driver is not so much the cost to produce as it is the rate of production . Can we produce five or ten million barrels of oil-from-coal a day? Can we replace a two or three percent annual drop in oil production rates through some combination of conserving and replacement without recessionary demand destruction? I'm not so sure.
Just the spike to $130/bbl in 2006 saw people switching away from SUVs to Priuses in droves. If that were sustained for any length of time, everyone would be driving a plug-in hybrid to work. The technology exists today, and the production capacity would ramp up pretty quickly.
If every switched from a 20mpg car to a 50mpg car where the first 100 miles of each trip was free, it'd more than make up for anticipated oil production declines over the next 50 years.