Peak Oil...

Not in Texas!

More on the amazing growth of crude oil production in Texas.

What If...We Never Run Out of Oil?

Ocean-bottom methane hydrates offer that possibility.  Researchers are working hard on practical ways to “mine” the stuff.

So think about it.  What would change if we knew that we had an essentially infinite supply of naturally renewed hydrocarbon fuel?

• Environmentalists who are convinced that carbon dioxide is causing global warming will be horrified.
• The economic incentives for switching away from hydrocarbon fuels (still by far the most efficient way, by volume or by weight, that we know how to store energy) will be greatly reduced.  Unless, that is, government decides to distort the market with “carbon taxes” or some such thing.
• The oil-supported country economies (Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, etc.) will be sorely tested.
• Prices for most goods and many services (especially transportation) will fall.

Most of that sounds pretty good to me!

Update and bump: reader and friend Doug W. points out this marvelous quote from the above-linked article:

To ask utilities to take in large amounts of solar power—electricity generated by hundreds or thousands of small installations, many on neighborhood roofs and lawns, whose output is affected by clouds—is like asking a shipping firm to replace its huge, professionally staffed container ships with squadrons of canoes paddled by random adolescents.

Hah! Squadrons of canoes paddled by random adolescents :)

Sounds pretty good compared with the Obama administration and Congress, though, doesn't it? 

Hmmm... Looks Like We're Not Running Out of Oil...

Every year a new round of hydrocarbon doomsayers predicts the imminent exhaustion of the planet's supply of crude oil – and the U.S. supply even earlier.  Every year reality proves them wrong.  Someday, of course, the doomsayers will be right – but it looks like someday is a good many years away...

Jerker Line Systems...

Power distribution.  When we think of that term today, what comes right to mind is electricity.  If we think a little harder, we might also think of the petroleum industry as a power distribution system.  Most of us would not think of “jerker line systems”, if for no other reason than we never heard of them.

In the early '60s, my dad, my brother and I took a trip out to the Western U.S. (from New Jersey) in my dad's beat-up 1948 Dodge.  We visited the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, and somewhere in those fields we saw several of these jerker line systems in action.  At the time we had no idea what they were called, but it was obvious how they worked: the back-and-forth action of the steel cables, often slithering along the ground, were operating oil pumps.  The motion of the cables made a distinctive sound.  We followed a cable from one of the pumps back to the electric motor that ran it (much like the one pictured here).  In the case of the one we followed, the motor was perhaps 500 yards from the pump – and that single motor was running three pumps.

We thought it was quite ingenious at the time.  It was most definitely low tech; a guy with a monkey wrench and some oil could maintain the entire thing, and it was obvious how it worked.

I wonder how they do this today?  Probably an electric motor in each pump, I'm guessing.  The advent of horizontal drilling has probably greatly reduced the number of well sites, too...

Learn About Fracking...

A nicely done, fact-based documentary, just a half hour long:

Not Quite Out of Oil Yet...

The GAO reports that recoverable oil reserves in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming are “about equal to the entire world's proven reserves”.

Too bad we can't go after it.

Oh, well.  November is less than six months away...

Oh, Noz! We're Running Out of Hydrocarbon Fuels!

Uh, not so much...

I've been talking about this for years on this blog, and so have many other people.  But when the facts even percolate up to a liberal bastion like Slate, then you know the facts have won the day...

Where Our Oil Comes From...

There were some surprises for me in the chart at right (click to enlarge).   For instance, I had no idea we imported significant amounts of oil from Angola and Columbia.

But the big surprise was that our (U.S.) total oil consumption declined last year.  It makes sense, given the recession, but somehow that little factoid had escaped my eye...