You didn't answer the question. How is the "free energy" used to produce oil?
Make that cookie factory the main source of cookies for a community in which people depend on cookies as their primary source of sustenance, and suddenly there are some important considerations that go well beyond the question of whether that factory can produce cookies at a net profit.
Yes: I asked a simple question. You dodged it. I asked it again. You dodged it again. Do you refuse to answer? May I consider your claim about "free energy" to have been one of those little excesses most of us are prone to indulging from time to time in the heat of argument?
What do you think it was that made them unprofitable until recently?
Besides profitability for oil companies? Gosh. Nothing important, I guess. Our national interests pretty much begin and end with theirs, don't they? As long as they're prospering, the rest of us will just prosper right along with them. I mean, it's not like they've been posting record profits while millions of Americans were struggling to find jobs, pay medical bills, and try to keep from losing their homes.
You did indeed. The question was simple and straightforward: How is this "free energy" you have mentioned used to produce oil?
Of course there's the possibility that I did address these things and you missed it or it just flew right over your head. I noted that Peak Oilers seem to have had a history of ignoring contrary data.
Technological improvements particularly in 3D seismic and directional drilling.
The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money, and Power summarized the oil business pretty well; it really hasn't gone out of date in several decades.
Just watch, the aspects of these economic issues which serve to prop up the "Peak Oil" Hysteria will be used to do so. All other aspects, implications and ramifications will be discarded.
In part, granted. Rising prices are obviously another factor. But the point mhaze has been dancing around is that what has made fracking a potentially profitable undertaking is that overall domestic production from conventional sources has finally fallen low enough -- and is projected to continue to do so -- as to make it competitive. Our domestic energy outlook is becoming more desperate.
With oil sands and some other enhanced recovery methods. In hydrolic fracturing? Show me.
Can you explain what that means? "Slowly and carefully"??? The first connotation is that otherwise, guys will go out and drill without proper geological analysis. But that wastes money, and it wastes hydrocarbons only as they constitute a component of "money".
And there we are - the dire predictions of Peak Oil at it's finest. A dismal, semi-catastrophe of a future, with all positives disregarded.
It's not that I disregard your "positives"; it's that I see them more as negatives. You're talking about limited, short-term successes that will only entice us to continue plodding farther down the path toward a long-term energy future that simply doesn't exist -- and, along the way, squandering precious resources that might instead have been used to create an energy infrastructure that could actually be sustained.
Actually, I haven't wondered about that. I've always known that it was because you are aware that you cannot answer in a way that is both factual and also supportive of your political ideology. What I'm really wondering is why, after all this time, you've never noticed the transposed letters in the spelling of my screen name.
Oil IS different, mhaze. It mostly has to do with this thing called "energy density". You might want to Google that. If oil were not different, then all this investment in contorted efforts to squeeze the stuff out of oil shale and whatnot would be directed toward building things like windmills and solar panels instead.
And the methane oceans on Saturn's moon Titan contain hundreds of times more hydrocarbon than on all of Earth. Look. Say you are the beneficiary of a trust fund worth a hundred million dollars, but the trust was set up so that you get a thousand dollars on the first day of every month, but never, under any circumstances, can you get another dime until the first of the next month rolls around. It's the first of the month, and you've got your check, but the landlady is at the door, and she wants her money. Your rent is twelve hundred dollars. So you're short. You keep pointing to all the millions of dollars in that trust fund, but the landlady doesn't want to hear it. She wants her money today.
But I know you did hear me when I asked you repeatedly to explain how those energy inputs would be captured and used, which means that you likely don't know the first thing about that. You're just parroting some of the selling points the operators of those projects toss around as a means of attracting investors.
Oh, so now oil shale is not only viewed as profitable; it's viewed as easy to recover. I guess that just shows how views can change over time. A Texas oilman of the early 1900s would have regarded the idea of going after the oil contained in those shale formations as insane. Back then, among the technical challenges he would have faced was handling those blowout events known as "gushers", which sent columns of oil spewing hundreds of feet into the air.
No. No more than was the case in 1956 when Hubbert presented his findings to the American Petroleum Institute. At the time, he was working for Shell Oil, a major player in what was then a major growth industry in the US. He did not present his findings as a way of "standing diametrically opposed" to the industry that had employed him for well over a decade, but as a way of providing that industry with a tool for planning its future. There were those in the industry who stood diametrically opposed to his findings, but the thing to remember is that it turned out that they were wrong, and he was right: He accurately predicted the peak of US production, and he did it fifteen years in advance of the actual event. Peak Oil denialists continue to reject Peak Oil theory. Oil industry analysts now accept it. In much the same sense, creationists reject evolutionary theory, while biologists accept it. I'm past seeing that as strange, because there is a simple explanation: a lot of people are just stupid.
No argument there.
From ensuing production streams, oil or gas.
True as that might be projects are still based on DCFROI exceeding some % return, and maybe yrs to payout if multiple available projects have similar DCFROIs.
And?
Operators tend to disagree when making go/no-go decisions.
At least it seems more efficient than, say, ethanol from corn.
Devaluing dollars is as big a problem as actual price increases.
Agreed.
I'm afraid I don't quite understand that answer.
In other words, for those who are not necessarily even concerned with the long-term viability of a particular operation, potential benefits or detriments to society -- especially future society -- are not even factors in the equation. Returning briefly to the OP then, the question remains as to why there are such strong objections to government attempting to accomplish what cannot be accomplished by those motivated solely by a desire for personal gain: Formulate plans which take into consideration the needs of all members of society, present and future, to act as advocates for those not in positions of power, and to serve as responsible stewards for natural resources that arguably belong to everyone.
Which isn't saying much. Production of corn ethanol is roughly equivalent to digging holes and then filling them back in again.
I seem to recall a post-apocalypse movie or two in which economies were based on commodity currencies, petroleum products being among the most highly valued. It's hard to imagine any scenario in which oil companies are not able to operate profitably.
Stripper wells and fracking economics are not comparable.
And there's the clincher. The dire future forecast by Peak Oil means oil resources and production must be nationalized or socialized, since clearly they are for "da common good". So says Dynamic. But look at his prior assertion:
As big a problem? Or the only problem? Wait, if "Peak Oil" didn't disregard non supportive facts, it wouldn't seem as tight a theory. In actual fact, gas averaged 30 cents per gallon until we went off the gold standard. Take any silver quarter from the first 2/3 of the 20th century, which would have bought one gallon of gas, and you can buy how much gas with it now?
Or subsidized, on the very same basis. Which is practically the same thing, except that only the losses are socialized; the profits go into (some already very full) private pockets.
The "hundred million dollar trust" in my above analogy. Of course, that number is going to vary widely depending on how one defines "proven", as well as on honesty and accuracy in reporting (Saudi Arabia, for example, treats the size of its remaining reserves as a State secret). But like I said, the landlady doesn't care about all of that anyway. Production numbers are a measure of how fast you're taking the stuff out of the ground on a given day, month, year -- not a measure of the amount you haven't taken out of the ground. People can't drive their cars on "proven reserves".
More importantly, there wasn't any need, with millions of barrels of the purest light sweet crude the world has ever seen practically (and sometimes quite literally) pumping itself out of the ground.
Peak Oil theory is based on an approximation: the Hubbert curve. The shape of that curve will vary depending on the data and the assumptions fed into the model. If the non-existent methanol fuel you're fantasizing about suddenly were to become widely available at the pump (at any price), the most that could do as far as Hubbert's model is concerned would be to alter some of the assumptions fed into it.