Comments on: And about that peak oil…

By: magdy halim

magdy halim — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:12:17 +0000

after 18 years of studying the subject of the end of civilization,I made a blog about it:
magdyhalim.blogspot.com
please have a look
Thanks

By: Maggie's Farm

Maggie's Farm — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:52:01 +0000

Friday morning links…

Why people go to graduate school in the humanities
Ilya Somin: How Markets Make Us More Rational
Cramped on Land, Big Oil Bets at Sea (h/t neoneo)
Politico: Democratic majorities safe, for now
Powerline: CT politics, then and now
Greece: A Gr…

By: Gringo

Gringo — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:49:41 +0000

Paul:
I’ve read that the idea of peak oil is nonsense. The reason so many on-shore oil fields are not developed to their full potential is mostly political. The WSJ talked about declining oil production in Mexico.

There are fields in Mexico that are not being developed because Mexico lacks the capital to develop them, and refuses to allow foreign investment in Mexican oil. However, these are offshore fields, not onshore fields.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:44:57 +0000

I’ve read that the idea of peak oil is nonsense. The reason so many on-shore oil fields are not developed to their full potential is mostly political. The WSJ talked about declining oil production in Mexico. The reason production is declining is because the mexican government put a limit on foreign investment, and they don’t have the capital or technology to develop some of their fields totally. This resource nationalism is rampant all over the world, it has almost nothing to do with declining reserves of oil.

By: J.J. formerly Jimmy J.

J.J. formerly Jimmy J. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:16:31 +0000

If this country is going to recover from this recession, we will need to open up ANWR, and all our offshore areas for drilling. The oil industry generates jobs (as per jon baker) and the effects spread into other areas of the economy. Drilling for our own oil means importing less, which helps our balance of payments problem.

We still need to be developing our huge natural gas reserves and working on alternative fuels to replace oil. (Bio-fuels, electricity, hydrogen and ??)But we need plenty of reasonably priced oil to make that transition.

Of course it would be a good idea to incentivize utilities to start building nukes for a clean, cheap source of electricity that is scalable to the size needed for our economy. Building the nukes would also create many new jobs that would have effects in other areas of the economy.

The green agenda is an agenda of stagnation and defeatism.

By: jon baker

jon baker — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:43:23 +0000

That rig count link I supplied is industry wide- not just one company’s rig count.

By: jon baker

jon baker — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:37:47 +0000

The company that is one of our main customers builds drilling rigs (on shore). We hear they may be about to hire 30 more welders (certified) this year. Those guys -blue collar- make $40 an hour. (Subcontractors- so they have to have their own welding trucks and welders) The gas industry is booming in east Texas and Western Louisiana. A number of my cousins work in it. My employer gets much of his buisiness by doing work for a rig building company. The boss is talking about increasing the work force by 20% this year. I just hope the cap and trade or EPA regulating CO2 does not kill us. If they wanted to do something about the jobs on the East Coast- they could open those offshore fields up.

By: jon baker

jon baker — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:32:09 +0000

Baker-Hughes puts out a weekly drilling rig count where you view the number of rigs that are drilling- both gas and oil. It is broke down by domestic and international and by state and on shore/offshore. Some are natural gas and some are oil. Some are new wells and some are workovers. Here is the link: http://investor.shareholder.com/bhi/rig_counts/rc_index.cfm

By: Bob from Virginia

Bob from Virginia — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:34:35 +0000

Note to readers: discarding oil based drilling mud into the sea or unprotected ground is very illegal in the US and not done; the industry is environmentally conscious. Drill sites are like construction sites, except after construction is finished there is little evidence that it ever took place.
And I can verify the comment about fishing from offshore rigs.

By: Gringo

Gringo — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:09:44 +0000

Bob from Virginia: as anecdotal support of your statement, there is a lot of fishing being done on offshore oil rigs and platforms. In some basins, oil naturally seeps to the surface, and drilling can actually reduce this by concentrating oil flow into the wellbore and to the consumer.

OTOH, I worked on a rig in Argentina during the times of the junta that discarded oil based drilling fluid ( a.k.a. mud) right into an unprotected pit, where it seeped into the ground. Not good for the environment, and given the political climate then, making a stink about it would not have been good for one’s health.