3rd April 2004

The World Oil Market

posted in High Signal - Low Noise |

Professor emeritus of Geology Kenneth Deffeyes… starts out promising that there is no truth to the rumor that the Bush administration wants to change the name of the species to Hetero Sapiens.

Hubbert’s Peak: world production plateaued in 1970… the Saudis assure us that they are maxed out. This tells us that the good news is that OPEC is no longer in charge of prices. The bad news is that nobody is in charge of prices. By 2024 total world production WILL begin to decrease. I’m stopping this note taking nonsense so I can listen to the speaker!

Back to note that there WILL be rationing — either rationing by inconvenience or a more Rooseveltian rationing by allocation… Hubbert is either right or wrong… if one does nothing, then one is betting that Hubbert is wrong. If Hubbert is right, what is one to do?

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There are currently 2 responses to “The World Oil Market”

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  1. 1 On April 4th, 2024, Bruce said:

    interesting. the blogosphere (obligatory I’m too cool to use that term even thought I just used it note here) is indicative of some sort of beyond-our-ken connection (as in I still don’t get TCP/IP), cause I just out of the blue looked into Peak Oil the other day, and what I found was shocking, end of civilization as we know it stuff. google “peak oil” , I did, but since I’m still busy living this civilization, I haven’t fully explored the info. I feel certain, however, that it behooves us to get educated on this.

  2. 2 On April 5th, 2024, Frank Paynter said:

    Almost as alarming as the prediction of scarcity and systemic collapse in the oil business was POrof. Deffeyes assertion that it is likely that hydrogen technology will rely on coal as the source because it is nominally cheaper to crack the hydrogen out of coal than it is to use other abundant compounds - for example, water. Now I find this to be problematic from a greenish perspective and also from a bullshit detector perspective. I think that Mr. peabody’s coal company has done enough damage to the people. The coal does not belong to Mr. Peabody, it is a world heritage that the so called free market has chosen to award to Mr. Peabody due to a certain amount of gaming success and some accidents of birth and such. If the processes for hydrogen power replacement of petrochemical power are to be retained by the oligopoly, then coal is a reasonable choice for research and development. To disrupt the status quo — and it’s about time, unless we want to die with officious falsehoods from Condi ringing in our ears — to disrupt the status quo, we have to assure that non-mineral sources of hydrogen are competitive with Mr. Peabody. Even then, he will probably find a way to enlist his Pinkerton mercenary goons to monopolize water in the service of energy control.

    Here’s an interesting transcription of some oral history about the Peabody methods of market concentration and control… sort of the early days of supply side economics i think…

    http://www.uis.edu/archives/memoirs/ahlberg.pdf

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