Super long-term kernel support

Posted Mar 20, 2018 16:12 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Super long-term kernel support by felixfix
Parent article: Super long-term kernel support

Peak oil doesn't mean we've *run out* of fuel: it just means the extraction rate has gone down and/or the amount considered extractable is declining.

I find it hard to believe that anyone would be so foolish as to consider that this would never happen. The Earth does not have an infinite volume, after all, and nearly all of it is nickel-iron and/or peridotite, not oil. Trivial back-of-the-envelope calculations show that we are using oil at roughly a million times its production rate, so eventually, if we keep extracting it, we will run out, unless we reduce the extraction rate more than a millionfold (which is obviously impossible without finding complete replacements for absolutely all oil's industrial uses, even the minor ones).

Super long-term kernel support

Posted Mar 20, 2018 16:33 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

Being extremely pedantic, peak oil means that the amount that you can extract and make a profit on has started to fall.

If a reduction in consumption means that oil prices stay below (say) $50 per barrel, then us knowing that there are 1,000 years worth of oil that costs $60 per barrel to extract is irrelevant to the peak oil concept; it's only the oil that you can extract and sell at a profit that counts.

So, any sane advocate of "peak oil" expects that there will be a significant amount of known oil around after the peak - it's just that it won't be worth extracting, because you'll have to sell it for less than the cost of that extraction.

Or, put another way, we can reach "peak oil" because the replacement of oil with substitutes like solar energy and plant-derived plastics has been so successful that oil is worthless, not just because we've run out of oil

Super long-term kernel support

Posted Mar 22, 2018 5:33 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

If a reduction in consumption means that oil prices stay below (say) $50 per barrel, then us knowing that there are 1,000 years worth of oil that costs $60 per barrel to extract is irrelevant to the peak oil concept; it's only the oil that you can extract and sell at a profit that counts.

Government could always just print more money.

What government couldn't do, however, is to change price of oil measured in terms of oil! Hundred years ago you needed to spend one barrel of oil to extract hundred barrels of oil. Today what you get back is closer to 6 to 8 (it's not easy to calculate the exact "price" since so many components are involved). When you finally hit the bottom (need one barrel of oil to extract one barrel of oil from the Earth) it wouldn't matter how much oil is left there - it's pointless to try to extract it.

Super long-term kernel support

Posted Mar 27, 2018 15:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, nearly. It's pointless to try to extract it *for power generation*, but may still be worth extracting using energy from cheaper sources for other purposes (plastics feedstock, chemical engineering etc).

Super long-term kernel support

Posted Mar 27, 2018 15:32 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

But even using cheaper energy, it's not worth it if the cost of extraction is ¢100/barrel, and the value of oil is ¢50/barrel. It doesn't matter what the value of a ¢ is, or indeed whether governments print more money - if the raw value of the oil is lower than the cost of extracting it, then it will get left alone.