http://finance.yahoo.com/news/article/107659/bp-makes-giant-oil-find-in-gulf-of-mexico

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil major BP Plc said it has made an oil discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, which analysts believe could contain over 1 billion barrels of recoverable reserves, reaffirming the Gulf's strategic importance to the industry.

That's not to say, it's not bad for the environment. But for the people that say we should get off of oil because it might run out, doesn't look like that's gonna happen, anytime soon.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption

The US alone goes through 20 million barrels per day. This extends world supply at current rates by less than two years.

My only gripe with oil is we are paying other countries. We have plenty and should be paying ourselves.

Oil is societies crack! despit the dangers we will just keep stuffing the class dick until it kills us. at wich point the Oil exec's will blast off for thier secret moon bases until the cannabilism subsides.

My only gripe with oil is we are paying other countries. We have plenty and should be paying ourselves.

Problem is that American oil companies sell more of what they produce to foreign countries than they do domestically. Chances are if they were to open up that Alaskan area for exploration and drilling the U.S. consumer would not see any of it if there were better paying buyers elsewhere.

Problem is that American oil companies sell more of what they produce to foreign countries than they do domestically. Chances are if they were to open up that Alaskan area for exploration and drilling the U.S. consumer would not see any of it if there were better paying buyers elsewhere.

Yeah because we make deals with them. I'm sure we didn't just up and decide to sell to china for less than they could get in America. It was part of a deal.

Abitoic Oil KKTHXBYE...

Haha 1 billion barrels, big whoop.

Guess I assumed you guys would click on the link to read the rest of the article.

Here's the meat of it.

Further appraisal will be required to ascertain the size of volumes of oil present, but a spokesman said the find should be bigger than its Kaskida discovery which has over 3 billion barrels of oil in place.

Estimates of recoverable reserves range from around 20 percent of oil in place.

"Assuming reserves in place of 4 billion barrels and a 35 percent recovery rate, BP's proven reserves .. would rise by 868 million barrels -- equivalent to 4.8 percent of the group's 18.14 billion barrels of proven reserves," Aymeric De-Villaret, oil analyst at Societe Generale said in a research note.



3 billion barrels is a lot of oil. And this discovery could be bigger than that. They are just saying 1 billion barrels is confirmed, but that is only 20% of what is really sitting down there.

Oil is societies crack! despit the dangers we will just keep stuffing the class dick until it kills us. at wich point the Oil exec's will blast off for thier secret moon bases until the cannabilism subsides.


I'm going to start quoting this, it's awesome. Thank you.

Abitoic Oil KKTHXBYE...

sorry.. there is no magic oil fairy.

A WORD ABOUT ABIOTIC OIL
There is some speculation that oil is abiotic in origin -- generally asserting that oil is formed from magma instead of an organic origin. These ideas are really groundless. All unrefined oil carries microscopic evidence of the organisms from which it was formed. These organisms can be traced through the fossil record to specific time periods when quantities of oil were formed.
Likewise, there are two primal energy forces operating on this planet, and all forms of energy descend from one of these two. The first is the internal form of energy heating the Earth's interior. This primal energy comes from radioactive decay and from the heat energy originally generated during accretion of the planet some 4.6 billion years ago. There are no known mechanisms for transferring this internal energy into any secondary energy source. And the chemistry of magma does not compare to the chemistry of hydrocarbons. Magma is lacking in carbon compounds, and hydrocarbons are lacking in silicates. If hydrocarbons were generated from magma, then you would expect to see some closer kinship in their chemistry.

The second primal energy source is light and heat generated by our sun. It is the sun's energy that powers all energy processes on the Earth's surface, and which provides the very energy for life itself. Photosynthesis is the miraculous process by which the sun's energy is converted into forms available to the life processes of living matter. Following biological, geological and chemical processes, a line can be drawn from photosynthesis to the formation of hydrocarbon deposits. Likewise, both living matter and hydrocarbons are carbon based.
Finally, because oil generation is in part a geological process, it proceeds at an extremely slow rate from our human perspective. Geological processes take place over a different frame of time than human events. It is for this reason that when geologists say that the San Andreas fault is due for a powerful earthquake, they mean any time in the next million years -- probably less. Geological processes move exceedingly slow.

After organic matter has accumulated on the sea floor, it must be buried by the process of deposition. In geological time, in order for this matter to be a likely prospect for hydrocarbon generation, the rate of deposition must be quick. Here is an experiment you can conduct to get an idea how slow the rates of deposition are. Place a small stone on the bottom of a motionless pond. Take another stone of about the same size and place it at the mouth of a small stream, a stream where the current is not so great that it will sweep the stone away. Check both of these stones yearly until they have been buried by deposition. You might see the stone at the mouth of the stream covered over within a few years, but it is unlikely that you will see the stone in the pond buried within your lifetime.

It is a simple geological fact that the oil we are using up at an alarming rate today will not be replaced within our lifetime -- or within many lifetimes. That is why hydrocarbons are called non-renewable resources. Capped wells may appear to refill after a few years, but they are not regenerating. It is simply an effect of oil slowly migrating through pore spaces from areas of high pressure to the low-pressure area of the drill hole. If this oil is drawn out, it will take even longer for the hole to refill again. Oil is a non-renewable resource generated and deposited under special biological and geological conditions.

My only gripe with oil is we are paying other countries. We have plenty and should be paying ourselves.

No.. we really don't.

You think we would have invaded Iraq if we did?

We do have plenty, for the time being, but why use ours when we can use theirs first? Our overseas "endeavors" aren't out of panic, but good (if evil) strategy.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/World_population_%28UN%29.svg/300px-World_population_%28UN%29.svg.png

Population in Millions

juxtaposed with:

http://www.scimaps.org/static/maps/73_______jpg_600x600_q85.jpg


Yes the graph of oil production is not perfect in its fine details and the population graph is vague but they make their points. Production is going to crest and then plunge in almost the same logarithmic curve as the production ramp up prior to the crest. Meanwhile the population itself is riding its own logarithmic curve ever upwards while the oil production plunges ever lower. Even if global non-renewable energy output plateaued, the population increase would still put the global economy in a position that is unsustainable. So, no, the oil isn't going to run out soon, but the ability for it to power the current paradigm of society
will run out long before the last drop has been squeezed out of the ground. Sooner or later the music is going to stop and chairs are going to be removed. Those who have invested in a better chair elsewhere stand the best chance of not ending up with a cold, dirty ass or getting into a brawl to take their neighbor's chair.

L2, you quoted something, but didn't provide the source? Is this from something that isn't on the Intertubes, or something you quoted from the voices in your head?

No.. we really don't.

You think we would have invaded Iraq if we did?

And the millions of barrels we export each day? Oh right...we didn't need those. We did get all kinds of lucrative oil contracts from Iraq after all....oh wait.

I think most of those contracts were written in Mandarin Chinese.

L2, you quoted something, but didn't provide the source? Is this from something that isn't on the Intertubes, or something you quoted from the voices in your head?


http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html

That guy (Dale Allen Pfeiffer) also wants you to pay to join the IWW (http://www.iww.org/), join the "Peak Labor" mailing list, and thinks everyone should be limited to working four hours a day to solve unemployment (http://www.mountainsentinel.com/content/peakoilworkingclass.pdf).

If anyone else here cited a crackpot source like that, you'd be only seconds behind them with MS Paint and lots of caps about tinfoil.

If you're citing the crazies, you might as well cite them all: http://www.911-strike.com/peakoil.htm

L2 gets to work by different rules than the rest of us. Isn't that the 'Liberal Mantra'?:rolleyes:
I'll agree we really don't know how much oil there is down there, nor whether or not the source is renewabled, nor at what rate it renews. But the sheer massive numbers of this discovery would allow us to leverage against OPEC, if nothing else.

Ok. Read the argument. Both sides are laid out in a pretty nonbiased way. I see a load of scientific evidence for fossil origins and pretty much only theory for abiotic.

Decide for yourself.

If you think there is finite oil, then you believe in peak oil... its just a matter of timing.

BTW. Mike Tyson is a communist.. that doesnt mean he can't box. The important thing is that science doesn't depend on your beliefs, it depends on the facts you can prove.

Ok. Read the argument. Both sides are laid out in a pretty nonbiased way. I see a load of scientific evidence for fossil origins and pretty much only theory for abiotic.

Decide for yourself.

If you think there is finite oil, then you believe in peak oil... its just a matter of timing.

BTW. Mike Tyson is a communist.. that doesnt mean he can't box. The important thing is that science doesn't depend on your beliefs, it depends on the facts you can prove.

oh /snap!

Time for something a bit less doom and gloom. Yes, Sixee, there is plenty of oil in the earth. Barrels and barrels. The problem is...most of the easy to extract oil has been extracted, leaving mostly the difficult to obtain and process stuff. The costs drive up the price, which makes alternates much more appealing from a purely economic stand point, never mind all the Huggatree feel good environmental stuff. If it costs me less dollars per mile to power my car by plugging it into the wall and sipping some wind power derived energy then I am going to go with that. As alternate energy matures and becomes more mainstream to the point of being "Energy" and not the alternate, then all that expensive to produce petroleum will make less and less sense to exploit. Planes have been powered by other means. Plastics can be produced by other means. Its all a question of developing the industries and retooling how we look at energy and efficient use of it in general.

BTW. Mike Tyson is a communist.. that doesnt mean he can't box. The important thing is that science doesn't depend on your beliefs, it depends on the facts you can prove.

That's an awful analogy. Nice truthy ring to get a nod from the cheap seats, but completely irrelevant.

Pfeiffer's fringe agenda is directly relevant to his prognostications on energy. Having thrown his support behind these end-of-Western-society groups, it should be beyond obvious that he is a deeply biased source.

He lays his evidence out right alongside the opposing view. Accept it or don't. Or show me how its biased by his ideology.

Im not a geologist. But his case seems to me to be the most persuasive. Your mileage may vary.

I'm sorry, but I cannot accept that you're naive enough to believe that the "Energy Editor" at FromTheWilderness.com (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/) is a credible source.

Are you referring to something else he's written when you're talking about evidence? What you quoted earlier cites no evidence, nor does it even try. It's an opinion piece, not any form of science.

Ok, thats fine. Im not a geologist. And I don't feel like getting into weeds about something I really don't care about. You have peak oil guys on one side and people like Jerome Corsi and Alex Jones on the other. Its an insane debate.

Believe in Abiotic oil or whatever. Could I find different sources? Yea, If I felt like giving a shit about this thread. I really just don't (http://static.scribd.com/docs/j79lhbgbjbqrb.pdf).

Something else to keep in mind.. the Abiotic theory came from Soviet scientists. Im not sure how you can find those Communists credible.

The bottom line remains that even if new oil is being created by the same process that creates shit like diamonds, it sure as shit isnt happening fast enough to replenish stocks. So any point is really moot. Who cares where it comes from, fossils, abiotic, Jesus, a giant raccoon at the center of the earth who shits it out every million years or so... what the fuck does it matter.

Look Jim, the oils all gone!

No Problem Bob, all we gotta do is sit here for a few million years and tank up! 'MERICA! FUCK YEA!

Time for something a bit less doom and gloom. Yes, Sixee, there is plenty of oil in the earth. Barrels and barrels. The problem is...most of the easy to extract oil has been extracted, leaving mostly the difficult to obtain and process stuff. The costs drive up the price, which makes alternates much more appealing from a purely economic stand point, never mind all the Huggatree feel good environmental stuff. If it costs me less dollars per mile to power my car by plugging it into the wall and sipping some wind power derived energy then I am going to go with that. As alternate energy matures and becomes more mainstream to the point of being "Energy" and not the alternate, then all that expensive to produce petroleum will make less and less sense to exploit. Planes have been powered by other means. Plastics can be produced by other means. Its all a question of developing the industries and retooling how we look at energy and efficient use of it in general.

Fair enough. I'm also of the mindset of cheaper = better. Getting corporations to go along, might be a different story. Cheaper for us, usually requires them to spends gobs of money to do things in a new way. We may have to see government incentives offered for them to follow along.

And L2, if you didn't care about this thread, then why did you even bother to post? Methinks the Liberal doth protest too much....

Or were you just trying to show us how big your brain is? Either way, Epic Fail.

And L2, if you didn't care about this thread, then why did you even bother to post? Methinks the Liberal doth protest too much....




Good point

Something else to keep in mind.. the Abiotic theory came from Soviet scientists. Im not sure how you can find those Communists credible.

Thankfully, you just finished making that Communist Mike Tyson analogy for us a couple posts back!

The bottom line remains that even if new oil is being created by the same process that creates shit like diamonds, it sure as shit isnt happening fast enough to replenish stocks. So any point is really moot. Who cares where it comes from, fossils, abiotic, Jesus, a giant raccoon at the center of the earth who shits it out every million years or so... what the fuck does it matter.

And you know all of this because?

Hydrocarbons of inorganic origin are so plentiful on a moon of Saturn that it literally rains liquid methane (http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMCSUUHJCF_index_0.html), yet we presume that the notion of untapped abiotic oil here is crazy-talk? We have barely scratched the surface of the Earth's crust. The deepest mine in the world is only about 10% into the thinnest, outer layer of the planet. Who knows what we've yet to discover.

We do not conclusively know anywhere near as much as we like to think we do. If everyone had such a closed mind to new theories, we'd still think the world was flat, lightening was God's anger, and that light flowed through the aether.

I subscribe wholly to neither Peak Oil Apocalypse (wasn't that supposed to have already happened, according to them?) nor the Abiotic Oil Fairy magically topping off existing wells. Not sure why you're in such a rush to mis-attribute me with an extremist opinion to argue with, but I'm not your Huckleberry (Osg is).

Thankfully, you just finished making that Communist Mike Tyson analogy for us a couple posts back!

I think I was being sardonic... but im not sure. Lets do some sort of flow chart.

and rr.. I wasn't addressing you.. main point I was trying to make, even if unsuccessfully, was the same you are.

Don't get all Malkin on me.

Thankfully, you just finished making that Communist Mike Tyson analogy for us a couple posts back!



And you know all of this because?

Hydrocarbons of inorganic origin are so plentiful on a moon of Saturn that it literally rains liquid methane (http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMCSUUHJCF_index_0.html), yet we presume that the notion of untapped abiotic oil here is crazy-talk? We have barely scratched the surface of the Earth's crust. The deepest mine in the world is only about 10% into the thinnest, outer layer of the planet. Who knows what we've yet to discover.

We do not conclusively know anywhere near as much as we like to think we do. If everyone had such a closed mind to new theories, we'd still think the world was flat, lightening was God's anger, and that light flowed through the aether.

I subscribe wholly to neither Peak Oil Apocalypse (wasn't that supposed to have already happened, according to them?) nor the Abiotic Oil Fairy magically topping off existing wells. Not sure why you're in such a rush to mis-attribute me with an extremist opinion to argue with, but I'm not your Huckleberry (Osg is).


Sanchek, that is all well and good but how much will the consumers be willing to fork out to leverage the cost of drilling down deep into the planet to get this mythical theoretical petroleum that might as well be siphoned directly from LL's pet raccoon's ass? As much as building a craft to enter the gravity well of Jupiter and establish a collection point for all this hydrocarbon goodness raining from the heavens on Titan? Might as well tap the gas of Jupiter directly like sticking a giant Tropicana straw into it. It would probably be as cheap and safe a concept as energy mining on Titan. Yes, you were using the Titan article to prove a point about EARTH but burning this shit still causes untold other problems does it not? 20 billion people are clamoring to suck the oil titty by the year 2050 but oil is still a poor model for our society because it is still not sustainable. Meanwhile the sun continues to send down lots of free energy just waiting to be harnessed along with wind and don't forget tidal power from the moon. Sure, we will always need hydrocarbons, but eventually we will wise up and figure out that they are worth more to us than just simply burning them. Oh and that deep into the earth theory of mining? If you are going to drill deep into the planet for oil you might as well tap all that thousands of degrees heat to I dunno, make some steam and spin some turbines to make some power or some nonsense like that. Whatever is feasible.

Sorry chum, I am not going to pay 6 dollars a gallon in todays dollars no matter how sexy the source of the fuel. Oh and Methane? There is plenty of it locked up in everyday garbage and sewage. Best be sticking a straw up the raccoon's ass eating the eggshells and banana peels in your local landfill. It might be cheaper to harness then its big cousin Jules Verne never told us about.

The point of Titan isn't that we could ever ferry its hydrocarbons back in any usable quantity, but that it never had the biomass we assume precursors for natural hydrocarbon formations.

Similarly, no one's saying we should necessarily try to extract oil from 30 miles down into the crust of the Earth. We know more about what's over 800,000,000 miles away on Titan than we do about what's going on 8 miles below our feet, yet presume to rule out any ideas that don't jive with what we learned on Flintstones as kids.

I completely agree (and have been vocal about that here, if you recall) that we must transition away from oil. We can't go cold turkey though.

We know more about what's over 800,000,000 miles away on Titan than we do about what's going on 8 miles below our feet, yet presume to rule out any ideas that don't jive with what we learned on Flintstones as kids.

I completely agree (and have been vocal about that here, if you recall) that we must transition away from oil. We can't go cold turkey though.

Don't tell that to the oil corps:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/GasPriceOR.jpg/800px-GasPriceOR.jpg

And yes, cold turkey is bad, but stealing butts out of the ashtray just for a desperate fix is worse.

but stealing butts out of the ashtray just for a desperate fix is worse.

What if we one day find that we've only just scratched the surface of how much oil is floating around down there? What if we've only just taken our first puff, and aren't desperate at all?

We have to be Sanchek. L2 said so, so it must be true. :rolleyes: Excellent point about Titan. No dinosaurs ever roamed the surface of that moon, unless you believe that they migrated to here from there.

I've heard this saying before, and I think it holds true: All of the knowledge Mankind possesses is but a single grain of sand on a beach. That's not to say we shouldn't try to understand the Universe around us.

The processes in which hydrocarbons are created, are speculation, at best. The processes take so long, that a creature with a lifespan of 80 years will never be able to see it to fruition, from the beginning.

However, the real question is, who gains from the perceived notion that we are about to run out of oil at any moment? The people who want to switch us to alternative fuels? Or the people that want to dig deeper to get more oil?

When I was a kid Sinclair had this really cool thing that they would travel from city to city with, it was a dinosaur exposition, and you got to make a dinosaur out of plastic.

Don't tell that to the oil corps:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/GasPriceOR.jpg/800px-GasPriceOR.jpg

And yes, cold turkey is bad, but stealing butts out of the ashtray just for a desperate fix is worse.


LOL!!!!!

I remember paying 23 cents a pack at the PX, and even as a civilian I can still recall 30 cents a pack. We were buying ten cartons for what they pay for one at the time of that sign. And now it is what, three times that almost?

And gas is no different, as we were paying almost the same per gallon as for a pack of cigarettes back in the late 60's. Oil will run out, yet we are only paying now maybe about half per gallon of what is charged for a pack of smokes, which gives a new crop every year.

Amazing how our vices continue to hold folks by the balls.

Cigarette prices being higher now isn't a matter of supply vs demand moreso than dramatic changes in taxes on them (hence buying "duty free" cigarettes and alcohol is extremely common at all international airports - duty free barrel of oil, not so much.

I'm surprised there's little discussion about the environmental impacts of oil usage. Setting aside the annoying distraction of global warming - be it true or not - the atmospheric impact of exhaust is undeniable, especially in major metropolitan areas. There's been some fair research done to show that if we want to continue to go outside, habits have to change.

Massive undiscovered supplies nonwithstanding, oil is going to be a crippling force in the future, if not already, both in terms of supply and who we're serving to get the oil.

heh don't know how old that photo is, but a carton was like $70 at the px the last time I smoked, and that was 4 years ago. Walked in to get some cigarettes, walked out a non-smoker :p

Fields of the depth reported in the original post are predominantly natural gas - not oil. This isn't the first huge "oil" discovery mentioned in the Gulf of Mexico, and the other ones haven't come anywhere near close to the original news hooplah when other wells have been drilled into the alleged deposits. One such example is Noxal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noxal_oil_field), which when "discovered" was claimed to be the next Cantarell Field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_Field), and has since turned out to be a fraction of what it was claimed (and almost totally natural gas). In the spanish-language press, President Fox claimed that the Noxal field was much larger than Cantarell (which itself is one of the largest oil fields in the world). Cantarell produces about 60% of the oil produced in Mexico and has been in decline for the past 5 years (dropping about 15% per year). Taxes paid by Pemex are 40% of the revenues of the Mexican government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber_oilfield

I'll believe it when it goes into production. Not when it is still just some bullshit claim by management and PR types.