U.S. Oil Output Tops 12M Barrels a Day for First Time
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
Most of the oil production increase in the last years in the US is due to fracking; such an amazing technology where a bunch of chemicals are injected directly into the ground. Ted-ed has a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tudal_4x4F0
Lets screw up the environment by not quitting our society's oil dependency so that a few shareholders of [INSERT_RANDOM_OIL_COMPANY_hERE] can enjoy all the $$$ while future generations (and probably us too given how fast this go) get to pay the price.
In many ways it feels like we still live in the wild west
Sure, all your neighbors died of the same thing, but maybe you’re the only one that would have had it anyway.
(This argument has worked in court, which is why I’m repeating it.)
However, your claim is nothing but anti-science drivel unless you source it. Do you also believe vaccinations are harmful because they "inject chemicals into your body"? These processes are more nuanced then you think and are heavily regulated.
This is sanctimonious and inaccurate. Oil allows our consumer culture to exist. We make plastic crap with oil, we import it from China using oil, we deliver it using oil to an amazon warehouse, and then deliver it again using oil to a Prime Member. That cycle, in turn, supports everyone else’s job. Indeed, the very web is built in that oil consumption cycle, since Google runs the web and 98% of Google’s business is helping sell more plastic crap to people.
Oil and gas is not particularly profitable. In fact it’s less profitable than average: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/.... Return on equity is single digits, versus 20%+ for companies like Facebook.
I'm sure this makes me an asshole, but given the choice between making regions of Saudi Arabia or the USA unlivable, I'd take Arabia any day.
This is a strange place for the love-it-or-leave-it fallacy to rear its simplistic head. Grandparent is pissed at fracking companies and the perceived greed of their shareholders. A widely-held viewpoint expressed plainly. The mere existence of your disagreement doesn't make his opinion any less valid.
I don't have kids, I walk to work, and I sit in the dark a whole lot (in the winter). I could deal if my state banned all motor vehicles (except the interstates, in order to stay Commerce Clause compliant) and coal mining/burning. I doubt most could.
We built a system that depends on borrowing from the future, and it's abundantly clear it's running out of available credit.
Also if you consume all the available non-renewable energy that you have, at one point you will mathematically end up in a dire situation.
A typical Engineering mindset conceptualizes the problem as if it were physics, where you see current output and stock and calculates the end result, but thats not how humans interact with each other: we are execute ingenuity at every step changing the basic formula again and again. If the former were true, you would have seen oil prices increase steadily over time, as oil absolutely runs out (no new one is produced), but you can see thats not what happens, it's even today way cheaper that it was decades ago. If it were starting to run out, the prices would shoot up and alternatives would become so appealing that they would be developed and used.
Hopefully the concept is clear, the TLDR is don't use physics to explain economics.
The main problem is not that we'll eventually run out of oil. It's just that by the time we finish all the reserves most people living on Earth will probably experience extreme weather conditions all year round.
The concept of "peak oil" (discounting whether or not it's a fallacy) wasn't ever that we'd run out of oil. When peak oil occurred, there would still be oil in the ground.
The problem was (supposed to be) that the amount of energy it would take to extract that oil from the ground would be greater than the amount of energy you would get from that oil extracted. In other words, it would take as much or more than a barrel of oil's energy to extract that barrel of oil.
At that point, it would make no economic sense to try to get that oil, at least from an energy consumption point of view (it may make sense for other reasons though - for instance, to use the oil to make chemicals or plastics or other materials).
We were supposed to hit that point - and we have hit that point multiple times on a per-oil producing country level. The United States hit it a long while back. But then this new technology of fracking came into being, and it changed the equation radically. Now it seems the USA is outputting more oil than it ever has, in effect reversing it's peak oil status (which I don't think was ever thought possible).
Shale oil and oil sands were known about for a long time, but the technology made it super energy intensive; fracking opened it up, and also made old wells produce again. I'm sure the concept is being applied world wide as needed, and that's caused the "world peak oil" timeline to recede as well.
What would probably happen if "peak oil" ever did occur on a world level, would be that other energy sources would be used to extract it; nuclear generated electricity would be the best choice, much like it's been proposed for water desalination. But even those thoughts were predicated on the idea that solar costs wouldn't drop like they've did in recent years, so maybe solar might be the better choice?
Also, the oil probably wouldn't be brought up for fuel usage in such a scenario, since you'd still be upside down in that regard. But it would make sense to extract it for its other uses as a raw material.
In all likelihood we'll need to consume the resources available to us to advance to the next level of technology where the existing resources are no longer needed.
> Also if you consume all the available non-renewable energy that you have, at one point you will mathematically end up in a dire situation.
Mathematically speaking, the resources will be consumed eventually. We just need to try to make as much progress as possible before that happens.
Economically speaking, oil is infinite. Thats why its price goes down over time!
Do you want to depend on someone to say how many beatings is moral to be inflicted upon yourself?
Regardless of what I want, we currently live in a society where the govt holds the monopoly on violence. You're free to have your opinion that an adolescent libertarian utopia is possible though.
Generic ideological flamewars are among the worst, because they're so repetitive.
Re previous 'warnings': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19894978, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19696256, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19348644 are the ones I was referring to.
Most people want to improve the environment. They way to do that is not legislating in controls on production because then we just import from ME and pay to secure shipping routes in that region. Instead, legislate in incentives to reduce demand (electric car subsidies etc.).
It's on the state to fulfill its obligations with the citizenry
Unfortunately, this is a geopolitical tactic to crush Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations like Iran so that it defunds terrorism. The tipping point for the US between electric cars and gas is about $6/gallon from what I've read. CA is getting close, I'm paying $4/gallon but most of that is taxes these days. We can't move forward until we get rid of $2/gallon gas throughout the country.
UK petrol prices have been close to equivalent of $6/USgal for a while - currently about £1.20 per liter, £4.50/USgal = $5.67, and electric cars are still pretty scarce. Hybrid taxis have been popular for a while though.
If I were in the market for a new car, I'd be looking at EV's. I drive about 5-6000 miles a year and can't really justify the money, though (and tbh 6,000 miles a year at 50+mpg means driving is a relatively small part of my carbon footprint. Really, I need to fly less)
Largest producer, not largest exporter. It consumes about 20M barrels a day so it is still a net oil importer, although it is forecast to become a net exporter in 2022 [1]. The combination of the US and Canada OTOH is a net exporter, and has been for a few years, which means the US has been functionally independent from OPEC for a few years.
The US imports more heavy crude than it needs because it has a competitive advantage in refining it and in turn exports a lot of easier-to-refine light crude (the product of fracking). This this "swapping" of light crude for heavy could be discontinued with little disruption to the US economy. I.e., it does not mean much. I'm mentioning it only because someone who doesn't know about it might be misled by export statistics.
Also, calling the shale-oil boom a geopolitical tactic gives the impression that the boom was somehow planned or at least incentivized by the US government, which George Friedman says was not what happened. (Friedman used the shale boom in a talk to help make the point that many important developments occur in the US without significant involvement by the government.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...
I just looked this up and so far I found in CA is 69 cents per gallon. Am I missing something?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenrwald/2018/09/28/californi...
In the past the consensus was they could outlast frackers, but I think that's changed in the past several years.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2019/04/01/saudi-aramco...
Edit: Falling demand for OPEC oil, I mean.
I've had the pleasure of working for a large driller as a software engineer. The innovation in drill tech is unbelievable. I hope all of you get the chance to read about the upstream industry - phenomenal work being done. Oil is an industry where a ton of the knowledge is only documented in books or the minds of the workforce. so better yet, visit your local rig site.