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Comment by gethly | Hacker News Reader

Silver is limited in supply. The production is actually in deficit for years now, as silver gets used up and there is very little recycling.

Oil on the other hand is infinite.

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How is it infinite? Oil forms from ancient organic matter under intense heat and pressure, a process taking millions of years, making it non-renewable on human timescales.

Biodiesel is a thing.

It can be synthesized from air and water with energy and the right catalysts, although the process isn’t cheap. However if solar power keeps getting cheaper it might become feasible to produce it this way instead of drilling.

Very interesting, I wasn’t aware of that

Despite spending a mind-numbing amount of time deeply embedded in the automotive world, I had no idea synthetic oil didn’t have oil or petroleum precursors.

This is an incredible, and wildly under discussed win.

As soon as solar energy is being used at scale, this will probably become way more commonly used - big electricity expense is the only main cost.

Carbon capture is the other main input…hmmm.

The problem is that solar only works when the sun is out and startup/shutdown on industrial chemical processes isn’t easy. Once you start involving batteries for around-the-clock operation, it’s more efficient just to use electricity directly. Synthetic hydrocarbons are best used for the cases like aviation where the energy density is the biggest hurdle.

Yes, these are the historical barriers.

They’re melting.

DME is even easier to synthetize from syngas and afterwards methanol than synth oil.

It's simply the reverse of oxidizing it (AKA combusting it).

Silver can be synthesized in particle colliders. Does that make it an infinite resource?

Anyone with basic physical literacy knows nothing extractive is infinite.

What interest is served by posting this obviously wrong rhetoric?

Sarcasm? 150-200M oz of silver are recycled annually[1]. Oil obviously is mostly burned and won't be recoverable, and clearly finite (even if we managed to squeeze out more with fracking etc.)

1: https://www.physicalgold.com/insights/how-much-silver-is-rec...

You must have had a lot of fun when the "peak oil" crowd was dominating the conversation.

Annually, we consume more oil than we find additional reserves of. The difference is something like 12 times less than annual consumption, and the gap is widening.

If you’ve found a way to escape that arithmetic, I’m all ears.

The math is pretty simple: the world consumes 36 billion barrels of oil a year and there are like 2 trillion barrels of known reserves. We have enough reserves for 55 years of current consumption. There’s 0 incentive to find more.

There's a $60+ / barrel incentive to find and extract more.

Ostensibly not all known oil fields are actively being extracted. This fact alone makes it unlikely that discovering a new source would affect the price of oil, unless it can be retrieved using cheaper than the existing methods. It’s also worth pointing out that “oil” as a resource isn’t this homogenous substance. Basically every different source of oil has a different (and expensive) refinement process on the other end. It’s a lot more variables than the Reddit-style armchair oil tycoon would probably expect.

I'm sorry, Reddit-style armchair oil tycoon? I've been using the word "oil" commodity the same way as everyone else has, why did you pick out my comment for that aspersion? Why not upthread when people were discussing 0 incentives? You are applying this aspersion and standard asymmetrically.

Am I? I think I used it in 100% of my comments before this one… it was not meant as an offense, but more as an acknowledgement that almost nobody here (including myself; I’ll happily take the moniker if you won’t) has the appropriate knowledge to argue this topic.

Nobody was talking about changing the price of oil, though.

Just someone getting paid market rate for the additional barrels.

Fair enough, though production does impact price to a degree. For oil this is less important than some other commodities, but it’s still a factor. But this is really a tangent from the central argument that is: oil exploration isn’t so important if we already aren’t producing from many existing known sources, and exploration itself is only sort of loosely tied to selling the end-product in terms of sales.

New exploration is in the $35-40 break even range, not $60. A well with $60 break even is a poor investment right now.

Incentive != break even point.

$35-40 takes into account the risks and time value of the investment, potential price fluctuations, and the preference for (all else equal) lowest cost extraction.

I would not expect someone to dump in a shit ton of money, hope the well works out, and nothing else go wrong right at an expected cost at $60/barrel with amortized investments/operations included.

To follow up on that, I think that 50 year horizon number has even been the case for something well over 50 years now. It seems we are incentivized currently to extract from deposits around that threshold of years? One professor I had even claimed this will always hold true indefinitely, since at some point we’ll switch away from oil, this holding constant there being about 50 years of known reserves left, once it become economically infeasible to extract that oil.

Interesting graphs of US oil and gas production:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66564

Funny, I like it. I guess gold has been too expensive for a while.

Erm, actually once we have subatomic assemblers then silver will also be infinite.

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