Bad times and not buying American, your thoughts?

[Mike DC]

 
I just wanna say this point one time in this discussion - we don't have "plenty of oil in the ground."  Not like what we need. 


I totally agree, we should be pumping Anwar and the north american offshort stuff and anything else we can.  But the problem is that it will hardly make a dent in the ultimate supply problem even if we do. 

The natural resources are in the earth but getting them out is another story.  Much of the huge remaining reserves of oil will be longer & more difficult fields to pump than what we're used to.  We can't just throw more money or man-hours at this problem and make it go away.    Getting consistent oil flowing from a field is an achievement that takes huge (and ongoing) engineering work to sustain.  It's not like unplugging the drain on a bathtub. 
   

[Tilar]

We do have plenty of oil in the ground. Gull Island and Anwar in alaska, Bakken reserve in the dakotas, There are wells capped due to our government not allowing us to use our own oil. We have one gas and oil well on our farm that is capped and the drillers claims there are at least two more but we can't do anything with it due to our government sticking their nose in the private sectors business.  And with the way it's gone in the last 100 days, It's getting a lot worse. Yeah, It's there, They just don't want us to drill unless it's election year.

[aone415]

Since 1998 I've owned 4 new cars, all Fords (98, 01 and 04 Expeditions and a 2008 Edge) and I've never had a problem with any of them.  Everyone else in my family drives Acuras and Inifinitis and are equally impressed by their quality.  THe problem that US auto makers are facing is NOT about quality, although the media will tell you different.  The problem was simply supply vs. demand and the bastardizion of the "free Market" concept. 

As mentioned in the thread already, US auto makers spent much of their R&D, marketing, labor and factories to produce Full Sized trucks and SUV's without really putting together any longterm plans regarding smaller sedans and coupes.  They never produced alternatives to a Bimmer 3 series, Acura TSX & TL, Infiniti G series, Mercedes C Class, etc.  With the exception of Caddy, no US marque ever really decided to make a better benz or lexus and as a result they slowly lost their market share to foreign brands.  Sure the Taurus was the #1 selling car in the US for years, but Ford never really improved on it, they never took the good things that Honda, Toyota had and then integrated them into their winning models and that was a problem.  Instead we made the biggest (and best) Pickups and SUVs known to man without a backup plan and once oil eclipsed $80 a barrel - GAME OVER - because there was nothing in the pipeline that was a known entity to the consumer...

[Mike DC]

We do have plenty of oil in the ground. Gull Island and Anwar in alaska, Bakken reserve in the dakotas, There are wells capped due to our government not allowing us to use our own oil. We have one gas and oil well on our farm that is capped and the drillers claims there are at least two more but we can't do anything with it due to our government sticking their nose in the private sectors business.  And with the way it's gone in the last 100 days, It's getting a lot worse. Yeah, It's there, They just don't want us to drill unless it's election year.

Gull Island?  I see little reason to think that's any more than a conspiracy story.  Some of the same kinds of websites that pass that story around also insist that a "fish carburetor" has been able to get 100mpg for decades.


Bakken reserve, Anwar . . .  still not much in the worldwide scale.  Probably not even enough to offset the coming production declines in existing fields by the time they're running.  You can't empty out an oilfield overnight, and it all just goes onto the worldwide market when it does get pumped.  Contributions from a few more oilfields are not gonna change our lives much unless somebody finds a previously unknown Ghawar-sized field. 

[Tilar]

Probably not even enough to offset the coming production declines in existing fields by the time they're running.

Therein lies the problem everyone bitches about. Nobody in government wants to drill. Ever. There is plenty of oil out on the coast but they don't want to drill. Hell, China is down near Cuba drilling oil now.  Our government won't drill untill everything we have now has dried up, and then we'll still be 10 years getting back up to par and off of foreign oil.

[Brock Samson]

 great hijack tilar. 

[Tilar]

Sorry, I just get real passionate when it comes to anything that hurts our country as a whole.... and everything this thread is about hits that sore spot. Didn't mean to hijack it.

[Mike DC]

Therein lies the problem everyone bitches about. Nobody in government wants to drill. Ever. There is plenty of oil out on the coast but they don't want to drill. Hell, China is down near Cuba drilling oil now.  Our government won't drill untill everything we have now has dried up, and then we'll still be 10 years getting back up to par and off of foreign oil.

"Plenty of oil" out there?

Compare those finds to what the world burns daily, yearly, etc.  Then figure in the EROI numbers of extracting that oil.  Then figure in the realistic steady long-term pumping rate we're likely to see.  The impact gets pretty damn small even if we were working flat-out on developing these finds. 

I agree that it's totally worth it to get started developing these fields, but it's not gonna change the basic issues we're dealing with.


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I'll quit soaping on the oil issue now.

     

[SFRT]

personally the minute they open an E85 station here im switching. 110 octane? YES. right now the closest station is 60 miles away.

[472 R/T SE]

According to this there's only enough oil at the Bakken formation for a year using the rate of us importing 10 million barrels a day.

The Green River formation is suppose to hold 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels but it's a shale.  To get that shale out of the ground creates substantial air pollution & carbon emissions & leaves toxic byproducts that could endanger the environment.  The whacko's will never let that happen.




When I worked in the patch most of our rigs only went down around 2500-2800 feet.  That could be done in around 5 days.  If a pulling unit would come in right away and set rods & tubing and then a pumping unit right after that, oil could be at the big tanks in less than a month.

Getting the oil on the market most likely wouldn't affect the price since OPEC countries would cut back exporting to keep the price where they want it.  There's been what, two or three meetings where they cut production to get the price back up. 

It's almost like you're pissin' in the wind if you think oil will stay cheap.  OPEC will just keep cutting production.

[Mike DC]

According to this there's only enough oil at the Bakken formation for a year using the rate of us importing 10 million barrels a day.

The Green River formation is suppose to hold 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels but it's a shale.  To get that shale out of the ground creates substantial air pollution & carbon emissions & leaves toxic byproducts that could endanger the environment.  The whacko's will never let that happen.

It doesn't take greenie-whackos to stop us from developing most of the shale oil deposits.  The majority of it is just not commerically viable and probably never will be.



 

When I worked in the patch most of our rigs only went down around 2500-2800 feet.  That could be done in around 5 days.  If a pulling unit would come in right away and set rods & tubing and then a pumping unit right after that, oil could be at the big tanks in less than a month.

Yeah, but it's the volumes that are the problem.  There might be 3 years (of USA's demand) of oil under somewhere, but it still might take us 15+ years of pumping just to get all that oil out of the ground.  The amount of steady daily production from these sites won't have effect on in worldwide production in any given year. 

Getting the oil on the market most likely wouldn't affect the price since OPEC countries would cut back exporting to keep the price where they want it.  There's been what, two or three meetings where they cut production to get the price back up. 

It's almost like you're pissin' in the wind if you think oil will stay cheap.  OPEC will just keep cutting production.

I think OPEC's reserves are probably way overstated in total.  Iran & SA are probably looking for excuses to rest their fields a little.  It's not gonna be pretty if this is true and it becomes more apparent. 

[472 R/T SE]

The only reason I even jumped in this was because you said something about how time consuming it was to get oil out of the ground and onto the market.  And that I respectfully disagree with.

Now I can't find it.  Did you edit it?  I guess I should have QFT like you did.

Yes I agree it takes volumes but 20 years ago the gubment was restricting how much the pumping units could pull out of the ground & I'm pretty sure they're still doing it.

[Mike DC]

 
I don't remember re-editing anything back there unless it was moments after I originally posted it. 

I never tried to defend these arguments about "we won't even see any of the oil for 10 years."  Because I don't believe them either.  If I ever did appear to defend that viewpoint then it was purely a bad phrasing of my words. 




But I have been trying to say that finding a site with XXX total amount of oil reserves in the ground won't give us XXX amount of oil in total to use any time soon.  I'm saying we could start the bathtub flowing reasonably quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll get a very big stream flowing (relative to the size of the tub).  Look at the most productive oilfields on the earth, and most of them have already been pumping for years & decades up to now. 

In general, drilling a new field with "3 years of oil" can be expected to do very little for our oil shortage problems during the next 3 years after the day the pumps start.


 

I agree, let's pump more domestically!  We should!  We need to! 

But if we're facing a (political) choice between drilling a few more domestic oilfields (with no real shift away from oil dependency) versus starting to cut back oil usage & starting to redesign our whole energy policy (without drilling more domestically) . . . I'm arguing that we'll be A WHOLE LOT better off going in the latter direction right now.  It's just a matter of about the raw numbers involved in the problem.