BP claims there is roughly 53 years of oil left
 

BP (ticker BP ) has provided an intriguing update to its global oil reserves estimate in the company's latest yearly review of energy statistics. BP raised its reserve estimate by 1.1% to 1,687.9 billion barrels, which is enough oil to last the world 53.3 years at the current production rates. However, there's likely a lot more oil left in the tank beyond what BP sees today.

Continued @ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...left/11528999/

As the article states they could of course be wrong, but even if there is two times as much and it last 100 years, that's not a long time when you think about it.

Time to move to mars!

just another bullshit reason to increase prices

that's what someone who was thinking clearly would conclude. so rare in these parts..

Not sure if that will save us on the long run, big cargo ships, planes etc still need gasoline/diesel... however I don't really know what's the oil usage percentage of personal/non-personal part..

don't believe it. There is gobs and gobs and gobs of oil left, more oil left than we've used to date.

And the best news is it's all right here in the good ole USofA! That's why we buy other's oil, we're saving our own. And more and more oil will be found going forward. deeper, sideways, every which way.

Don't be a ********** and spend all your money on electric cars because the television told ya to.

I agree.... We'll all be using electric cars.

My future goals are getting solar power and then a electric car.

Dunno.. 40-30% for cargo still sounds like a lot in the long run :)

Fuck BP

http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpr.../oil-spill.jpg


http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoess...l_birds_01.jpg

This :2 cents: same reason they did the oil spill

i remember they were teaching us max 40 years in school, that was 30 years ago...

nevertheless I am very pro renewable energy

switching to electric transport & carbon taxes & cold showers all dont amount to shit. because...

until the world grapples with population growth, there is no sustainability.

:2 cents:

don't hold your breath for that...

They said we had 50 years worth back when i was in grade school 25 years ago.

So BP is to Oil, what DeBeers is to diamonds?

Heard this BS before, same old lies. Wish we would run out of it, and make room for plenty of other non monopolized energy sources.

Actually if you think about it, they were probably right at that time. Technology has increased the amount of oil we can gain access to which is why we have so much in the US now. Prior to the shale oil fields becoming useable we were not producing much of anything.

It's not that we found any new oil, it's just technology made what was locked away, open for the taking.

the tech lag is easily 30+ years. I helped build the first shale oil retort plant way back in 1982, this was when retort was the way to extract gas/oil from shale. It was bleeding edge tech at that time and now not viable.

That's part of what makes these estimates so far off. THe BIG future will be much deeper wells, we can only even see just several miles down re: gas&oil. Many believe that there's billions of barrels deeper still.

ANd electric cars? maybe. DOubtful actually. There needs to be a massive breakthrough in battery technology + more efficient production of the cars, the batteries and the energy network to supply what would be millions and millions of eectric cars.

:)

I bet they will offer "cheap" solar energy and electricty price will sky rocket

I was going to say the same thing. They said 40 to 50 years max and in 30 it would be crazy. Well 30 years later it is 4 dollars for gas but not quite what they called though

Lets turn it all into carbon dioxide and see what happens.

The shale plays have made America an energy powerhouse without most of the world realizing it. Production is growing in the us. There's also shale plays worldwide. China has 1.5x the oil we have estimated but they haven't even begun to frack yet due to the shale formations being in more densely populated areas. America sits on even more natural gas from the shale
. In fact we are burning natural gas in North Dakota as we frack for oil since the infrastructure doesn't exist up there yet to process and ship it all.

What's further interesting is no one has mentioned about how Moscow has backed off the Ukraine situation, and is caving to EU demands now. They invited Ukraine over to check their border posts lol. Quietly the US permittee 2 companies to start exporting liquefied natural gas, prior to this it was illegal. Ever since that happened Putin has changed his tune, dramatically. If the world doesn't need Russia's energy or becomes less dependent on his energy he's screwed in a bunch of ways, and even though he inked a massive deal with china, they now see how he treats his customers when they become dependent on him.

**edit: Russia parliament revoked his right to send troops in as well recently. Russia has changed it's tune dramatically since the us hinted we'd start exporting natural gas (to the most obvious place of EU)

The most fucked up thing about the shale oil/gas in the US is the oil companies had started investing heavily into renewable power, like solar and wind. Even BP renamed themselves from British petroleum to beyond petroleum as they looked toward a future short on oil.

Soon as the shale fields opened up, each of the major oil companies dropped all investments in green energy and sold off the related assets.

Also, as far as Putin goes the China deal wasn't really that big. It was like 400 billion over the course of 30 years or something like that. While yes it's a lot of money, for a company but not that much on the state level. IMO, Putin has significantly weaker Russia's position in the long term for a short gain.

As long as govt. officials ride around in big limousines and private jets and have carbon footprints the size of small towns...I question things.

As long at that same govt. keeps a GIANT over-sized military in place that has tanks that burn more fuel in a mile than a small towns entire fleet of cars do...I question things.

Until the govt. stops handing money to solar companies for nothing...and starts paying them to INSTALL solar panels on every home in the U.S. ... I question things.

Too bad that more people don't question these things.
The govt. RULES over us and tells us to live as primitively as possible. Meanwhile THEY live it up and don't even try to pretend they are "conserving" energy. :(

Exactly. We don't even need to use oil, they just withhold technology so profits can continuously be made. Tax dollars are a very big profit with continual pumpage. :disgust

I think everyone agrees that one day we need to be on green but today is not that day. There's been 2 trillion invested I green worldwide and it's yielded very little while shale frackonf was a major breakthrough. With shale frackin, there will be fossil fuel energy for a couple of generations most likely.

I think the green technology breakthroughs will come soon enough and getting the country off of coal and onto natural gas was still a major improvement.

America is on the right path though. We consume less, produce more, and therefore import significantly less. We import about 25% less oil than we did from about 5 years ago and every year that number improves. We are on the right path to gaining more and more energy independence, we are one of the few countries on this path. 'Murica!

Lol! Oil is not unlimited, and it is not renewable. But no problem, just keep believing and buying the stuff oil companies sell you.

This weekend I passed 1000 kilometres on my odometer. Total energy cost? $11.23. Money spent on gas? $0.0.

Hi Rochard,

Maybe consider getting an electric car first. The money you save in gas & oil will help pay for solar panels maybe...

I never really considered solar before, but I'm really hooked on this electric thing now, and I'm thinking... wouldn't it be awesome to charge an electric car from solar? Wifey and I are buying a house this year and as we tour properties, I find myself thinking about solar panels all the time. It might be expensive but it would be cool as hell.

Whoever gets solar panels charging their electric cars first has to invite the other to his house to check it out. Deal?

Double post (iPads suck ass)

For sure big machines need and will always need gas and oil... I wonder though about big container ships. They already have Nuclear subs and aircraft carries. Why not Nuclear powered cargo ships?

There are tax rebates for installing solar in many states. However I suspect the govt will eventually try to stop solar on people's houses because it takes profits away from the big energy companies. Instead they will give big energy companies money to build solar farms. The energy companies can't charge you if you supply your own power.. The goal is not to let people be self sufficient but rather keep them on a leash.

They don't want people generating their own power for free, that's bad for profits. Corrupt state offices will make sure the big power companies can fuck everyone. Example in Florida, they have made it illegal to have a house that is off grid. Meaning you can't get a occupancy certificate unless you are hooked up to the power grid.

Hi Robby,

The governments (yours and mine) already offer a huge incentive to go green. They give you $8000 towards the purchase of an electric car (up to $8500 in some states), and they also pay you up to $1000 to purchase a home charger and for extra wiring. The do this because the pollution savings on electric cars is significant.

Solar panels are cool but they are not worth the money just yet. They are very expensive and not terribly efficient yet.

It makes more sense for any investor such as the government, to invest in technologyes that improve solar panel performance, and reduce the dependancy on oil where it is the most inefficient (like cars).

I agree with you that it would be nice to see them use electric cars, but then again Limo's are very big and heavy, especially when they are armoured.

feel free to quote a post of mine where I've stated oil&gas are unlimited and renewable.


The funny part is I called it, you think just because you don't stick a gas nozzle in your car that you're renewing/doing something right. Not to mention you're the one that bought the $40k electric car, not me.

that car will be paying for its own carbon footprint for the next ~30 years. :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

And to the best of their available knowledge they probably weren't too far off. It's only technology that has allowed us to delay that. You can't look at past predictions that were incorrect and conclude that new predictions won't come to pass and it's not something to worry about, we've just gained reprieves here or there. Essentially new predictions are probably pretty close based on existing technology but you have to allow an x factor for further advances in recovery.

However first off there are two issues with BP's predictions, one, their 53 year timeline looks to be based on present consumption which is stupid as bar a recession here or there the long term trend for oil consumption is only growth which means there is actually significantly less than 53 years left. However they are also using a very loose definition of "proven" oil, which although not as strict as a company would use to report their own reserves (because they have to rely on nationalised companies reporting their own figures) is still very strict in terms of actually measuring the likely amount of oil. Proven oil is generally oil you have a 90% certainty of existing which is quite high. Once you add in Probable (50% chance of existing) the world reserves would blow out a lot further than their stated 53 years. Then of course you have Prospective or Possible with a 10% chance of existing which would blow it out further still. So there is probabilistically more oil than they're stating and it will likely be used faster than they're stating. I don't think we have to worry about oil "running out" in the next hundred years, the problem is that there won't be enough to meet demand which is the more immediate issue. There will probably still be oil in 300 years it'll just be $300 per drop and of course won't be used as more economic alternatives will be around.

That said it's vaguely annoying to see idiots here think they've got it all figured out and it's all a scam to keep oil prices high. "Can't fool me hah!". Yeah, it's all a big scam and oil campanies are refining tar sands, drilling insane depths in the ocean, testing shale formations to see if they can be fracked economically and are even trying to move onto methane hydrates. Yeah they waste billions on unnecessarily expensive exploration and production just to fool you! Idiots.

Oil is running out and it's becoming more and more expensive to extract, we can never have cheap oil again as we've already drilled all the cheap places. It's deeper and deeper in the ocean and less and less economic shales which means the baseline production costs will keep rising. Anytime the price of oil dips it just makes the least economic wells turn off the tap which reduces production and brings the price back up. We will never have $30 oil again because the new extraction methods cost more than $30 to even get it out of the ground. It might sink to that in a recession temporarily as consumption falls and capitulation sets in but it can never be kept that low on a sustained timeline because most of the wells in the world would have to be shut in to not make a massive loss and therefore it would become scarce again, which would further knock the wind out of economy which would make it fall again and so on until we properly transitioned away from it which would take decades if we hadn't properly started by that time.

Don't get too comfortable in the US either, world prices will dictate exports. Some of you think America owns the oil in America lol. No company extracting the oil is beholden to sell it for less than they can. That's why LNG trains are currently being built to connect the domestic gas market to the world markets to get higher prices. Come around 2019+ your low heating bills will be a thing of the past. Similarly with oil it's going to be sold to the highest international bidder. The only thing that will prevent that is more regulations, ie granting leases with the proviso that x% is sold for domestic consumption and that sort of thing.

Come about 2017ish I'll probably start taking positions in gas stocks that are currently being hammered by the domestic glut at ~$4 HH in anticipation for more interfacing with the world market at ~$12 LNG prices. Or at least I'll be evaluating the options depending on probable tonnage to be exported and global demand to work out an early entry or DCA or something.

Nope...it's not based on that. According to the article it's based on current PRODUCTION levels not consumption levels.

That's why the article also said there is "probably" a lot MORE than what BP is stating because production levels will probably rise as technology is improving more and new sources are being found.

In the context of the argument production and consumption is essentially the same thing as there is only ever roughly as much produced as will be consumed and both production and consumption rise in tandem. There is a few % difference and lag times but it's nothing compared to the actual growth in consumption/production ie 33% in the last 20 years.
Production has it's own problems as a measure of oil left as it's not possible to produce 87mmbbl/d for 53 years for a total of 1688BBL, all oil fields decline and produce most of their oil up front, even in non conventional extraction highest ROI areas are extracted first leaving less productive areas to be extracted last.

It's a simple back of the envelope calculation to get a point across, my issue with it stands, it doesn't take into account growth in consumption (or decline rates etc) and it doesn't take into account probable and possible reserves. Basically it's 39 years of proven oil left at current consumption and production growth rates which means shortages would start in a decade as they decline. If we double reserves from 1688BBL to 3276BBL to take into account probable reserves and future tech it gives us 69 years with shortages a few decades away. Of course this isn't factoring in efficiency gains if we start really trying to move away from oil.

I have no idea why they would base their predictions on production either. Seems you would base it on consumption.

But honestly...all those predictions are using TODAY'S numbers.

We have no idea how much or how little more they will find and be able to produce 50 years from now.
And conversely we have zero idea how much consumption there will be of fossil fuels either.

For all we know technology could take a huge leap and a whole new energy source could be found. Or maybe not. Either way, solar and wind are already generating a nice chunk of energy.

I can only assume that will continue to rise and eventually rise faster than new population growth in energy consumption. :)

Well, ok.. but you did say there's "Gobs and gobs" left. Maybe I mistakenly read "Don't worry! It'll be here forever" in your words.... I take it back.

Well, a little. I'm just glad not to be putting any more money into big oil. Oil causes wars, Oil pollutes more and kills more people than any other source of energy, etc. I'm just glad that we finally have a choice when it comes to the source of energy, and I'm glad I made a new choice. That's it...


Not to mention you're the one that bought the $40k electric car, not me.

that car will be paying for its own carbon footprint for the next ~30 years. :1orglaugh:1orglaugh[/QUOTE]

What do you drive again?

There is more oil left than we've consumed thus far. A lot more is the point and while predicting is crucial, it's not a true measure of reality for many reasons.

Be proud in your choice, that's good, you do your fair share of trolling here and I like to troll ya back, electric cars is a fun place to do that.

what I drive-

http://dru-cdn.zipcar.com/sites/defa...58-en-US_1.png

http://www.allyellowtaxi.com/sites/a.../taxiprius.jpg

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...ticleLarge.jpg

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6...8cfe970b-600wi

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mdc2FXbFl_...600/fixie1.jpg

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/201...ing_JR_604.jpg

I've sold all my cars and motorcycles except for the motorcoach, which does get shitty mileage, but it is a 1994 and already paid for its carbon footprint and we don't drive it long distances and I am also finishing up converting the electrical system to pure battery recharged with solar panels, completely unplugged from the grid.


:)

Hopefully we'll have moved on from fossil fuels way before 53 years.

Not until the U.S. federal govt. figures out a way to make solar tanks, missiles, bomber jets, and drones. :(

Controlling the world with our giant overbloated military that has huge bases worldwide requires fossil fuels. And if there is one thing our govt. is intent on doing the last 70 years...it's controlling the world. (and failing miserably at it while spending trillions and burning more fossil fuel in a day than we can even imagine)

That is GREAT news maybe America should go green energy, oil only pollute the enviroment. If people got that thru their tick skulls maybe there would be a ban on gas hungry cars, USA produce a shitload of pollution every day due to all the cars. :2 cents:

i dont believe it :2 cents::2 cents:

you should get familiar with the new world.

http://abortionsforall.files.wordpre...0/09/road1.jpg

http://cache.g4tv.com/ImageDb3/31390...ad-warrior.jpg

http://i722.photobucket.com/albums/w...ad-warrior.jpg

Why do you only mention the USA?

China is NUMBER ONE in polluting. The U.S. is number 2.

Here is the breakdown of the top 10 in "greenhouse gas" emissions:

1. China 6,018 million metric tonnes per year
2. USA 5,833 million metric tonnes per year
3. Russia 1,704 million metric tonnes per year
4. India 1,293 million metric tonnes per year
5.Japan 1,247 million metric tonnes per year
6.Germany 858 million metric tonnes per year
7. Canada (SURPRISE lol) 614 million metric tonnes per year
8. United Kingdom 586 million metric tonnes per year
9. South Korea 514 million metric tonnes per year
10. Iran 471 million metric tonnes per year

Source: http://www.actionforourplanet.com/#/...ies/4541684868

Keep in mind that these are "Greenhouse Gas" emissions. There is no real breakdown of what these stats tell us.

And if it's mainly carbon dioxide being put out...then that is a whole other controversial debate.

I remember when I was a kid we thought of "air pollution" as being smog created by big smokestacks belching black filth into the sky.
This isn't the same thing.

I'm starting to think that some people won't be happy until we all live in caves with no electricity and no way to travel except on horses and bicycles.

we won't make it another 50 years burning oil, global climate change will be in full affect in 20 years. We better hope something better comes around before then.

Why would that be a surprise? We're a very industrious nation.

Of course, 614 million is but a speck compared to the 6+ BILLION tonnes from China or the 5+ billion from USA.

But we're trying!