Are you referring to me or the person who wrote the fucking article?

If you are referring to me, even though I didn't use the word, I'll use it here & now:

160 billion barrels of oil is a tremendous amount of oil to be sitting on.

feel free to fill me in on any new math you are aware of that proves it's not.


I know gfy is negative nancy central, the neg spin on this is classic gfy.

stay classy gfy!


:1orglaugh

It's hard to be positive about coal. We should be moving away from that antiquated energy source -- that means oil too.

that's not realistic. In fact, it's entirely unrealistic.

and clean coal tech is hardly antiquated.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Thanks for proving my point from a while back, you aren't really interested in changing behaviors because this is a total attempt at that. While you high five yourself for buying a volt, these corps/peeps are risking a billion dollars to reduce the equivalent of 350000 cars pollution per year but thats not good enough for you. You should be applauding the effort at the very least. Eh.

Lolz.

It doesn't work like that. For a starters it doesn't have a lot to do with the actual amount of oil left. A hundred billion, two hundred billion, three, it doesn't matter. What matters is the production capability which is always a tiny fraction of the reserves vs the demand which is always going up. It would take many decades to produces that oil. It doesn't even sound like the first drops will be produced for a couple of years.
You're drinking a milkshake while someone is slowly refilling your glass from a massive vat.. If you're drinking faster than the vat is refilling it doesn't matter if there is a gigalitre of milkshake left, there is none in your glass and that's what actually matters.
Then of course you have the issue that it's a world commodity. It doesn't mean jack that America might have another 160B in reclaimed reserves because it's going to be sold to the highest bidder.. basically that vat is feeding a couple of hundred other milkshakes.

Now, to show it's not all the evil O&G companies, look at natural gas in the US over the last 5-6 years. It's a domestic market (can't export it yet) that really did experience an excess to demand situation from fracking. The excess made natural gas so cheap they lost money drilling for it. Same companies, drilling with the same rigs, sometimes in the same hydrocarbon deposits (gas caps are found over oil) but one resource (oil) is "the bad oil companies keeping gas high and never letting it come down" the other associated resource (natural gas) crashes in price so low people lose money drilling it but no one says "yay those awesome nat gas companies making it cheap to cook or heat my house"!

The reason oil states generally have cheap prices for their locals is they are largely socialised producers and cheap oil is a low cost form of welfare. Hell, Saudi Arabia is essentially a welfare state. Blame capitalism

that is precisely what makes it jack. Worldwide Economic power, not just having it in our own back yard, is real value. Petrodollars, etc.

You're conflating two different issues. I'm saying it doesn't mean jack in the context that future reserves "should" mean cheaper oil locally. I'm obviously not saying oil aint shit but hoes and tricks.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification.

I know full well "it doesn't work like that". I said "should", did I not? And it's not I that is saying the world oil supply is affecting prices, I just happened to be the one paying attention to what's been fed to the public via the news over the past 40 years. You can't seriously sit there and tell me "limited world oil supply" has never been used in the past as the talking point for raising prices, can you? No one said it was the actual reason, I certainly didn't say it was.

But frankly I'd wager most people don't care about oil production not keeping up with demand. Most people I know anyway realize that both Canada and the US have existing reserves of oil already refined and already paid for that are huge, certainly huge enough to keep both countries going while they adjust production and/or purchasing to match any discrepencies in consumption, or major oil spill, etc. It's just another excuse to hike up gas prices.

And frankly most people are just tired of excuses. Forgive me but your laborious attempt at educating as to "how it works" really reads like more excuses. I know you'll say "no it's reality" and that may be true, but if you think that the size of the overall supply in the world has never or won't ever be (or be said to be) the reason for gas prices going up then it's not just I who needs the reality check. Whether you agree or not I know full well that as the supply still in the ground dwindles the price IS going up. Unless of course we find new oil deposits off-world, like Mars or the 5th moon of Jupiter or something. Then we'd have what we have now, a whole new huge source of oil. And at that time someone will say "hey, shouldn't prices for gas come down a bit since we have all the new oil?"
And someone like you will say "no, because it doesn't work like that"
Eventually someone's going to throw rocks at you Bhuto. :D

Fact is whenver there's the least little hitch in the oil industry anwywhere in the world, it's not long before gas prices are raised. All I'm saying is it would be nice if once in a while when something positive happens in that industry, say, by way of a huge new oil deposit or source found, that we the consumers get gouged a little less, that's all. Most people can't drink more than a litre of milkshake at a time, but they sure need a steady stream of gas.

Bhuto, does your family own a string of gas stations or something? :D

No, in fact I was literally describing "limited world oil supply", why would I be describing and explaining something I didn't think existed or had been used as a "talking point"? Limited oil supply of the kind I described is THE limit that has been used over the years. When a hurricane develops near a refinery or a war starts in the middle east, it's production supply limits people are talking about. The main spike in prices that had a reserves based component (the kind you're talking about) would have been '07 as there was lots of peak oil talk at that time.

However there are basically 5 entities involved. Explorers/producers, refiners, speculators, gas stations and consumers. Sometimes a producer is also a refiner, sometimes a producer is a speculator as they have to hedge against price fluctuations (like a canadian webmaster might against CAD/USD fluctuations in their income). It's not all a monolithic entity out to screw over poor motorists. An explorer has jack to do with anything.. they just want the oil out of the ground as fast as possible and their money in the bank.

But think about it for a moment, if world supply is always being used as an excuse to jack up prices, how come oil prices aren't at $10,000/gal? Obviously you only note when it's the cause of the price going up, but you don't notice the decline when it happens - it's not like it only goes up! When the GFC hit oil plunged because demand contracted and obviously it goes up and down every other day. Now over the last ten years there is an underlying price driver and that's that there is no more cheap oil so there is a floor in the price. Oil used to cost $6 a barrel to produce in supermassive fields now it costs $50-$60 in tar sands and bad shale. So there might be a lot of reserves, but the cost of accessing those reserves is way up because it's not as simple as sticking a drill in the ground and getting a gusher of oil that wants to be free. Almost the only place you'll find a gusher these days is in mile deep water they drill with billion dollar rigs with robots. Each deep sea drill costs between $60 -$100M dollars.. Of course the production cost is going to go up from when you could spend $2M to drill on dry land.
Now if you're going to complain about a gas station putting the price up the day the war in iraq starts even though he's got a station full of gas paid for before the war started and then take a month to pass on the savings of an exchange rate fluctuation then yeah, i agree, they're taking advantage of the situation, being quick to raise prices and being slow to lower them. If you want to complain about speculators driving the price of oil up or down over and above the underlying fundamentals, sure, but this happens on all commodities, it's still the most efficient way we've found to get the correct price. but if you want to talk about reserves, production and extraction costs then that's a different thing entirely.

I'm completely happy to take your mars example. I 100% guarantee you if they somehow found 500 trillion barrels of oil on mars tomorrow that it would have no effect on the oil price. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of payload in Earth orbit.
I imagine it would be much, much more to send it to mars. The return journey might be easier as mars has less gravity but it would cost trillions to even set up the infrastructure and colony there there to send oil back and then you're sending empty shuttles at about 5-10B per trip back to mars to refuel..
Let's ignore all that and go on the earth's orbit figure.. it costs $2,954,000 to put a barrel of oil into earth's orbit given it's 295.4 pounds of payload. So your 500 trillion barrels of mars oil costs a minimum of almost $3M a barrel. That is why reserves don't mean the slightest red cunt hair of a fuck to the price of oil. If people want to throw stones for my use of logic and math they can go nuts, i know they'll only be doing it out of frustration at the truth of what i'm saying.

Deep sea drilling, tar send extraction and shale extraction are smaller version of this. I promise you though if we suddenly found a trillion barrels of sweet light crude on land in one big deposit prices would plummet.

The US has the strategic oil reserves, but that's just that, a strategic reserve. It's meant to save the nation in the case of physical or economic war. It's not meant to save consumers a few cents every time the price goes up. The government doesn't flood the market with cashew nuts every time there is a shortage to help out consumers, or deposit money in all citizens bank accounts every time the USD goes up and makes imports more expensive. It's not their role to shield people from the normal fluctuations of the economy. You're supposed to feel those fluctuations so behavior changes and the economy is dynamic instead of central government soviet style controls.

I've already explained the supply glut of natural gas halved the price and above the extra supply the GFC created with lower economic activity.. those were LARGE falls but no one takes notice of them or goes "thanks petroleum industry!" people only notice when it hurts.. No one notices when things are going great until the great time is over. Hell the supply glut of gas caused by fracking is credited with a large part of the US economic recovery.

I invest in O&G explorers.

The US economy will massively recover/rebound due to 3 things primarily:

Fracking
Carbon recycling
3d printing