Plus, the effects of present-valuing the benefits of production…sooner is worth more than later.

And the cookie factory would be influenced by new startups if the prices of cookies got high enough!

A story: When I was a senior in ChemEngr school (1952) I was advised to avoid the petroleum industry as there was only some fifty years of proved reserves of petroleum. Years later it dawned on me that no one would spend money to prove up reserves any longer than that, because the present value of a barrel of oil to be produced fifty or more years in the future would be less than the current cost per barrel spent to prove it up.

BTW, cookies are a no-no in our household; too fattening!

JimB

Can’t stop trying though…

When you wish upon a star….

How many Thorium reactors would it take to replace existing coal and NG fired capacity? How does that compare with the existing number of conventional reactors? Is there is an existing design, what about U-233 proliferation?

As far of PO is concerned, it is very true that the fast crashers such as Hirsch were wrong. The plateau has been flat and there is no discernible 2nd derivative in the rate of production. But it should be very clear that a consequence, the Export Land Model, is playing in places like Egypt…

Fusion is pipe dream, simple as that. I would bet that we have a better chance of seeing a high current 500 MeV cyclotron optimized for muon production so as to breed plutonium via the neutron flux from D-D mu-catalyzed fusion than we do of seeing a “conventional” fusion reactor….

There’s something else about Peak Oil that’s interesting: the concept of _one single peak_ plays into the emotional core of all dramatic narrative: that a story has a peak moment where all the plot details come to a head. This sets us up to anticipate a “dramatic moment”, such as waking up one day to news headlines that oil prices have suddenly spiked to $200/bbl and grocery store shelves have been emptied by terrified crowds. When that doesn’t happen, we tootle along as if nothing’s the matter.

What’s important about your posting here, which IMHO should be made to go viral, is that real life doesn’t work like cinema: this story won’t have its peak moment in the plot, but instead there will be a series of adjustments, each one involving more and worse compromises than the rest, all incremental so each of them doesn’t seem “that bad.”

As for Saudi, anyone who doubts that it’s a truly horrid regime should look up the human rights situation there for women and girls.

And the one point on which I differed with the President during his SOTU speech, was where he said that natural gas was “the bridge fuel.” In truth, natural gas is a band-aid on a life-threatening wound. The real bridge fuel will be thorium, which, in conjunction with renewables, could provide power for hundreds of years: more than sufficient to get us from here to full commercial deployment of fusion.

in fact i was thinking of “peak peak oil” – that time when the most articles on the subject were extracted from the trove of minds turned that way after appropriate time in the appropriate cooker

i myself experienced “peak peak oil poetry” – that time when i was most prolific as a “poet”

whatever, your post may be one of those statistically predictable outliers

perhaps an appropriate line
would render an end that’s sublime
the peaks rise and fall
and we all drop the ball
it’s just a matter of time

p

And as much as you and I would like to see a happy ending to the story, it would appear that what is playing out is the solution to Fermi’s Paradox in real time…

Either a civilization figures out how to move beyond it’s fossil fuel endowment or it dies trying. If the history of our species is any guide, when AGW becomes absolutely undeniable they will start spraying S02 in the stratosphere….

You know the rest of the story…