William Engdahl: Global Elite Geopolitics

[wintler2]

.. I've read great essays debunking peak oil ..

Link?

I see some unsupported opinions re Gull island and russian abiotic oil..

..Every report of fabulous reserves at Gull Island and government conspiracies to keep them from being exploited trace their roots back to Lindsey Williams, a Baptist missionary who published a book in 1980 called The Energy Non-Crisis, which describes the Gull Island field and speculates that it might contain enough oil to supply the U.S. for 200 years; in other words, that it is another "elephant" field. That there are thousands of websites echoing Williams' amazing claims is testament to the resilience of cornucopian myths, for Gull Island has indeed been explored and drilled, but it is not producing anything like the 2 million barrels a day that he claims it is capable of, but more like 4,000 barrels a day at the most from Gull no. 1 and Gull no.2. Gull Island State no. 3, drilled in 1992, was a dry hole. According to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC), and by the words of ARCO geologists working at the site, “both the geologic evidence and the small area not yet developed into oil fields around the Gull Island wells preclude the possibility of a giant oil accumulation.”(Petroleum News)

According to Alaska's Division of Oil and Gas, the largest pool at Gull Island has thus far produced 396 million barrels of oil, and has perhaps 164 million remaining- and that is the largest of the pools. Therefore, we are probably talking about 1 billion barrels of oil at the most to be had from this legendary field, which, while respectable, is piddling relative to the truly large fields containing 5 billion barrels or more, let alone the supergiants of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. It's difficult to believe that any consortium of industry players or government bureaucrats could keep such a find a secret for longer than it takes to file for the drilling permits. ..link

Russian abiotic oil - if they've got it. how come their oil production peaked over 20 years ago? For nostalgia's sake see FTW - Dale Allen Pfeiffer - If abiotic oil exists, where is it? More recent refs available on request.

Yes Goldman Sachs & others are profiteering from price fluctuations, by at least $20 possibly 50 or more dollars a barrel, and many should go to jail for it. But they don't control how much oil is in the ground OR how much gets pumped out, no single faction does, and thus the engineered scarcity theory falls flat on its arse.

Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

[wintler2]

http://www.petroleumnews.com/pntruncate/690171677.shtml

..So what are the facts concerning oil drilling at Gull Island?

There have been three wells drilled from the island. And, although these wells were tight at the time of the drilling, the data from the wells are now in the public record. Williams’ supposed Gull Island field discovery presumably relates to the Gull Island State No. 1 well, completed and suspended by ARCO in 1976.

In a response to Rep. Stump’s 1981 letter AOGCC Commissioner Harry Kugler set the record straight on the two Gull Island wells that had been drilled at that time (Gull Island State No. 3 wasn’t drilled until 1992). The Gull Island No. 1 well tested 1,144 barrels of oil per day in “the equivalent of the North Prudhoe Bay (Permo-Triassic) reservoir,” while the Gull Island No. 2 well tested 2,971 barrels of oil per day from the Lisburne, Kugler said.

“We do not believe the evidence from these two wells indicates a massive new oil find,” Kugler said. “Additional wells will have to be drilled and additional studies made before the economic feasibility of developing these known reservoirs is determined.”

Geologist Peter Barker didn’t sit in on senior oil company executive board meetings, but he did sit the Gull Island No. 1 well in 1976 (“sitting a well” is geologist speak for monitoring and interpreting the geologic evidence from a well while the well is being drilled). The objective of the Gull Island drilling was to test a deep structure on the north side of a geologic fault, to the north of the Prudhoe Bay field, Barker told Petroleum News July 7. The drilling proved disappointing, he said.

“There was an (oil and gas) trap there but there wasn’t an economic quantity of oil,” he said. ..

[Wombaticus Rex]

.. I've read great essays debunking peak oil ..

Link?

Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

You're confusing the shit out of me....I feel like Admiral Ackbar right now. You asked me for a link, then provided the exact link I originally read about the debate in...the exact link I was referring to? WHAT ARE YOU SETTING ME UP FOR???

[lupercal]

Surprised by his dismissal of peak oil. Not the fact of it: I've read great essays debunking peak oil, but the way Engdahl did it triggered my bullshit alarms.

He never really addressed the actual claims which is startling since he used to be an advocate for that whole line. He kept saying there is "absolutely no evidence" but there is, I mean, there's entire feature length films exclusively about that.

Personally, I'm not persuaded either way (same with controlled demo and abortion and g-g-g-ghosts) but I felt he was disingenuous here by reducing it to "dead dinosaurs" ... that's such a straw man distortion I was amazed it passed without comment.

Well, it was a radio interview, which I thought was pretty good (thanks for posting Starman), and Engdahl wrote his "Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer" back in September 2007 (link below), and has written a lot since and isn't a geologist, so I don't fault him for being sketchy on the details, but I do recall him saying "dead dinosaurs, and algae, and so forth" in the interview, or words to that effect, i.e. mentioning algae which is thought to be an organic source of offshore oil deposits. Anyway here's his peak oil article, followed by two related ones from May 2008:

War and "Peak Oil": Confessions of an ‘ex’ Peak Oil believer, by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, September 26, 2007 - http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6880

‘Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation,’ by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, May 2, 2008 - http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8878

More on the real reason behind high oil prices, Part II, by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, May 21, 2008 - http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9042

Now as for peak oil being a scam, I will readily agree to that if we leave aside the question of abiotic/fossil origins as one that is interesting but not, when you get down to it, crucial. All resources are limited, including renewable resources like sunlight, so the peak oil debate is really about whether those limitations are being realistically represented. I would venture to say that they're not, and that "Peak Oil," the Bush-Cheney-era phenom, was a marketing campaign to propagandize a particular view of petro resources that is both false and beneficial to Big Oil profits.

Here are a couple of pro-business types who share that view, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, authors of a 2005 book called The Bottomless Well put out by the Manhattan Institute, so caveat emptor, with a link to the book, a reasonable five-minute 20/20 segment based on it (worth watching), and a WSJ article summarizing it:

THE BOTTOMLESS WELL: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy
By Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills, Basic Books, 2005

The sheer volume of talk about energy, energy prices, and energy policy on both sides of the political aisle suggests that we must know something about these subjects. But according to Peter Huber and Mark Mills, the things we "know" are mostly myths. They explain why demand will never go down, why most of what we think of as "energy waste" actually benefits us; why more efficient cars, engines, and bulbs will never lower demand, and why energy supply is infinite. In the automotive sector, gas prices matter less and less, and hybrid engines will most likely lead us to cars propelled by the coal-fired grid. As for the much-maligned power grid itself, it's the worst system we could have except for all the proposed alternatives. Expanding energy supplies mean higher productivity, more jobs, and a growing GDP. Across the board, energy isn't the problem, energy is the solution.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/bottomlesswell/

Oil, Oil, Everywhere . . .
By Peter Huber and Mark Mills, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2005

The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.

The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50-a-barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 per barrel for the next 100 years at least.

The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.

To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion -- over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.

Then you have to get the oil out of the sand -- or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like western coal, and that's very cheap -- but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum.

In sum, it costs under $5 per barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily.

But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco. Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike -- both up and down -- not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion dollars over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh.

The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored.

In the short term anything remains possible. Demand for oil grows daily in China and India, where good government is finally taking root, while much of the earth's most accessible oil lies under land controlled by feudal theocracies, kleptocrats, and fanatics. Day by day, just as it should, the market attempts to incorporate these two antithetical realities into the spot price of crude. But to suppose that those prices foreshadow the exhaustion of the planet itself is silly.

The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html ... il_oil.htm

[wintler2]

You're confusing the shit out of me....I feel like Admiral Ackbar right now. You asked me for a link, then provided the exact link I originally read about the debate in...the exact link I was referring to? WHAT ARE YOU SETTING ME UP FOR???

Nothing, i was just asking a question: which essays do you think debunk peak oil? If they're on that thread, where/which ones?

[wintler2]

.. the peak oil debate is really about whether those limitations are being realistically represented. I would venture to say that they're not, and that "Peak Oil," the Bush-Cheney-era phenom, was a marketing campaign to propagandize a particular view of petro resources that is both false and beneficial to Big Oil profits.

Debate on Peak oil/the Hubbert curve predates Bush II by decades, and the decades of evidence have all but finished the debate.
And you must then believe that Colin Campbell, Kenneth Defeyes, Jean Leherre were part of the neocon marketing campaign? What about Mollison & Holmgrens cite in Permaculture 1 circa 1982? And the Transition Towns and Permablitz networks, them too?
Any shred of evidence, or just your opinion?

Here are a couple of pro-business types who share that view, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, authors of a 2005 book called The Bottomless Well put out by the Manhattan Institute, so caveat emptor, with a link to the book, a reasonable five-minute 20/20 segment based on it (worth watching), and a WSJ article summarizing it:

THE BOTTOMLESS WELL: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy
By Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills, Basic Books, 2005
..[standard tech-optimist cliches not supported by any empirical evidence]

One question for you Lupy: If discovery costs have fallen so much and there is so much out there (as Huber & Mills claim), why did discovery peak so long ago, while price has increased 5 fold in last decade?

[lupercal]

Any shred of evidence, or just your opinion?

Lets see, I posted 1, 2, 3, 4, no 5 links and a video, each with several more links within, and you posted what? A wet fart with a Bush-Cheney Social Security trust fund graphic.



Game over, you lose.

[wintler2]

Any shred of evidence, or just your opinion?

Lets see, I posted 1, 2, 3, 4, no 5 links and a video, each with several more links within, and you posted what? A wet fart with a Bush-Cheney Social Security trust fund graphic.



Game over, you lose.

So you can't explain even the first of the impossibilities of your position

If discovery costs have fallen so much and there is so much out there (as Huber & Mills claim), why did discovery peak so long ago, while price has increased 5 fold in last decade?

..and resort to provocation.

If your links contain an answer, surely you are familiar enough with them to explain?

Or do you just copynpaste 'em, sight unseen?

[Stephen Morgan]

One question for you Lupy: If discovery costs have fallen so much and there is so much out there (as Huber & Mills claim), why did discovery peak so long ago, while price has increased 5 fold in last decade?

There's more than enough for the oil companies' purposes. Why would they want to discover more when their prices are maintained by artificial scarcity?

[Stephen Morgan]

www.smarterearth.org/content/history-iraqs-oil

[wintler2]

There's more than enough for the oil companies' purposes. Why would they want to discover more when their prices are maintained by artificial scarcity?

Because 'oil companies' are not a monolithic entity, each is trying to maximise its own profit. Price draws supply if supply is to be had, economics/human nature 101, look at OPECs long history of quota-breaking, everybody pumped more than they said they would whenever they could (now, they can't).
Are you really claiming that all existing oil exporters are of the one mind and pump less than they could (despite Saudi Aramco promising and then failing to pump any extra to cover Libya's current shortfall) to maintain prices?

Just for laffs, if i pretend that impossibility, that still wouldn't stop oil co's wanting to discover more.

Corp stock prices factor in oil in the ground, and every executive with stock options is thus personally motivated to find more, regardless of how much they eventually pump. I googled 'reserve revisions' and presto: BG Group Demonstrates Potential With Upgrade of Brazilian Resources Estimate, note corresponding share price rise, nice for execs but 3 bil. barrels is a mere month's more oil for business as usual (if they can get it out of deep water).

[wintler2]

http://www.smarterearth.org/content/history-iraqs-oil

Top of page at your link:

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil - Alan Greenspan (2007)

If theres so much oil, why go to Iraq for it?

[Stephen Morgan]

http://www.smarterearth.org/content/history-iraqs-oil

Top of page at your link:

I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil - Alan Greenspan (2007)

If theres so much oil, why go to Iraq for it?

Not to get the oil, to control the oil. Or can you not see why the oil industry may want to control one of the three most potentially productive sources of oil rather than letting it fall into the hands of potential competitors or those who might wish to raise production and thereby lower prices?

[Stephen Morgan]

There's more than enough for the oil companies' purposes. Why would they want to discover more when their prices are maintained by artificial scarcity?

Because 'oil companies' are not a monolithic entity, each is trying to maximise its own profit.

Oh yes, I had forgotten that we live in a capitalist society which, obviously, is a system of free enterprise in which individuals and corporate bodies compete honestly with each other in the interests of efficiency and self-interest, while price-fixing and other conspiracies between "competitors" are unheard of and/or vigourously prosecuted by the incorruptible agents of the state.

Price draws supply if supply is to be had, economics/human nature 101, look at OPECs long history of quota-breaking, everybody pumped more than they said they would whenever they could (now, they can't).
Are you really claiming that all existing oil exporters are of the one mind and pump less than they could (despite Saudi Aramco promising and then failing to pump any extra to cover Libya's current shortfall) to maintain prices?

Yes. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's a conspiracy.

Just for laffs, if i pretend that impossibility, that still wouldn't stop oil co's wanting to discover more.

Oil prices are based on futures. The prospect of future scarcity leads to higher prices.

Corp stock prices factor in oil in the ground, and every executive with stock options is thus personally motivated to find more, regardless of how much they eventually pump.

But not the amount of oil in the ground, the value of oil in the ground. Better to have ten barrels at $100 each than 50 barrels at $10 each.

[wintler2]

Not to get the oil, to control the oil. Or can you not see why the oil industry may want to control one of the three most potentially productive sources of oil rather than letting it fall into the hands of potential competitors or those who might wish to raise production and thereby lower prices?

If oil companies have so much control over the price of oil, why did they let let prices spike in 2008 and trigger the GFC, significantly reducing oil price and consumption such that it has yet to recover?

After you've had a go at that, could you explain how & why OPEC, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Vietnam, Indonesia et al are all dancing to the western oil corp's tune re production, even as many of those nations nationalise or otherwise work to edge out those same oil corps.

And lucky #3, tell me do you agree that oil is a finite resource?