The end of Oil and other resources on planet Earth.

Fixer · Post by **Fixer** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:18 pm

[quote="NickGXZ";p="483105"]I'm not so worried about Oil. I'm more worried about the price of it now because it is relevent to me because me + car + work = 20 mile drives daily.[/quote]
Ha! I do not pity you.

Fixer + son to Daycare + Work + Car + Trip Home= 95 miles/day.

My car gets about 33mpg, so a tank of gas lasts about 4 days for me.

mikehendo · Post by **mikehendo** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 8:02 pm

[quote="Deacon";p="483086"]Fixer, the ocean is full of water.[/quote]
The ocean is full of water, but desalination is damned expensive and not efficient. Sure there is no shortage of water, but there is a shortage of drinkable water.

Deacon · Post by **Deacon** » Wed Apr 20, 2005 8:11 pm

No, see, he made a statement:
[quote="Fixer";p="483065"]No, the 'rule' of science is abundantly clear: Water is life.[/quote]

mikehendo · Post by **mikehendo** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 2:22 am

I was attempting to derive a meaning out of the comment, while still bringing it back to the conversation at hand..
Oil is not what we need to worry about running out of. We have enough of it in the earth to last a while longer. At least long enough to develop many alternative fuels, or better yet we can use the technology that already exists and is being used in much of the rest of the world. Check out Brazilian cars for instance, most of which do not run on petrol.

Post by **Martin Blank** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 3:47 am

[quote="Deacon";p="483104"]Where's the UN in all of this? Aren't they supposed to be watching out for the rest of the world? Can't they issue some resolution against OPEC's price fixing scheme?[/quote]
No, because OPEC is already pumping near capacity as it is. They've put off maintenance on some equipment to keep the levels high, and have started erecting new equipment. They're able to start pushing more oil into the market now because equipment taken offline for maintenance prior to the summer driving season that begins around Memorial Day is now coming online.

The problem is two-fold:

1) Chinese oil demand spiked faster than anyone thought it would. Even Beijing took note of this, and took steps to slow the growth of the Chinese economy before energy prices could cause a recession (or worse) due to high inflation.

2) Institutional investors start buying up every contract they can when oil gets into the low $50's, reducing supply and pushing the prices back up.

One good thing about this is the development of tar sand extraction technology is suddenly not only viable, but highly profitable. This is allowing the companies that work that niche to really pursue development. Alberta, Canada, sits on some 1.3 trillion barrels of oil recoverable by both conventional and newly-developed technology. The trouble is that it's very heavy oil that requires a lot of refining before it can be used, so the drive is on to cut the costs of extraction and refining to a minimum.

Lack of oil isn't a problem. We'll get to it in some fashion, even if it gets a bit pricey.

Fixer · Post by **Fixer** » Thu Apr 21, 2005 11:41 am

[quote="Deacon";p="483086"]Fixer, the ocean is full of water.[/quote]
Thank you for your pointing out the blatantly obvious. I kept wondering why that ocean thing was so wet. You deserve a Nobel Prize for that one....

If you look around the whole world, not just the industrialized parts, you will discover that the major shortage is water, not oil. I think it is Madagascar or somewhere (sketchy memory) that they cannot even drink from their own wells because their nation has an unusually high arsenic content in the ground.

Humans can live without water a lot less time than they can live without oil. Oil is what runs our conveniences (vehicles, chemicals, etc), not our necessities... unless you live in a big city, where you can't hunt, fish, or get clean water easily, then you're screwed without oil, but big cities are not in abundance in the world compared to the amount of free space.

Smaointe · Post by **Smaointe** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 3:07 am

[quote="Martin Blank";p="482830"] Much of the world does not have access to clean water; in Bangladesh, there is a huge portion of the country that has groundwater laced with naturally-occurring arsenic, so the wells have become useless. [/quote]

[quote="Fixer";p="483605"] I think it is Madagascar or somewhere (sketchy memory) that they cannot even drink from their own wells because their nation has an unusually high arsenic content in the ground.[/quote]
Don't be too hard on yourself, I forget things from the beginning of the page all the time!

eyextra · Post by **eyextra** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 3:25 am

[quote="Martin Blank";p="483483"][quote="Deacon";p="483104"]:

1) Chinese oil demand spiked faster than anyone thought it would. Even Beijing took note of this, and took steps to slow the growth of the Chinese economy before energy prices could cause a recession (or worse) due to high inflation.
[/quote][/quote]

I think may be this is a main problem:Because Chinese factory's product technology is not so good ,so it must cost more resource than developed country's factory when create same production.

Fixer · Post by **Fixer** » Fri Apr 22, 2005 12:44 pm

[quote="Smaointe";p="483958"][quote="Martin Blank";p="482830"] Much of the world does not have access to clean water; in Bangladesh, there is a huge portion of the country that has groundwater laced with naturally-occurring arsenic, so the wells have become useless. [/quote]

[quote="Fixer";p="483605"] I think it is Madagascar or somewhere (sketchy memory) that they cannot even drink from their own wells because their nation has an unusually high arsenic content in the ground.[/quote]
Don't be too hard on yourself, I forget things from the beginning of the page all the time!

[/quote]
Yeah, and I'm older than you and the alzheimers has already taken root...

gravity · Post by **gravity** » Sun Apr 24, 2005 9:53 am

[quote="mikehendo";p="483271"][quote="Deacon";p="483086"]Fixer, the ocean is full of water.[/quote]
The ocean is full of water, but desalination is damned expensive and not efficient. Sure there is no shortage of water, but there is a shortage of drinkable water.[/quote]

You guys forget, humans aren't the only living things in this world. Some animals need salt water to survive.

Post by **Martin Blank** » Sun Apr 24, 2005 5:59 pm

That's entirely not the point here. Salt water isn't in danger of going anywhere. Fresh water, though, is required by humans and by a lot of other life forms. It's a rare land-dwelling species, for example, that can handle even mildly brackish water for very long.

mikehendo · Post by **mikehendo** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 4:17 am

MB is right.. We will likely never have a problem with a lack of salt water, but saltwater isnt the issue at hand. Fresh water on the other is a much needed commodity if we are goign to survive, clean fresh water at that.
Although, there is all that water frozen at the poles.. What a wonderful supply of fresh water.

Bigity · Post by **Bigity** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 1:40 pm

I thought most of the iceburgs were saltwater. Or at least contained a high salt content.

peter-griffin · Post by **peter-griffin** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 2:46 pm

[quote="gravity";p="484818"][quote="mikehendo";p="483271"][quote="Deacon";p="483086"]Fixer, the ocean is full of water.[/quote]
The ocean is full of water, but desalination is damned expensive and not efficient. Sure there is no shortage of water, but there is a shortage of drinkable water.[/quote]

You guys forget, humans aren't the only living things in this world. Some animals need salt water to survive.[/quote]

what's your point?

applekidjosh · Post by **applekidjosh** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 3:46 pm

I thought most of the iceburgs were saltwater. Or at least contained a high salt content.

Iceburgs tend to be freshwater. The problem is, when you tow them away from the arctic (or antarctic) they tend to melt, and you lose the water.

So we're kind of leaving them alone for now until we've thought of a better way to get at them

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