Saudi: Just 18% of world oil has been tapped

[DesertFox]

The world has tapped only 18 percent of the total global supply of crude, a leading Saudi oil executive said Wednesday, challenging the notion that supplies are petering out.

Abdallah S. Jum'ah, president and CEO of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known better as Aramco, said the world has the potential of 4.5 trillion barrels in reserves — enough to power the globe at current levels of consumption for another 140 years.

Jum'ah challenged oil ministers and petroleum executives at an OPEC conference in Vienna to step up exploration "and leave the minimum amount of oil in the ground."

"The world has only consumed about 18 percent of its conventional potential," Jum'ah said, contending that should lay to rest fears that the world is in danger of being tapped out within a few decades.

More (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/09/13/financial/f040850D43.DTL&type=printable)

[Rhino]

Don't matter if you find it, if the envirowackos won't let you drill it (ANWR).

[2nd_Amendment]

Still, let's say he's right. 140 years. Then what? As long as we have "cheap" oil we aren't going to develop anything else. It's just not financially worthwhile. Also, the alternatives don't look real promising...to a society that likes huge metropilitan areas and lots of easy travel and commuting. Corn based fuels and hydrogen and such are a net loss in energy, generally. Electricity/batteries are little better and present their own enviromental problems.

If we want to maintain this big city mentality that has formed in the past 100 years then it is way passed time we went all nuclear. Electricity should be entirely nuclear generated, and all public transportation should be running on that electricity, too. Save the crude for private transportation and, really, very damn little else. Then we'd have, what, a thousand years reserve?

But that's never going to happen. The environazis aren't actually interested the enviroment, per se. They are far more interested in returning mankind to caves while reducing the population to approximately 136...worldwide.

[Timberwolf]

I thought there was enough oil in the shales of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico alone, to keep us supplied for 700 years. Let everyone else find their own...:evilgrin:

...or buy it from us @ $150/barrel....

[DoctorDoom]

The ecozealots are elitists who don't give a damn if they force the country back into a feudal, agrarian, subsistence culture as long as they are in control. They fantasize that they are infinitely superior to the hoi polloi, and that they alone know what's best for America. They want to be able to walk the trails in the forests and worship Gaia without encountering "those people", and ride in their limousines without being held up by the rabble in their private vehicles.

The mindset of the loonies is succinctly expressed by these quotes from two of the most influential Guiding Darks of the "movement".

"It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we might do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that don't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to each other."
-- Amory Lovins, Mother Earth News, 11-12/77

"In fact, giving society cheap abundant energy at this point would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
-- Paul Erlich, Not Man Apart (Friends of The Earth), Vol 5, No. 18, Sept 1975

That is the distilled essence of elitist arrogance and snobbery that saturates environmental extremism.

[DoctorDoom]

A pot pourri ...

"Out of the 1,944 million acres in the United States, only 5.2 percent of it is developed - that is, supporting streets, highways, stores, homes, schools, Sierra Club headquarters, whatever.

The rest falls under the following categories: cropland (20 percent); pastureland (6.3 percent); rangeland (21.4 percent); forest land (21.5 percent); federal land (21.2 percent) and other rural land (4.4 percent). (These 1997 government figures - and we know the government does not lie - do not include Alaska, which is two-thirds federally owned.) Amazing, isn't it? There's virtually as much federally-owned land as there are forests across the fruited plain! That's an astonishing statistic, folks. Over four times more land is controlled by the federal government than has been developed by Americans.

"No surprise that most of the western states such as Wyoming (1 percent developed) and South Dakota (2 percent) are sparsely populated. The stunner is in the East Coast states, where settlers have been building homes, businesses, and industry for over 400 years. Yet Delaware is only 15 percent developed. The most heavily concentrated state, New Jersey, is only 34 percent developed! Of course, that didn't stop Jeff Tittel, director of the state's Sierra Club chapter, from warning, "If we don't do something now [in New Jersey], the environmental consequences are going to be devastating."
-- Rush Limbaugh, "The Limbaugh Letter" July 2001

Introduction

In recent years, an increasing amount of terrorist activity in the United States has been carried out in the name of animal and environmental protection. Automobile dealerships, housing developments, forestry companies, corporate and university-based medical research laboratories, restaurants, fur farms and other industries are targeted across the country. Although no one has yet been injured in a domestic ecoterror attack, the increasingly violent nature of attacks suggests that someone will be hurt before long.

Since the 1970s, hundreds of groups in the United States have advocated for stricter legal protection for animals and the environment. Change has been incremental. Some activists on the fringes of these causes, frustrated by the pace of legislation, have become violent, creating an underground terrorist movement to combat companies and practices they consider abusive and immoral. During the past two decades, extreme animal rights and environmental activists, or ecoterrorists, have committed hundreds of arsons, bombings and acts of vandalism and harassment, causing more than $100 million in damage.

In recent years, fast-food restaurants have been firebombed and car dealerships and housing developments burned to the ground in the name of "ecology" and "animal rights." Increasingly, people that work for companies perceived as harming animals or destroying the environment are targeted as well.

Influenced to varying degrees by their English predecessors and by segments of the anarchist movement, ecoterrorists operate through autonomous cells, are unconstrained by geographic boundaries and are very difficult to infiltrate and stop. Unlike racial hate groups with established hierarchies and membership requirements, for example, an activist can become a member of the ecoterror movement simply by carrying out an illegal action on its behalf.

While post-September 11 discussions of terrorism tend to focus on Islamic threats, ecoterrorist attacks continue to occur around the country and pose significant problems for law enforcement officials. It is unlikely that this movement will disappear any time soon.Ecoterrorism: Extremism in the Animal Rights and Environmentalist Movements (http://www.adl.org/Learn/Ext_US/Ecoterrorism.asp)

Last month, Miss Nevada Crystal Wosik found herself in newspaper headlines statewide, and not just because she was participating in the Miss America pageant in her hometown of Las Vegas.

During the interview portion of the pageant, Ms. Wosik was asked about the federal government's plans to entomb high-level nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Ms. Wosik, 23, expressed support for the project -- a view not uncommon among Southern Nevadans.

Predictably, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists went batty. They ripped Ms. Wosik as though she were an elected official with genuine influence on public policy.

Apparently, things got worse from there. According to Ms. Wosik's mother, Lena, their family has been subjected to anonymous taunts and threats that condemn Miss Nevada's support for the Yucca Mountain Project.The nature of environmentalists (http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Feb-09-Thu-2006/opinion/5767355.html)

IN A NURSING home where I once used to work during school holidays, there lay a barrel-chested man with a kind face and thick black hair. He was a Vietnam War veteran and had his own room, though he never seemed to have visitors. He was paralysed and I rarely did more than glimpse him through the door, except when called in to help with some gruesome task or other, such as a manual, which required a nurse with gloves to manually, or more accurately digitally, extract fecal matter from the poor man's backside.

He also had malaria - legacy of a Vietnamese mosquito - which would come on him periodically, soaking his sheets with sweat and causing him terrible torments. The door of his room remained closed on those days and the feverish existence inside seemed to be hell on earth.

I have been paranoid about mosquitoes ever since, and the debilitating, often lethal, diseases they carry.

The paranoia is not entirely irrational, even in Australia, far away from the malaria killing fields of the tropics. Mosquitoes, once brought to heel by the much-maligned pesticide DDT, are on the march.Millions dying so fish may live (http://www.smh.com.au/news/Miranda-Devine/Millions-dying-so-fish-may-live/2005/06/18/1119034100717.html)

Disagreement with the world's environmentalist extremists doesn't mean that one is for dirty air and water, against conservation and for species extinction. Dr. Richard Stroup, Montana State University professor of economics and senior associate of the Center for Free Market Environmentalism, explains common-sense approaches to environmental issues in his new book, "Eco- nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment."

Stroup starts out with the first lesson of economics: There's scarcity. That means more of one thing means less of another. California's San Bernardino County was just about ready to build a new hospital. That was until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered that the endangered flower-loving Delhi Sands fly was found on the site. The county had to spend $4.5 million to move the hospital 250 feet; it also had to divert funds from its medical mission to pay for mandated Delhi Sands fly studies.

Question: Was it worth it? On the benefit side, we have the survival of some Delhi Sand flies, but what about the cost side? How much pain and suffering and perhaps loss of human life was there because millions of dollars were diverted from the hospital's medical mission?

Stroup's analysis warns us that we must always attend to a regulation's unanticipated side effects. In other words, beneficiaries of a regulation tend always to be easily detected, but the victims are invisible.BALANCE CONSERVATION WITH ECONOMICS (http://www.sharetrails.org/magazine.cfm?story=270)

Arrant bullshit courtesy of Greenpeace assholes: Gas Guzzler (http://www.devilducky.com/media/48830/)

The envirowackos won't be happy until civilization is destroyed.

[Nutrider99]

The fact is, the world is literally drowning in oil and will be for centuries, by which time in the unlikely event that we manage to depleat our reserves and not find any more, we will simply move to another form of energy. There is no shortage of oil, only a shortage of the will to extract it.

[DesertFox]

Good stuff, Doc.

[Lazarus]

The ecozealots are elitists who don't give a damn if they force the country back into a feudal, agrarian, subsistence culture as long as they are in control. They fantasize that they are infinitely superior to the hoi polloi, and that they alone know what's best for America. They want to be able to walk the trails in the forests and worship Gaia without encountering "those people", and ride in their limousines without being held up by the rabble in their private vehicles....That is the distilled essence of elitist arrogance and snobbery that saturates environmental extremism.
:claps: Excellent, Doc... And, I would add, they fit precisely into the plot of Tom Clancey's Rainbow Six... I recommend that book to anyone who hasnt read it...

As a side note, the estimates on this new deep field they have found in the Gulf will supposedly increase US output by 50%... I think the Saudi estimate is a good guess at the least, and probably is conservative...

[neglesaks]

The world has tapped only 18 percent of the total global supply of crude, a leading Saudi oil executive said Wednesday, challenging the notion that supplies are petering out.

Abdallah S. Jum'ah, president and CEO of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known better as Aramco, said the world has the potential of 4.5 trillion barrels in reserves — enough to power the globe at current levels of consumption for another 140 years.



IS OPEC lying to us?

http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/329

[Air-Warrior]

For the record, I'm not an alarmist on oil reserves. I suspect that a large percentage of oil is scattered in such small individual pockets that it cannot (will not) economically be recovered.

In other words, in a random example, 35% of the remaining oil inside planet earth is in pockets of a thousand barrels or less. Another 20% may be in pockets of a million barrels or less.

I'm just pulling these numbers out of thin air but I can readily believe the logic behind the possibility that such numbers might be close to true.