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I liked the graphic from the No Agenda show better:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8664684.stm
If we burn all of the proven reserves, especially if it includes the oil in the tar sands, we’ll have much bigger problems than a lack of oil to deal with.
I’m pretty sure the 5000 barrels/day for Deep Water is a very rough estimate. I’m 99.9% sure 🙂
As for a better guess for “worst” case I say at least 5x that amount. If we want accuracy, someone should head to DP, kill the people protecting the tape showing the oil gushing out, and put it on youtube. Then we can all do the calculations as to how much oil is coming out 😀
Answer. None.
If I’m not looking for it, how it be “lost”?
M.S.: “If we burn all of the proven reserves, especially if it includes the oil in the tar sands, we’ll have much bigger problems than a lack of oil to deal with.”
Wrong. Running out of oil would be wonderful and totally wouldn’t be a problem.
We’d learn to walk without the crutches of non-renewable energy.
But just watch … I bet there is 200-300 years of oil out there. Far more “fossil fuels” if you include coal.
I hate oil and the trivial waste of it, but if you consider all the untapped deep water oil in the 70% ocean volume and the artic/antarctic potential oil, there has to be vast quantities far exceeding conventional perception.
The oil industry has the same motivation to promote “OMG we are gonna run out of oils to drills” as the diamond industry has to promote mythical diamond scarcity. To jack the price.
And politicians offering up faux concern for the future have plenty of motivation to offer up the weepy teary-eyed “One day will won’t have no more oils …” to seem all environmentalist and shiznit. To get voter sympathy and support.
And alternative energy peoples who want government subsidy tell the weepy “OMG … no more oils” story to get funding.
And electric car handout wannabees like General Motors who wants more bailouts tell the weepy “OMG … no more oils in future” story to get fat government grant for non-working products or their wonderful 19 MPG *electric* SUV. Two gold stars for electric vehicle managing to get shit gas mileage — congrats GM — only you could bring fuel inefficiency to electric cars!
So …
As much as I’d love the world to run out of oil and for oil to cost $18 per gallon — hello local economy boom! And goodbye imports! — I am highly skeptical that this will ever happen.
There is just too much money in promoting the perception of “imminent oil is running out” by corporations, governments and scalawags to raise prices and get funds.
They started telling that story in the 1970s and it is damn near 40 years later and we use more now than ever.
Something is amiss …
Worst case is highly definitional. Not even a large enough track record to go with “average” time to cap and stop. I can easily imagine a hurricane coming in and destroying the half drilled “solution” to this gusher extending the worst case by another 60-90 days.
Related, I have only now heard in the news analysis the concept of “long range safety/regulatory planning based on best case scenarios.” That happened in our financial industry and now with our energy exploration program. It is short range cheap, long range unacceptable.
It really is “beyond me” why Big Oil would not drill with all the safety precautions in mind. Just as it has been beyond me why Big Business would not be for Single Payer Healthcare==although its looking that such ideas were immediately blocked by Big Unions.
“Big”–(as in government?)==something to avoid.
Where’s the BS meter on this one?
One barrel of oil = 42 US gallons (34.9723 imp gal; 158.9873 L).
If the graphic starts with the basic unit of measurement being in error, what’s the value of the graphic ?
Yeah… so???
Next you are going to tell me that a 747 airplane crashing and killing everybody onboard is no big deal because the Tenerife crash killed twice as many.
The USA has been ultra super lucky that the winds / tides / currents have kept the oil mostly in open waters. Anybody that does not recognize this for the huge disaster that it is has no concept of reality.
#6
Petrol = gasoline
“U.S. refineries produce between 19 and 20 gallons of motor gasoline from one barrel (42 gallons) of crude oil.”
Besides…choose any units you want. The relative amounts remain the same. It a very valuable “graphic”.
I guess the point of this post is to put the spill into perspective (as No Agenda also did) and that is useful for dampening the rhetoric. However, it is sort of like implying President X is not that bad because President A was such a incompetent moron.
The oil spill (as reported) is very large and very destructive and will adversely affect allot of people and even more non-human species. It clearly is a massive disaster.
It could be worse is heavily overused and can be a dishonest attempt to trivialise real issues.
#4 – Hmeyers,
Wow!! All I can say is “Ack”. Excellent post. I sit corrected. Running out of oil, in and of itself, would not be a problem. The environmental damage that would ensue from burning it however would indeed be an enormous problem.
Anybody want a free “Spill Baby Spill” bumper sticker to commemorate the event? Greenpeace is giving them away now.
http://tinyurl.com/2vzmwy6
‘and all that it amount’s to is a tear in a salty sea, someone’s been a bit untidy, they’ll have it cleaned up in a week’
10,000 Maniacs Poison in the Well
#Bobbo
The companies are NOT required to report any incidents. They are protected by the government. So any type of long term future proof planning is almost meaningless when there are no consequences and conditions imposed to begin with. I hope this disaster will change some of the current thinking and shed some light into the business.
#9
It’s considered a natural disaster by the government. I think that’s the word, kind ill today. That means the nations resources are 100% go to fix this problem. In addition, other nations are involved.
With that, we now have the blaming game started this morning! Lets guess who will be paying for the bills 🙂 I vote for DeepWater
There seems no way to stop the oil rushing out.
As soon as the Gulf of Mexico is full, the US will have achieved oil independence & can bail all it needs/wants right out of the Gulf.
BTW, I wouldn’t try categorizing or putting into perspective the magnitude of this event until the spill is stopped. So far they’ve tried 1 thing and failed, and they have no plan B so they’re struggling to make plan A work, but what if it can’t? How long will it take? Nobody’s even guessing. So the worst case scenario in the diagram is pure BS.
Let’s hope they stuff a cork into it before they poison the entire Atlantic.
TheONe–huh? What does incident reporting have to do with this thread or anything I posted? DON’T answer that, its irrelevant.
BP is not protected by the government. The cost of the acoustic shut off valve is a small fraction of the revenue lost by the escaped oil==so even in a totally regulatory/consequences void, it is in Big Oil’s interest to load up on safety devices yet they don’t do it.
Why? I think it is the LIEberTARDIAN strain of non-think that affects so many Captains of Industry. They think by their own will they can turn back the tide, or drill a mile down in the ocean without any downsides.
Silly non-think hubris that needs to be controlled.
All these potential “lessons” have been learned before. What we know is it takes about 50 years for lessons to be forgotten and for hubris to take the reins again.
Silly Hoomans.
They should send out Benjamin to suck up all the oil. The way he can suck up cum, he should be able to clean up this mess in a matter of minutes.
How’s that “Drill! Baby, Drill!!!” working out?
Never forget, the conservatives want MORE of this, not less.
This must be sort of what it is like to be in a click of heroine junkies, and one of them OD’s and dies and the rest of us just sit around and continue to shoot up unable to do anything about our situation.
Looks like this spill is the best thing to come along in ages for some of you. It validates all of your beliefs about BIG oil.
Things aren’t as lax in the Gulf as you think. I think the last big spill was in the bay of Campeche over thirty years ago. During that time the number of rigs drilling in the Gulf has exceeded 400.
This spill is a disaster as you know but statements like “Running out of oil would be wonderful and totally wouldn’t be a problem.” by #4 – Hmeyers do nothing to solve the problem.
I would love to be king and be able to shut all of the oil off to see how long it would be before people started screaming.
I personally do not like our dependence upon foreign oil but I haven’t seen anyone do much about it unless you talk about the bird shredders off of new England.
has anyone noticed that this GRAPH shows only 19gallons of fuel per barrel??
I think that is WRONG.
#6 has it..
And creating FUEL from crude gives an Equal amount of FUEL, and then OTHER products.
It comes out as a 50:1 process..for all the gas’s and other materials we get from 1 barrel.
We saw the THREE STOOGES from BP, Haliburton, and the other company in Congress today and the story was that they were pointing at each other to place the blame, but what they were really doing is GIVING CONGRESS THE FINGER !!! THEY ARE EXEMPT, AND THEY KNOW IT !!!
CORPORATE POWER UBER ALLES !!! THE CORPS RUN THE GOVERNMENT, WE HAVE ***FASCISIM*** IN AMERICA !!!
The graphical representation of data in this chart is garbage. It uses circles to imply relative size, but the scale is way off. On closer inspection you see that only items in the same horizontal line use the same scale, but how many people will look that carefully? The bottom circle, when compared to the upper left circle, at first makes you think that we’ve spilled a significant portion of worlds total oil supply, but when you read the numbers you realize that the scale is not even close. What’s the point of the big circle then?
I still think the explosion that caused this is highly suspicous. This kind iof thing is a once in a generation type disaster, and it happens just as Obama says we’ll drill? China has a very significant presence in the Gulf of Mexico, thanks to the deals with Cuba and Venezuela. Having the US rollup their Gulf Oil Projects would be a great win in their minds.
Now what if they CANNOT plug the hole in the Gulf? What happens then?
Wow! When the leak reaches 1,225,104 million barrels, we’re in REAL trouble!
I hope we run out of oil. It would be great, the oil companies would go broke, congressmen would lose their re-election money, and finally we would get electric cars.