1.  
   Kay from Scotland says:

   Sep 25, 16:04

   I don’t consider continued dependence on oil as the way forward but we really should accept that there ISN'T a shortage of it. Also, since we won't have nuclear in 20 years time, investing in further plants now seems nothing more than a quick fix at huge cost to the next generation. Just consider how much ENERGY will be required to decommission!
   Peak oil: postponed - What the oil companies don't tell you
   Oil supplies will actually last for far longer than our politicians think, the scaremongers fear, and the oil companies tell us. So says Dr Richard Pike, head of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and someone who isn’t afraid to stir controversy. Whither, then, Peak Oil?
   In a wide-ranging interview, Dr Pike talked about energy independence, Peak Oil, and how to educate our scientifically illiterate elites.
   Before becoming chief executive of the RCS, Pike spent twenty five years in the oil industry. His background hasn’t prevented him from calling for alternative energy sources to fossil fuels, and making criticisms that have embarrassed industry executives, latterly over the amount of oil lost to leakages.
   But the most intriguing argument is that we’re simply not told the truth about how long oil supplies will last. Conventional wisdom reports the oil reserves as 1.2 trillion barrels. There’s far more than the oil companies report. This is neither cock-up nor conspiracy, he says, but a combination of conservative reporting, a failure to understand probability theory, and consequently a lack of understanding of the figures actually mean. Oil engineers and planners have their own – these are figures we don’t see.
   The figure quoted when oil companies declare their reserves is a “P90” figure, which means an oil reserve has been discovered, the oil in it is recoverable, and the estimate has a 90 per cent chance of being exceeded. This is always on the conservative side. Another figure, the P50 estimate refers to “proven but possible” oil reserves, and is rarely quoted. P50 can exceed P90 by a factor of two or three, and often reflects the output more accurately. So why don’t we hear P50, rather than P90?
   “P90 is a lower bound, and companies have a duty to report what the lower bound is to statutory bodies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, and BERR in the uk,” says Pike. And that figure is conservative.
   “Over time, ‘lower bound’ has come to mean ‘proven reserves’. But it’s actually the extreme left hand side of the probability curves.”
   Pike illustrates this with the example of throwing dice.
   The oil man's odds
   “If you add together the estimates of thousands of reserves, you’re taking the lower bound each time. Say you throw a dice: The probability of throwing one is one in six. With two dice, you’ll be above one 97 per cent of the time. With three, it’s 99.4 per cent of the time. So if you throw thousands of dice, the chances of you getting all ones are infinitesimally small. But this is what oil companies are doing in their statutory reporting.
   “The statutory bodies will effectively say, ‘We don’t want some complicated probability analysis on what P90 is, just give us the straight simple number.”
   Then other bodies, such as the Peak Oil eschatologists (“the end of the world is nigh…”), take the number and use it for something else.
   Pike blames the compartmentalisation of the industry – engineers rarely make it to executive level and the people at the top never get to understand probabilistic analysis.
   Inside the oil companies themselves, he points out, they’ll often use the probabilistic approach – whether when estimating their own prospects, or eyeing up a rival in an M&A analysis. So why do they do it, then? Follow the rest of the article at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/17/richard_pike_rcs_interview/

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2.  
   Kelly from uk says:

   Sep 19, 23:39

   The problem is in the EXPonENTIAL rate at which the resources are being depleted. Higher energy requirements do not just steadily increase at a linear rate, but in line with population wealth and business requirements.
   When North Sea Gas was found, it was enough for "hundreds of years" or the "foreseeable future".
   once all houses were transferred over to natural gas, the generating stations also came on line as well as everything else. Oil and gas was exported during the mid 1990's with a booming economy.
   The "foreseeable future" of North Sea Natural Gas verses requirements has changed to such extent that we began net imports of gas in 2004.
   With China's present economic boom, their expectation of a better standard of living; will require more gas, petrol, food, oil and raw resources. Imagine 100 million cars!
   It is the size of their technological jump and the vast size of the population which reduces the availability of WORLD resources.
   Rather than linear or exponential I would say this has been nothing but EXPLOSIVE!

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3.  
   AJH from London says:

   Sep 18, 19:35

   Energy's cost is what will criple us, just look at the prices now, you may believe the price will go down again but that will just be a blip, I have all my energy bills for the last 20 year all on a spread sheet, prices just go up and up.

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4.  
   phyzx from a chair says:

   Sep 15, 00:34

   We have found more oil than ever before ? what a stupid question .
   oil finds in venezuela , the Orinoco basin , 110 new oil fields in Russia alone in the past 10 years , its now the biggest oil producer in the world .350 finds since 1970 . far from running out , were running into it , Purdhoe bay Alaska , , huge find bigger than Saudi , same with gull island , another find bigger than Saudi .
   No evidence of it running out at all . ( the opposite )
   The Russian ukrainian , deep abyssal oil theory , suggests it will never run out .( only western oil companies would want you to think this ) A little research ( ahem ) will prove this easily .

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5.  
   bob21 from temperate region says:

   Sep 10, 08:39

   NO...because we are putting time and money into biofuels. we now know that algae is around 20 times more productive at growing and producing bio-oil than the earlier bio-fuel plants. We now have the technology to reduce our carbon emissions from coal fired power stations by around 90%. Solar power is becoming more efficient by the year and wave and tidal power is becoming innovative and dynamic (truly an entrapreneurs field). We as a planet, now recycle more than ever before as well as things we never would have looked at processing to re-use as a resource. In saying that, I still do not believe that we are ready for nuclear fision( uranium-long half life and plutonium-very very long half life ). I believe that in a decade this will be a very differenty world?

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