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"I've been hearing stuff about oil in general is at its peak and will run out soon."
Don't believe the end of he world baloney from either side. Humans are survivors. The ignorant and predators will weed themselves out. My house was built in 1885. I am the third owner on these 107 acres. I could live the way the bulders did because I know how they did it.
A city person who buys take-out or stops at the deli for his supper won't last long if the water pressure on the 38th floor is gone and the elevators don't work. If he makes it out of the building alive, he will have nothing useful to him when he gets to the street. The city person chose to put himself in that situation.
Location: God's Gift to Mankind for flying anything
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When we find a way to replace engines (powered by gasoline) with motors (powered by electricity), we still need some oil for lubrication, so we will always have a need for some oil.
Maybe we will find a way to reduce friction by some other way than oil someday?
Movement of people and cargo by "flight without the need for oil" is, in my opinion, a pipe dream for at least a very long time!. The size of a "drone" to move a certain amount of weight today is out of proportions now known! They would be so huge, there is just not enough room to do it!
I have not seen any discovery yet of people knowing how to control gravity!
Oil is technically renewable, if plastics and such were turned back into oil or bio-oil like corn oil was injected back into the ground, but costs would be enormous. The peak oil of the 70s was with the simple extraction methods of the time. Fracking has made huge previously unavailable sources into rich wells. Once that isd gone, there is the shale oil in Canada that again is a huge deposit. Coal can also be turned to a type of oil.
Oil is all about economics and power (political and monetary power). The improving economies of other energy sources and creative ways to make money in energy will eventually reduce its use.
Crude petroleum is the basic feedstock for a large portion of our chemical industry, and to some degree, refiners can fine-tune the process to better meet demand for particular products. At $50-$150 per barrel, oil can be economically used for motor and industrial fuel, but should the price continue to rise, demand would ebb as substitutes were found. And conversely there are, doubtless, a few products that would justify a much-higher per-barrel price. Just supply and demand at work -- as always.
I've been hearing stuff about oil in general is at its peak and will run out soon
"Peak Oil" has been a boogeyman for 40 years and was based upon extrapolation that stupidly assumed that technological or other advances would be unable to change any dynamic.
Generally speaking, people that make extrapolations without accounting for any sort of reaction do so intentionally to create *scary* scenarios that the typical person isn't educated enough or perhaps just too fearful to rationally process and spot the logical fallacy.
That lets the claimant sell books or other products, do the talk show circuit and so on and so forth.
Tech breakthroughs pour in at such a rapid pace these days that I think predicting the distant future of energy generation\usage is nearly impossible.
Water is endlessly recyclable using relatively simple technology. It's just a problem when nature doesn't provide all we care to waste.
hahaha
DH got his master's in Civil engineering waste water treatment. Yeah you can filter urine and drink it on space trips. But 99% pure from the Trinity river is not something I want my grandkids drinking. Read up on all the crap they can't get out.
If water coming out of water treatment plants is so great, why are Coke and nestle's selling so much bottled water? BTW, imagine when getting bottled water that 1/4 of it is petroleum products. That's what it takes to get that bottle of water into a person's hand.
"Peak Oil" has been a boogeyman for 40 years and was based upon extrapolation that stupidly assumed that technological or other advances would be unable to change any dynamic.
Generally speaking, people that make extrapolations without accounting for any sort of reaction do so intentionally to create *scary* scenarios that the typical person isn't educated enough or perhaps just too fearful to rationally process and spot the logical fallacy.
That lets the claimant sell books or other products, do the talk show circuit and so on and so forth.
Tech breakthroughs pour in at such a rapid pace these days that I think predicting the distant future of energy generation\usage is nearly impossible.
The term was originated by a man in the oil industry itself, and also subscribed to by energy and financial market analysts.
DH got his master's in Civil engineering waste water treatment. Yeah you can filter urine and drink it on space trips. But 99% pure from the Trinity river is not something I want my grandkids drinking. Read up on all the crap they can't get out.
None of which contradicts what I said. I wasn't necessarily talking about the treatment plant down the street - almost nothing fundamentally changes water, so it is always plentiful and ready for recycling. That's a difference from substances that have to be chemically reformulated to be "recycled."
Quote:
If water coming out of water treatment plants is so great, why are Coke and nestle's selling so much bottled water?
You might want to google up this thing called "marketing." Also some side reading on irrational fear syndromes.
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