Peak oil is starting to rear its ugly head

[NJ5]

Final-Fan said:

cwbys21 said:
Even though I can't find anything, it was on a History Channel show called Mega Disasters where one guy thought that a big plume of methane gas came up from the ocean during a storm and lightning caught it on fire and it was a big fire ball that might have killed off the dinosaurs. In the show they said that there is 3000 years worth of methane in the oceans in US waters. The show won't be re-aired in the next week and I don't want to buy it for $25. The guy got the idea from some thing that happened in the early 1900s in Africa where methane gas came up out of a lake and created a fire ball.

3000 years worth of gas =/= 3000 years worth of recoverable gas, I bet, even if the number isn't BS in the first place. The focus of that show wasn't on the accuracy of that tidbit.

Not only that, but I suspect the 3000 year figure would only be valid at current usage levels. If natural gas replaced oil in a big way (for electricity generation, powering more and more cars, etc), it would probably be much lower.

@Ickalanda: According to the Hirsch report, and if those new oil production forecasts are right, we may already be too late to start mitigating the consequences:

• Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.

• Initiating a mitigation crash program 10 years before world oil peaking helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.

• Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.

As Final-Fan said, the free market doesn't always solve everything. It focuses too much on short term profits. All I'm saying is that governments need to have the balls to start solving this problem NOW (and that doesn't mean throwing a few millions towards renewables, it means a large scale effort; nuclear power will probably be needed to sustain the transition).