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. 

NJ5 said: The IEA has predicted for several years that crude-oil supplies will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day now. But the agency is now worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to break beyond 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

Now in this case I'll agree with Kyros that the market will adjust fast enough to counteract the problem. If the problem is merely that people aren't trying hard enough to get the oil out, then the market will certainly have more than enough companies/governments scrambling for the privilege of picking up the slack well before the global economy self-destructs.

Creating entirely new energy resource pools, on the other hand, is another matter. The natural instinct of capitalism is to keep taking from the well until it runs dry and by then it's FAR too late to avoid consequences on a scale yet unseen by man. Oh, I'll bet that by the time that oil was just getting to the really bad downslope on the bell curve there'd be a few great new energy sources, but they'd take many years if not decades to scale up to anywhere NEAR the levels that the world is used to getting -- no, anywhere near the levels the world NEEDS with its current setup. (Well, unless we get fusion, but we've been "10 years away" from that since the 1960s if I recall correctly, so don't bet on it.)

The market REACTS, and this time reacting just fucking isn't good enough. What is needed is to ACT.

(Reposted for visibility. Also, to clarify, nobody does anything in capitalism unless it turns a profit. By the time there's enough pressure to get people really going on non-oil (i.e. until enough people see enough profit for them in it), it'll be too late. That's why the government, hamhandedly and (in the case of ethanol) even misguidedly, is pulling all sorts of strings to create artificial market pressure.)

I wouldn't be worried about it. The human race when faced with a problem will always find a solution.

If it does ever reach a point where alternative energy sources are needed that will be when they finally get more attention and money put into them.

It's not like people are just going to let everything crash and burn and we're all going to die. Necessity is the mother of invention and only once it becomes necessary that we need something new will it happen.

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).

 

Yes it is at current levels. I don't know how recoverable it is, they didn't say. But they were trying to estimate how much methane gas was in the oceans and they could have embellished some, wouldn't be the first time I'm sure, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a bunch of the stuff out there, though recovery would be hard.

Here is a wikipedia article on oceanic methane reserves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate#Oceanic

Current estimates are that there are between 1 and 5 quadrillion cubic meters of methane at "narrow range depths."

 

Here is an interesting article on various energy sources and their pros and cons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_development