"End of the oil age"

[Jimbeaux]

Honestly, the buzz I hear is that natural gas is going to become more and more the new fuel for wider applications. BP has just opened huge fields near my home just recently.

[Skodaku]

hidetheelephants said:

If we are running out of anything it is cheap oil(and commonsense); black gold will be being pumped out of holes in the ground long after we are all wormfood. even if it becomes too expensive to use as a transportation fuel, its derivatives use in the production of everything from lubricants via plastic tat to weedkiller and paint make it too valuable to leave in the ground.

Amen to that. Cheap oil is on the way out but there's still a lot of acreage that hasn't been checked out and all the numbers reported are for "known" reserves. There is still lots to be found and to become economically extractable.

Economically extractable are two words that will become increasingly important as far as oil and gas supplies go.

UK should be planning nuclear and coal for power generation................then electric mass transport makes sense and, no, I'm not a greeny - far from it.

[Jimbeaux]

Skodaku said:

hidetheelephants said:

If we are running out of anything it is cheap oil(and commonsense); black gold will be being pumped out of holes in the ground long after we are all wormfood. even if it becomes too expensive to use as a transportation fuel, its derivatives use in the production of everything from lubricants via plastic tat to weedkiller and paint make it too valuable to leave in the ground.

Amen to that. Cheap oil is on the way out but there's still a lot of acreage that hasn't been checked out and all the numbers reported are for "known" reserves. There is still lots to be found and to become economically extractable.

Economically extractable are two words that will become increasingly important as far as oil and gas supplies go.

UK should be planning nuclear and coal for power generation................then electric mass transport makes sense and, no, I'm not a greeny - far from it.

Sensible.

[maser_spyder]

There's a lot of harping on about nuclear (and I'm all for it too, I don't understand why we don't already use a lot more), but from refining to decommissioning, the fuels used still require a massive amount of 'old' energy to make it all happen.

That's not to say it's not a good idea, but it takes a whole lot of fossil fuel to run a nuclear plant. There's still a massive room for improvement, science appears to have slowed down on this a bit.

Think of 1890s to 1940s, in the space of 50 years, there were massive leaps in technology, perfecting internal combustion, nuclear, etc. Now 70 years on from this, we've had a massive technological leap, but are still using similar energy production methods (albeit much more refined and efficient) as we were 50-60 years ago. Nuclear should be much more efficient and effective by now.

There's a school of thought that says early civilisation (Mayans and Romans et. al.) died out (or at least slowed down) because of problems with energy capture. We could go the same way.

I'm glad it's not a problem that I have to solve, that's for sure.