The End of OPEC? Massive Oil Find in Australia.

China is considered the most likely to be the next major producer of Shale gas and oil but the industry there is moving at a snails pace compared to North America.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...0AMAN220130117

Argentina is said to have very good fields as far as Shale extraction is concerned. But left wing government there recently decided to nationalize the Spanish oil company that was doing almost all of the drilling in the country. The result is that none of western companies that know how to make Shale work will help them get there Shale fields into production. So end result is they have the resources but lack the knowledge of how to bring it into production.

Yes it does.

Well, at least the sort of bitumen production we do here in Alberta uses a tremendous amount of fresh water and that's even with a lot of pressures to use less. 158 million cubic meters in 2011 for example or 41.74 million gallons if you prefer. There just no economically feasible way to extract non-conventional oil without water and lots of it. They'd need to build some sort of delivery system to bring water in before anything else happened.

fanaskin_sl said:

Notice nobody talks about peak oil anymore? the problem with doom and gloom philosophies is that they don't account for change at all, changes in technology, in findings or in use/attitudes

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Wow you aregenuinelystupid. Peak oil doesn't mean "No more oil, everyone go back to living in caves", peak oil means "Welp, all the easy-to-drill shit is drying up. Time to figure out how to get the rest of it out".

Which is, you know,exactly what is going on with shale oil/gas. Why did nobody do it before? The technology? Not so much. It's because it wasn't profitable. Why is it profitable now? Becausewe've hit peak oil. Crude is now ~$110/barrel so something which costs ~$60/barrel to extract (i.e. shale oil) will make money where it wouldneverhave when oil was ~$20/barrel.

Chinese are looking at building 100s of mines of pipeline to ship in seawater to use for fracking. Seems you don't need fresh water just water for fracking. But unless you luck into some bellow sea level geography you have to pay the cost of pumping all that water uphill from ocean to the drilling site.

fanaskin_sl said:

Notice nobody talks about peak oil anymore? the problem with doom and gloom philosophies is that they don't account for change at all, changes in technology, in findings or in use/attitudes

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As has been mentioned, Peak oil refers to peak oil production out of specific fields. No one refers to it anymore because it's come and gone. The last big oil shock was America coming to that collective realization.

If we have another oil shock like that it will fuck us proper. The last one is STILL fucking us.

It's referring to those specific middle eastern fields, the ones that have been mined and providing the bulk of the oil supply over the past 40 years. Within that definition we've hit and passed peak oil. It never meant that we run out, it means that it gets more expensive. Part of that is geology, part of that is economy.

I mean you're not wrong. Most people DID understand peak oil to be "we run out" and proceeded to talk about the sky falling with accompanying bell graphs of production and appeals to zero point energy. But that's really not what it means -- or at least not what I thought it meant after doing some reading about it. It was always specific, not global. Every mine has a production curve, and we're getting a lot better at estimating it.

Edit: These were the easy mines, so it gets more expensive from now on due to a combination of geology, tech, and economy.

I'm sure there are still at least a few massive conventional oil fields left to find, not including the arctic or Antarctica. I know of one myself VERY crudely (and likely overoptimistically) estimated at 1.8 trillion barrels, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows of some little tidbit like that. Even if the reality is only one tenth of that its still a pretty damn big field. That one hasnt been officially discovered yet since the original finders werent licensed to be looking for oil (they were surveying for something else at the time), and since its not in a politically stable area nobody has been eager to try to open that can of worms yet. Its been out there for over 30 years, but its becoming known by more people over time as data collects from various sources, so I daresay it will come out one day. Fuck knows how they'd resolve the politics to be able to drill there without sparking another war though, since its disputed territory. And there's a good number of other fields out there that ARE publically known but havent been developed yet for various reason, not all of them technical. The Orinoco Belt in Venezuala, at just over 500 billion barrels, is the largest I think (although that one is oil-sands rather than conventional); uncertainty in the safety of investments there have been keeping foreign companies away so far. I'm guessing that, since the exploration there was properly licensed, the figures for that field are relatively reliable regarding its size.

Edit- I just poked around a little to see if it had gone public yet, and it more or less has- this is the one I've known about since 1978 -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Oil_Dispute

VariaVespasa_sl said:

I'm sure there are still at least a few massive conventional oil fields left to find, not including the arctic or Antarctica. I know of one myself VERY crudely (and likely overoptimistically) estimated at 1.8 trillion barrels, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who knows of some little tidbit like that. Even if the reality is only one tenth of that its still a pretty damn big field. That one hasnt been officially discovered yet since the original finders werent licensed to be looking for oil (they were surveying for something else at the time), and since its not in a politically stable area nobody has been eager to try to open that can of worms yet. Its been out there for over 30 years, but its becoming known by more people over time as data collects from various sources, so I daresay it will come out one day. Fuck knows how they'd resolve the politics to be able to drill there without sparking another war though, since its disputed territory.

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Ok there James Bond. Will you get waxed by some shadowy cartel if you dare speak the name of this third world shithole to everyone on the fake substitute for the erstwhile unofficial WoW forum?

Yep. Peak oil is essentially when oil production can not match demand from a set of defined sources (I'm not hip to oil production terminology but essentially sources that cost under a certain amount to get.) Lots of forces/people have attempted to confuse this, mostly speculators looking to make a buck with demand on futures from oil intensive businesses, so the public perception of what this means is very, very skewed.

The reality is, hitting peak oil will be both a good and a bad thing for most countries (Or if we've hit it already, it will continue to be a mixed bag). It's bad because our economy has become based on very liberal (Economics sense) resource usage, so a fluctuation in a staple commodity is going to rock the boat. Bad also because the U.S. dollar essentially gets a cheat code due to how oil reserves are traded. However, it's good because it's mostly western nations who have the technology to extract other sources of oil and use other sources of (Green? Sometimes) energy (Which will be massive markets once OPEC shits the bed.) and because many western nations have shale reserves that are even larger than the middle east reserves we've been using.

Saudi Arabia actually broke with OPEC policy a few years ago and decided to completely open their supply, because they know that due to speculation, they are essentially a small distance away from losing billions of dollars.

Explain more of how OPEC is fucking itself? (Layman's terms of course!)

Famm_sl said:

Ok there James Bond. Will you get waxed by some shadowy cartel if you dare speak the name of this third world shithole to everyone on the fake substitute for the erstwhile unofficial WoW forum?

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Nope, its not that kind of political problem. Its the whole Turkey/Greece/Cyprus thing, essentially. I've edited my post accordingly to include a link since it has gone mostly public now.

I think the idea is that they'll make more money off speculation now than they'll make selling the exact same oil in 5 years.

Edit: Which if you look at the speculation bubbles, is probably true.

Famm_sl said:

Explain more of how OPEC is fucking itself? (Layman's terms of course!)

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Well, historically, OPEC has openly price fixed total production to make it profitable for all of it's members. Some members have bigger bills for oil production than others. But because there was such a huge "gap" between the price of oil, and the price (And demand for*) of the "next best" energy source (Whatever it is), they could freely shift this supply to affect the price per barrel and get it into a "sweet zone" that they all compromised on (So they could all make an "acceptable" profit.)...They did this so they wouldn't have to compete on an actual open market (Which would be better for us as consumers, vs better for them.)

And this happened for decades, until this last decade. Recently, because of speculators, it's been difficult to foresee how supply will effect price. Oil speculation is very risky because of this, and so is tinkering with supply. ALSO, because of new technologies (Fracking/Green ect), there is a "soft" ceiling now where if that price goes up to high, demand will DROP, rather than prices increasing. If it stays up to high, those drops could become systemic (For example--investors might feel it's time to build networks of alternative fuel stations--because now their sure they can make money, because the price of oil stabilized above X point.)...And because of how speculation is working, this means changes in supply are....very risky.

OPEC has tried to drop the supply a few times recently, and Saudi Arabia has given them the finger and increased supply. Because it really wants to avoid that "shift" over to new sources of supply. Some other nations (As I understand it) are hurt by this, because they are less flexible in their production (So require a higher price to maintain that acceptable profit.)

*The ubiquity of oil use is also an important factor. Certain fuels are significantly cheaper, but only because there is far less demand, because of how infrastructure puts a big initial price on lots of other substances that oil does have, thanks to it's age of use. When discussing price, that "initial" infrastructure cost comes into play along with the cost for developing/producing the material itself. So like fuel X might cost 1/3 as much as oil to produce, but if you can't make plastic out of it, and there are no fueling stations for cars to use and not enough production facilities match demand if those things existed? Then those costs would need to be added to find the true market cost of using fuel X or Y. Unless the government foots the bill!

Canada has the most oil locked up in tar sands than the rest of the world. And it's not even close.

The amount of energy it would take to turn that non-oil sludge into oil and oil products is one of the main reasons why this paradigm is fooked. 233 billion barrels of pre-oil is not enough news to get the Saudis out of bed(s).

There were lots of idiots predicting $600 oil just a few years ago. It was never going to happen simply because of market forces. Increase price of Oil and suddenly lots a of production that wasn't viable at the lower price suddenly becomes viable at higher price. At current $100 price conversion of coal into gasoline is most likely profitable. That makes trying to sustain even the current $100 price for oil nearly impossible in long run.

Fanaskin is right there were a huge number of idiots involved in Peal Oil fad. There were just a larger number of people that always knew Peak Oil was bullshit in the near to medium term.

Many people my self included are wondering why oil price is so high given the flood of production entering market and slow pace of global growth that has actually reduced total demand for oil.

Were at the point now where ether price of Oil drops are North America will become the new middle east of energy. How you sustain prices while at same time North America changes over from a oil importing region to a oil exporting one is simply not logical given the slow down in global growth.