Comments on: No use planning for climate change without acknowledging peak oil

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Is worldwide ‘peak oil’ *really* the problem that we think it is, *right now*? The reserves of the Canadian and Venezuelan ‘oil sands’ are estimated to be twice as large as the world’s conventional oil reserves, and many other countries have large supplies of oil sands also. It costs about US$70 a barrel to refine, which is now more competitive than the conventional sweet light crude rate, and the chemistry of extraction is constantly improving. This would seem to suggest petrol prices can’t really go up beyond the $1.50/l price point, not $8.00/l. It seems we have earned a reprieve for a few decades more…

By: Scott D

Scott D — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

Ahh, the age old “Peak Oil” comment. Wasn’t this supposed to happen in the 1990’s?
People who believe in this phenomena seem to forget the role of the market in controlling supply and demand. When demand increases, the price goes up, meaning more investment in the supply side as greater profits can be made.
There are huge reserves of oil out there, but it is too expensive at the moment to drill for it. Also Nazi Germany pioneered the technology to convert coal to oil back in the 40’s and there are large coal deposits still waiting to be discovered. The only limit to this is cost. However, if the price of oil increased dramatically, all these options become economically viable, causing the supply of oil to increase. The increase in supply would then cause the price to go down again. Economics 101.
There are many reasons to do something about climate change, however peak oil is not one of them.

By: Cavitation

Cavitation — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000

While there is some evidence that crude oil is reaching a peak, which has not happened yet, there is still plentiful supplies of natural gas as well as other sources of hydrocarbons such as in shale deposits (visit Newnes in the Blue Mountains to see where shale was mined to make kerosene a hundred years ago). Australia itself has decades of supply of natural gas, and while this is inherently more expensive than gasoline to use in transport, because of the difficultly of handling a liquified gas, the difference is not all that great. Many motorists already have installed gas tanks in their vehicles. If the Australian government thought it worthwhile, we could probably convert most of our transportation across to LNG in a couple of years. But currently, and until gasoline prices rise, and stay at high levels, it is not worth doing this, and instead we are exporting our LNG to run powerstations in China and Japan. But we could easily change over, well before petrol got to $8 a litre.