Oil Price

[Diver]

Close - Oxford

http://www.angelfire.com/nb/oxfordglobal/

[SandyDown]

I have three but they costed me 50 euros.

And they gave you a Russian catalogue bride as a free gift, what more do you want...

[London75]

Peak Oil - or maybe not.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09...rcs_interview/

God damn media scam I tell thee

[BrilloPad]

Peak Oil - or maybe not.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09...rcs_interview/

God damn media scam I tell thee

" Say you throw a dice: The probability of throwing one is one in six. With two dice, you’ll be above one 97 per cent of the time. With three, it’s 99.4 per cent of the time."

this is nonsense surely? with one die the odds of >1 are 83.3%. with two dice the odds of above 1 are 100%! The odds of above 2 are 97.2%.

What I think he is trying to say is that the odds of throwing a 1 with 1 die are 1 in 6 - but the odds of throwing a 1 with 2 dice are 11 in 36.



But getting such basic stuff wrong to be colours the rest of the article. maybe I am a tad unfair?

[London75]

I think he's effectively saying that the figure for future oil production is on the mega conservative side and only refers to "dead-easy-to-drill-and-pump-and-profit-from" locations.

The thing is, at $125 per barrel, the next 10% of potential sites probably become economically viable.

At $200 per barrel, probably 10 times the cost at which most existing supplies are economically viable I'd imagine the number of locations would be significantly larger.

That's part of the problem, and why I hate the BBC and it's let's make news rather than just report it attitude, stats are being manipulated and the assumptions made never declared, here the assumption with the peak oil theory is that none of the additional resources available will ever become economically viable. I would suggest the dirtiest oil that has to be sucked out of porous rock would become viable before we hit $500 per barrel.

We put men on the moon with not much more than an Acorn Electron controlling the flight systems so I think we have to give much more credit to the human race to engineer it's way out of this problem.

[TimberWolf]

I would suggest the dirtiest oil that has to be sucked out of porous rock would become viable before we hit $500 per barrel.

$500 a barrel would have pretty big consequences on oil dependent economies though, i.e. most off them. Even small price rises could mean significant changes and increased cost of living. Reserves will probably never run out, just as our oil North Sea reserves will never run out, but we will stop pumping them out in any quantity at some point in the (near in our case) future. Big painful changes await.

We put men on the moon with not much more than an Acorn Electron controlling the flight systems so I think we have to give much more credit to the human race to engineer it's way out of this problem.

The guidance systems they used were much simpler than an Acorn Electron, but it doesn't actually take much processing power to integrate Newton's equations of motion, just few lines of code at most basic.