Front page of The Independent.

Not checked every post on this thread so forgive me if someone else has said something similiar.
What most people forget about oil is that a vast amount of it is not used as fuel but as part of manufacturing items. Look around your home and ask yourself how many items are made from oil. Your bike doesn't just run on the black stuff; but your tyres, pipes, wire covers, etc are also made from it.
It's ok to say we can find alternative fuel source, but what about making items that we use every day.
The planet is running out of oil and we all will suffer for it, but it is our future generations that will suffer the most if we cannot find a way of creating things without the use of oil as well as finding an alternative power source.
What makes me laugh ( sadly ) is that this is very old news, but only now are the general public actually discussing it ( nevermind the governments and scientists ).
Oh and one more thing:- a couple of boffins worked out the maths of how much oil was left in the north sea and it wasn't looking good. The government laughed at them, now the government are worried that those boffins are right.

The North Sea oil field passed peak production in 1999 so I hope those weren't recent boffins.

Originally Posted by Ping

Will you change your name when it happens?

Not as long as there's enough bio-ethanol left to fill my tank. Amber coloured 5% solution or red coloured 13% solution. Either will do to keep me "Well Oiled".

Originally Posted by Razor

The North Sea oil field passed peak production in 1999 so I hope those weren't recent boffins.

No, the warning was given in the early 80's.
America has been warned since the 70's and yet they still have not changed the way they live. Cannot wait to see what happens over there, when the general public start to feel the effects of having reduced oil. I personally think that it will be more chaotic than over here.

I was taking the ****, you haven't read the whole thread so how were you to know.

The whole thing actually started with M.K Hubbert in 1954. He warned America then. In 1970 he warned the whole world. With globalisation the world is more connected than ever.

"Colorado and Utah have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates combined. " it says here...


http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_6012082

Oil from shale is still a huge waste of energy. They have to mine the stuff and then convert it to oil. It's not as cheap as drilling and then pumping the stuff out. These operations produce vast amounts of waste water and air pollution, they consume almost as much energy to manufacture as comes from the resulting fuels.

The problem for us normal folk isn't the end of oil, it's the end of cheap oil.
The wealthy will still have their fortunes to offset most financial difficulties that will result, the rest of us, well, only time will tell...

Ah, but...

"The breakthrough is that now the oil companies have a way of getting this oil out of the ground without the massive energy and manpower costs that killed these projects in the 1970s," said Pete Stark, an analyst at IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colorado, research firm. "All the shale rocks in the world are going to be revisited now to see how much oil they contain."

Shell are backing out of oil shale
Cost implications.

$100 dollah oil y'all !