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Originally Posted by henry 351
Everyone knows oil can be made synthetically, so can petrol. The Germans were using synthetic petrol back in World War 2. So if oil runs out, it can be made, but at what cost???
It's scarey how much of the worlds economy is geared around oil and fuel.
The poms are sitting on a bit though, saving it for a rainy day. Remember the Falklands Islands conflict with Argentina? Well apparently those little islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean are sitting on a massive untapped oil reserve, property of Her Majesty. You didn't think they would fight for some penguin poo covered rock in the middle of nowhere for nothing....
I wonder how much undiscovered or untapped oil there is. Its what the fight modern wars for I suppose.
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Overnight news has Bahrain discovering 80Bn barrels of reserves as shale.
& yes UK is putting new QE class aircraft carriers in the water now, any future Falklands taskforce will have considerably more punch than 1982. They suffered badly for neglecting fixed wing aviation in '82 (Ark Royal had been paid off only 3 years prior and with her went the Phantoms, it was a miracle they had the Harriers and Invincible/Hermes at all...)
My 2c - yes there are more reserves being found, but they are harder to get to, harder to process, big environmental mess in getting them. EROEI is the 'peak' phenomenon - that is, the energy obtained from the effort of processing it is going down. As EROEI lessens, societal complexity will diminish, for the complexity of our society & all the wonderful things rests on abundant easy-to-harness energy.
We are seeing US shale drillers surviving on very cheap funding, keeping them pumping where perhaps they would not at market-set rates of interest.
If you look fuel itself, the 98 mixes have high % of BTEX chemicals to add to the octane, I read that this is occuring as the quality of underlying fuel has less octane. If anyone is a petroleum engineer, Would be happy to be corrected on this.
But yeah its EROEI that is the peak phenomenon.
PS still need energy to mine and process that lithium battery, solar panel, wind turbine...
PPS the amount of energy in plastic pollutants is incredible. The world and its oceans are inundated with these high energy-storing toxic waste. A movement has begun to recover fuel from them. I calculated 20 plastic milk containers = 1L of petrol recovered...
PPPS - US Navy has successfully obtained carbon from seawater and refined it into aviation fuel.