Industrial policy is not just green technology or an electric car…
The New Yorker gives us a small look into policy in china other than the currency peg:
The Problem Statement
U.S. manufacturing’s competitive status is increasingly challenged by other economies. Established industrialized nations such as Japan, Germany, Korea and Taiwan are developing state-of-the-art technologies, which range across all areas of manufacturing from electronics to discrete parts. Products based on technologies that originated in the U.S. economy, such as semiconductors and robotics, are increasingly both developed and produced elsewhere.
Emerging economies, such as China, are acquiring manufacturing capability through modest R&D intensities, tax and other incentives for foreign direct investment, and intellectual property theft. This second group then competes through low-cost labor and the use of exchange rate manipulation along with tariff and non-tariff barriers.
However, emerging technology-based economies have the long-term goal of attaining world-class status as innovators, which means they are not content to operate at the low-technology, labor-intensive portion of manufacturing. China already is producing 30,000 patents annually and its patent application rate trails only the United States and Japan.1 Finally, event the huge U.S. lead in biopharmaceuticals is now under attack, as an increasing number of economies invest in supporting science and technology infrastructures and provide financial incentives for foreign direct investment in this rapidly expanding technology.
The combined long-term impact on the U.S. economy of investments by both established and newly industrialized economies has been the offshoring of substantial portions of U.S. manufacturing supply chains—first the labor-intensive industries but now the high-tech ones, as well.
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In the years that followed, the government pumped billions of dollars into labs and universities and enterprises, on projects ranging from cloning to underwater robots. Then, in 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular: energy technology. The reasons were clear. Once the largest oil exporter in East Asia, China was now adding more than two thousand cars a day and importing millions of barrels; its energy security hinged on a flotilla of tankers stretched across distant seas. Meanwhile, China was getting nearly eighty per cent of its electricity from coal, which was rendering the air in much of the country unbreathable and hastening climate changes that could undermine China’s future stability. Rising sea levels were on pace to create more refugees in China than in any other country, even Bangladesh.
In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place. As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October of this year, China must “seize preëmptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.”
A China born again green can be hard to imagine, especially for people who live here. After four years in Beijing, I’ve learned how to gauge the pollution before I open the curtains; by dawn on the smoggiest days, the lungs ache.
…
David Sandalow, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs, has been to China five times in five months. He told me, “China’s investment in clean energy is extraordinary.” For America, he added, the implication is clear: “Unless the U.S. makes investments, we are not competitive in the clean-tech sector in the years and decades to come.”
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China is already buying and installing the world’s most efficient transmission lines—“an area where China has actually moved ahead of the U.S.,” according to Deborah Seligsohn, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. In the next decade, China plans to install wind-power equipment capable of generating nearly five times the power of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest producer.
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The prospect of a future powered by the sun and the wind is so appealing that it obscures a less charming fact: coal is going nowhere soon. Even the most optimistic forecasts agree that China and the United States, for the foreseeable future, will remain ravenous consumers. (China burns more coal than America, Europe, and Japan combined.) As Julio Friedmann, an energy expert at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near San Francisco, told me, “The decisions that China and the U.S. make in the next five years in the coal sector will determine the future of this century.”
…
When Albert Lin, an American energy entrepreneur on the board of Future Fuels, a Texas-based power-plant developer, set out to find a gasifier for a pioneering new plant that is designed to spew less greenhouse gas, he figured that he would buy one from G.E. or Shell. Then his engineers tested the Xi’an version. It was “the absolute best we’ve seen,” Lin told me. (Lin said that the “secret sauce” in the Chinese design is a clever bit of engineering that recycles the heat created by the gasifier to convert yet more coal into gas.) His company licensed the Chinese design, marking one of the first instances of Chinese coal technology’s coming to America. “Fifteen or twenty years ago, anyone you asked would have said that Western technologies in coal gasification were superior to anything in China,” Lin said. “Now, I think, that claim is not true.”
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The Obama Administration is busy repairing the energy legacy of its predecessor. The stimulus package passed in February put more than thirty-eight billion dollars into the Department of Energy for renewable-energy projects—including four hundred million for ARPA-E, the agency that Bush opposed. (It also allocated a billion dollars toward reviving FutureGen, though a final decision is pending.)
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/keeping-china-relatively-green/
Another set of examples of energy use that needs addressing.
China needs energy, all it can get. Green energy in China is not to replace oil or coal but to add another souce of energy. China is doing drill baby drill all around the world by partnering with both private and national oil companies. In China Coal production has doubled over the last 10 years.
How about this for a start of a pro industry policy in the United States — open all the offshore promising exploration sites.
You missed the point.
Thanks Rdan—summarizes much of what I have said for the past 3 years.
You are thinking simply about tomorrow and not a decade or two from now, and limiting your view to energy of the moment, not innovation, infrastructure, and future jobs.
***How about this for a start of a pro industry policy in the United States — open all the offshore promising exploration sites.***
1. Petroleum prices are set globally, not by domestic volume in the US. More production in the US will have very little effect on oil prices. It would affect balance of payments
2. The reason that lease areas are not all put up at the same time is to maximize royalties. That’s the same thing a private company would do. The governments are simply acting in a businesslike manner. You have a problem with that?
3. It’s very unlikely that there is a lot of oil offshore. Somewhat better chances for natural gas (It’s a geology thing), but we don’t actually need offshore gas right at the moment as we have just stumbled into a fair amount of easily drilled gas in onshore black shale deposits and don’t have the infrastructure to use it.
4. What oil is out there is mostly going to be very expensive oil because of the cost of recovering it. Probably better to wait until higher crude prices justify high lease prices.
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What would make sense (and I don’t know why the Republicans never proposed it) is to try to lease just enough new oil on the North Slope and Arctic Sea to run the trans Alaska pipeline at full capacity. That’d cut our oil imports by about 10%. Would have a neglible effect on prices.
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In any case, we are dependent on petroleum for 40% of our energy needs. It looks to me like that is a really bad idea because of a probable huge demand surge overseas in the next few decades with no offsetting supply surge. IMO we should be concentrating on switching to other energy sources — just about any other sources other than whale oil and corn based ethanol. Conservation wouldn’t hurt either, but higher energy prices will take care of that.
I understand objections to currency manipulation as a trade distorting tool. I don’t understand worry that somebody else is joining the effort to make the world a better place by expanding knowledge. If a lab in China figures out how to fix what ails Aunt Maud when no US lab has done so, how is that anything but good news?
The big head-scratcher for decades has been the failure of convergence in economic performance. Technological leadership among richer countries means that poorer countries have access to technology that they don’t have to develop themselves. The guess was that poor countries would be able to hitch a ride on rich country development and close the income gap. The income gap widened for a long time. Now, we have a convergence, and somehow that, in itself, is a reason to whine and belly-ache. Now, rapid increases in resource use and resource destruction are worries that come with development> But other than resource issues having Chinese people earn more, innovate more, live better and all that stuff? That’s good news.
Cantab,
Until a few months ago we were part of a unit on the Bartlett Shale. I also drove a tanker and I hauled fluids to and from nat. gas rigs for a few months a couple years ago. What people from outside the oil and gas industry commonly fail to understand is that the pace of extraction, and exploration, is controlled based on prices. A valve is simply opened more when prices are up, and the flow is restricted when prices are down.
After the ‘thumper trucks’ came and did the subterranean survey it was 2 years until a drill rig appeared. We were very anxious during this period, as were our neighbors and just about everyone else in the surrounding areas and communities. Our lease was with Devon and Chesapeake was the other big ‘player’ in our area (Cleburne, Tx.); And we were told at the time that the reason for the delay had to do with a shortage of drill rigs. It was not until a few years later that we all began to understand that unless prices were up, that there was little happening. But when prices did go up, the amount of activity rose dramatically. Transient workers came as if it were an emergency, and the difference in traffic patterns and all economic activities was so significant that locals would make jokes about prices etc. based on these activity factors.
Boo-koo overtime when prices are up, and ‘no work’ when prices are down. One of my co-workers put in 126 hours in a 7 day week. Some of us had sleepers on our trucks and some of the younger drivers would work shifts of 24 hours and even a 36 now and then, and napping while being paid time and a half was allowed, when prices were up. Same policies also apply in the oilfields of West Texas and Louisiana.
‘Fracing’ has changed everything and there is no need for “all the offshore promising exploration sites.”
kharris,
This is fine framing. Lowering standards of living is a tough sell for Americans overall. It is being sold quite well by multi-national companies without much thought to citizens transitions in the name of being free when it is planned policy by these companies, and certainly not a shared idea when it comes to personal incomes of these leaders. But lowering wages is such a partial answer to trade flows.
My approach has been US centric as my kids will probably be living in the US and need a context that is useful to them to earn a living in a reasonable way. It is a good reminder sometimes to re-frame.
What also seems widely misunderstood is that the US was that nation which spearheaded Globalization. Trade agreements are devised as dictated by economic necessities which must be reciprocal and the US has benefited more than any other nation. Trading paper for actual goods is an advantage that is difficult to complain about when it was at our insistence that these arrangements be adhered to in the first place. And so it is critical to understand that our exploration and extraction efforts are secondary to our global commitments. The Empire always comes first but the integral and underlying motives are rarely made public. Yet a great many things begin to make sense once it is accepted that there is no shortage of fossil fuels in the US.
a revised problem statement
US manufacturing at the end of WWII dominated the world economy and enabled a “fantastic” domestic expansion, as time passed, japan and germany rebuilt their manufacturing capabilities while the US invested in offshore manufacturinfg taiwan, south korean and other countries, and made little investment in domestic manufacturing capability. Multinational corporations promoted a “free trade” policy that used inter-governmental trade agreements to further their international expansion. The US has not developed a manufacturing strategy to offset the loss in economic strength that has occurred.
rl love,
Your work experience sounds pretty interesting. And I agreee that you can’t just say today we’ll bring on an extra 2 million barrels per day of oil production. As matter of fact we’re told that finding and developing a significant new field is likely to take 10 years. But I had this same argument 10 years ago and had my side won we would today be getting the output of what we started 10 years ago.
I also would challenge the 10 year number that the EIA came up with in an analysis they did to answer the development time question. My challenge is based on sitting in the library and going though old oil & gas journal surveys of productive fields and looking at the time they started drilling, discovered oil, and then had significant new production running. Looking at the North sea the time seemed to be more like 5 years rather than 10. Ekofisk in Norway was discovered and brought on line in less than 2 years. So if we opened up more offshore sites I think it would reasonable to expect significant new oil in 5 year (provided that its there) and in 10 years we have new production that we have don’t have today, because 10 years they told us not to do it because it would take 10 years.
VtCodger,
1. Petroleum prices are set globally, not by domestic volume in the US. More production in the US will have very little effect on oil prices. It would affect balance of payments
So what? The oil production will create jobs and corporate profits, regardless of what happens to oil prices.
2. The reason that lease areas are not all put up at the same time is to maximize royalties. That’s the same thing a private company would do. The governments are simply acting in a businesslike manner. You have a problem with that?
Of course I have a problem with that. The role of the government is to provide leases in an orderly manner to facilitate exploration and production. Having the government use its monoply power to maximize revenue on oil leases or any of the other services they provide to the public would be a nightmare.
3. It’s very unlikely that there is a lot of oil offshore.
This is the downside in my view. I’m not sure there’s anything to be had. However, the oil companies investing their own money in exploration are the best judge if this is true or not.
On the future in my view either we develop a new cheap source of energy or the human race is doomed.
Rdan,
You are thinking simply about tomorrow and not a decade or two from now, and limiting your view to energy of the moment, not innovation, infrastructure, and future jobs.
What makes you say this. Have you ever been working late into the night on a world energy balance, nagging a colleague in Paris to send his diesel consumption in Swaziland data?
The government with its bans on oil production does nothing to create innovation, infrastructure, or future jobs. Remember the movie top gun when Tom Cruise’s character lost his nerve and would not engage. Not going for oil is not engaging and lifting the ban is allowing us as a country to join the fray and from this engagement with come the future innovation, infrastructure, and jobs. Bans and conservation beyond what prices tell us is losing.
***As matter of fact we’re told that finding and developing a significant new field is likely to take 10 years. But I had this same argument 10 years ago and had my side won we would today be getting the output of what we started 10 years ago.***
Sure … except that there is no reason to believe that the output would be significant when compared to US and world needs.
***So if we opened up more offshore sites I think it would reasonable to expect significant new oil in 5 year (provided that its there)***
There is probably some oil off the California coast that can be developed faster than that. The issue is whether there is enough to make any real economic difference. The Atlantic? Not too promising so far. The Gulf? Most of the remaining oil looks to be pretty deep. Alaska? Surely there is some. The problem is how to get it to civilization.
There’s also probably some oil on shore in places with roads and infrastructure and the legal situation isn’t too gawdaful. Just not a lot.
I think ten years is for places that are damn near impossible to drill. Problem is that the only places we are likely to find major oil deposits in the US is in places that are damn near impossible to drill and, in the case of Northern Alaska, damn near impossible to get really major amounts of oil out of. Ten years may be optimistic for those. And no oil company is going to drill an incredibly expensive well in very deep water or 100km out under the Arctic ice unless they think that the price of oil is going to be high enough to pay for the well, and the dry hole next door, and a bunch of other stuff.
You need to spend some time at http://www.theoildrum.com I imagine that you can ignore pervasive — we’re all gonna die tomorrow doom and gloom atmosphere. But the technical posts are excellent and will give you a good picture of the likely future of world and US oil and gas production. Bottom line. The oil outlook is dismal. The natural gas outlook is maybe not entirely black.
BTW, the EIA does a pretty good job, but they are the first to admit that their crystal ball is hazy.
So lifting a ban is the sum total effort for innovation, infrastructure, and future jobs. Or what per centage…. you missed the point.
Rdan,
If we knew what the new innovation was going to be then it would not really be innovation. Unless maybe you can tell me what the new fuel will be in 200 years.
So lifting a ban is the sum total effort for innovation, infrastructure, and future jobs.
Lifting the ban will automatically create innovation, infrastructure and jobs now, and importantly how can anyone take this administration seriously on these three items if they are so skewed ideologically that they won’t even pick off the low hanging fruit.
Okay.
Cantab, ~ “And I agreee that you can’t just say today we’ll bring on an extra 2 million barrels per day of oil production. As matter of fact we’re told that finding and developing a significant new field is likely to take 10 years.”
We seem to be having yet another misunderstanding. I have already explained this on this site, but, evidently my comments are mostly ignored anyway, so, I shall just come out and say this as plainly as I am able to. I know that there are vast amounts of oil and gas still in the ground in Texas and New Mexico. It turns out that oil that was too expensive or too difficult to extract in the past is now plentiful and cost effective to retrieve from the same fields that were thought to be played out. The technology now allows subterranean surveys that show exactly where deposits that were missed are. I have seen these surveys on site and drilling techniques have improved incredibly, and I mean incredibly in the literal sense. Anyway, rather than explaining all of this again and again, let me try this: I know many, many people who work in the oilfields at every level, I have worked on the rigs and I have had access to the technological wonders, and I have played golf with the execs etc., and, when the subject of ‘peak oil’, or the availability of nat. gas arises, folks in the industry — chuckle and wink.
The supply of oil, and of gas, has simply been downplayed so as to maintain price levels.
***On the future in my view either we develop a new cheap source of energy or the human race is doomed.***
Basically, Yes
Not doomed, but if we don’t develop an abundant energy source and/or dramatically alter our way of doing things or both, this is likely to be a really bad century for the human race.
The best bet looks to be fusion followed distantly by solar and fission. Problem is that fusion is probably three or four decades away. We (developed countries plus China) ought to be spending a lot more than we are to try to close that gap. And we — all six billion of us — need a realistic plan to get from here to 2050 in some sort of orderly fashion. The danger is continuation of the sort of bungling the human race engaged in during the 20th Century is all too likely to lead to that thermonuclear war we somehow avoided last Century. THAT would be really bad for business.
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****Having the government use its monoply power to maximize revenue on oil leases or any of the other services they provide to the public would be a nightmare. ***
But isn’t that what your favorite political party favors? Run the Government like a business? Surely, YOU aren’t advocating running it like a government? Seriously, maximizing oil lease revenue will ever so slightly ease the unbearable burden of taxation that you will shortly be whinging nonstop about. Maybe there’s some way to do exploration and still maximize lease revenue. … maybe
BTW, am I to take it that you would like the FCC to stop auctioning spectrum, and instead allocate it on the basis of perceived social good? Sure sounds to me like what you are saying. Keep that sort of thing up and you’ll end up a liberal.
I agree with rl love. There is enough oil and gas to last for the forseeable future.
Food for thought : “….A Future of Endless Oil”
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34770285/ns/business-oil_and_energy//
Codger, and company.
First, once the execs decide it is time to drill on a site, it typically only takes a few weeks to get things flowing. On the Barnett it took a couple of years though to get the infrastructure of pipes laid which are those that are used to transport the gas, although many sites are drilled and capped so as to be productive on the very day that the pipes are on line. The gas though is flowing through some of the earliest laid pipes in a matter of months. So, I can only guess, but I did see the entire process from the beginning until now (I drove through N.Texas yesterday), but an educated and fair guess as to how long it actually takes to produce a significant amount of gas is about 2 years but… it is important to understand that it could be in less time if not for this:
About 5 years before drilling on our unit (we only had 7.5 acres so we were part of a unit=640 acres), the first land-man who came by offered us $50 per acre as a sign-on bonus. Then a few months later another land-man from a different company offered us $100 per acre and one our neighbors signed on then (15 acres). Then another offer and another and to keep this short I’ll skip ahead about 2.5 years and say that we held out until $825 per acre and we were the last hold-out in our unit. And we were rather proud of ourselves until a couple of years later when we discovered that all of those who waited until some of the first wells began to produce actually received bonuses that ran into the thousands per acre.
Anyway, I don’t have time to tell the whole story, but essentially, the trading of leased mineral rights is an industry in itself. Mr. Landman claims that he represents a company that intends to drill on your unit but in truth our lease changed hands 4 times before Devon bought it. So a lengthy part of the process has to do with speculating and if a land-man tells a land-owner the truth it costs the land-man and his company $$$. Be it enough for now to say that asymmetrical information is their stock in trade. And the wrangle between companies over leases is a never ending process.
***I know that there are vast amounts of oil and gas still in the ground in Texas and New Mexico***
Of course there are. The trouble is that the American demand for oil is a lot more than just “vast”.
You need to know one number 18,000,000. That’s the number of barrels of crude oil that the US burns every day. How many barrels do we use in a year ? That’s simply 365*18,000,000 =6,570,000,000 barrels. Vast enough for almost anyone I think.
Now go to http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/natural_gas/data_publications/crude_oil_natural_gas_reserves/cr.html and feast your eyes on Figure 4. That’s “proven” oil reserves. We’re down to about a three year supply and the numbers are dropping every year. (Those charts include natural gas liquids=Service Condensate BTW)
It’s pretty clear. We are already short of oil. We already import more than half of what we burn and the situation is going to get worse even allowing for the fact that we have a vast amount of oil in the ground. Our appetite for oil is more than just vast.
But there is good news Our proven reserves of natural gas are pretty healthy and getting healthier. The gas won’t keep us going forever, but it should keep our world from ending for a number of decades. And one anticipates that natural gas reserves overseas also will be increasing which means that we will not be competing with China, India, et al for natural gas — which is also a bit difficult to ship around compared to petroleum.
The problem is that a lot of our infrastructure is geared for oil products, not natural gas. For example, it is possible to convert a car to run on Compressed natural gas. And in many places in the US, the cost of CNG is substantially less than gasoline for the same number of BTUs. But at this time, I doubt you could find enough CNG suppliers in the right places to even drive a car across the US.
Further, not everything can be converted to CNG cheaply or at all. You probably won’t see a CNG powered airliner any time soon for example. Converting a house heated by fuel oil to natural gas requires a good many thousand dollars in equipment and plumbing. etc.
***I agree with rl love. There is enough oil and gas to last for the forseeable future.***
Sure — if you are planning on dying young and leaving a good looking corpse.
Might want to do a little research starting with how many billion barrels of oil the world consumes every year. And the real worry — what happens if the 5 billion human beings who do not live in developed countries start using just two quarts of gasoline a day? — which might very well happen if there were enough oil to support that … which there probably isn’t.
There actually may be a enough natural gas to tide the world over for a few decades. And there are also fairly substantial reserves of coal and heavy oils (oil too thick to pump).
VTCodger: “Conservation wouldn’t hurt either, but higher energy prices will take care of that”.
This reminds me of an old comment of Bakho’s, where he lays out the importance of regulation to ensure conservation happens. See here (scroll down to Bakho’s comment). Here’s a sample:
“Standards enacted to date are having a significant impact on U.S. energy use while saving consumers and businesses billions of dollars. Appliance standards rank with automobile fuel economy standards as the two most effective federal energy-saving policies.
“In 2000, according to analyses by the U.S. Department of Energy and ACEEE, standards reduced U.S. electricity use by approximately 88 billion kWh and reduced U.S. total energy use by approximately 1,200 trillion Btus. These savings are 2.5% and 1.3% of U.S. electricity and energy use in 2000, respectively”.
It’s true that Bakho also talked about the market failures which make standards necessary, which seems to imply that in a perfect market standards wouldn’t be needed. But remember how the Rocky Mountain Institute’s book “Natural Capitalism” hammered on about the cost savings available from conservation which were never implemented. They gave example after example of expensive waste.
So in addition to Bakho’s list of market failures, I would add the stupidity which prevents people from responding to price signals even when they are present. Once you admit that, the case for regulation becomes overwhelming, and reliance on higher energy prices to “take care” of regulation looks like a pretty forlorn hope.
rl love,
The suppy of oil, and of gas, has simply been downplayed so as to maintain price levels
Commodity prices don’t work this way. The only way prices can be kept up over time is if the Cartel keeps them up; or if there’s a real shortage.
On the future of supply those oil executives don’t know how much oil there is. The good ones know the history of the industry going back to Colonel Drake. They know the long history of thinking we were running out of supply only to have new discoveries and the prices crash again. Since I’ve been watching the industry we had two price increases in the 1970s as Opec took over their oil properties, one the late 1970s with the Iranian revolution, a pretty big price crash in 1986 as the Saudis went for market share, followed by low prices until 2000 with a short spike following Sadam’s invasion of Kuwait, and then another crash with the Asian financial meltdown.
For most of the Bush administration they were fighting the headwinds of rising oil prices until the spike up in 2007/2008. And this spike was a demand driven one. Last year prices went down but they never crashed below $30 a barrel and they seem to have support in the $60-70 range. I would say the cartel has been doing one heck of a job. Better than most cartels and better than this particular cartel had done in the past. Basically the old hands in the oil industry are extrapolating from the past. You can be sure they won’t anticipate a shortage until it bites us in the ass. This is the fate of an extrapolator. The only other way to do an analysis is to inventory oil fields around the world, and this method just allows you to do a beter job extrapolating.
rl love,
Trade agreements are devised as dictated by economic necessities which must be reciprocal and the US has benefited more than any other nation.
China seems to be giving us a run for number one at collecting the benefit from trade.
Jamzo,
If most of the money is in marketing and distribution then why should we stress over manufacturing.
Codger and Cantab,
You are each wrong. Codger is wrong because Cantab is correct about ‘proven reserves’ being based on extrapolation. But each of you are wrong in the end because 3 dimensional seismic surveys are able to provide enough information now that estimates based on these surveys do allow for extrapolations to be accurate. But these are not being done to the extent that is possible because it is not an important concern for those who control the technology. The seismic surveys are no small endeavor, a grid of cables must be strung together and insofar as Texas, Louisiana, and Eastern New Mexico, are concerned, well, that would take years. So Cantab was right in a way, “the old hands” in the industry are making educated guesses but I think each of you are underestimating just how educated those guesses are. And Cantab is completely wrong about commodity prices and how things ‘work’. What he is missing is that the industry has no incentive to prove that supply is not an issue. If they believed that proving that ample supplies for a 100 years was in their best interest — they would pay to send out the thumper truck crews. But ‘peak oil’ concerns are free and I don’t have room here to teach the importance of political will so I’ll just leave it at that.
And Codger, fuel consumption has fallen 9% in the past 2 years. And so I suppose that your concerns are based on an optimism for a recovery that I doubt will come anytime soon. I stand by vast because I believe that fossil fuel use will continue to trend downward and alternative fuels will trend upward. I am optimistic about progress but pessimistic about an economic recovery and I doubt that the conspicuous consumption of energy will be tolerated for much longer. Border taxes do not need compliance and the US has fewer friends with each passing day. ~ ray
Codger,
I replied to you and Contab in one swoop. Mostly just because I type so slowly.
Cantab,
That will probably depend on whether that paper we have been trading for stuff turns out to be worth anything?
when did the “the money is in marketing and distrivution” come to be?