sahtt

You are supposed to. That's what drives new investment. Crude prices should be exactly where they should be so that the markets are proportionally motivated to build a solution. These high crude prices are not a blessing or a curse, they are exactly what is needed and nothing more. Without them, the expected profit from alternative energy investment would not correspond with what is needed to create them. Long live capitalism.

lOOkatme

I understand what you are saying......but the problem everytime I read on the subject is.


scale.....energy density.......time....materials.


I think there will be less energy to go around...I am all about investing in green/alternative energy (solar/wind/geothermal/etc)....but let's get real. We will be losing an insane amount of energy from oil very soon....and regardless of how fast we ramp the alternatives (in a midst of a true energy crisis)...we aren't going to make up the difference. especially since we will be increasing our electricity supply....when what we really need is oil....although we might be able to retrofit cars with electric engines....never know. or NG could step up and we use a mix of NG and oil.

but as you look out....see China/Europe buying shitloads of LNG from Qatar and Russia.....I don't know where the US is going to get its LNG from. They are pricing LNG at $20/MCF...thats getting up there. Russia's Gazprom will profit like mad....I have a huge investment there....which I have a double on already.

lOOkatme

I agree......it seems that new production coming online is met with fresh declines from the fields you mention.


thats not going to last very long......and I see oil going up quickly if we start seeing declines in production.....its going to get very high quickly.

sevenrd

And I agree right back!

Goldman Sachs predicted $150 - $200 barrel oil within 6 - 24 months. I agree. And probably closer to the 6 than the 24. Although, there will likely be a point where demand destruction occurs and prices fall, but I have no idea what point that may be.

Even with new production from Brazil's recent find, the tar sands, etc., it's not enough to replace the declining fields, let alone increase production on top of that. And really, if there were easier oil to be had, the oil companies wouldn't be investing the extensive amount of money and energy extracting oil from the tar sands - pretty telling of the state we're in.

Unfortunately, I can't see alternatives being developed quickly enough to mitigate a major crisis. The Hirsch Report estimated we'd need 20 years lead-time to make a relatively painless transition. With peak appearing to be here now, or at least very close...well, I don't like to think of the consequences.

I'm hoping there's still room for production to increase, but I'm growing less and less optimistic about it.

This is one investment where I'd be happy to be wrong. I'd much rather lose some money in an energy play than face peak oil.

tritium_pie

capitalism is accelerated evolution. evolve or die.

Penforhire

I think short-term insame oil prices are good for us long-term. How else will we get the political will to invest in alternate energy fast enough. Heck, if it was up to our politicians the sun would be exhausting its energy before they invested in anything that won't show a net gain during their term.

lOOkatme

I think we are to the point of not capitialism driving energy......but the fact the science and the environment becomes the limiting factor.


Economists always think money can solve a problem. But I said they could throw an unlimited amount of money at traveling the speed of light......and not get anywhere...they probably would disagree.....and they would do so in the greatest minds of the world.


Now....maybe there is a way...and we just don't understand.....but obviously we would need to put a time constraint on development.

so everything basically comes down to time, money, resources, technology.

ace123

interesting thing this made me think of... an engineer spoke at a seminar i attended. he was working developing computer memory in the early 80s. they put together something insane for the day--i forget the exact numbers, but i want to say it was a 1 megabyte tape-based HDD around 1982. CS history buffs could probably correct me. regardless, that capacity was absolutely enormous for the day.

the thing i remembered--what really stuck out to me--was that they calculated how much money it would cost to build one terabyte of memory. they found that it would have cost more money to build 1TB of memory than all the money in the world at the time.

...and today on google shopping i can get one for under $200.

sahtt

I never learned that 'money can solve any problem' when I got my economics degree, far from it actually. I took over a dozen higher level economics courses ranging from international trade to econometrics to developmental economics. Money rarely solves a problem by itself if ever and that was never mentioned tome. A lot of people speak for economists on investment forums I've noticed.

Legislation and government entities-resistance to change-are usually the limiting factors of development.

sevenrd

Since this thread has become more oil/energy focused, there's an excellent essay over on The Oil Drum regarding our current state of energy.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4007#more