BIKE: End of Cheap Oil Debate Again

[Jeb Boyt]

These grafs are also notable:

"All the players are looking for bigger reserves than what's on shore," 
Colling says. And deep water changes the business plan. With each well a 
multibillion dollar investment, the discovery must amount to at least 
several hundred million barrels of oil and gas for the drilling to be 
economic. Chemical signatures and detailed basin models are just more tools 
to help them decide where to drill, he says.

"A big part of the future of exploration is being able to effectively use 
chemical information," Cathles says. Working in an area with more oil by at 
least a factor of two than the North Sea, he says he hopes that his models 
will help companies better allocate their resources. But equally important, 
Cathles says, is that his work is shifting the way people think about 
natural hydrocarbon vent systems — from the past to the present.


----Original Message Follows----
From: Patrick Goetz <pgoetz>
To: Austin Bikes <forum>
Subject: BIKE: End of Cheap Oil Debate Again
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2005 15:32:56 -0600

One of my coworkers who lives in Kyle (a suburb of Buda) sent me this link 
in response to my frequent admonitions that he'd better get used to 
commuting to work by bike real soon.  The link seems to come from a 
reputable source, and includes this:

"Cathles and his team estimate that in a study area of about 9,600 square 
miles off the coast of Louisiana, source rocks a dozen kilometers down have 
generated as much as 184 billion tons of oil and gas — about 1,000 billion 
barrels of oil and gas equivalent. "That's 30 percent more than we humans 
have consumed over the entire petroleum era," Cathles says. 'And that's just 
this one little postage stamp area; if this is going on worldwide, then 
there's a lot of hydrocarbons venting out.'"

I've read it and don't see the catch -- any experts out there care to 
comment?  Is there really some chance that I'm going to be choking on H2 and 
Chevy Suburban fumes well into my dotage?  Should I just get some newly 
availabe assault weapons and go postal now to save myself a lot of 
aggravation?

    > http://www.geotimes.org/june03/NN_gulf.html



_______________________________________________
Get on or off this list here:  http://BicycleAustin.info/list