"Inspired" by gas prices...

How are new reserve discoveries reported ? Small to minimize tax liability, high to boost stock market value or as the full known recoverable discovery ?

Fields discovered in 1964 are presently being harvested ? or lie fallow due to cost of extraction issues .

I never know how to interpret numbers.

 

I think Boston is right. There is a demand issue. A growing population of oil users is actually making it profitable to pull it out of oil laden sand. That shows you how much supply vs demand there is. There isn't enough oil in general. We are obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel here by sand extraction and hydraulic processes. Thus is only economically possible because so many people want oil.

 

exactly, when they start squeezing sand in Canada for oil in, you know they are running low on the easy stuff to extract. Same for drilling in thousands of feet of water. Or in the frozen north. If oil was all that plentiful we wouldn't see them drilling for it in all the hardest places.

although I agree that the numbers may not be entirely accurate, its pretty obvious that there going to some pretty extreme lengths to find oil these last 30 years or so.

 

I have seen claims that we, in the US have hundreds if years of Natural gas supply so back a few years ago when prices of gasoline were really high i started researching the idea of converting a gas vehicle and found that the kits were readily available, most of them from brazil but it was impossible to buy a reasonably priced filling station to plumb into my garage, i had heard many years ago that the locat utility was running a fleet of Astro vans on cng so i gave them a call,they no longer used them and still had the filling station but couldnt sell me gas, in short apart from Utah,there was no infrastructure in place even though the fuel was abundant. Now dont get me wrong,i love my diesel vehicle but what i dont like is the lack of choices, if i want to drive a diesel car i can drive a VW or Mercedes product, both great vehicles but what really burns me is that in the rest of the world just about all the vehicles we have here are available in diesel, hell, i was down under last october and read a review of the new 2012 Ford Ranger pickup(designed in the Ford design studio in Melbourne) the thing is gorgeous and is available with 2 different turbo diesel engines, what was amusing was when i got home there were TV ads for the "new" 2012 Ranger here which looks like the same cab as the last new vehicle i bought, a 1990 Ford Ranger, what a joke. We are 3rd world when it comes to vehicle choices. Why cant Ford bring this vehicle here? all the major manufacturers have long had fuel efficient turbo diesels available in other countries in all vehicle classes, but not here. Dont get me wrong, i dont think that diesel is the be all, end all fuel, its just that its the only one where the infastructure is already in place. we could ban gasoline powered passenger cars tomorrow, replace them with diesel and halve our fuel consumption.
Steve.

 

couldn't agree more
its nuts how big oil has us by the short hairs in this country.

 

That's a strong point Steve, it also fits in with the point I made about being adaptable.

Biodiesel is very up and coming, there are several stations around here (greater Sacramento area) that serve Biodiesel, and there are plenty of backyard Biodiesel brewers making their own fuel... With that in mind, SHTF and you can still get around by producing your own fuel, gasoline users are F***ed.

 

What will happens to Middle East Country when they will be running out of oil?
They have nothing in place to replace oil as a income to pay for everything.

 

I've never looked into it, but how hard would it be to convert a gasoline engine to run on straight ethanol? Bio brewers could make that pretty easily if the SHTF (by the way, I kept reading that as STFU - though there was a fight going on... ha ha ha)

Get some bio mass, dump in the yeast and sit back while a simple process takes place.

Then, just use a (solar) still to get the ethanol out.

Probably easier to make ethanol than bio diesel, from what I've seen with cursory glances at the processes.

 

Ethanol uses more energy to make than it produces. It is not a solution to the problem, but drilling is.

 

Is that my post you were talking to, Hoyt?

I may have worded it incorrectly, but I was responding to the post I quoted.

He was saying bio diesel users would be able to run their engines if the supply of fuel was disrupted. They would be able to do this by home brewing bio diesel.

What I was saying was that gasoline engine users might also have an option to home brew if there was no more gasoline. They could do it just like home brewing beer (or more precisely, moonshine!)

Wasn't saying ethanol is the answer to fuel costs.

I meant you could home brew it yourself if you had to run a gasoline engine. Dump any free, sugary plant into some water with yeast, then use a solar still to create your fuel. That doesn't even use energy (apart from the heat from the sun and your muscles to move the bio mass into the brewery). The yeast does all the heavy lifting for you. Direct conversion. Much more simple than brewing bio diesel, actually, if you can convert an engine to run 100% ethanol.

 

I was referring to "Probably easier to make ethanol than bio diesel, from what I've seen with cursory glances at the processes.", said by you, Sir.

My uncle made moonshine and it took a lot of heat to distill and he still didn't get all the water out.

http://chemistry.about.com/b/2005/07/20/how-to-make-moonshine.htm links to http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryhowtoguide/ht/ethanol.htm

 

There are a number of vehicles out there that will run on E85 or gasoline,the problem is that they get worse mileage from the E85 which offsets any savings in fuel cost. Doesnt seem like a practical solution to me. We have a gas station locally that sells only Biodiesel, B5, B20 and B99. Unfortunatly its a bit out of my way. About 5 years ago i ran B100 for a whole summer and was very happy with it, i didnt notice any difference one way or another other than the smell, at that time i was paying about 25cents/gal more but i felt pretty good about running fuel from southern Minnesota and all my lubricating products from Amsoil just across the river in Superior,Wisconsin. Then the co op folded and i couldnt get Bio until recently.
Steve.

 

Hmmmm... I am talking on the fly here without looking anything up, but isn't the boiling point of ethanol much lower than the boiling point of water?

All you need to do is use a solar still to hit the boiling point of ethanol and condense it out.

Nothing needed but sunshine and a very precise control of temperature - always under 100C/212F, but higher than the boiling point of ethanol.

Still sounds easier to me than all that work and all the chemicals involved in bio diesel production.

Remember... I was answering one of die_dunkelheit's posts saying that gasoline engine users would be screwed if there was no more fuel provided by fuel companies. He was saying bio diesel users brewing their own could still run their engines.

I am saying maybe gasoline users could too, if they ran straight ethanol.

It's a little bit of thread drift, not the answer to any of the world's energy problems. Just a "waterworld" or "Gilligan's Island" type of thing.

 

Using a solar still is a brilliant idea for ethanol, as well as a lot safer for the backyard brewer (you've heard of a moonshine still going off with a bang). Doing so in mass could help bring down the production cost of ethanol, make it cheaper, and possibly lessen the effect of the issue Hoyt brought up.

 

Ethanol would probably be better suited for firing up a steam engine, but for that you could just use pine knots.