Australian politician goes on record about peak oil and gas

[robertpaulsen]

I wasn't sure this should go in LBN, since it was originally published February 22. But if not late breaking, I do believe it is groundbreaking to have a member of Parliament in Australia to go on the record like this.

Australian politician goes on record about peak oil and gas

by Andrew McNamara

I rise to support the Petroleum and Other Legislation Amendment Bill. This bill is necessary to ensure consistency and efficiency in the administration of the petroleum and pineline industries in Queensland, including implementing our vital coal seam gas regime. I say ‘vital' because we will soon be faced with the effects of the rundown of the world's oil reserves after the advent of peak oil. Peak oil represents the most serious and immediate challenge to our prosperity and security. It will impact on our lives more certainly than terrorism, global warming, nuclear war or bird flu. While it may not be a term with which members are familiar now, I predict it will come to dominate debate in this place over the next 10 years.

The concept of peak oil was identified in 1956 by the late US oil industry and government geologist M King Hubbert. Dr Hubbert suggested that the rise and fall of oil production in a nation, or indeed the world, would follow a pattern for individual wells; that is, rising sharply from when oil under pressure in the ground is first spiked, increasing as more wells are sunk, plateauing when half the oil has been extracted and tapering away as the remaining recoverable oil is pumped out. This is now referred to as the Hubbert curve. From the halfway peak, all oil flows decrease as the pressure in the oil basin declines. The cost of recovering the oil rises exponentially from this point as it has to be extracted with greater degrees of technical difficulty, such as flooding the reservoir with water to float residual oil into a recoverable position.

Dr Hubbert worked for the United States Geological Survey as a senior research geophysicist for 12 years. He was employed as director of Shell's research laboratory in Houston for 20 years. He taught at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Johns Hopkins University and made a number of outstanding contributions to the field of geophysics. Regretfully, his modelling of peak oil was ignored by government and rejected by industry, but he has been proven right.

As the US energy administration now concedes, oil production in the USA peaked in 1971, as he predicted it would, and has been in steady decline since. Production for all nations outside the Middle East peaked in 1997. The scientific community is currently involved in a vigorous debate about the anticipated date of world peak oil. I quote from an article published in the Scientific American of March 1998 by Dr Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere. It states—


Using several different techniques to estimate the reserves of conventional oil and the amounts still left to be discovered, we conclude that the decline will begin before 2010.

more of this excellent speech...

http://www.energybulletin.net/4654.html

[rman]

1. this is not to be ignored

-

[robertpaulsen]

2. Agreed.

I'm waiting for someone decent in Congress like Kucinich to stand up and make a similar speech. That would be a great day.

[FtWayneBlue]

3. Peak oil is a problem that more people need to be told about

[robertpaulsen]

4. Kick

:kick:

[rman]

5. "Production for all nations outside the Middle East peaked in 1997."

Oh well, the transnational, environmentally and socially responsible corporate conglomerates will figure something out, won't they?