On Jun 8, 1:54 pm, Paul kgyy wrote:
Will it really peak in 5 years? I think not. Google Thomas Gold and
non-biogenic oil and you will find that the party line may not be
true.

Not sure about the peak - depends on how good the reserve estimates of
the Saudis are, but then we know they never lie, do they?

Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle were astronomers who between them came up
with a number of pretty wild ideas, one of which was that Venus would
turn out to be solid petrocarbons. So far, apparently Sweden has
actually found 80 barrels of oil in their test of Gold's hypothesis
after spending $$millions of dollars drilling in crystalline rock.
But the source of that 80 barrels might just be percolation from
nearby oilbearing strata.

Would you feel any better if production peaks in 10 years instead of 5
in the face of increasing demand?

The amount of oil wasn't the point, the fact that there were 80
barrels of oil in what has been considered non-oil bearing rock
(granite) at a depth where it shouldn't be is a strong support for the
non-biogenic theory. Russia looked at the results of this experiment
and decided to explore the Dneiper river basin, a place where
conventional theory said oil wouldn't be likely. That basin is now
the largest oil producing field in all of Russia. There is a
technical paper written by a couple of Russian petroleum engineers on
this topic that I have read, it is very interesting.

Western oil companies continue to publicly poo-poo the non-biogenic
theory, but the Russians seem to have adopted it.

Coal is clearly biogenic, but there is a lot of coal in the world
which can account for ancient plant and animal life trapped in the
earth. Oil comes from very deep down, and it is harder to believe
that dead plants and animals could be responsible for all that oil at
such great depths. The recent findings that the oil in one of the
Gulf of Mexico fields was being replenished from a deeper source via a
fault line (reported in the Wall Street Journal) also tends to support
this theory.

Thomas Gold was right about the composition of the surface of the
moon, and of the nature of pulsars, and has been right about a lot of
other things that were initially considered far out. Time will tell,
but I think there is a lot of merit in the non-biogenic theory.

While people believe that the supply of oil is very limited, the
prices will remain high. If it is found that the supply is way
underestimated, the value of the oil will drop (standard commodity
rules apply) which is not in the best interest of the oil companies or
OPEC. I expect that we will be told that the oil supply will peak in
5 years for at least the next 100 years. It will just always be 5
years away from whatever day they happen to say it.