Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 9:06 am Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
JustinFrankl wrote:
ClubOfRomeII wrote:
In the end, its all about dollars, not crude which just spills out of a well under pressure. If the price someone pays you for your product is $70, as long as you can find it, exploit it, and move it to the sales point for less than $70, there is money to be made. Be it tar sands, oil shales, oil in Greenland or gold in the ocean.
No, in the end it's all about energy, and money is only a proxy for energy.
Yes, there is money to be made for the sole reason of being able to exploit peoples' ignorance of the situation. No, it will not help in the long run.
Well, then all is well and good, because the Canadian tar sands can be turned into crude using less energy than is available in the final product, drilling in Greenland isn't any different, and Shells in-sitsu refining process is energy positive as well.
And anyone who thinks Venezuela heavy oil is any WORSE than what the Albertans are doing isn't paying attention.
Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 9:32 am Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
Quote:
In the end, its all about dollars, not crude which just spills out of a well under pressure. If the price someone pays you for your product is $70, as long as you can find it, exploit it, and move it to the sales point for less than $70, there is money to be made. Be it tar sands, oil shales, oil in Greenland or gold in the ocean.
I kind of see your point, in that the producer will have to purchase the energy needed to get the energy, but I do believe that at some point, if it requires more than a barrel's of oil worth of energy to get a barrel, the game is lost. No matter whether the price is $5 or $500 a barrel.
Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 9:56 am Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
zberry wrote:
I kind of see your point, in that the producer will have to purchase the energy needed to get the energy, but I do believe that at some point, if it requires more than a barrel's of oil worth of energy to get a barrel, the game is lost. No matter whether the price is $5 or $500 a barrel.
Energy mix matters. If you can use a cheap form of energy to create/develope an expensive form of energy which is critical, and can make a buck doing it, EROEI doesn't matter much either. Its incredibly wasteful in terms of efficiency of course, but if you have to, you have to. "Have to" being defined as "someone will pay you enough for it".
An example being, if you have to have hydrogen, just MUST have it, and someone is paying you TONS of money to get it, you drop a nuke fired power plant near an ocean and dedicate it to spending its life creating hydrogen from water. Incredibly inefficient but it sure would do the job, if you didn't have any cheaper way to do it.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 6:24 am Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
ClubOfRomeII wrote:
zberry wrote:
I kind of see your point, in that the producer will have to purchase the energy needed to get the energy, but I do believe that at some point, if it requires more than a barrel's of oil worth of energy to get a barrel, the game is lost. No matter whether the price is $5 or $500 a barrel.
Energy mix matters. If you can use a cheap form of energy to create/develope an expensive form of energy which is critical, and can make a buck doing it, EROEI doesn't matter much either. Its incredibly wasteful in terms of efficiency of course, but if you have to, you have to. "Have to" being defined as "someone will pay you enough for it".
An example being, if you have to have hydrogen, just MUST have it, and someone is paying you TONS of money to get it, you drop a nuke fired power plant near an ocean and dedicate it to spending its life creating hydrogen from water. Incredibly inefficient but it sure would do the job, if you didn't have any cheaper way to do it.
Theoretically yes, but the economic system has been subjected to so many confidence tricks through time that the economic picture is a scary one, hanging onto the edge of a precipice. So long before we even get to an energy sink situtation.... a directly proportional increase in energy production overheads and drop to fractional profit returns in any part of the market would signal the permanent end to growth In short, oil versus other energies- the gulf between energy yield and extraction/profit return is so wide that our fate is already sealed
We mismanaged a potent energy source and all we have to show is a
perilously unstable economic system with too many leeching off the system and scientific stagnation, disproportionate wealth and population distributions, etc etc.
I think this is the beauty that most people miss in the Olduvai theory... the die off is more a result of the complexity and fragility of our economic/social situation rather than a question of resource recovery and our technical
know how. Peak oil phenomena just facilitates our demise in the panic it will cause when people realize the gravy train WILL at some point hit the buffers, not WHEN it hits the first +standard deviation point in the P.O graph
never mind the end game.
ANd this what dismays me when reading some of the posts on this web site that intelligent people can fall back to the quantitative analysis and ignore
the stark realities that our economic system is based on little more than chicken bones and black magic.
In the end there will be plenty of oil in the ground but the industrial civilization above it will lie in tatters unable to extract it purely because
of economics, not peak oil in itself but the statitistics of peak oil.... ever noticed how markets will react more fervently to little bad news than a wad of good... when it becomes apparrentt that there's no easy out or sleight of hand to play, the first world collaspes.
The ironic part of this all is that the two things that will combine to send man
back into the stone age are our two most complex creations, power distribution grids and economic systems.... they've become too complex and
cumbersome to manage without oil, which has been a crutch for economic systems all along.
Will this find in Venezuala make a difference, probably not as we shift to tar shales we'll have to ditch the fat we've gained in dining on cheap Arab oil
and crash dieting can be fatal. Economic collapse will ensue long before the energy sink point.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 9:30 am Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
perpetrator_unknown wrote:
We mismanaged a potent energy source and all we have to show is a
perilously unstable economic system with too many leeching off the system and scientific stagnation, disproportionate wealth and population distributions, etc etc.
You have a big assumption in here, and that is things would be better WITHOUT the world having developed a potent energy source. Do you have any evidence that the feudal system of England, say, was better for the serfs prior to the use of fossil fuels? That the economic system allowed them a proportionate measure of the wealth? That scientific research was just ripping along back in the "good ol' days"?
Seems all well and good to be happy with the worlds state of affairs in any particular area, but its tough to argue everything would be honkey dorry without the human species having trod the fossil fuel path.
perpetrator_unknown wrote:
I think this is the beauty that most people miss in the Olduvai theory... the die off is more a result of the complexity and fragility of our economic/social situation rather than a question of resource recovery and our technical
know how.
If you are referring to Duncans work, please, lets stick with reasonable science here and not things people just make up. Go look at the Duncans graph where he defines the beginning of the "slope". The poor guy can't even draw a staight line without slanting the information, he starts at a 1980 peak and draws his line to a 1990 trough and then proclaims it a declining slope. Sure...because he DREW it that way. Do a least squares fit on the same data, wanna bet the slope is either 0 or +? So please, lets at least use examples from people who aren't so intellectually dishonest in such an obvious fashion, particularly when what he tries so hard to show on that graph is mostly efficiency and little else except wild conjecture.
perpetrator_unknown wrote:
Will this find in Venezuala make a difference, probably not as we shift to tar shales we'll have to ditch the fat we've gained in dining on cheap Arab oil
and crash dieting can be fatal. Economic collapse will ensue long before the energy sink point.
It isn't a new "find" in Venezuela, its just a category change from "gee what do we do with it" to "gee Chavez says he wants to claim more reserves than Saudi Arabia even if he doesn't have any money to develop the resource so we better do what he says", nothing more. Economic collapse, while interesting, is hardly a natural consequence of Chavez playing around with his reserve numbers.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 10:14 am Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
ClubOfRome you have it completely wrong. It is about energy return , specifically Net energy. This is what Deffeyes has to say about poor quality energy:
Quote:
When oil was $3 per barrel, many people said that if oil ever reached $8 per barrel, Green River oil shale would have its revenge on Spindletop and shut down the oil industry.
Granted he is talking about Shale, but the same applies to any unconventional source. The price to extract the unconventional is indexed to cost of entire petroleum infrastructure because the mining equipment is built with cheap petroleum.
Right now there is a huge subsidy supporting tar sands, biofuels, ultra-deep exploration, etc.: devices and labor all built in the days of cheap petroleum. However, the new costs are working their way through the system. See drilling equipment.
Net Energy is everything. As unconventional EROEI declines, conventional petroleum reserves are drained out of the 'consumer,' 'productive' sectors society to manage energy production. There is less to get mom and the kids to the soccer game. Less 'work' is done. The economy shrinks. _________________ ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 6:39 pm Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
pstarr wrote:
ClubOfRome you have it completely wrong. It is about energy return , specifically Net energy. This is what Deffeyes has to say about poor quality energy:
Quote:
When oil was $3 per barrel, many people said that if oil ever reached $8 per barrel, Green River oil shale would have its revenge on Spindletop and shut down the oil industry.
Granted he is talking about Shale, but the same applies to any unconventional source. The price to extract the unconventional is indexed to cost of entire petroleum infrastructure because the mining equipment is built with cheap petroleum.
"Poor quality energy" strikes me as sloppy wording, since energy is basically energy and can be measured and quantified and used and one calorie of heat energy has been defined as one calorie of heat energy, there is no difference between a "good" heat calorie and a "bad" heat calorie.
So whatever Deffeyes was thinking, and I can't tell exactly from your example what that was, I seriously doubt he was actually talking about "poor" calories versus "good" calories.
So now lets talk about your example, but it isn't entirely clear what I was wrong about which requires this example to learn me. I think I understand the $3 and $8 example, but here is the part I don't get...
"The price to extract the unconventional is indexed to cost of entire petroleum infrastructure because the mining equipment is built with cheap petroleum."
Whats this mean? Mining equipment is built with cheap petroleum? Not if it has been built in the last year it hasn't. In the greater scheme of things, is it reasonable to say that the heaters and production wells for, say, the Shell technique can't be used because...they are built with cheap petroleum? I just don't get that. And if they were built recently with expensive petroleum, this makes their efficiency different...how? It costs more to make the equipment. Great. So payout for the project is longer. But you still get the shale turned into crude in the same volume.
Joined: Sep 11, 2007 Posts: 340 Location: In freefall speed right down to the claws of the devil
Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 6:52 pm Post subject: Re: GregPalast Venezuala Oil 5 Times Larger Than Sadi Arabia
Quote:
AMY GOODMAN: There certainly is. And right now, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, who you recently met with and interviewed and we broadcast on Democracy Now!, was in Vienna, offering to the poor of Europe cheap oil. Of course, the deaths continue in Iraq, both U.S. soldiers and Iraqis. We have the spy scandal that is unfolding here in the United States. Link them.
GREG PALAST: Yeah, that’s why I wrote a book, because it does link the whole thing together. I mean, I just got back from meeting with Chavez, as you know, and you showed our interview a few weeks ago. He’s offered the U.S. $50-a-barrel oil. That’s a third off of what we’re paying right now. Now, you would think our president would be down in Caracas kissing Hugo Chavez’s behind and saying, “Thank you, thank you for dropping the price of oil by a third, and let’s make a deal,” because Chavez wants a deal.
But he’s not doing that, our president, even though the high prices are costing about a million jobs right now. And the reason he’s not is that what Chavez will not do is that Chavez will not return the money. It’s not about petroleum, it’s about petrodollars, as I explain in the book. In other words, when George Bush rides around King Abdullah in his little golf cart on the Crawford ranch, he’s not trying to get Abdullah’s oil. Abdullah can’t drink the stuff. He’s got to sell it to us and Japan. But Abdullah takes the money back from the—when you fill up your SUV, you give your money to Saudi Arabia, the big oil companies, Saudi Arabia. But then he returns it the form of petrodollars, and that is what is funding George Bush’s mad spending spree.
We have a president who has racked up $2 trillion in extra debt, you know, stone sober, apparently. And someone’s got to pay for that. And basically we’re paying for it by effectively an oil tax, which is returned to us, because the Gulf states and our other trading partners are now buying up $2 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds and debt. So, in other words, they’re recycling the money back and paying for George Bush’s spending spree on ending inheritance taxes, you know, several wars, etc.
Now, Hugo Chavez says, “I’ll give you cheap oil, not only to the poor, but to everyone. But I’m not giving you back the money. That money is going to stay in Latin America to build our nations.” And he just withdrew $20 billion out of the U.S. Federal Reserve. You have to understand, this is a punch in the face of the U.S. administration, far more than withholding oil, withholding and withdrawing petrodollars, as I explain in the book, and that’s why you have that little nice floater from—balloon thrown out by Reverend Robertson, Pat Robertson, saying “Hugo Chavez thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, and I think we ought to just go and do it,” because they have got to get that—it’s not that they need that oil, they need that oil money. And if they can’t get it, they have to eliminate Hugo Chavez.
AMY GOODMAN: Is the war in Iraq a war for oil?
GREG PALAST: Is the war in Iraq for oil? Yes, it’s about the oil, but not for the oil. In my investigations for Armed Madhouse, I ended up with a story far more fascinating and difficult than I imagined. We didn’t go in to grab the oil. Just the opposite. We went in to control the oil and make sure we didn’t get it. It goes back to 1920, when the oil companies sat in a room in Brussels in a hotel room, drew a red line around Iraq and said, “There’ll be no oil coming out of that nation.” They have to suppress oil coming out of Iraq. Otherwise, the price of oil will collapse, and OPEC and Saudi Arabia will collapse.
And so, what I found, what I discovered that they’re very unhappy about is a 323-page plan, which was written by big oil, which is the secret but official plan of the United States for Iraq’s oil, written by the big oil companies out of the James Baker Institute in coordination with a secret committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. I know it sounds very conspiratorial, but this is exactly how they do it. It’s quite wild. And it’s all about a plan to control Iraq’s oil and make sure that Iraq has a system, which, quote, “enhances its relationship with OPEC.” In other words, the whole idea is to maintain the power of OPEC, which means maintain the power of Saudi Arabia.
And this is one of the reasons they absolutely hate Hugo Chavez. As you’ll see in next week’s Harper’s coming out, which is basically an excerpt from the book, Hugo Chavez on June 1st is going to ask OPEC to officially recognize that he has more oil than Saudi Arabia. This is a geopolitical earthquake. And the inside documents from the U.S. Department of Energy, which we have in the book and in Harper’s, say, yeah, he’s got more oil than Saudi Arabia.
AMY GOODMAN: And is it accessible?
GREG PALAST: That’s the trick. It’s accessible, but the price of oil—it’s heavy oil, which means it costs about—you need oil to be about $30 a barrel, less than half of what it is now. Chavez says, “Cut a deal with me. Oil will never drop below a minimum price, but we’ll get off this insane world-destroying $75 a barrel. I’ll give you cheap oil, but you just put a floor under it.” He shook hands with Bill Clinton on the deal. And Bush came in and spit on his hand, to say the least. He had the guy kidnapped back in 2002. Bush does not—you have to remember, he doesn’t like cheap oil. When we talk about paying $3-a-gallon gasoline, Bush’s benefactors, donors and his own family collects the $3 a gallon.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
GREG PALAST: Well, we’re paying three bucks a gallon. ExxonMobil is collecting $3 a gallon. There’s a chapter called “Trillion-Dollar Babies.” When Bush came in, we had oil as low as $18 a barrel. It was like water. Bush has successfully built up the price of oil from 18 bucks a barrel to over $70 a barrel. That’s the “mission accomplished.” He didn’t make a mistake here. That’s the “mission accomplished.”
ExxonMobil, which after Enron is the biggest lifetime donor to the Bush campaigns, its value of its reserves, of its oil reserves, because of the Bush wars and Bush actions, has gone up by almost exactly $1 trillion in value. Just one company. A trillion-dollar windfall to a single company. That’s the Bush benefactors. And you have to look at where’s Bush make his money.
So, the problem that they have now is that Chavez is trying to supplant the Saudis running OPEC, and we’ve got a president who basically is caught up in, you know, these guys in bathrobes and crowns, these dictators of Saudi Arabia in the Gulf. And that’s what the Bush family is linked up to, and they are not going to let them be supplanted by Chavez.
AMY GOODMAN: Greg Palast, when you open your book, Armed Madhouse—most people have a white space there, but you use every inch, and you have a secret history of the war over oil in Iraq.
GREG PALAST: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a chronology.
GREG PALAST: Yes. I had a big fight with my capitalist pig publisher to put in this very fancy colorful front page to give you a chronology, the complexity of these secret deals between the administration and big oil. We actually got our hands on two different plans for Iraq’s oil, a 101-page plan and a 323-page plan, which is all about, in great detail, what we are going do with Iraq’s oil, and the number of Iraqis involved in writing this thing is exactly zero. You know, and of course, the number of Americans who know that that’s why we’re in Iraq, and we even know from—in my research for Armed Madhouse, going through this and getting this document, I now know what was in the discussions between the oil companies, Ken Lay and Dick Cheney, in his bunker.
Well, I guess that takes care of this " Kapitalist pig " writer/filmmaker. Perhaps the competence with another such lobbyst, like John Pilger, to gain the graces of this folkloric "hero", just exhausted whatever he used to look like, and to behave like, a normal person.
At the lights of the current events and with oil in this supersonic race to the $200/barrel mark by the end of the year, and Venezuela STILL barely producing 2 Million barrels/day, it is obvious the kind of brownish matter the guy has underneath that filthy hat and that of the greenish small papers hugo, so generously, as usual, ought´d handed him out for his "literary services".
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ree rah rip ram. sunofabitch godamn. hidey didey christ almighty. rah rah crap 
