"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
...
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember "nightjar" nightjar@insert my
surname here.uk.com saying something like:

How long is a piece of string? Currently the oil companies are discovering
new reserves of fossil fuels at a much faster rate than the rate at which
their use increases

Peak Oil is on us already, according to some very knowledgeable folk in
the oil industry.

As it has been at regular intervals for the past 30 years, according to the
same experts. However, they rely on Hubbert being right in assuming that the
level of recoverable reserves are fixed, but that has proved to be wrong at
regular intervals over the past 30 years. It will not be true until we reach
the point where recovery technology cannot be improved and we are a long way
from that.

(except for 2005, which had an unusually rapid, but
short lived, increase in the rate of use, so that it just about matched
new
finds). In any case, for the foreseeable future, the limitation on how
much
fossil fuel is available is not what actual reserves there are in the
Earth,

No reserve is 100% obtainable.

We could, however, do a lot better than we do now, if anybody wanted to
spend the mony on it, which they may well do in the future.

Aye, and then there's the Falklands oil. That was reckoned to be
economically retrievable when oil prices reach 80usd /barrel. Mind you,
that was back in the 80s, and I don't think deepwater drilling has
improved that enough in the past 20 years to make it realistic.

The area is still disputed, so the oil companies will try to avoid it as
long as possible, in case the Argentineans try another takeover and they
lose all their investment. Similarly, the seabed around Greece and Turkey is
geologically similar to the North Sea, but nobody wants to explore that area
because of the long term political tension between the two countries.
Politics is often as important in deciding where drilling takes place as the
feasibility of extraction.

Colin Bignell