online.wsj.com/article/SB125189057895179241.html
“BP PLC announced a major new oil find in the Gulf of Mexico,
the latest in a string of discoveries there that cements the offshore waters of the southern U.S. as one of the oil world’s most promising exploration regions.”
"As new technologies have enabled exploration in the deepest recesses of the Gulf, nearly a dozen discoveries, including BP’s Tiber, have been made beneath nearly two miles of water.’
““If you are looking for another opportunity of that scale that is oil and that is open to [Western oil companies], the
Santos Basin of Brazil is the only other one in the world,” said Andrew Latham, a vice president of global exploration services for consultant Wood Mackenzie.”
“**Other recent finds **in Uganda, Kurdistan and off the coast of Ghana are estimated to be several billion barrels of oil, while the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil contain “tens of billions of barrels,” he said.”
Seriously, do a little research. That was low-hanging fruit from a quick “new oil discoveries” search query in Google. Look deeper and I’m sure you’ll find more.
Yes, it’s expensive to extract, and yes, current technologies can only extract so much, but prices still make it quite economically feasible and rewarding, and technology has consistently progressed to allow greater degrees of oil recovery.
Oh, and then there’s this possibility:
wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59991
“Discovery backs theory oil not ‘fossil fuel’
New evidence supports premise that Earth produces endless supply”
The point is that oil keeps being discovered, on land and at sea. As a percentage of surface area, we’ve hardly even begun to look for oil. Of course, we’d have looked for and tapped much more in the U.S. if it weren’t for government regulations–and that’s where you get a major complicating factor in the whole idea of “Peak Oil.” Peak Oil is an attempt to extrapolate a known phenomenon within a single oil reserve that extraction efficiency declines after a certain point. The problem is that that concept can’t just be extracted to a world oil supply, because it cannot factor in the addition of new production facilities or the myriad pressures of supply and demand, a huge part of which is dictated by politics–stability/war, treaties, taxes, regulations, and bans.
And yes, as you pointed out earlier, StA, fertilizers and fuels can be synthesized with other sources of energy, not requiring petroleum or natural gas. The cheapest other sources is coal (even clean coal), of which I hope you agree that we easily have many centuries’ supply. But we’ll have transitioned away from that long before existing capital investments in natural gas and oil extraction fail to produce. Instead, we’ll have renewables such as wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal, which last is my personal favorite:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy
I’d call that pretty abundant, easily abundant enough to synthesize some fuel and fertilizer.
I will agree that there will be supply fluctuations over the next century, as there are in all transitions of infrastructure and technology, with price of energy potentially rising to a higher proportion of expenses, but so what? Such fluctuations happen all the time; change is a part of nature, human and otherwise.
Spending millions of dollars on cow farts is pure craziness.
