What a bunch of nongs.

I bet the average Aussie believes when things get tough they can lift up on their bootstraps till they reach the moon where they can eat green cheeze and get laid by moon maids.

If you don't believe the Second law of thermodynamics is true then all that is possible i guess, just like NET ENERGY from nuclear and algae. Both of which require more energy inputs(from oil mostly) than the energy you can extract over the life cycle of the installation.

Clever country?

F in Hopeless!

If peak oil and the 2nd law are correct how to explain Titan:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/02/14/2162556.htm

Taswegian/KAEP/Geoff of Perth

look fellas, peak oil was declared dead a few weeks back, and not before time. Analysts had mostly stopped considering the concept long before the declaration. Now if you have problems with the work of the Citibank analysts who made the declaration, orm object to analysts abandoning the concept, then what are those objections?

In any case peak oil was never intended to refer to the total supply of oil. It was meant to refer to the easy-lift oil (the sutff in the onshore reservoirs). There's still plenty of unconventional/deep sea stuff. So sorry you'll have to drop that particular scare story. There has been a production plataeu of late, attributed to OPEC's failure to invest in production facilities for internal reasons.

As for a peak coal, its an absurd notion. coal reserves have always varied according to coal prices, not production.. this has been recognised for decades now, so for heaven sake Geoff of Perth start reading about the industry..

Cohenite,

Titan is irrelevant . There is no oxygen so there is no NET ENERGY gradient from the Hydrocarbons. They are just gases vaporised off a GAS Giant planet. The only net energy on Titan comes from tidal heating caused by Saturn's spinning gravity field.

If you take oxygen to Saturn it will cost you more to get it there than the energy you get from any combustion at Titan.

In fact it is true that the only worthwhile NET ENERGY source in this solar system, apart from Earth and Venus Geothermal, is at or about Mercury orbit where 11 times the radiance at earth could support human biology in a very comfy and sustainable fashion. Heat shields and magnetic shields are easily made with materials and energy at Mercury.

NASA's Mars visions are yet to bite them on the butt. They too have a fondness for not fully respecting the 2LT. And they will PAY for that.

The 2LT is a LAW that can be you best chance or your worst nightmare.
IT JUST REQUIRES MORE THOUGHT. Unfortunately Australian politicians and CSIRO scientists don't like to think too much. It interferes with their photo ops & drinking time.

Curmudgeon, Saudi Arabia does not possess the 2-3mbd of spare capacity which most have assumed, they ceded the position of top oil producer to Russia in 2006. They made no production response to the loss of Libyan oil in 2011.

Nearly 60% of global oil supply comes from outside of OPEC from the US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, China, and Russia.

There is no spare capacity in this non-OPEC grouping, and there hasn’t been for years.

There is oil to be developed in non-OPEC countries; but that is not production capacity. Russia massively increased its contribution to world supply in 2002. In the past two years, its production growth tapered off and flattened, to just shy of 10mbd.

The problem now is that the oil market has been re-educated. Faith in the non-OPEC countries' ability to increase supply is no more.

The recent great deceleration in Russian oil supply growth has spooked the market. A market with 74mbd of production and a ? spare capacity of 3mbd creates too much uncertainty.

The recognition of supply are now dominant factors in the oil price a point so obvious. The developed world is still largely operating on the classical economic view that higher prices will make new oil resources available.

That is true, it’s just not true in the way most anticipate.

While higher prices have brought on new supply, these have been slow to develop, more difficult to extract, flow at lower rates. As the older fields decline, the price of oil must reflect the economics of this new tranche of oil resources.

There are no vast new supplies of oil that will come online in 2013-15 at the scale to negate existing global declines.

During the entire time that global oil supply has been held at a ceiling of 74mbd, since 2005, a lot of new production in the Americas and Africa has come online, but it has not been enough to increase total world supply. The price of oil has finally started to price in that new reality.
Ditto Coal

NASA Study Illustrates How Global Peak Oil Could Impact Climate09.10.08

Satellites show sources and sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide across Earth, measured here in 2003. High concentrations are shown in red and lower concentrations are shown in blue. Credit: NASA
> Larger image The burning of fossil fuels -- notably coal, oil and gas -- has accounted for about 80 percent of the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial era. Now, NASA researchers have identified feasible emission scenarios that could keep carbon dioxide below levels that some scientists have called dangerous for climate.

When and how global oil production will peak has been debated, making it difficult to anticipate emissions from the burning of fuel and to precisely estimate its impact on climate. To better understand how emissions might change in the future, Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York considered a wide range of fossil fuel consumption scenarios. The research, published Aug. 5 in the American Geophysical Union's Global Biogeochemical Cycles, shows that the rise in carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels can be kept below harmful levels as long as emissions from coal are phased out globally within the next few decades.

"This is the first paper in the scientific literature that explicitly melds the two vital issues of global peak oil production and human-induced climate change," Kharecha said. "We're illustrating the types of action needed to get to target carbon dioxide levels."

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that concerns climate scientists because it can remain in the atmosphere for many centuries and studies have indicated that humans have already caused those levels to rise for decades by burning fossils fuels. Also, carbon dioxide accounts for more than half of all human-caused greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.