[ExI] Whatever happened to peak oil by 2020?

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
.
> 
>>... Would you happen to have a convenient source for said costs and time?

> A quick search didn't find any, but I may have used the wrong terms.

It can be tricky to find. Here's an article with a few numbers:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/business/energy-environment/sasol-betting-
big-on-gas-to-liquid-plant-in-us.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Eugen

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Thanks Eugen, that is a good article.  Quote:

>...For decades, South Africa defended its system of apartheid from
international oil embargoes by producing synthetic oil from its rich coal
resources. Nazi Germany did the same to fuel its military machine in World
War II...

Imagine that things play out the way I vaguely envision it: industrialists
everywhere recognize that in the long run, the Red Queen model is
compelling, and that the person situated to make the biggest buttloads of
money will be the one who can use wind, nuclear and GB solar power to
convert coal, natural gas and biomass to liquid fuels as Arab oil wells are
drying up ever more quickly.  

The big winner is the one who foresaw this in time and invested her money
accordingly in viable alternatives.  Then we could have a period of
expensive but attainable energy, humanity's attention and intellectual
energy would be focused away from football and on energy production, then we
make out OK after a hungry but survivable decade or two.  Then the history
books would trace this slender thread of survival all the way back to 1920s
Germany.  The technology that averted planet-wide catastrophe will have been
developed by Nazis with dreams of brutally controlling the planet and South
Africans hoping to maintain their apartheid form of government.  

The future history books will need to explain that the bad guys are still
bad, but they accidentally saved our collective asses.

spike