[ExI] Doomsday Oil Price: (was RIP: Peak Oil)

[Samantha Atkins]

Oil is not going to 1000x current value anytime soon.  It is likely to go past $200/bbl if Iran is attacked though.  Note that the US produces about half of all the oil it uses.     But no, we can't bring alternatives online that quickly.  It takes years, about 10, just to bring a new refinery online.  How long you think it would take to bring enough plants online to provide alternate IC fuels including the retooling of pipelines, tanker trucks, and delivery systems that might be needed for some of those fuels?   It would take even longer to phase out IC engines complete in favor of electrics, if we find the energy and get the grid in shape to supply the load and handle all those hopefully fast charging units.  

- samantha

On Feb 24, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 2:30 PM, The Avantguardian
> <avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I just had a sobering thought while in the shower. Since most costs of doing business or even basic survival are tied to oil prices, then the cost of researching and developing alternative energies is also proportional to the price of oil.
> 
> Only to a point.  If the price of crude oil were to skyrocket to 1000
> times its present level, there are already solutions that could and
> would be brought online quickly, capping the price of "oil" as you're
> using it here.  Yes, there would be a crunch during the transition,
> but crude oil is not so completely irreplaceable that the lack of it
> would be a holocaust.
> 
> More importantly, the oil companies themselves would be the
> most hurt by this crunch.  That's why they're hedging their bets
> with alternative fuels, in so far as this crunch seems likely.
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