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Economic Meltdown (37 posts)

26. JohnA
    Member

    hmmmm....

    did anyone see 60 Minutes this last Sunday?

    Did you see the new facilities they are building in Saudi Arabia - and the statistics associated with output?

    The Shaybah facility is now being expanded to extract a total of 750,000 barrels a day of high-grade, Arab extra-light crude.

    "The truth is here is the kingdom with more than 260 billion barrels. And I firmly believe that the potential to add another 200 billion barrels of oil are there to be found," Al-Naimi said.

    On the other side of the kingdom, there's an even bigger mega project at a field known as Khurais. It is also scheduled to go online next year.

    "This is the biggest oil project in history," project manager Khalid Abdulqader said.

    He told 60 Minutes 1.2 million barrels a day will be tapped from that field, more than the entire daily production of some OPEC countries like Qatar and Indonesia.

    The oil will be stored in massive tanks, some seven stories high. One of those large tanks is 300 feet across and the length of a football field. And like just about everything at Khurais, even the tanks have the latest bells and whistles.

    "This is a floating roof. So, when oil comes in, the whole roof will go up," Abdulqader explained. "And the stair also will rise up with it."

    There's more oil in the Khurais field than in the entire United States. It's the largest oil facility to come online anywhere in the world in nearly three decades with, the Saudis say, 27 billion barrels of oil.

    Abdulqader said it will take more than 50 years to deplete the field.

    And Saudi Arabia is not the only country with oil.

    The good news is that the world is not running out of oil - yet. it just isn't.

    The bad news is that the world is not running out of oil - yet. it just isn't.

    Posted 15 years ago #
27. truthmod
    Administrator

    Well, this sort of belongs in a Peak Oil thread but...

    It really depends what you mean by "running out of"--oil is a finite resource, so technically, we have always been running out of it. On the other hand, if production is increasing (and this is becoming very questionable) then it appears that we are getting more oil not running out (but we still are). These new projects may sound big, but in the scheme of things, they aren't necessarily, in a world where we use about 83 million barrels/day.

    Of course, if demand sags, and we've got this infrastructure ramped up to produce for this peak demand, there will be a glut of oil, cheaper prices, and a longer plateau in sufficient supplies. This seems to be what is happening. But unless there's a societal cataclysm or a revolutionary planned transition, we're still going to come up against a point where demand outstrips supply.

    World oil demand to fall for first time in decades
    http://ca.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE4B84PY2...

    Global oil demand will contract for the first time since the early 1980s as world economic growth slows to a near standstill, the U.S. government said on Tuesday.

    The forecast for 2008 and 2009 is bad news for energy companies and oil producing nations that depend on robust prices, but could benefit cash-strapped consumers by sending gasoline and heating costs lower, according to a U.S. Energy Information Administration report.

    World oil demand is projected to fall by 50,000 barrels per day in 2008 and 450,000 barrels per day next year, the EIA said, led by a 1.2 million bpd contraction in top consumer the United States this year a 200,000 bpd drop in 2009.

    The report marked the first major forecast for shrinking energy demand tied to the current global financial crisis.

    Posted 15 years ago #
28. mark
    Member

    The 60 minutes puff piece also admitted that millions of gallons of sea water would be pumped into the Earth because the new oil field did not have the internal pressure of previous fields.

    Peak Oil doesn't mean the end of oil, it means the end of oil increases (which an economic paradigm based on endless growth cannot handle).

    The oil industry is shifting to more marginal oil fields as the best fields wind down. Some of the new fields (like the one profiled by See BS) are large, but they're smaller than the existing supergiant fields. Many of the new fields are in more remote places, offshore, deep water, lower quality and generally more expensive and difficult to extract (more energy input for energy output).

    This new field seems very large if you don't think about how much oil is used every day -- 1,000 barrels a second, over 30 billion barrels per year.

    You don't need to be a petroleum geologist to understand that if the oil companies are flushing out oil fields with vast amounts of sea water that the days of easy to extract oil are coming to an end. The second half of Hubbert's Peak will be the more difficult oil to extract, and our society, food system, economy, transportation systems, etc. are completely unprepared.

    We're on the Peak Oil plateau. The decline doesn't seem to be here yet, but it's probably not very far away. How will we use the rest of the oil - more overdevelopment, more "growth," more highways, more globalized production? Or will we recognize the limits to endless growth on a round planet, revive the train systems, relocalize food production, and convert the war machine for peaceful purposes?

    ---

    http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary24.html

    James Howard Kunstler

    December 8, 2008 People Get Ready

    The price of oil is suddenly down to an astounding $40-odd per barrel. Those of us studying the Peak Oil story have said that the "bumpy plateau" years of peak production would be expressed in tremendous price volatility, and for exactly the reasons now evident -- that the high-price phase would mangle advanced economies, that they would fall back in paralysis, then respond anew to oil price collapses by straggling up again, only to be crushed again when a resumption in demand for oil drove the price back up.

    Posted 15 years ago #
29. JohnA
    Member

    i would agree that 'easy to extract' oil is becoming harder and harder to come by - but - i'm also not so sure why it matters that the Saudis will be pumping sea water as a way of leveraging extraction. they do indeed seem prepared to do it - have built vast facilities to do it - and the volume of oil available using this method is very significant.

    additionally, there is a report just today that it is now estimated that 25% of the world's total oil reserves lie beneath the arctic. yet again a not 'easy to extract' location - but - again - the technology does exist and the quantity is rather significant - so you better believe it will be tapped.

    i think we would all agree that the bigger problem is the increase in consumption.

    but i'm not completely convinced that the over emphasis on a production plateau - in the here and now - is completely accurate. i don't think that plateau has yet been reached.

    1. EIA’s International Energy Outlook 2000 predicts that the global conventional oil production peak will occur after 2020, since production is still growing in 2020.

    but - essentially - we do agree about the larger problem at hand. consumption and environmental impact. these are the key issues that the world needs to come to grips with. unfortunately, i believe that greed will continue to find way to pump oil out of the ground in a new and innovative - yet effective - ways.

    Posted 15 years ago #
30. mark
    Member

    The reasons the sea water pumping matters:

    • there's less "EROEI" energy return on energy invested. This is crucial, since the more energy required to extract the oil, the less of an "energy source" it will be. An oil field that takes as much energy to extract and process is not an energy source. The number of dollars or euros or any other currency is a tertiary concern at best. This is a hard concept for most people to get, but it is probably the most important Peak Oil paradigm.

    • putting vast amounts of sea water into the crust of the Earth could permanently contaminate aquifers

    • when oil fields get too full of water it can become impossible to extract the remaining oil. The fact they're admitting they are going to do this at the beginning of extraction of this new field is sobering.

    Estimating oil reserves in places that have not been drilled is notoriously inaccurate.

    There was thought to be 250 billion barrels in the northern Caspian Sea area in the late 1990s, but it turned out to be less than a fifth of this figure when test wells were drilled. This is of considerable relevance to the reality based part of the 9/11 truth movement - see Crossing the Rubicon, p. 573

    As for the EIA, their most recent report estimated that there could be a nine percent annual decline in existing fields, but of course new fields will make up for some of this depletion. Conventional oil has almost certainly peaked already, even the pollyannas in the oil world have scaled back slightly their previous estimates. Tar sands and other "unconventional" sources take almost as much energy to extract as they contain, they are barely a "source" but their output gets included in most lists of how much flow is going on.

    Given the financial crash and the oscillating oil prices, it is unlikely that there could possibly be another, higher peak. An undulating plateau seems more likely.

    Colin Campbell, founder of ASPO, quipped that in reports of oil reserves the only accurate figures are the page numbers.

    Posted 15 years ago #
31. chrisc
    Member

    Jim Rogers, one of the world's most prominent international investors, on Thursday called most of the largest U.S. banks "totally bankrupt" and said government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded.

    ... "Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt," said Rogers, who is now a private investor.

    http://uk.reuters.com/article/fundsNews/idUKLNE4BB...

    I'm sure this is also the case in the UK and probably in lots of other places...

    This guy appears to be Peak Oil aware:

    "We're going to see $200 oil at some point, it may be by 2013. It's a sad fact but the world is running out of known oil," he said.

    http://www.reuters.com/article/InvestmentOutlook09...

    Posted 15 years ago #
32. truthmod
    Administrator

    Things are happening pretty quickly, although people barely seem to care here in whatever-land.

    Fed Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion in Lending

    http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109...

    The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

    Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

    The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.

    Jim Rogers calls most big U.S. banks "bankrupt"
    http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4BA5...

    Jim Rogers, one of the world's most prominent international investors, on Thursday called most of the largest U.S. banks "totally bankrupt," and said government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded.

    Speaking by teleconference at the Reuters Investment Outlook 2009 Summit, the co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, said the government's $700 billion rescue package for the sector doesn't address how banks manage their balance sheets, and instead rewards weaker lenders with new capital.

    Dozens of banks have won infusions from the Troubled Asset Relief Program created in early October, just after the Sept 15 bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LEHMQ.PK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). Some of the funds are being used for acquisitions.

    "Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt," said Rogers, who is now a private investor.

    "What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming and who kept their powder dry go and take over the assets from the incompetent," he said. "What's happening this time is that the government is taking the assets from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying, now you can compete with the competent people. It is horrible economics."

    Posted 15 years ago #
33. truthmover
    Administrator

    Meanwhile ...

    The National Association of Broadcasters, which estimated that $1 billion in ads and other marketing efforts have addressed the [digital TV transition], has volunteered to create a phone bank to handle an estimated one million calls from confused consumers on Feb. 18, and another million in the following days.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/technology/22dig...

    Posted 15 years ago #
34. truthmod
    Administrator

    http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087...

    SALES AT U.S. RETAILERS FELL MORE THAN TWICE AS MUCH AS FORECAST IN DECEMBER

    Sales at U.S. retailers fell more than twice as much as forecast in December as job losses and the lack of credit led Americans to cut back on everything from car purchases to eating out.

    The 2.7 percent slump marked the sixth straight month of declines, the longest string since comparable records began in 1992, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Labor Department data showed the global collapse in commodities caused prices of goods imported by the U.S. to fall for a fifth month.

    Today’s sales figures indicate the hit to spending in the recession is even deeper than estimated, and spurred a sell-off in stocks. The loss of 2.6 million jobs and declining home and stock values are squeezing households, hurting retailers from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to Tiffany & Co., which today said its holiday sales fell 21 percent and cut its earnings forecast

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/4229198/Shippin...

    Shipping rates hit zero as trade sinks

    Freight rates for containers shipped from Asia to Europe have fallen to zero for the first time since records began, underscoring the dramatic collapse in trade since the world economy buckled in October.

    “They have already hit zero,” said Charles de Trenck, a broker at Transport Trackers in Hong Kong. “We have seen trade activity fall off a cliff. Asia-Europe is an unmit­igated disaster.”

    Shipping journal Lloyd’s List said brokers in Singapore are now waiving fees for containers travelling from South China, charging only for the minimal “bunker” costs. Container fees from North Asia have dropped $200, taking them below operating cost.

    Industry sources said they have never seen rates fall so low. “This is a whole new ball game,” said one trader.

    Posted 15 years ago #
35. truthmod
    Administrator

    http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-day-o...

    Jan 9, 2009 – It's not possible yet for any world leader to tell people that the collapse of industrialized civilization is coming but it appears as though the Obama administration is preparing to say it… at least from what we can see. (It's going to become obvious soon enough.) What is not known are what secret plans are being made and what contingencies are being prepared for. There are some clues.

    ---

    I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a couple of days with 700+ point losses in the Dow over the next ten days to two weeks. The data is just horrendous and it is also becoming torrential around the globe as the Gaza crisis diverts attention.

    So we're still waiting to see how the Obama Administration is going to conduct itself. I can pretty much bet that as many as 50-75 new Executive Orders will be announced within 72 hours of the inauguration. That's going to require some heavy reading on my part. The actions of the administration will tell us much more than the public statements and appointments which have given me grounds for optimism.

    the meantime WHILE EVERYONE WAS WATCHNG GAZA the stories of a global implosion are mounting. -- Europe's economy is contracting at a faster rate than in the 30s. In the meantime the Russian shut-off of European gas supplies is wreaking havoc, especially in the Balkans, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, causing factories to be shut because there isn't enough energy to run them and keep people from freezing. Corporate pension funds in the U.S. are facing serious shortfalls. Unemployment Claims have crashed three state web sites. Every major industrialized nation (including the U.S.) is preparing for civil unrest. And we haven't seen Q4 earnings reports yet.

    ---

    Manufacturing has hit a 28-year low and today's jobs report is the worst since 1945 with the biggest job losses yet to come. Officially, unemployment now exceeds 7%. Fourth-quarter earnings reports are due soon and that will be one of the biggest buckets of cold water in the face we've seen in a couple of months.

    As I correspond with a number of key friends and researchers around the world we have all concluded that it may be just a matter of weeks before we start seeing major disruptions in everyday life. It's hard to keep up with the torrent of ominous news.

    Posted 15 years ago #
36. truthmod
    Administrator

    Bye bye Circuit City

    Circuit City to liquidate, adding to U.S. job losses

    http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/16/news/companies/cir...

    After failing to secure financing from creditors and lenders, bankrupt electronics vendor Circuit City Stores Inc. said Friday that it will liquidate, joining the list of retailers like Linens 'n Things that are closing up shop due to the economic downturn.

    The liquidation will affect more than 30,000 employees, adding to the rising number of U.S. job losses, which last year hit their highest level since World War II. As of Dec. 31, Circuit City had 567 stores in the United States and about 765 stores and dealer outlets in Canada.

    US foreclosure filings up 81 percent in 2008

    http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5...

    More than 2.3 million American homeowners faced foreclosure proceedings last year, an 81 percent increase from 2007, with the worst yet to come as consumers grapple with layoffs, shrinking investment portfolios and falling home prices.

    Nationwide, more than 860,000 properties were actually repossessed by lenders, more than double the 2007 level, according to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing firm based in Irvine, Calif., which compiled the figures.

    Moody's Economy.com, a research firm, predicts the number of homes lost to foreclosure is likely to rise by another 18 percent this year before tapering off slightly through 2011.

    Still, foreclosures — which keep breaking records going back 30 years, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association — are likely to remain well above normal levels for years to come, and that will continue to keep home prices from rebounding.

    Posted 15 years ago #
37. Anonymous
    

    Delete

    Posted 15 years ago #

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