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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >Look at the abundance of methane hydrates on the continental
> >shelves around the world; it's practically an untapped resource for
> >natural gas.

Someone (Bev?) brought up oil sands and oil shale.  They don't contain oil 
per se, they contain kerogen, a sort of proto-oil.  To get anything that you 
can 
put in your tank, the kerogen has to be 'cracked' into lighter hydrocarbons.  
That is done presently with natrual gas.  Peak NG is almost as heavily upon 
us as peak oil.

By present methods it takes nearly as much energy to extract gasoline from 
oil shale and oil sand as you get in the final product.  You are only burning 
up 
vast amounts of energy to change forms of energy.

I've read all the "evidence" pro and con for the concept of peak oil.  Fact 
is, unless it goes up in the near future, world oil production HAS peaked.  
Every giant (called King) oil field in the world is in decline with smaller 
wells 
taking up the slack for now.

As to new discoveries, you probably heard of the Jack 2 tauted recently in 
the Gulf.  Large oil wells are called Kings, smaller ones are Queens, and 
still 
smaller ones are Jacks.  Jack 1 was almost dry.  Jack two might,  (that's 
MIGHT) yield as much as 15 billion barrels of oil ( or as little as 300 
million).  
How much oil is that?  The world uses 82 million barrels of oil a day ... 
even IF that well could be successfully pumped, and IF it yielded the very 
maximum estimate, and IF you could get it from the deep well site to on shore 
pipelines ... all those if's  ..... that well couldn't supply the world oil 
but for 
six months.