patrick.net

About 2% of oil reserves are consumed each year, but about 0.75% in new reserves keeps being found each year.

I well remember that halcyon period in my childhood when government experts delivered the awful news that we were running out of oil. They said we might have a handful of remaining good years, and so the nation was forced by President Jimmy “the Nut” Carter to go onto gas rationing. This resulted in massive gas lines for consumers, and President Carter soon entering a new line of work. Yesterday, Fox-7 Austin reported, “Geological survey in Texas uncovers 1.6 billion barrels of oil.”

The ghastly gas lines of the 1970s were perhaps my first awakening to the deadly perils of experts.

In grade school, teachers taught gullible children the “fact” that oil was a “fossil fuel” that greedy dinosaurs made before they went extinct from climate change. Pretty soon, Ms. Skinner (grade 3) soberly instructed us that all the dinosaur oil was a “non-renewable resource” that would soon, any minute now, be completely drained— after which civilization would collapse (if, that is, the Soviets didn’t nuke us first).

So, Ms. Skinner explained, Democrat gas rationing just made sense. Plus overpopulation!

Now, 40 years on, there’s more oil than ever, and drillers are finding it far deeper than the deepest parts of the fossil record. In other words, oil is not brontosauruses that melted into goo. The now-accepted fact is —and I am not making this up— scientists don’t know where oil comes from. They’re baffled! And —I am not making this up, either— it comes back. Texas oilfields that shut down in the 1980s because they ran out of black gold are being reopened now and are flowing like rivers.

Basically, and unsurprisingly, the experts were completely wrong about everything they assured us were facts about oil. Oil is, apparently, a renewable resource.

Patrick says

all our radar systems shut down without any explanation

I wonder if this was coordinated by Maduro insiders who helped the US. I can see how even higher ups would tire of Maduro and his Cubans destroying Venezuela.

Oil is, apparently, a renewable resource.

Patrick says

all our radar systems shut down without any explanation

I wonder if this was coordinated by Maduro insiders who helped the US. I can see how even higher ups would tire of Maduro and his Cubans destroying Venezuela.

Patrick says

Oil is, apparently, a renewable resource.

Maybe not "renewable, but more plentiful that previously thought, especially with improved extraction techniques.

I always wonder what will happen to our continents when those holes deep down get too big?

FortWayneHatesRealtors says

I always wonder what will happen to our continents when those holes deep down get too big?

Scale. The deepest oil well isn't even 10 miles. The Earth is about 8,000 miles thick. Thos like worrying that a mosquito will plug his straw in deep enough to suck from your liver.

The deepest man-made hole on Earth is the Kola Superdeep Borehole (SG-3), located on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia near the Norwegian border.

It reached a maximum true vertical depth of 12,262 meters (approximately 40,230 feet, or about 7.6 miles). This record was achieved in 1989 during a Soviet scientific drilling project that began in 1970.

Drilling stopped in the early 1990s (with final abandonment around 1995) due to extremely high temperatures (around 180°C or 356°F, much hotter than anticipated), which caused equipment issues and made the rock behave more like plastic. Funding shortages after the Soviet Union's collapse also played a role.