A game changer: Israel Discovers Massive Oil Reserve

[josephpalazzo]

http://www.ibtimes.com/israel-oil-discovery-massive-reserve-could-meet-domestic-demand-obstacles-production-2130639

[Baruch]

I have my doubts ... if will take five years to put in a production well to know for sure ... same as off Cyprus and in the Aegean.  Are they still pumping in the Arctic?  The drillers their got less play than they did in N Dakota, and they have pulled out, because current politics mandates cheap oil.

[aitm]

I have my doubts ... if will take five years to put in a production well

psshaw.....you put anything between a jew and his money and they will dig it by hand in a week. LOLOLOL.....er.....okay that was insulting and not a very nice thing to say....LARD I pologize.

[Baruch]

psshaw.....you put anything between a jew and his money and they will dig it by hand in a week. LOLOLOL.....er.....okay that was insulting and not a very nice thing to say....LARD I pologize.

Apology accepted, but then I am not an Israeli.  It takes years to move thru the exploration phase, and even more to put access into practice.  And if it happens, it is all at the vagaries of the current oil price.  If the price is too low, nothing happens.

[stromboli]

This is a game changer, assuming they can develop the reserve. Makes sense they want to rid the Golan Heights of non Israelis, if they knew previously there was oil there. It may be they have known about it longer than they claim.

If anybody can pull it off, they can. Smart bunch, those Israelis. Damn fine pilots as well.

shame on you, aitm.  :021:

[josephpalazzo]

Jews, as an ethnic group, won the most number of Nobel prizes.

[spoiler]Almost 1/5 of all Nobel laureates are Jewish, who constitute about 1% of the world's population.[/spoiler]

[SGOS]

Makes me wonder how such a big reserve of oil could have laid hidden under such a small country.  Given Israel's geographic location, there would be no reason to avoid exploration on the assumption that oil wasn't going to be found.

[SGOS]

Back in the 60s I read an article in either the Scientific American or the Atlantic Monthly that predicted oil reserves would begin to decline somewhere around the year 2000.  It included a graph that showed a final dramatic increase in oil production followed by a mirror image of decline.  The graphic depiction of both the final increase and decline was almost vertical, forming a lone spike that comprised 9/10 of the height of the graph itself.  Before and after the spike, production was shown as a laboring but flat looking rise and fall surrounding 20 or so years of the dramatic spike.

Since the article, there seems to have been a lot of surprise discoveries of unanticipated reserves (I'm not sure how one predicts unanticipated reserves).  A friend of mine talked about the oil shale of Colorado that he claimed had enough oil to last for 100 years.  I never heard a thing about the oil shale afterwards, but up popped the "oil sands" of Alberta Canada, which is kind of the same thing.  There appears to be more oil about than I suspected, and for some reason this adds to the theory, seemingly held by many people, that oil is like an inexhaustible renewable resource.

Anyway, here we are in 2015, fifteen years after the predicted 2000 spike, although 15 years in a graph depicting 100 years is still in the ball park.  Although, I do suspect there's more oil about than geologists thought 60 years ago.  However, it's still a finite supply.  Somehow, the idea of finite supply seems to escape many people, who find great comfort in the idea, that there is still more oil about.

When I originally read the article, the phrase "global warming" had not yet been uttered by any media I knew about.  The idea of global warming was still 10 years off, but no matter how much oil might be left to use, global warming throws a whole new wrinkle into an equation which is more or less synonymous with survival of our species, unless of course that fusion thingy in Germany works out, and then we will have to figure out other ways to die off.

[Baruch]

Back in the 60s I read an article in either the Scientific American or the Atlantic Monthly that predicted oil reserves would begin to decline somewhere around the year 2000.  It included a graph that showed a final dramatic increase in oil production followed by a mirror image of decline.  The graphic depiction of both the final increase and decline was almost vertical, forming a lone spike that comprised 9/10 of the height of the graph itself.  Before and after the spike, production was shown as a laboring but flat looking rise and fall surrounding 20 or so years of the dramatic spike.

Since the article, there seems to have been a lot of surprise discoveries of unanticipated reserves (I'm not sure how one predicts unanticipated reserves).  A friend of mine talked about the oil shale of Colorado that he claimed had enough oil to last for 100 years.  I never heard a thing about the oil shale afterwards, but up popped the "oil sands" of Alberta Canada, which is kind of the same thing.  There appears to be more oil about than I suspected, and for some reason this adds to the theory, seemingly held by many people, that oil is like an inexhaustible renewable resource.

Anyway, here we are in 2015, fifteen years after the predicted 2000 spike, although 15 years in a graph depicting 100 years is still in the ball park.  Although, I do suspect there's more oil about than geologists thought 60 years ago.  However, it's still a finite supply.  Somehow, the idea of finite supply seems to escape many people, who find great comfort in the idea, that there is still more oil about.

When I originally read the article, the phrase "global warming" had not yet been uttered by any media I knew about.  The idea of global warming was still 10 years off, but no matter how much oil might be left to use, global warming throws a whole new wrinkle into an equation which is more or less synonymous with survival of our species, unless of course that fusion thingy in Germany works out, and then we will have to figure out other ways to die off.

Peak oil was inevitable, regardless of undetermined finite fuel reserves.  Here is the US history:
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2&f=A

Notice the original peak around 1970 ... this was predicted and happened as predicted.  Then there is the new increase on the far right ... this is due to fracking.  Normal petroleum sources can be pumped for 20 years or more ... fracking sources are only good for about 5 years.  So this second peak will be narrower, and peak sooner than you might expect.  Fracking wasn't considered in the original pre-1970 analysis (which used an ordinary differential equation to calculate it using USGS data).  Neither was oil shale.  It is all a matter of price and thermodynamics.  The crash in prices will cause the new peak to form sooner but the curve will be wider.  I don't know at what price it is economical to exploit oil shale (much more recalcitrant than tar sands ... mostly in Canada and Venezuela).  Oil shale is mostly in the US.  Also it might not be thermodynamically viable to use the output of oil shale as fuel, if the energy required to input is greater than the output from burning.  A similar curve for the whole-world production could be made. 

Widespread use of working fusion reactors, also causes global warming, but by a different mechanism.  Carbon cycle warming is because of putting extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ... fusion reactors add to global warming because of inefficiency in producing electricity (something we have anyway with any energy source).  The existing carbon dioxide, will slowly decrease if we stopped all regular power plants today, but it is a slow decrease, so the slower effects of global warming will continue for awhile ... past the peak carbon consumption ... peaking after the cut off of regular power plants.

[Baruch]

Makes me wonder how such a big reserve of oil could have laid hidden under such a small country.  Given Israel's geographic location, there would be no reason to avoid exploration on the assumption that oil wasn't going to be found.

Reserves found off Askelon technically belong to the Palestinians ... and found under the Golan Heights ... technically belong to Syria.  This is something that had to be kept quiet for a long time.  Also pollution running off the Golan Heights will endanger the water supply (since the Sea of Galilee is directly below).