MattB

Coal, Oil and the Human Difficulty of Grasping Long Duration Problems

@353732 ... "It is not actionable to look beyond the strategic horizon: there is no business or personal return today for trying to "solve" a problem where the payoff to a solution is far distant and most uncertain but the cost of the solution is immediate and certain" ...

Fortunately there is always a cadre of idiosynchratic individuals prepared to take a stab at solving long-range problems - real or perceived - who, along the way, invent things that contribute immediately to our wellbeing. Without "grand challenges" it is difficult for us to think beyond incremental improvement. We certainly aren't going to run out of wood, coal or oil in our lifetime, but the inspired search for "ultimate solutions" will lead us to technologies and solutions that we would otherwise never strive to discover.

How Low Can Crude Oil and Gas Go?

Oil prices below $50-60 spell disaster for many of the primary producing countries' economies - notably Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. Geopolitics says the price cannot stay below that level for long without increasingly desperate measures to underpin the price. I agree that the spot price is driven more by perceptions and speculation than fundamentals - $30 makes no more sense than $150 did (although I think the latter is a truer reflection of the supply/demand balance once the global economic correction settles down). Looking beyond the violently swinging price pendulum, I think a realistic price target for 2009 - assuming there are no more major nasty suprises in the economic closet - is in the $65-80 range.

Forget $100 a Barrel - Oil Will Plummet to $30

Why isn't there a "report abuse" button at the end of the main article? This is the kind of nonsense "spin" that gets tabloid news its reputation, and isn't fit for Seeking Alpha (unless you want me to quit reading it and divert my short attention span elsewhere). Does the fact that it attracted a lot of comments get the author invited back to write more rubbish? Any hack can pull a bunch of headlines into an article and string them together with incoherent analysis. I want to hear real insight into the issue, not that the sky is falling, again (or has the bubble burst and Armageddon is upon us...?)

Oil: Does Supply and Demand Still Apply?

I agree with most of the earlier comments ... misses the point.
First, a large fraction (if not majority) the exploration wells are targeting natural gas, not oil. Liquids production may certainly have peaked (not going to argue about when) but the global energy mix features a lot more nat gas usage today (e.g. via LNG production and transport creating an arb market) and it will continue to grow in importance.
Second, the size of new discoveries follows an approx log-normal distribution, with only rare exceptions (e.g. Brazil). You need an exponential increase in exploration success to maintain a constant reserves replacement, and global offtake is increasing, not flat.
Third, enhanced oil recovery is allowing operators to get substantially more oil from existing discoveries than was possible in the past , and technology is also allowing recovery from intervals previously considered unproducable (e.g. shale gas, dominating US growth in nat gas development) These have a not insignificant effect on the supply side as "conventional" plays are replaced by "unconventional".
Conclusion: the supply side is way too complex to simply talk about drilling success rates and some mythical peak from whence liquid hydrocarbon production will be in terminal decline...