William Robb wrote: > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Adam Maas" > Subject: Re: Global warming was: The Nine-spotted > > > >> As to petrochemicals, there are alternate solutions for most uses of >> them. The alternate solutions are more expensive however, but I expect >> they will become more popular as reserves drop. The biggest problem I >> see with Oil is poor management in certain countries. Venezuela has >> already seen their output nosedive as the Chavistas replace engineers >> with politically reliable incompetents in the oilfields, and the Saudi's >> have greatly shortened their fields lifetimes by overpumping. >> > > I think we are going to see an even bigger problem with petrochemical supply > due to political issues. For some reason, those darned Pinkos in Venezuela > and the Muslims who are sitting on the middle east oil fields think they own > what is beneath their feet, and they are increasingly coming to dislike us > westerners. > As an aside, does anyone know what the military consumption of petrochemical > is on a daily basis to run the war in Iraq? > >
Venezuela won't be an issue. They're in the process of running everybody who knows how to run oil production out of the country, initially by tossing the foreigners and also by putting the 'politically unreliable' local experts out of work(who have mostly left to find work now). At some point in the next 10 years they're going to have a major crash in production based on current trends as their production decrease rate is increasing. The middle east is a bigger issue. That said, the oil-producing nations are generally quite friendly to the US (Iran being the standing exception). Apart from Iran, the nations which dislike the US tend to not be major oil producing nations(Syria, Libya). While the military consumption of pertochemicals is quite high, it's mostly coming from local production over there. The real bottleneck is the lack of regional refining capability (Which is particularly bad in Iran, which has to import most of its gasoline because it is incapable of refining its own oil production). The two major challenges with regards to oil worldwide are China's need to secure oil sources in order to ensure economic stability (which has China heavily involved in Africa and Iran, and may lead to a 3 corner war between China, Vietnam and the Phillipines over the long-contested Spratly Islands) and the games Russia is playing with its pipelines to Europe. -Adam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
