Re: the future long term financial apocalypse of the USA

On 5/24/2024 11:59 AM, D wrote:
...>> We have, as a world, been through three or four Peak Oil events in my

49 year career to date: 1973, 1991, 2008.  We will go through more.  There will always be somebody who invents a wonderful new way of producing energy.
>
You are always with the bad vibes !  Be happy, dude !
>
Lynn

 Ahh... and the memory was jogged some more... it was _you_ Lynn I think who discussed in a long marathon thread with Scott. And yes, I'm much younger than you and even I remember multiple peak oil predictions and they never came true, and even if they do come true, it will not be a decline over night, and engines do keep getting better and better, not to speak of throwing hybrids into the mix (if we're talking the limited use case of only cars, that is).

I used to be a Peak Oiler.  But the harsh reality of real life has sponsored the human race to reinvent itself time after time.  It is amazing to watch and be a part of.
Back in 2008, we were running out of natural gas again.  The price of natural gas had increased from $3/mmbtu to $14/mmbtu.  People were drilling all of the place and putting in gathering system pipelines for incredibly small wells that would have never been profitable before.
Several of my customers were starting to look at building coal to natural gas plants here in Texas in the middle 2000s.  Texas has huge coal fields, maybe the most in the nation.  This prompted us to improve the solids handling and thermodynamics in our software.  Then fracking was released to the public in 2008 and the price of natural gas crashed back down to $2/mmbtu.  We have enough natural gas in the USA to last for a thousand years at the current usage rates.  So much natural gas that we are now shipping 25% of our natural gas production to Mexico and Canada via pipelines and to Europe and Asia via 20+ LNG plants and many ships.
Lynn