Woah - massive oil discovery?

[Vic]

Originally posted by: glenn1
Vic, the quantity of oil vs. gold produced to date doesn't really matter since as you noted oil is found in greater abundance than gold. We've been digging up both as fast as we could get our hands on it, for 6,000 years plus with gold and 100 or so for oil, and we're not close to running out of either. If anything, the fact that gold is rarer means we should have run out of that long before we run out of oil.

Well... we can't really "run out" of gold because we keep it as gold. In other words, we're not burning it. So I don't think your analogy quite works.
And gold has become more scare and difficult to mine of recent years. New mining techniques involve strip-mining and an acid chemical process than extracts milligrams of gold per cubic meter, if even that.

While I don't think the sky is falling, I do think (like I posted earlier) that it would be foolhardy to think (and act) like we are never going to run out of oil. While I think that actual "running out" will never happen, I do believe that eventually oil, like gold, will become more difficult to extract from the earth in the large quantities that we require today. The tar oil sands of Alberta and their difficult and expensive extraction process comes to mind. As oil eventually (someday at our current rate) becomes harder to obtain, that will greatly impact cost and availability.

"Waste not, want not".

 

[etech]

Originally posted by: SuperTool
Can they replicate oil creation in the lab, one way or the other?

Yes.

Gas to liquids

 

[glenn1]

Well... we can't really "run out" of gold because we keep it as gold. In other words, we're not burning it. So I don't think your analogy quite works.
And gold has become more scare and difficult to mine of recent years. New mining techniques involve strip-mining and an acid chemical process than extracts milligrams of gold per cubic meter, if even that.

While I don't think the sky is falling, I do think (like I posted earlier) that it would be foolhardy to think (and act) like we are never going to run out of oil. While I think that actual "running out" will never happen, I do believe that eventually oil, like gold, will become more difficult to extract from the earth in the large quantities that we require today. The tar oil sands of Alberta and their difficult and expensive extraction process comes to mind. As oil eventually (someday at our current rate) becomes harder to obtain, that will greatly impact cost and availability.

"Waste not, want not".

Agreed. No reason to waste it just for the sake of wasting it. But being overly concerned about it doesn't really help anything.

Here's another example of exhausting a (theoretically) finite resource. There are only 8 notes in the musical scale (an octave) and a limited amount of octaves the human ear can hear, therefore there is a finite amount of distinct songs that can be written. But needless to say, we haven't run out of new songs yet.

 

[zephyrprime]

First of all, they used gold alloy in coins, which we could still do if we wished. However, since Nixon took us off the gold standard a few decades ago....

Second of all, you're wrong.

It's not really quite that simple. The value of gold is greatly depressed by the invention of fiat and fiduciary money. That is to say, gold is cheap because we don't use it for money. In your own link, the value of gold in 1800 was $300.

historic tonnage
historic gdp

But since 1800, the amount of gold above ground has increased by a factor of 9.6. But the world GDP has increased by a factor of ~200. So if gold were still used for money as much as it was in 1800 (an even in 1800 they already had a lot of fiat an fiduciary money), gold would have to have a value of $6700 an once.