The Gardener
Senior Member
- Reaction score
- 25
Again, you can't just look at uranium deposits in sea water and say "see, there's energy" without taking into account the NET energy effect after you subtract the energy used to obtain it.Nuclear power - you can extract Uranium from sea water & granate...Near infinite energy right there.
Sure, you may find uranium by distilling ocean water, but, it takes energy to distill water. What good is it if you expend ten megawatts of energy to heat ocean water just to recover a teaspoon worth of uranium dust.
The coal sands are an even more dramatic example of this. Now I will admit that there is "net" energy in the coal sands, and I hear the refrain that if oil reaches a certain price, it becomes profitable. The fallacy of this is that as oil reaches that higher price to make oil sands profitable, it also increases the costs of extraction, which makes the "profitability point" spiral a lot higher than the oft quoted $80/bbl after things sort out.
Actually, both of your points miss the main crux of the peak oil argument. It makes no difference how much oil is in the ground. Peak Oil is NOT a philosophy where they are claiming that we are "running out of oil". That is not the point. Savinar's point is not that we are in imminent risk of running out of oil, his point is that the rate at which we are able to extract oil is not growing at the same rate as the rate at which our demand for it is increasing.
And that is the fallacy embedded in these "peak oil debunked" websites. They aren't understanding Savinar's point, makes me wonder if they even took the time to read and think through Savinar's piece at all.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/