We’re not looking beyond about 12,000 feet, because there isn’t any oil in deeper waters. Pelagic sedimentation rates are too low, and any organics are too dispersed to form any quantities of oil before the deep ocean crust subducts.
If you can’t bring yourself to read peak oil advocate Kenneth Deffeyes “Hubbert’s Peak”, then at least read “Oil 101″ by Morgan Downey, and learn how, why and where oil (and oil shale) are formed.
Your credibility just took a huge hit with those who are geologically savvy.

“The US is 2% of the Earth’s surface (10 out of 510 million sq km). Assuming an even distribution, that means total shale oil on Earth is over 1200 years’ supply at current rates.”

If an even distribution is true, why isn’t Europe, Japan, India, etc. swimming in oil like the Saudis?
Why not mine oil sands in Florida with nice weather vs. Alberta with cold nasty weather? (there aren’t any oil sands in Florida – that’s why!)
Look at geological estimates, and see that the U.S. won the oil shale lottery, and has 60+% of the world’s known oil shale resources.

“In any practical sense, the amount of oil on Earth is a function of the technology you have to extract it.”

Sorry, oil is formed at definite places and situations, and trapped at a certain percentage depending on the local geology. While technology and economics determine how much of that oil gets found and extracted, there is only so much oil on the Earth. And we’ve used about half of the conventional oil already.
Also to consider – the energy return on energy invested in exploration/discovery/production of oil.
-G

Proliferation worries are solvable by engineering — consider the traveling wave design. If the political will had been there, solutions would have been found.

But that’s a historical detail. For the coming century, nanotech could build a box the size of a phone booth (remember those?) that would capture all your body efluents and reprocess them back into clean air, water, and food for an input of about 100 watts. Total Earth footprint per human: 1 square meter, including the solar power for the gadget. (and the person eats all the meat he wants

Compare that to the ~2 hectare footprint typically quoted for Americans — a factor of 20000. So with nanotech, without increasing our total footprint at all, we could have 20000 times more people or each be 20000 times richer.

I’ll take the latter…

First, nuclear power hit a glass ceiling w.r.t. proliferation. IFRs and any fast neutron reactors are quite good at producing weapons grade material, especially considering that “Integral” in the name means on-site reprocessing. You might call this political interference but more accurately its a concern about security in a world with some very radical and immature social groups. There was a trade off made in the 70s over further developing nuclear generation against security. There’s certainly no question that good engineering would have resulted in much better reactors (consider the British experience with Dounrey, France’s Super ‘Phenix’ or the US Enrico Fermi plant) . The first generation was not cost competitive due to triple heat exchanger loops. The high-level question was whether nations would have kept control of the materials produced, or (thinking further) how bad the potential accidents or intentional terrorist acts would have affected society.

Second, LtG wasn’t particularly built to prove society would collapse, and the authors themselves knew the model was simple and flawed. What they focussed on was the feedback loops between different parts of the model. I believe that was their real point: taking a first step to modeling and understanding those interrelationships, watching out for problem areas. Unfortunately that cautionary tone regarding feedback was instead projected onto the results of certain runs of the model. Useful articles about LtG will point that out. Modeling has gone far past what was done back then.

– Ron Fischer

Turns out that current recovery techniques only get about half the oil from the wells we’ve drilled so far…

I would strongly recommend to do more investigation and study. You indeed do not need any supercomputer to understand basic thermodynamic laws. It is key to all around us including limits to our (humankind) exponencial expansion. Please spend sometime on basics and thermodynamic laws. No need for any calculator. Just brain, paper and pencil is enough.
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