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#26 2016-08-11 18:49:47

clark
Member
Registered: 2001-09-20
Posts: 6,362

Re: Peter Zeihan

I am a generation therefore I am consigned to an archetype? Historical analysis can be painted in broad strokes, but it perhaps may gloss over some rather important details. Probably some good analogy about global warming in there for those keeping score.

Anyway, the human condition is more consistent and universal than generational descriptors of the United States population since the 1940s. Better to use that prism when attempting to dissect the sociological psyche to discern future outcomes. 2 cents. Adjusted for inflation.

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#27 2016-08-11 19:32:15

RobertDyck
Moderator
From: Winnipeg, Canada
Registered: 2002-08-20
Posts: 7,781
Website

Re: Peter Zeihan

I'm part of the tail end of the Baby boom. One person called me a "baby Baby boomer". So I'm part of that generation too. But everything was tail end, everything was consumed by the ones who came just before.

I asked one person "what happened"? Baby boomers had a majority, they were the largest demographic, they had a chance to change things. What happened? The person answered that they sold out. When boomers grew up, they had to get a job to pay the bills.

So never ending wars of the US continue. Waste hundreds of billions of dollars per year on useless wars. Waste thousands of American lives, not to mention civilian lives in war zones. Destabilize other countries, just to support America's military industrial complex, and to perpetuate the myth that America is the empire in control of the world. What ever happened to "Give peace a chance?"
John Lennon: Give Peace A Chance (1969) - Official Video

When I was a child, gasoline was cents per Imperial gallon. Canada used British imperial measurements, one imperial gallon = 1.20 US gallons. I remember a road trip, my father stopped at a rural gas station, freaked out when he found gas was over a dollar per gallon. In the 1990s, I remember gas was 38¢/litre. It was lower in the early 1990s, but in the mid '90s gas stations tried to increase prices. One independent station held out, sold gas at 38¢/litre. The line went a couple blocks, major gas chains were pissed off. Today the average price is 96.3¢/litre. (According to a website that tracks gas prices in major cities in Canada.) Was over a dollar per litre, so has come down somewhat. Last time oil price was as low as today was 2003. Gas price at the pump in my city that year was 67.6¢/litre (according to statistics Canada). Gas prices seem to jump up quickly, but don't come down!

I'm debating politics on a Canadian forum. It has a number of military veterans, and a couple Americans. There's one Republican in California there, on the Canadian forum. He's a Trump supporter. Quite a vigorous debate. It's American politics, but he chose to debate on a Canadian forum. And I used to live in the United States, I was an immigrant from Canada. Lived in a suburb of Richmond Virginia for 6 months in 1996, and Miami Florida for 10 months in 1999/2000.

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#28 2016-08-11 22:37:03

clark
Member
Registered: 2001-09-20
Posts: 6,362

Re: Peter Zeihan

War is ongoing, ever since the first water hole on the Savannah. Point is that this not a generational thing. Baby boomers is not a generational thing- it is a population explosion; a demographic spike significant enough to have sociological and environmental implications when it occurs in a country with a high standard of living, deep resources, and significant influence. There is almost no statistically significant difference between generations. We like to pretend there is because it makes us feel special. But we are not. We are the same monkey deep down.

Your republican troll buddy from California suffers from low self-esteem and is using your forum as a means to find self acceptance. You should offer to be his friend or provide virtual hugs. I hate those assh*les. You have a point of view, great, but turning the internet into your f*cking sob couch because you can't figure out how to love yourself? Well, most of you who have tolerated me this long know where I stand.

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#29 2016-08-16 20:12:41

Antius
Member
From: Cumbria, UK
Registered: 2007-05-22
Posts: 1,003

Re: Peter Zeihan

Oil shale is not oil.  It has more in common with brown coal and is an inferior resource to coal, as it is usually present as an organic contaminant within solid rock.  Hence the name 'shale'.  It would be easier to produce oil from coal than it would from this resource, which is probably the lowest grade hydrocarbon.

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#30 2016-08-16 22:15:55

Void
Member
Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 6,976

Re: Peter Zeihan

Well here I go.

Probably you are mostly correct.

It would depend on the worldwide price of oil, internal USA economics, politics, and the rise of alternative energy.

I see that the US is getting ready to try to penetrate the European natural gas market, so that is relatively new.  That gas comes I suppose largely from shale oil.  They are struggling to get sufficient markets for the gas.  So, it is an example of export of hydrocarbons.  Coal is/was also.

Oil Shale is being utilized.
http://globaloilshale.com/?page_id=420

For this, they think they need $80.00 oil prices.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news … -boom.html

And yet a company is trying to establish an extraction in Utah.  The technology is based on Estonian methods.
http://www.ksl.com/?sid=39229149&nid=14 … -oil-shale
Maybe it will go bust, it sure isn't popular with everyone.

I am encouraged by the above effort, have misgivings about it's acceptance, and probability of success, but it points in a direction.  Someone must think they can make money doing it.

But I want something more.  I want to put the pollution to work in E.O.R.
http://neori.org/resources-on-co2-eor/h … eor-works/

Today, most of the CO2 used in EOR operations is from natural underground ‘domes’ of CO2. With the natural supply of CO2 limited, man-made CO2 from the captured CO2 emissions of power plants and industrial facilities (e.g., fertilizer production,ethanol production, cement and steel plants) can be used to boost oil production through EOR. Once CO2 is captured from these facilities, it is compressed and transported by pipeline to oil fields.

Primary Production refers to a new oil field discovery where production wells are drilled into a geological formation and oil or gas is produced using the pent-up energy of the fluids in the reservoir.

At the end of primary production a considerable amount of the oil remains in place, with sometimes as much as 80-90 percent still “trapped” in the pore spaces of the reservoir. (Melzer, 2012)

If an oil field is not abandoned after primary production, it moves into a secondary production phase wherein a substance (usually water) is injected to repressurize the formation. New injection wells are drilled or converted from producing wells, and the injected fluid sweeps oil to the remaining producing wells. Secondary production could yield up to an equal or greater amount of oil from primary production. But this has the potential to ultimately leave 50-70 percent of the original oil remaining in the reservoir since much of the oil is bypassed by the water that does not mix with the oil. (Melzer, 2012)

Primary and secondary production are sometimes referred to as “conventional” oil production practices.

During tertiary production, oil field operators use an injectant (usually CO2) to react with the oil to change its properties and allow it to flow more freely within the reservoir. Almost pure CO2 (>95 percent of the overall composition) has the property of mixing with oil to swell it, make it lighter, detach it from the rock surfaces, and cause the oil to flow more freely within the reservoir to producer wells. In a closed loop system, CO2 mixed with recovered oil is separated in above-ground equipment for reinjection. CO2-EOR typically produces between 4-15 percent of the original oil in place. (ARI, 2010)

CO2 is in limited supply from its traditional sources.  Of course if you could get it from power plants or coal, that would be an option, but I believe that Coal is being phased out and replaced by natural gas, and it would take a lot of infrastructure to gather it.  You could pull it from the atmosphere, but I think that will prove to be expensive.

On other continents, they could do E.O.R. but I believe that most places don't have CO2 from dome formations, and for North America that supply is limited.

I am not an oil person at all, but I will describe a process which could be technologically possible, but I am not going to claim that it will become economically possible.

Use horizontal drilling and fracking deep down in the Oil Shale deposits, inject supercritical CO2 into them at a high temperature, extract the product, upgrade it with hydrogen from natural gas.

For the heating energy, use a solar power tower.  So, it would be partially solar energy, and you would overcome one of the limitations of solar power towers, by not needing to store energy, or convert it to electricity.  Simple heating of pressurized CO2.

Then upgrade it to a fluid you can flow through a pipeline using Hydrogen, and perhaps that process could involve solar heat as well.  I don't know that much about refineries, so I am not sure about that one.

Then pipe the high Carbon oil to an E.O.R. site, and upgrade the oil further, extracting excess Carbon for CO2, possibly handling the Sulfur the same way (Not sure that can work).  Use the result for E.O.R. and extract extra oil from existing oil plays.

Export a low Carbon oil for sale. 

So Carbon is used against itself to reduce Carbon emissions, by producing a low Carbon product, which I presume is easier to transfer to another location than Liquid Natural Gas would be.  If this then replaces Coal burned in Europe or Asia, then you have reduced Carbon emissions world wide.

Economical?  Perhaps not.  But remember that Shale Oil was expected to be a high cost oil, and it is now medium cost heading for low cost.

And again, someone is building a Oil Shale extraction process in Utah, and they must think they can turn a buck.  As I said, maybe it's not going to work out, but for now it is a positive indicator.

If Peter Zeihan turns out to be right, there will be a two tier oil market on the planet.  North American (Or much of it) and non North American.  So, while the USA might have oil priced at $50.00 (Speculative), the rest of the world might have oil priced at $100.00, so then politics would enter the picture.  A two tier situation has existed in petro states, so, I think it might be possible here, since with a lower price for energy here (As we currently have), our industry (Which employs voters), would have an economic advantage.  Other petro states have not been able to make much use of those advantages they might have had, because of cultural issues, lack of skilled labor, lack of water and so on.  But we might.  It will depend on political pressures, and how the local industries might feel about it.

As for electric cars, and electrical grids with advanced storage methods, I am all for it.  But still we have a whole planet where everyone wants to have it all.  Desire for energy will grow.  The ability for many places to buy it may not.

So, with alternative energy emerging, perhaps hydrocarbons will largely get stranded without a market, but I am betting that demand will grow, and at the same time the USA will have an excess of Hydrocarbons to export.  Maybe not from Oil Shale/Oil Shale CO2 EOR though.  Time will tell.

I like to look at possibilities, but I don't make myself a slave to a certain outcome.

In reality, I like the idea of horizontal drilling and fracking, as I think it could eventually evolve into a process to extract metals from the deeps.  Minerals which will eventually be in very short supply.

If we want stuff, we have to get it from somewhere, somehow.

Blah Blah Blah Blah smile  I'm retired, I don't need Oil Shale much.  I will probably be dead by then.

Last edited by Void (2016-08-16 23:18:04)


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#31 2016-12-14 09:04:34

Void
Member
Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 6,976

Re: Peter Zeihan

Open board just now.  So...

http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/10/peter-zeihan/

This is text and not video, so maybe in some ways more usable.  It does spin a story about a possible future for the world, and also some specific countries including the US.


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#32 2016-12-14 13:16:54

elderflower
Member
Registered: 2016-06-19
Posts: 1,262

Re: Peter Zeihan

America cannot withdraw from international trade. The US and Canada produce huge food surpluses. If these are not sold or otherwise shifted abroad prices will fall and the agriculture sector will be so badly hit by reduced incomes and bankruptcies that the political consequences will not be able to be contemplated in Washington, nor the financial ones in Wall Str.

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#33 2016-12-14 15:06:11

Void
Member
Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 6,976

Re: Peter Zeihan

A good point.  Farmers what to make money, and the government wants to get a cut from taxes, and businesses want farmers to buy their stuff.

So, yes thats's got to be true elderflower.

Peter Zeihan has video's where he speaks to certain entities who wish advice on marketing their products.  Agriculture as well.

He indicates a very good market for calories in Mexico and South East Asia, also southern China.  (I am not mentally equipped to evaluate his notions about China,  we shall see.  I cannot judge his analysis).

So, the US and yes Canada, and I suppose any food producer will have hungry people to market the products they create to.

For energy, the USA apparently is in a very sweet spot for a while.  There are some problems with it such as Earthquakes from injecting too much water back into the deep rock strata, down in Oklahoma.  However, I just read an article about Australians growing tomatoes from salt water.
https://www.cnet.com/news/tomatoes-grow … -seawater/
So, I am thinking why not.  Just concentrate the brine, cut it in half for volume and then pump it into the strata, and get some vegies.
So, I don't see a show stopper.  Their was mention in another thread of a oil spill in North Dakota, but it looks to me like that particular spill was not on agricultural land.  So, in that case not a show stopper either.

Some positions of power want to kill this new situation, but I think they are headed for Hades for a while smile  Until they learn to walk on two paws again.

And if you listen to Peter Zeihan, the USA has a good situation with demographics.

None of this is because I was clever, strong, or worthy in any way.  It seems that people just got lucky, because of fate, and others who understood what to do.

So, what the heck?   Am I to be sad for good fortune in my old age?

No, of course I should be thankful, and I am.

Last edited by Void (2016-12-14 15:24:44)


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#34 2016-12-21 21:49:29

Void
Member
Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 6,976

Re: Peter Zeihan

More on Peter Zeihan:
http://zeihan.com/
http://zeihan.com/maps/
And some commentary:
http://zeihan.com/topics/

This guy is worth researching in my opinion.  Why do we care?  Well the Earth is the Launchpad for any human expansion into space, and if we can better know the probable futures of the sections/nations of Earth, we can better plan for that launching into space.

That's how I think about it anyway.

Last edited by Void (2016-12-21 21:57:06)


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#35 2016-12-29 19:38:12

Void
Member
Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 6,976

Re: Peter Zeihan

Its me again with Peter Zeihan.  Pretty similar materials to the videos, but this time as text.

Just interested in what he says is the likely future of certain things.  This would of course affect the future of humans in space, so it's important, I think.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2 … e3e2323841
Quote: (Articles Title)

Reasons Why The US Will Dominate The World Economy For The Foreseeable Future

I don't seem to be able to copy text for quotes so I will summarize it as I see it.

Canada wants the UK in Nafta.
The areas where the USA will most want to maintain trade will be with Latin America (Specifically Mexico), and South East Asia.  Pretty much everything else will have major problems.

Mexico is not really a direct illegal alien problem anymore, but people from elsewhere are crossing through Mexico (Central America being the most major source of illegal aliens now).

Mexico and the USA will likely come up with a mutual solution to address the illegal alien problem.  Peter Zeihan says the Mexicans are more paranoid about illegal aliens than the USA is.

There will be massive capital flight from other parts of the world to North America/USA.
There will be large numbers of skilled workers coming from other countries to North America/USA.

If Hillary had become president the transition to this new world would take much longer.  With Trump, it will happen much sooner.

Pretty soon North American energy independence, and not long from now very likely USA being potentially energy independent.  However, I do wonder if Canada will become a major supplier of oil to the UK and some other parts of Europe, very likely through the USA.

Not necessarily from the quoted article, but I more or less recall that Peter Zeihan believes that the EU may very likely fail in the next 7 years.

So if this is true then "We" might have two types of space partners.
1) Wealthy countries.
2) Desperate countries with a desire to somehow boost their situation with space activities, If that is possible.  I am guessing sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Last edited by Void (2016-12-29 22:30:48)


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#36 2021-07-26 17:27:40

SpaceNut
Administrator
From: New Hampshire
Registered: 2004-07-22
Posts: 28,747

Re: Peter Zeihan

bump

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#37 2021-07-26 17:53:05

tahanson43206
Moderator
Registered: 2018-04-27
Posts: 16,749

Re: Peter Zeihan

Five years have gone by .... for Void ... if you would care to update the forum on Mr. Zeihan's current thinking, I I would be interested. Perhaps others would as well.

(th)

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#38 2021-12-21 13:36:23

Void
Member
Registered: 2011-12-29
Posts: 6,976

Re: Peter Zeihan

Sort of about China?
https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/omicron-and-c … g-calculus
Utube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj00flkpAGw

I feel it is good to get some estimates/measurements of reality.  It is generally good to understand better.

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#39 2022-10-05 13:17:17

Mars_B4_Moon
Member
Registered: 2006-03-23
Posts: 8,892

Re: Peter Zeihan

The imperialist Russians and mohammedan Saudis are suddenly best friends?

Antius wrote:

It would be more practical to grind up and burn kerogen (oil shale) in a coal burning power plant than attempt to convert it into oil.  Shale oil on the other hand, is more expensive to extract than conventional crude and most of the US oil majors sank huge amounts of money into the technology during the oil price surge of the 2000's.  As a result there has been a dramatic surge in US oil production, but it was achieved at a huge financial cost, using borrowed money at a time when nobody could foresee a drop in oil price to $40/barrel.  This is part of the reason why oil prices have not sunk back down to their 1990s levels in spite of weak demand, much of the world production outside of OPEC requires considerably more than $40/barrel to break even.  Unfortunately, most economies are now so loaded with debt that we may never see a strong recovery in oil demand that pushes the price back above the break-even point for most producers.

OPEC to Cut Oil Production, Dealing a Blow to Biden
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/05/op … g_trending

Void wrote:

Mexico is not really a direct illegal alien problem anymore

Hundreds of thousands of young dead Americans

So many predictions by Peter Zeihan came wrong but I wonder if he took the same pills or lived inside the same delusion as George Friedman?

The old usenet Godwin's law or Godwin's rule. He is now saying the next Hitler was elected in Italy, 2022 Italian general election.

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-10-05 13:22:53)

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