Decius wrote:
] It does imply that we have a lot more oil
] then we think we do, but how much is totally unclear, as the
] actual theory is unproven. In order to measure the size of
] something you must first establish that it exists.

[ This is the crux of it. Even if you accept that there are billions of barrels of oil somewhere underneath the levels we know about, it's going to take a serious capital investment to find, assess, and develop those resources. I think it's a good idea to spend some dollars investigating the theory, especially if it leads to mechanisms that allow you to identify existing fields that are likely to refill themselves at some point soon (i.e. from a bigger pocket underneath it).

In the meantime, as Decius says, the resource is still limited on timescales we care about. It's not effectively renewable, so yes, we could put off the impending lack of oil, maybe for a hundred years or more, so lets look into it, but I think it's still imperative to spend the majority of our resources in this area on finding and building an energy infrastructure that's actually renewable.

This article tripped a wire in my increasingly disorganized brain about an article i read a few years back in Wired which i thought was an interview w/ Dr. Gold (who's cited here)... sure enough, a few tries at wired's Lycos powered search engine yeilded this story from about 4 years ago : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

-k]

WorldNetDaily: Sustainable oil?