How did Napoleon manage to crush Egyptian Mamluk armies so easily?

Napoleon Bonaparte himself explained it two centuries ago with the old, as military history, rule - An army of soldiers led by warriors will always defeat an army of warriors.

Napoleon gave credit to the individual combat qualities of the Mamelukes: -”The Mamelukes are beautiful, magnificent… their horses rearing, plunging …”

Napoleon himself recognizes their courage: “The Mamelukes charge the cannons with their sabers and their horses… They fought like lions … “

But he stressed their incompetence in organized mass operations: - “Two Mamelukes were undoubtedly more than a match for three Frenchmen; 100 Mamelukes were equal to 100 Frenchmen; 300 Frenchmen could generally beat 300 Mamelukes, and 1,000 Frenchmen invariably defeated 1,500 Mamelukes, ”

Napoleon just organized his army into five gigantic squares. These are men kneeling and standing and firing so you got a continual rolling fire. The Mamelukes rode around the squares and were shot at by that square and by this square. The French lost thirty men, the Mamelukes lost probably five or six thousand.

Note: In fact, the entire military history of mankind can be described as a series of wars and battles in which armies of disciplined, manageable soldiers easily defeat even larger armies of warriors-knights, in which each warrior far surpasses any of the soldiers in combat skills and courage. Greeks against Persian, the victorious marches of the Roman legions, the English at Crécy and Agincourt against the French knights … The difference always comes from the basic quality of the soldiers, their controllability, opposed to the warriors, usually acting according to their own decisions.

And then someone realized that instead of lining up on a field of battle, you could send small highly trained groups of special forces to sneak around in secret and beat any size army, often by ignoring it and going around it.

>>14289144 pb

>>14288902 pb

The child in stripes message requires the photo to be published

So that other cult members can see it

Like for instance, a child at a father and son event

Here is one such child

From a cult family

In Grade 8

Wearing a striped jacket

I'm wondering if "sacrifice" is the right term her

Because it may be "given over into cult service"

Now many of those kids are used for MK Ultra torture and abuse programming

And they end up as lone killers,

Who then kill themselves or go stark raving mad

Lone operators who connect the killing back to nobody.

In the case of Trump

He went to a special school in upstate New York

For gifted youngsters like this one

The second building photo

Is the actual, real life NYMA

I believe this was run by white hat freemasons

Who were recruiting/training deep cover operatives

To take down the Cabal

Trump was one of those, therefore his Batman career

As an undercover spy against organized crime

But it wasn't until much later that he was chosen

To be the front man for the operation

There is a huge organization of military and intelligence people

Many now retired

That are all working together on this

The X-Men and their Xavier school

As well as the Legion Academy of superheroes and Tony Stark

Are used to organize this group

And send comms.

Ironman is Donald Trump in the DC universe

He is the man with an Iron Will

Who sees the mission through to completion

Stark Tower in New York has its own advanced power source

I think Trump may have gotten his uncle to build the same

For Trump Tower

One of the few buildings in NYC

That was built to stand for centuries

And not fall down after a few generations

Like the Bonwit Teller building

Look at the art on that building

Isn't it about knocking down buildings?

>>14289406

$6 $60 60 leaders

= 666

>>14289434

>>14289438

Ragone Plot Comparison of Radioisotope Cells and the Direct Sodium Borohydride/Hydrogen Peroxide Fuel Cell With Chemical Batteries

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/3270750_Ragone_Plot_Comparison_of_Radioisotope_Cells_and_the_Direct_Sodium_BorohydrideHydrogen_Peroxide_Fuel_Cell_With_Chemical_Batteries

April 2008IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion 23(1):171 - 178

DOI:10.1109/TEC.2007.914159

Abstract and Figures

Radioisotope cells (RCs) and a direct sodium borohydride/hydrogen peroxide fuel cell ( FC) are compared to conventional chemical batteries through Ragone plots of theoretical (RCs) and experimental (chemical batteries and FC) data. It is found that the RCs are projected to have superior specific energy but inferior specific power, while the borohydride/peroxide FC shows an impressive range for both parameters. Thus, RCs may be especially useful in battery charging, communications, or other applications that require a long-lived, low-power source or periodic pulses of energy. While the borohydride/peroxide FC can be scaled to a variety of high-power applications, it is especially well suited for space and undersea use where air independence is essential.

Is this what suppressed technology looks like? PDF is attached.

Researchers Have Invented an Awesome And Scary Nuclear Battery Pack

https://www.sciencealert.com/high-power-nickel-63-betavoltaic-device-shrinks-pacemaker-radioactive-batteries

Batteries powered by radioactive materials have been around for more than a century, but what they promise in power they usually lose in bulk.

Not so with a new kind of power source, which combines a novel structure with a nickel isotope to pack ten times more power than an electrochemical cell of the same size. The only question is, are we ready to go nuclear?

A team of Russian researchers have put a new spin on technology that uses the beta decay of a radioactive element to create differences in voltage.

Your average electrochemical cell uses contrasts in the reactivity of various materials to build a difference in voltage potential.

This gives plenty of power for the volume of the battery, especially when using materials such as lithium.

But as we all know too well, batteries based on electrochemistry simply don't last all that long. Sooner or later they need to be recharged or replaced.

The lifetime of a nuclear battery, on the other hand, is based not on its reactivity, but the half-life of its decay. Rather than being measured in hours or days, their potential lifetimes can be decades or even centuries.

So-called betavoltaic batteries were dreamed up way back in 1913. They aren't at all like miniature nuclear reactors. Instead of producing heat, they get their charge from beta particles emitted by an isotope knocking electrons from another material.

Unfortunately this doesn't exactly result in a torrential flood of power. To overcome this shortfall, the trickle of electrons could be fed into some sort of accumulator, such as a capacitor. It works, but it also adds to the overall bulk.

Given this sort of technology would be ideal for powering things you can't (or don't want to) access often – such as pacemakers or small satellites – added mass is something you'd want to avoid.

What's more, the word 'radioactive' isn't as charming as it was a century ago. Marketing a nuclear-powered pacemaker in today's world would demand more than a catchy jingle; but this new approach might help tip the scales.

The devices is made of stacks of isotope of nickel-63 sandwiched between a pair of special semiconducting diodes called a Schottky barrier.

This barrier keeps a current headed one way, a feature often used to turn alternating currents into direct ones.

Finding that the optimal thickness of each layer was just 2 micrometres, the researchers were able to maximise the voltage produced by every gram of isotope.

Nickel-63 has a half-life of just over 100 years, which in an optimised system like this adds up to 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram: ten times the specific energy of your typical electrochemical cell.

It's a significant step up from previous nickel-63 betavoltaic devices, and while it isn't quite enough to power your smart phone, it does bring it into a realm of being useful for a wide variety of tasks.

"The higher the power density of the device, the more applications it will have," says the director of the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials, Vladimir Blank.

For example, current generations of pacemaker are around 10 cubic centimetres in size, and use around 10 microwatts of power provided by a subcutaneous electrochemical battery.

Wireless charging through the skin could one day be a possibility, but for now they need to be replaced through an invasive surgical operation.

Pacemakers would be a whole lot simpler and safer if they had a power source that outlasted the patient, and a betavoltaic cell like this could be ideal.

But after an initial love affair with all things radioactive, public appeal has since flipped. Half a century of dealing with the threat of atomic war and fear of fallout has led to confusion and mistrust of the power of the isotope.

Even communicating the risks of radioactivity using innocuous comparisons does little to ease concerns over the potential impact of any material described as radioactive.

But for some, tiny nuclear powered devices would be the technology to invest in.

C-14 powered dye-sensitized betavoltaic cells

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/cc/d0cc02046j/unauth

Abstract

A dye-sensitized betavoltaic cell is developed for the first time, which utilizes radioisotopic carbon, composed of nano-sized quantum dots, and ruthenium-based dye sensitized TiO2 as electrodes. In this cell, emitted beta radiations are absorbed by the dye rather than TiO2, which resulted in enhanced performance compared to the pristine betavoltaic cell.

full paper is attached as PDF

>>14289490

Betavoltaic batteries show

That nuclear materials

Emitting radiation

Can directly produce a flow of electric current

Now imagine how much electric current

Can be produced by a reactor

That is at or near critical.

No need to produce heat, boil water, run steam turbines and spin generators

And some have noted that simply streaming photons onto a material like Uranium

Causes it to generate electricity

Think laser light beams

Suppressed technology that is now becoming unveiled

Because the forces of EVERGREENING

Have lost control to the Patriots

God did not create us to pay a monthly fee to some wealthy fat cats

For everything we need in life

The world is already ours

A gift from God

There is no need to pay somebody else to use our birthright

ABUNDANCE!

>>14289518

Inventing an Abundant Future with Foresight Thinking

https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/blog/post/inventing-abundant-future-foresight-thinking/34359

Abundance is a powerful word that promises many things.

In my previous essays for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, I have explored the role of abundance for our national future, in urban growth, in crowdsourcing, in organizational culture, in specific industries, in philanthropy, and even in the legacy of the American Dream, among other topics.

An abundance mindset moves us away from reactionary thinking and into the realm of optimism and imagining possibilities. In fact, innovation is nearly impossible without it. Those who can transcend radical pessimism and a fear of scarcity will find themselves tomorrow’s future leaders.

A growing number of researchers are showing how American leaders are adopting and embodying an abundance mindset. Historian Joel Mokyr argued recently that pessimists have it wrong, that we are in fact entering into an age of technological abundance. He observes that economists often advance notions of pessimism and “that economic growth, measured as the growth of income per capita (corrected for inflation), is not the best measure of what technological change does.”

Others are personally experiencing a new abundant economy of information. High school teacher Shawn McCusker is witnessing a fundamental shift in education. In the past, information scarcity meant we had to adopt an industrialized approach to education. Youth were mere vessels for a finite amount of information to be transmitted. With the help of mobile technology and the Internet, teachers are shifting in their classic role as an information giver to becoming a “chief analyzer, validity coach, research assistant, master differentiator, and creator of a shared learning experience.”

Indeed, in my collection of essays with the Chamber Foundation, I address the role of youth as an asset for American business in developing an abundant future. It has been frequently noted that countries with shrinking populations suffer in their innovation capabilities. Through more STEM-based education, pro-immigration policies, and family-centric work benefits, more and more leaders can reimagine the youngest generations as part of an integrated strategy for national business growth.

While population decline and shrinking birthrates may inhibit national innovation, other measures of scarcity do not necessarily imply the same. In the new book Resource Revolution, authors Stefan Heck, Matt Rogers, and Paul Carroll explore how a scarcity of natural energy resources can fuel an era of abundance in business and innovation. As Reid Hoffman writes in a recent book review, “Dealing with resource scarcity will compel companies to adopt new technologies, new manufacturing processes, and new management practices—all of which will drive innovation faster and faster.”

So how do we square scarcity with abundance? How do we advance an abundant mindset amid fundamental economic pessimism? How do we help our children actualize a future of abundance? How can leaders imagine and create products and services that open up new abundant possibilities?

We invent the future.

With a Foresight Thinking™ approach, I have empowered many global leaders to change how they perceive their innovation capabilities from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance. An abundance mindset does not deny scarcity. Rather, an abundance mindset allows for scarcity—and embraces scarcity as an opportunity.

Leaders with an abundance mindset see today’s children as tomorrow’s future leaders. They seek to create opportunities to develop their skills that will be needed for the future. Leaders with an abundance mindset know that to take their companies into the next century they need to impart this vision to their teams.

Foresight Thinking™ provides leaders ready to adopt an abundance mindset with the skills to embed these strategies in their organizations and extend actionable strategies to their teams. Through simple tools, today’s global leaders are developing a culture of intrinsic and continuous innovation through long range planning. They are revolutionizing their own company cultures by developing new strategies—and new products—for the future, moving beyond just the next pivot to imagining and creating the needs for tomorrow’s customers.

5 Ways To Go From A Scarcity To Abundance Mindset

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2020/07/12/5-ways-to-go-from-a-scarcity-to-abundance-mindset/

One of my favorite quotes is, “The mind is everything, what you think, you become.” It is so true. Mindset is a critical component of success in business, sports and life in general. There is also quantitative research to back this up. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck examined mindsets among young students. She found that children who have a growth mindset that intelligence can be developed are better able to overcome academic challenges than those who have a fixed mindset that intelligence is predetermined. Another study on middle-aged adults, completed by researchers at Yale and Miami, revealed that those with more positive beliefs around aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perceptions of aging. So basically, your mindset can prolong your life!

Another way of looking at this phenomenon is in terms of a scarcity mentality versus an abundance mindset. Stephen Covey initially coined these terms in his best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Scarcity mentality refers to people seeing life as a finite pie, so that if one person takes a big piece, that leaves less for everyone else. Most people, particularly in the corporate world, have been conditioned to have a scarcity mentality. It's no wonder when promotions and raises are scarce, resources are limited, managers hoard information, micromanagement abounds, and generally, short-term thinking is the norm. A scarcity mentality is what keeps many of us from achieving our goals. An abundance mindset refers to the paradigm that there is plenty out there for everybody.

The next question is, how can we make the shift from a scarcity to an abundance mindset?

1.) Focus on what you have

If you’ve been thinking about a career change but haven’t taken the leap, you’re probably having thoughts like, “There aren't enough good jobs out there," "I don't have enough transferrable skills," or "Who am I kidding, there’s too much competition.” These are all ideas based on scarcity, what you don’t have. A scarcity mentality sees limitations instead of opportunities. Instead, turn those around to thoughts like, "Wow, I have 25 years of marketing experience, which will be a huge asset if I decide to start a business" or "Over the last ten years, I've made great contacts which will be essential when I start networking for my next job.” If you’ve just been laid off, instead of wallowing in self-pity, think about how great it is to finally have the time (and maybe the money if you received a severance package) to think about what you REALLY want to do with the rest of your life.

2.) Surround yourself with people that have an abundance mindset

You know those people who always seem positive and see the glass as half-full instead of half-empty? Find them and start spending time with them. Attitudes rub off, and if scarcity-minded individuals surround you, you will need to counteract that to make a career change. As Tony Robbins says, "The quality of a person's life is most often a direct reflection of the expectations of their peer group." Ask yourself if you look up to the people with whom you spend time. If not, you may need to search for other people living the life you aspire to.

This is where Trump's Art Of The Deal comes to play

3.) Create win-win situations

A scarcity mindset believes that if one person wins, another loses. Try to create win-win conditions in your life to combat this manner of thinking. Look for ways for both parties to leave with a sense of accomplishment and a better feeling about the relationship. Consider practicing this in both your personal and professional life. This often means listening without judgment or censorship, fully understanding what a win-win means for both of you, and brainstorming solutions until you find one that satisfies both parties.

4.) Incorporate gratitude into your daily life

…

5.) Train your mind to recognize the possibilities

…

Ultimately, just remember what you believe is what you receive.

Abundance of Petroleum

The Mysterious Origin and Supply of Oil

By Ker Than October 10, 2005

https://www.livescience.com/9404-mysterious-origin-supply-oil.html

It runs modern society and fuels serious political tension. But where does oil really come from, and how much is left? The far-out possibilities might surprise you.

Nature has been transmuting dead life into black gold for millions of years using little more than heat, pressure and time, scientists tell us.

But with gas prices spiking more than $1 per gallon in the United States this year and some experts predicting that the end of oil is near, scientists still don't know for sure where oil comes from, how long it took to make, or how much there is.

A so-called fossil fuel, petroleum is believed by most scientists to be the transformed remains of long dead organisms. The majority of petroleum is thought to come from the fossils of plants and tiny marine organisms. Larger animals might contribute to the mix as well.

"Even some of the dinosaurs may have gotten involved in some of this," says William Thomas, a geologist at the University of Kentucky. "[Although] I think it would be quite rare and a very small and insignificant contribution."

But another theory holds that more oil was in Earth from the beginning than what's been produced by dead animals, but that we've yet to tap it.

How it works

In the leading theory, dead organic material accumulates on the bottom of oceans, riverbeds or swamps, mixing with mud and sand. Over time, more sediment piles on top and the resulting heat and pressure transforms the organic layer into a dark and waxy substance known as kerogen.

Left alone, the kerogen molecules eventually crack, breaking up into shorter and lighter molecules composed almost solely of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Depending on how liquid or gaseous this mixture is, it will turn into either petroleum or natural gas.

So how long does this process take?

Scientists aren't really sure, but they figure it's probably on the order of hundreds of thousands of years.

"It's certainly not an instantaneous process," Thomas told Live Science. "The rate at which petroleum is forming is not going to be the solution to our petroleum supplies."

The United States' latest reminder of its petroleum dependency occurred when hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Gulf of Mexico, where the majority of the country's oil platforms and refineries are located. Many analysts predicted gas prices would surge to $4 and $5 per gallon, but the fears turned out to be overblown. Many of the structures suffered only glancing blows and were operating again soon afterwards.

SPECIAL REPORT Thinking Beyond Oil

Still, the average price of regular gas nationwide is about $2.94 a gallon now, according to the American Automobile Association. It was $1.77 at the beginning of the year.

Alternative source

The idea that petroleum is formed from dead organic matter is known as the "biogenic theory" of petroleum formation and was first proposed by a Russian scientist almost 250 years ago.

In the 1950's, however, a few Russian scientists began questioning this traditional view and proposed instead that petroleum could form naturally deep inside the Earth.

This so-called "abiogenic" petroleum might seep upward through cracks formed by asteroid impacts to form underground pools, according to one hypothesis. Some geologists have suggested probing ancient impact craters in the search for oil.

Abiogenic sources of oil have been found, but never in commercially profitable amounts. The controversy isn't over whether naturally forming oil reserves exist, said Larry Nation of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. It's over how much they contribute to Earth's overall reserves and how much time and effort geologists should devote to seeking them out.

If abiogenic petroleum sources are indeed found to be abundant, it would mean Earth contains vast reserves of untapped petroleum and, since other rocky objects formed from the same raw material as Earth, that crude oil might exist on other planets or moons in the solar system, scientists say.

Both processes for making petroleum likely require thousands of years. Even if Earth does contain far more oil than currently thought, it's inevitable that reserves will one day run out. Scientists disagree sharply, however, on when that will occur. And, some say, a global crisis could begin as soon as increasing demand is greater than supply, a possibility that might be measured in years rather than decades, some analysts argue.

Timing and origin of natural gas accumulation in the Siljan impact structure, Sweden

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12728-y

Abstract

Fractured rocks of impact craters may be suitable hosts for deep microbial communities on Earth and potentially other terrestrial planets, yet direct evidence remains elusive. Here, we present a study of the largest crater of Europe, the Devonian Siljan structure, showing that impact structures can be important unexplored hosts for long-term deep microbial activity. Secondary carbonate minerals dated to 80 ± 5 to 22 ± 3 million years, and thus postdating the impact by more than 300 million years, have isotopic signatures revealing both microbial methanogenesis and anaerobic oxidation of methane in the bedrock. Hydrocarbons mobilized from matured shale source rocks were utilized by subsurface microorganisms, leading to accumulation of microbial methane mixed with a thermogenic and possibly a minor abiotic gas fraction beneath a sedimentary cap rock at the crater rim. These new insights into crater hosted gas accumulation and microbial activity have implications for understanding the astrobiological consequences of impacts.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, astrophysicist Thomas Gold put forward controversial theories of mantle-derived methane ascending through fractures to shallow crustal levels where it would accumulate and form higher hydrocarbons and petroleum12,13. Gold proposed that significant amounts of methane of mantle origin had ascended the impact-deformed basement at Siljan14, and accumulated beneath a cap rock of carbonate-sealed fractures in the upper crust. Accordingly, from the late 1980s to early 1990s, deep exploratory wells were drilled in the central plateau of exhumed Paleoproterozoic granite15, but no economic gas quantities could be established and the project was abandoned. The origin of the hydrocarbons found during the deep drillings remains disputed, not the least due to potential contamination from drilling lubricants16. Gold’s theory is now considered invalid and has been overtaken by newer models on deep hydrocarbon formation17. Abiotic methane does occur in a variety of geological settings10, including Precambrian shields, but the presence of a globally significant abiogenic source of hydrocarbons has generally been ruled out18. Recent studies of fractured Precambrian crystalline rocks have revealed deep methane occurrences of various, often complex origin, including microbial, and abiotic19. High methane concentrations in crystalline rocks are commonly associated with serpentinized ultramafic and graphite-bearing rocks10,19, but at Siljan these rock types are not present and contribution of abiotic methane to the crystalline and sedimentary rock aquifers is yet to be proven.

The abundance of supply … a new problem facing the oil…

https://al-khaleejtoday.net/business/5121942/The-abundance-of-supply-%E2%80%A6-a-new-problem-facing-the-oil.html

Despite the difficulties and challenges of recovering demand for crude oil due to the rapid casualties of the Corona pandemic, especially in the United States and Europe, oil prices achieved weekly gains, with Brent crude gaining 0.2 per cent and US crude 0.7 per cent.

The technical committee of the “OPEC +” group held its meeting Thursday in preparation for the meeting of the ministerial committee to monitor production cuts headed by Saudi Arabia and Russia, which holds its monthly meeting virtually tomorrow, Monday, to review developments in the market situation and discuss the extent of producers’ compliance with production cuts quotas, especially the compensation required from previously faltering producers.

OPEC + producers are discussing the situation of oil supplies, especially since the group had previously planned to ease production restrictions as of January 2021 by reducing about two million barrels per day from the current level of cuts of 7.7 million barrels per day, but it faces a new problem related to the abundance of supply after the increases Rapid and unpredictable Libyan production in exchange for weak demand due to the epidemic injuries and economic closure in some European countries.

In this context, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) quoted Dr. Khaled Al-Fadhel, the Kuwaiti Minister of Oil, confirming that this vital period in the oil industry remains OPEC ready to deal with and overcome many challenges, indicating that OPEC acts like a “bank.” The Global Central Oil Policy “bears all risks as an oil producer in light of the market swings while continuing to cover any current or future shortages by managing the supply in the group, which affects all over the world.”

A recent report by the organization pointed out that OPEC’s efforts to achieve balance in the oil market are in the interest of the crude oil industry as a whole, indicating that the continuous coordination between OPEC and outside it definitely shows the responsibility of producing countries to unify common policies that reduce the risks of the oil market and support the stability of the industry. In the interest of all parties, he pointed to the great support provided by the reports of the technical committee of “OPEC +” and the ministerial committee to monitor production cuts.

He stressed the importance of the 45th meeting of the Joint Technical Committee, which was held last Thursday hypothetically by video in preparation for the 23rd meeting of the joint ministerial meeting to monitor production cuts tomorrow, stressing that the two committees were mandated under the historic “Declaration of Cooperation” to review the conditions and prospects of the global oil market and monitor the levels of compliance with voluntary production adjustments. Approved by the ministerial meeting of OPEC and non-member states.

The report quoted Secretary-General Mohamed Barkindo as confirming that for more than six months, producers have worked side by side to confront the unprecedented market crisis in history, adding that the dark clouds of this epidemic are still hanging over everyone’s heads, pointing out that in some countries there are Indeed, a second wave exacerbates the human tragedy and economic uncertainty.

The Secretary-General indicated that the monthly OPEC report on the oil market expects global GDP to decline by about 4 percent this year, and then rebound in 2021 at a rate of about 4.6 percent. “Our forecast for 2020 remains oil demand at just over 90 million barrels per day, down 10 percent for this year,” the report added, quoting Barkindo.

Upon reviewing the long-term outlook for the oil market, the report clarified that OPEC believes that global demand for primary energy is rising and continuing to grow with a significant increase of 25 percent over the next 25 years, indicating that oil is expected to retain the largest share of the energy mix as it represents Close to 28 percent in 2045.

The report quoted Gabriel Lima, Minister of Hydrocarbon Resources in Equatorial Guinea, confirming that cooperation between OPEC and outside it was effective in supporting stability in the oil market and providing a strong impetus not only to the global economy, but to Equatorial Guinea’s economy, as 75 percent of the country’s revenues come from The oil sector.

He noted Equatorial Guinea’s conviction that “OPEC” will continue to play a decisive role in ensuring the stability of the global market and supporting the growth of the oil sector in all countries.

Why We'll Never Run Out of Oil

Back in 1973, some experts were predicting $100-a-barrel oil prices by the year 2000. What happened?

https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/why-well-never-run-out-of-oil

American civilization as we know it appeared to be in grave peril a quarter century ago. When Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States during the 1973 war in the Middle East, gasoline prices abruptly rose 40 percent and panic ensued. Motorists idled in long lines at gas stations, where creeping tensions led to fights and even occasional shootings. Automakers scrambled to retool their assembly lines to manufacture miserly compacts rather than gas-guzzling behemoths. Entrepreneurs poured millions into upstart solar-energy and wind-power companies. Politicians pontificated about the need for collective belt-tightening and offered income tax credits to homeowners for energy-saving insulation. Meanwhile, doomsday scenarios predicted ever-increasing shortages of fossil fuels and $100-a-barrel oil prices by the year 2000.

And it looks as though we won’t be running short by then either. “It’s hard for people who remember the seventies to accept this, but I believe we’ll never ‘run out’ of oil the way the pessimists used to think,” says Michael Lynch, a political scientist at MIT.

“People think of the Earth as having a certain amount of oil the way you might have a certain amount of money in your bank account,” adds Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who wrote the The Prize, a history of oil, and The Commanding Heights, a study of market forces and the energy industry. “But in reality, the ultimate amount available to us is determined both by economics and technology.” So even though the United States has already spent more than half its domestic oil reserves on its energy-hungry economy, the gloom-and-doom predictions of the seventies were averted because of advances in oil technology and colossal new oil finds in West Africa, Colombia, and Russia. And Roger Anderson, director of the energy research center at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, expects the future will hold more of the same. “If you pay smart people enough money,” he says, “they’ll figure out all sorts of ways to get the oil you need.”

These days a host of innovators is probing for new sources of oil underwater. Geologists have perfected seismic imaging of seafloor geology, with the hope of tapping into vast new oil fields like the one that lies beneath the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. That region could harbor a staggering 200 billion barrels — making it one of the largest oil basins ever discovered. And drilling companies can now venture well over a mile into the seafloor. Unmanned submarines make the descent, fitted with robotic arms that guide the drill into the seafloor. The Gulf of Mexico could produce a total of 15 billion barrels, the coast of Brazil 30 billion, and the coast of Angola and elsewhere along West Africa another 30 billion — totaling some 75 billion barrels. “This ultra-deepwater drilling moves into the realm of science fiction; it’s something no one ever believed would be possible,” says Lynch. By the year 2005, a fifth of the world’s oil could be recovered from such deepwater drilling.

That prize has prompted oil companies to spread the risk of discovery among themselves. Chevron, working with a consortium of other oil companies, recently drilled an exploration well in the Gulf of Mexico in waters 7,718 feet deep, a distance five times the height of the Empire State Building. The 618-foot Glomar Explorer, a former CIA vessel built during the Nixon administration to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank deep in the Pacific, was converted into a deepwater-drill ship. And instead of dropping anchor — which is impossible in such depths — the ship hovered over the spot with the help of the global positioning satellite system, which identified the latitude and longitude. First the crew lowered the pipe — 21 inches wide and weighing a million pounds — into the water through a hole in the ship. Once the drill bit reached the seafloor, it bored another 10,000 feet until it had reached down 17,000 feet — more than three miles.

But, after $20 million in work, the well is said to have come up dry. If so, that’s not unusual: about half of all prospective wells do. “But there’s lots of oil to be found at that depth,” predicts Anderson. “The big news is that it can be pulled out at a profit.” And crews should soon be able to drill in even deeper water. The Glomar Explorer can’t be used in water much deeper than 8,000 feet, because it doesn’t remain stable against the million-pound pipe. But new, larger ships are under construction, and they could lower pipe down to 10,000 feet, maybe more.

>>14289691

(continued…)

https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/why-well-never-run-out-of-oil

The Origin Of Oil

Unlike coal, which is widely distributed throughout the world, petroleum is more difficult to find and extract. Coal forms wherever plants were buried in sediments in ancient swamps, but several conditions must exist for petroleum — which includes oil and natural gas — to form.

The first is an accumulation of algae and other microorganisms in shallow seas, like those that periodically formed as the continents drifted apart and moved together again over hundreds of millions of years. Second, these microorganisms must get trapped in silt, which can happen wherever giant rivers emptied into shallow seas. “There wouldn’t be much oxygen, so they were preserved instead of rotting away,” says Roger Anderson, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. Finally, these pools of dead microorganisms must be subjected to the right conditions — say, a temperature of about 150 degrees, under pressure for a few million years. That prolonged pressure-cooking causes chemical reactions that convert proteins, carbohydrates, and other compounds in the material into crude oil. If the temperature rises to about 200 degrees, the result will be natural gas.

No matter where oil is found, it is always a sign that the area once lay at the bottom of a stagnant sea. And in places like the Salt Lake in Utah and the Black Sea, oil continues to be formed today. In the Gulf of California, near the Colorado River delta, researchers pulled up a mud sample and found it laced with petroleum — a sure indication that, somewhere down below, oil is now being formed. That may prove to be an oil-rich province someday, but don’t rush just yet to bid for exploration rights, says Anderson. “It’ll take about 10 million years before its ready.”

Even the most inhospitable locations are being made drill-friendly. A decade ago, oil was discovered in just over 200 feet of water off the coast of Newfoundland. Because icebergs flow through the area, no ordinary oil platform would work. Then engineers hired by a group of oil companies designed an iceberg-proof goliath. Its base is a huge 16-pointed star made of 650,000 tons of concrete and steel. (The points, which are supposed to deflect and break up icebergs, have not yet actually collided with one.) The price: $4 billion. The platform, called the Hibernia, is expected to recover 615 million barrels of oil over 15 to 20 years. That’s not much compared with, say, the 200 billion barrels that Saudi Arabia holds in its oil fields. But it’s a good example of how oil companies are branching out and squeezing oil from improbable places.

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Know Your Hydrocarbons

Fossil fuels — the hydrocarbons known as peat, coal, oil, and natural gas — are formed from the constituents of deeply buried and preserved organic matter. They make good fuels because the energy stored in the bonds between carbon and hydrogen is abundant and easy to release in combustion with oxygen. Some hydrocarbons are simpler than others. Coal, for example, is mostly carbon, while petroleum — which includes oil and natural gas — is mostly carbon and hydrogen. Still, crude oil is anything but simple. It’s made up of carbon molecules of many different sizes. The lightest— — with the shortest carbon chains — make good motor fuels because they are easily vaporized in engines. The heaviest hydrocarbons form viscous oil, paraffin, and asphalt. But even the longer carbon chains can be broken up chemically — in a process called cracking — to create fuels made of lighter molecules. Here are some better known hydrocarbons found in crude oil:

Methane CH4 (gas)

Ethane C2H6 (gas)

Propane C3H8 (gas)

Butane C4H10 (gas)

Pentane C5H12 (liquid, found in gasoline)

Hexane C6H14 (liquid, found in gasoline)

Heptane C7H16 (liquid, found in gasoline)

Octane C8H18 (liquid, found in gasoline)

Pentadecane C15H32 (liquid, found in kerosene and jet fuel)

Tetracosane C24H50 (liquid, found in lubricating oil)

“People think of the oil industry as this backward, nineteenth-century industry with people randomly drilling holes,” says Yergin. “But in fact, next to the military, it’s emerged as probably the biggest consumer of computer technology in the world.” Because of the way oil is distributed throughout cracks and pores in the Earth, as much as 70 percent of the oil from a typical well used to remain trapped in the ground. So anything that increases a single well’s yield can have a huge impact on production. All the big oil companies are beginning to tap hard-to-reach deposits by using 3-D seismic imaging and computer-controlled sensors to detect where pockets of oil are located in a well. Once the well is bored, drill bits can be steered sideways through the ground in search of oil.

“There’s no specific technology, no silver bullet to extend the oil supplies,” says Lynch. “But there are sure an awful lot of copper bullets lying around.”

He most promising copper bullet is new technology for turning natural gas into fuels like gasoline and diesel. For years, natural gas has been used mostly for generating electricity and fueling kitchen stoves and some home furnaces. In the Alaskan oil fields it’s pumped back into the ground to maintain pressure in the oil wells. In Nigeria and the Middle East, it’s simply flared. But such waste is soon to become a thing of the past.

Chemical engineers long ago figured out how to convert natural gas into liquid fuel, but the process was never cost-effective. “The Nazis did it in the final days of World War II because they had to,” says Anderson. The South Africans followed suit during the international boycott through the apartheid years. “No one would sell them any oil,” he notes. “They had to figure out how to make it themselves.” There was one significant drawback, however: the exorbitant cost. Twenty years ago, a natural gas plant that produced 100,000 barrels of liquid fuel per day would have cost about $100 billion to build, says Anderson. But now that companies are doing it on a large scale and with better technology, the cost of building a natural gas plant has come way, way down. Today a natural gas plant can be constructed for as little as $10 billion, bringing the total expense of producing a barrel of fuel from natural gas down to under $20.

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“That will effectively put a ceiling on the price that anyone can charge for a barrel of oil — which is something that has never existed in history,” says Anderson. “The moment anyone tries to charge above that amount, people will switch to fuels derived from natural gas.”

By most estimates, there’s enough natural gas to produce about 1.6 trillion barrels of oil. Most of that gas probably will not be converted to oil. Still, the figure offers a hint at the extent of the world’s reserves: more than all the petroleum ever consumed — roughly 830 billion barrels — and enough to fuel the world for some 60 years at current rates of consumption. And there may be far more. John Edwards, a former Shell geologist and now an adjunct geology professor at the University of Colorado, believes that underwater deposits of another form of natural gas could raise the total to 5 trillion barrels.

In many parts of the world, the seafloor contains natural gas trapped inside ice crystals called hydrates. The hydrates can be extracted by lowering a pipe into the ground and drawing up a core of mud and crystals. The problem is that unless the core is properly contained, the change in pressure and temperature at the surface can cause it to explode, says Edwards. But that isn’t stopping the Japanese, who plan to drill and see if it is feasible to extract the fuel. The payoff could be huge. “There’s at least again as much natural gas trapped in hydrates as has already been discovered, and probably more,” he says.

Miles of Methane

The abundance of natural gas could keep the car culture rolling for years. Oil companies are coming up with strategies to convert natural gas into liquid fuels like gasoline and home heating oil — at prices below $20 a barrel.

Chemically known as methane, natural gas is among the simplest molecules on Earth: a single carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Turning it into a liquid requires some coaxing. First, the chemists release the hydrogen from its bonds with carbon by mixing methane with oxygen, throwing in a catalyst, and turning up the heat. The carbon atoms then form new bonds with the electron-hungry oxygen, creating a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, called synthesis gas. That gas becomes a building block for the larger molecules of liquid fuels.

The next step involves another chemical process to combine the carbon monoxide and hydrogen of the synthesis gas into a complex fuel like gasoline (which contains hydrocarbons with as many as eight carbon atoms) or heavier products such as kerosene, diesel, and lubricating oil. The goal is to create strings of carbon that are just the right length and reactive enough to burn easily in engines. Because these larger molecules have a higher boiling point than natural gas, they exist as a liquid. “The trick is to adjust the process so you don’t get a lot of waxes, which have many carbon atoms per molecule and are very, very heavy,” says Safaa Fouda, a chemical engineer of the CANMET Energy Technology Center in Ontario, Canada.

Fuels derived from natural gas burn more cleanly than those derived from crude oil because they don’t contain components like nitrogen, sulfur, or carbon arranged in rings, which are notorious air pollutants. The only thing that can’t be produced from natural gas is asphalt, which is the heavy residue left at the end of the crude-oil refining process.

Environmentalists once hoped for oil shortages to cut carbon dioxide emissions, but that no longer seems likely. Only voluntary restrictions or, more likely, taxes on fossil-fuel consumption and incentives for developing alternative fuels will reduce emissions.

Indeed, the perfect solution already exists: a carbon-free fuel cell that strips combustible hydrogen from a molecule like water or alcohol and yields only water when it is burned. But the cost of the technology remains prohibitive. And in a world swimming in oil, few companies and governments bother to spend big on alternative fuel technologies. Even if they did, the addiction to cheap oil would most likely persist.

“We could make the switch in fuels quite easily, but the switch in infrastructure would be far more difficult,” says Edwards. The world is wired for oil. “We’ve got hundreds of thousands of petrol stations around the world. The switch, when it comes, is going to be slow. And it’s sure not going to be voluntary.” With fossil-fuel consumption projected to grow, and grow, and grow, the question isn’t when are we going to run out of oil, says Arthur T. Andersen, a former director of the division of energy and international analysis at the U.S. Department of Energy. “It’s what are we going to do about the greenhouse effect?”

In light of this, the gravest prediction yet regarding the future of oil may not be its impending shortfall but its unimaginable bounty.