Scott Tinker
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Scott Tinker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes. So, well, and you've got to do fracking, right? Let me defend that. You know, you can't go out there like the wild west. Fracking is a major industrial operation. It is. You're lining up big trucks around a hole, putting a bunch of water under pressure. You're producing oil and gas. You've got to do it right.
And it's regulated. Occasionally there's a bad actor. So what I'm saying here, remember we have 95% still left in the US, very hard to get a lot of it out technologically, but we'll get more. Middle East and Russia haven't even started to release that because the oil they sell to the world's markets today is cheaper. So the arbitrage is better.
It depends on the fields, and I've been there many times. It depends on the fields. But yeah, it's an incredible... There's lots of stories we won't go into, but they're just beautiful reservoirs. Now, some of them are getting kind of old. And the oil doesn't last forever. Remember that leaked off, but they still have their source rocks.
So I don't want to give people the impression that oil and natural gas are forever. They're not. They're naturally formed. They're not replaceable in human time scales because it took millions of years to cook those plants. But there's a lot of resource still left.
Not done.
They're not taken dry. We leave a bunch of oil and gas behind in shale and in conventional reservoirs. Think of your driveway, your cement driveway, when you spill a little oil on there. Can you get it out? It's stuck in that limestone. That's just limestone. Cement is limestone. It's stuck forever. It sticks to the rock. And that's what secondary and tertiary recovery processes do.
They put in carbon dioxide, ironically, CO2 floods. And you can, it changes the way the oil and the rock interact. It's called wettability and releases more oil. So there's these enhanced, but you're putting something kind of, it costs money, just like the bolted on coal. It's expensive. So I'm putting money in the ground to get more oil out.
I can always get more oil out, but I don't always get more money out. So the things you put in have to be cheaper than the value of the oil that you produce.
We don't run out of commodities. Why? something better comes along. You described it. The supply demand economics kick in and we say, well, holy crap. We'll switch. Let's invent something better. And there we go.
Incredibly complicated. And you see the technological uses of these things with energy always changing. I was riding over here today and there's this autonomous car just driving along with us, you know, and so... you don't run out of oil, it becomes too expensive. And back to what we talked about earlier, we start using it for those things that only it can uniquely do. Yeah, right.
Instead of transportation and burning it, Well, maybe we use hybrids or maybe we use fuel cells, hydrogen. There's a lot of hydrogen in the world. You gotta make it, you gotta split the water.
You take nuclear, you can split the water molecule, hydrolysis essentially, you can split the methane molecule easier, energetically cheaper, and that's called steam reforming. So I'd make hydrogen and I can put it in a fuel cell and drive my cars. So this will, it's economics. Which one's more affordable today? There's optionality out there in the future. We're not gonna run out of oil.
And I haven't even talked about one important source of, two important source of natural gas. One is called hydrates. I don't know if you've heard of natural gas.
Oceanic and permafrost. You're freezing, they're called clathrates, you're freezing gas molecules. And you're not freezing molecules, you're locking them up in ice. In the deep ocean floor, because it's cold and pressure and dark, and in the permafrost, there's a plethora of methane locked up in ice. They're called hydrates. I don't know if you've heard of them.
In the ocean and up in the permafrost.
It's the ice, yeah, that's a decent analogy. It's the ice equivalent of shale rock. You've locked this methane in. How much of that is there? It's bigger than anything we've talked about.
They're expensive. Right. So I don't want your listener to say, oh, well, why don't we go do that?
It doesn't matter if you get rich enough. If you get rich enough and with technology, the cost comes down. And so when you need that thing, there it is.
And then there's this crazy thing. And I, myself... I like to say when I'm completely thought something that was completely wrong, which is often, there was a guy named Thomas Golem and he talked about abiogenic gas, abiotic gas, not from organics.
Russian guy.
Showing 141–160 of 207 · page 8 of 11
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