My poppa was a geologist and I've done a lot of reading on this - deep hydrocarbons.

I find it hilarious when people actually believe oil could be coming from dinosaurs (nobody said that here, but the kids get that stuff).  What, the entire earth was covered with dinosaurs 250 feet deep?

The Russians have proven - not oil per se - but vast amounts of mineral methane in the very deep rock (e.g. 1.5 miles down and more) is of an inorganic origin.

That said, the original posters also had a point.  Recovering that resource is uneconomic.  It's super deep and spread out.

The mechanism is that over hundreds of millions of years, the methane is catalysed into polymerising into the longer chains we know (pentane, octane, decane etc etc).  Through fractional distillation it is gathered into regions of oil.  That is the oil we have today.

Interestingly, the process is the same for gold, although in this case the gold is in solution in very hot water and salts.  Fractional distillation (a very interesting process if you have time to check it out) very slowly concentrates substances in a back and forth solution/dissolution or melt/solidify process.  It is one of the ways solid gold is purified, and silicon for chips.

So the original posters are also correct in that we are at peak oil.  Our economies run on liquid petroleum products, and the methane in the deep earth is unlikely to do it for us.

I'm not a nuclear guy - the IEEE (engineer's association) pointed out that the economics of decommissioning a nuclear plant make it the most expensive form of energy possible.  It's only "nearly free" if you don't have to pay to clean up (not that anyone has ever found a credible non-temporary solution to that either).  It's like saying driving a car is cheap - based on the idea that the roads are free.  But of course general taxpayers - including bus-only riders - pay for the roads.

A few square miles of solar + storage would do the entire US. Yes, expensive, but ...

Imagine for 5 seconds if the US had put $1 trillion into solar energy instead of killing 1 million innocent people.  They'd still have $1 trillion left over to make some kind of pale facsimile to Canadian health care.

Okay, enough of that.   Kodiak.  I'm thinking about the long time period for drilling - e.g. two years.  I think the SP once good news comes out (assuming) will be in the $4 range again.  I'm going travelling, so I trust all of you to keep it in a healthy range while I'm gone!