Oil Crisis

Its not irrelevant at all,.Oil companies jealously gaurd their data on reserves and supply. They have shareholders greed to feed. Its the vaiabilty of getting those reseves out of the ground at a profit that drives them. They won't open up a new field when oils at 20 bucks a barrel will they? Like i said all of a sudden a new field is going to open up off the west of Scotland- just when the price per barrel is sky high. I have a lot of friends in the oil game in Stavanger ,Norway. Thats were my 50-100 year figure came from

 

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Ok i was reading like a few sites on google about alternate resources for power and their just aren't any that are good enough. When we do run out of oil we will need oil to try to find a new resource and stuff so we can become self reliant on the new source. arg im not sure what im trying to get it. The oil mess is alot bigger of a problem then what people think and will most likely have fare more great devistating efffects.

 

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True. I think we are lucky enough to be living in the golden age of fossil fuels. Adversity is a great spur to invention. When i notice oil companies seriously developing alternative fuels and spending vast amounts of cash on the problem, then i think we are at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels

 

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I don't know where you acquired this quaint idea. Oil companies are secretive about many aspects of their business, no more so than when in the exploration phase of their activities. Reserves are however very much a matter of public record. That's how they satisfy governments, bankers and shareholders. Witness the recent debacle with Royal Dutch/Shell when they got it wrong.

And, your point? [Do you want them to work at a loss. If you have any kind of pension arrangement you are one of the shareholders.] That doesn't alter the fact that oil/gas consumption is driven by demand. The demand, as with all well behaving capitalist commodities, varies somewhat with price. Nevertheless the demand is such that the production capacity is going to peak within the next ten to twenty years. Supplies will last well beyond that, but the problems begin when demand exceeds supply and that occurs soon after production peaks.

I believe you are refering to the Rosabank/Lochnagar discovery by ChevronTexaco. I want to focus on two phrases you have used:
all of a sudden and going to open up.

I do not have to hand the date when ChevronTexaco acquired this acreage, but typically they will have had his structure identified for several years from seismic profiles. Outline planning likely took place last year, then moved into a detailed phase at the start of the year when drilling budgets had been allocated. The well spudded in July and drilled tight hole - that's the jealously guarded part of your post - let no one know what you have found or any problems you are having. It reached total depth in August. The data were analysed by CT's reservoir engineers, and the discovery was announced at the start of December.
Please tell me what in that normal sequence of events is all of a sudden? In what way is it just when the oil price is sky high.

So, if the all of a sudden appearance of this field is tied to the high oil price CT must be raking it in. Of course not. The field will open up sometime late next year, after one or two further wells are drilled, and sub-sea completions are installed.

That's a good figure for the end of major oil production, but as I have tried to explain it is the peak production timing that is important. It is also a good figure for peak production time in Norway, [They are blessed with very large reserves, which they are developing in a very intelligent and controlled manner.] but not globally.

slotty, I am not trying to pick a fight with you, and I note my opening post was a trifle aggressive. (Apologies for that.) However, I feel this is a topic I know a little about and consequently believe you are mistaken in regard to the points I have addressed.
(As a concillatory gesture I offer a recommendation: if you are visiting your Stavanger friends get them to take you the car park diagonally behind the Hotel Victoria - there is an excellent Thai restaurant there. Bon appetit.)

 

This debate seems to have only looked at one side so far. The other side is that we dont need to consume nearly as much energy as we do today. We live in an era of gross inefficiency.

American car gas consumption figures are bordering on obscene by european standards for example. And even here in Europe average car mpg is very far behind what it could be.

A good portion of air conditioning can be replaced by thermostatic whole house fans, plant shading etc.

Much house heating can be provided by solar flat panel space heating (which has excellant payback)

Filament bulbs can be replaced by fl and cfl at about 4x the efficiency - most domestic lighting is still filament.

Heating costs can be reduced slightly by programmable thermostats, or more significantly by a low-spec computer/pir setup that watches the house and works out when heat will be needed in each room.

Heating cost can also be cut by continuing with programs of insulating existing housing, and increasing new build insulation requirements.

Refrigeration energy use can be cut by thicker insulation and replacing old and inefficienct machines.

We fly fresh fruit in from around the world, with gross unnecessary energy use.

We fly when we can take the ferry.

We go to work when some jobs can be done from home.


And on and on and on and on and on - we live in a world of energy excess, and our actions reflect that. As energy prices steadily increase, habits will improve, because they have to.

Of course there will be a price for this: greater input into each design to maximise efficiency, more control technology to cut energy use, and so on.

We're already seeing this increase in efficiency today, but as time goes by it will become much more serious and aggressive, and many very wasteful habits today will be cut right back.


Lava

 

Another side again is that technology will continue to move ahead providing new lower cost ways to do things, so that less overall energy willl be needed to perform the same functions. Again this already happens, but there is lots of room for improvement.

Take washing machines as an example.

100 years ago the standard clothes washer was a top loading barrel, the wash water was boiling hot, and the detergent was green soap.

40 years ago it was still a top loading barrel, now turned electrically, but used new detergents that no longer required boiling hot washing. 60C was enough.

30 years ago in europe the standard was the front loading machine, in which the clothes are not submerged in water. They are just dipped into a puddle of water each time the drum turns. Result: far less water use and thus energy use to heat it.

(I dont know) years ago, biological detergents came along, allowing lower wash temps, typically 40C instead of 60.

In the 90s, machines have been developed with much smaller water puddles, again cutting energy use substantially. These are the machines we use today, in europe, and use a small fraction of the energy that was once used. America still mostly uses outdated toploader technology, which consumes many times the quantity of water and electricity as our machines.

But even our modern european machines are by no means cutting edge. Cutting edge machines use no water puddle at all, every drop that comes off the clothes is sprayed back onto them, so the only water used is that held in the clothes themselves during the washing. These machines are still rare, but once patents expire I expect they will likely take over.

Note that with such small quantities of water use it becomes possible to wash in /cold/ water first, then wash hotter only as and when needed. Future machines should be able to make such decisions for themselves by measuring waste water clarity, or sniffing the clothes. My own experiements have shown that cold wahsing is satisfactory in a lot of cases, though by no means all.

Who knows what the future further ahead will hold. Perhaps new or modified fibres that will wash clean in cold water, perhaps cold wash detergents, perhaps vibration replacing drum rotation (20w instead of 200w), perhaps clothes that oxidise and shed dirt by themselves when hung in the sun like todays catalytic ovens, who knows.

In other words, for a given standard of living we will use less energy in future.


Lava

 

If you would like to consider a different approach to understanding this issue go here http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tg21/ , scroll down and read some of Mr. Golds' work. Very interesting.

 

Nope, Mr Gold looks like another of those "Oil is formed at depth and oil fields will recharge themselves" cranks.
The 80 barrels from out of a well drilled in Sweden was so little as to be worthless, and is not regarded by most geologists as proving anything.

 

I don't think you can categorise someone of Gold's pedigree, lifetime work, and intellect, as a crank. Let's just say he is wrong, along with half the Russian reservoir engineers.

Edit: Well, of course you can . Let's say we probably shouldn't.

 

He had plenty of skeptics regarding his theory about radio signals from space too but he was proved right on that. I know that doesn't mean he is right concerning the oil question but I have a difficult time simply dismissing his writtings about oils origin.

 

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dammit, I'm doign it again. Its feeling now like my entire brain has gone on holiday.
OK, so Gold isn't totally a crank, just wrong. I read somewhere really convincing about why he and his ilk were wrong, but cant remember where.

 

I'd like to read that guthrie if you can remember where to find it. Gold a total crank? I don't hardly think so although he certainly could be wrong on this but who knows at this time. I think if truth be told the jury is out on this one. I know most of you seem to be convinced allready that he is wrong , I'm not ready to give my final answer yet and I find his theory interesting.

 

I'll have a look. I first heard of the abiogenic theory on sciforums a year or two ago. I did a couple of geology modules at uni, and thought the theory seemed vaguely plausible, then I read some more and decided it was bunk.

 

HHmmm, I cant find what I was looking for, but enough otehr stuff surfaces to suggest that Gold (Now apparently deceased) was one of those intelligent obsessive types, who was often right, but also often catastrophically wrong:

http://mainlymartian.blogs.com/semijournal/2004/06/tommy_gold.html
"But he isn't always right. In the 1940s, early in his career, Gold developed the idea of a "steady-state universe" with Herman Bondi and Fred Hoyle, when the three of them left their wartime jobs in the British Admiralty and made their way back to Cambridge. (Bondi and Gold, both Viennese, had met as refugees, sleeping on the concrete floor of a British internment camp before their mathematical talents were pressed into service on naval radar programs.) The hypothesis has now been almost completely rejected in favor of the big bang theory. But for a while the steady-state idea, in which expansion was eternal and creation continuous, was the most satisfying scientific explanation of the universe around. Though cosmologists now think it wrong, few think it stupid.

"Some Gold interventions, however, don't look so impressive in hindsight. His suggestion that the moon might be deeply covered by very fine dust -- an idea he insists was misrepresented by academic enemies -- has been widely dismissed since the Apollo landings. (Gold now thinks the moon, too, may well have a deep biosphere - as may many other bodies in the solar system.) And his ideas about hydrocarbons remain widely disputed."

He was however correct on:
""If a maverick theory of oil were all there was to the Tommy Gold story, he could easily be dismissed as a crank. But he is an enormously respected physicist. When the first radio astronomers started seeing radio sources in the sky, they thought they were unusual stars; from the early 1950s onward, Gold championed the idea that they were actually distant galaxies, and after a long and acrimonious dispute, he was shown to be right. Later, in the 1960s, a new sort of radio source was detected in the skies, one that flashed on and off regularly. Gold rushed into print with the idea that these pulsars were astrophysical oddities called neutron stars, the existence of which had been predicted in the 1930s but had never been seen. Many of his colleagues thought the idea outrageous. It was right on the money."

So, a complex man. But obviously inordinately prey to hobby horses:
""Everyone now thinks of Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Iran and Iraq as being the oil region of the world. There is no feature that the geology or the topography of this entire large region has in common, and that would give any hint why it would all be oil and gas rich."
A: it is obvious from such a statement that Thomas Gold, an astronomer, does not know anything about geochemistry and oil exploration.
The source-rocks of the Arabo-Iranian Mega-Petroleum System (Laherrère J.H., Perrodon A., Demaison G. 1994 "Undiscovered Petroleum Potential" Petroconsultants report -383p - March) are described as follows:
All these source-rocks are almost entirely characterized by type II Kerogen, with often more than 10% TOC and high SPI: 14 t HC/m3 for the Hanifa-Nadrya Upper Jurassic sourcerocks of Saudi Arabia (Demaison and Huizinga 1991). Other Cretaceous source-rocks are of comparable quality. These organic-rich sediments spread over large surfaces, more than 400 km2 for Jurassic formations, and are within the oil window over much of the region. So the amount of hydrocarbons generated is around 5.6 Ttoe = 40 Tboe."
http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/102104_no_free_pt1.shtml

On the other hand, you also have this:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0405930101v1?view=abstract
"Generation of methane in the Earth's mantle: In situ high pressure-temperature measurements of carbonate reduction"

 

Thanks for the links guthrie. I have been reading some of the information and trying my best to digest it with my untrained brain. At this time I remain unconvinced that Gold is wrong as I am unconvinced that he is right also. It seems to me that some of the points used to counter Golds theories are based on assumptions drawn from present day understanding of the questions and so are still open to some debate. I find it all quite interesting but somewhat draining also. I will continue to read up.

 

Here's a basic overview of the issue from the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC).

M. King Hubbert

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Born in the Texas oil patch and educated at the University of Chicago, Hubbert observed that the production histories of most oilfields follow a similar pattern. Output climbs slowly after discovery, rises steeply once the reservoir is mapped, slows during the peak-production years, and then declines steeply once the easy-to-get oil is gone. When plotted on a graph, this looks like a bell curve.

Hubbert poured his own most productive years into directing research for Shell Oil, where he knew that the discovery of new U.S. oilfields had peaked in the 1930s. Hubbert factored this data into his bell-curve model, and predicted in 1956 that production of crude oil in the contiguous 48 states would peak sometime between 1966 and 1972. The oil industry dismissed his prediction and discredited his work.

U.S. crude oil production peaked in 1970, and has fallen steeply ever since.

Hubbert became a legend, and his prediction became known as "Hubbert's Peak." In the past decade – as the rate of discovery of worldwide oil reserves has slowed to a trickle – a flood of Hubbert followers have tackled the obvious question: When will global production peak?

Peak Oil

When the last oil well runs dry

Just as certain as death and taxes is the knowledge that we shall one day be forced to learn to live without oil.

Exactly when that day will dawn nobody knows, but people in middle age today can probably expect to be here for it.

It has come apparent that we are headed off the plateau going down the arc of decline on the global production curve. What this means is that from now on, every barrel of oil will be harder to get to, more expensive and energy intensive to extract, and more costly to refine.

Oil in the ground isn't like gas in the tank of your car. With a car, you can drive it until you get to the last drops. With oil, you have a certain quantity that you can extract economically (known in the industry as 'proven reserves'), and then after that the well will no longer be viable for extraction since it will become what's known as an 'energy sink' and require more fuel to pump out the oil than you actually get.

There is light oil, and then there is heavy oil. The light surface crude is what we have been running off of this entire time. The heavy crude settles to the bottom of the well, is hard to feasibly recover if at all possible, and is harder and more costly to process and refine. The vast majority of all heavy crude is deemed 'unrecoverable' because its an energy sink.

Right now we are headed to the downslope of the bell curve of oil production and will begin riding the arc of decline. Oil production levels will drop, therefore there will be less energy available to do work, and therefore everything will shrink along with it.

I am sure most if not all of you are familiar with the fundamental dynamics of supply and demand. Demand for oil has done nothing but gone up since it's inception, with the notable exception of the oil shock of the 70's where OPEC nations refused to sell the U.S. oil in protest of our involvement in the Yom Kippur war. During the oil shock, demand went down for the first time in history and fuel prices skyrocketed exponentially. Back then we had other swing oil producers such as Venesuela to help fill in some of the gap and supply us with a percentage of our oil requirements. After production decline, there will be no such producers.

China's appetite for Canadian oil derives from its own insatiable domestic energy demand, which sent their oil imports soaring 40 percent in 2004. Yeah, 40% increase in demand in 1 year. That's an insane level of growth. In a world with oil on decline, the last thing we need is that kind of consumption. China is now the #2 consumer of oil in the world, second only to the US. India is trying to expand it's economy and is demaning more oil as well.

So as you can see, we clearly have a dillema on our hands. Increasing demand with decreasing supply. But that is only the beginning.

Signs

For this section I will cite relevant info from the topic Canary in a Coalmine

In the practice of mining, there is a story about miners placing a canary in the mineshaft to test the safety of its atmosphere. If the bird lives, the air is breathable and you're probably going to be okay. If the bird dies, get out quick. In today's world, the airline industry is akin to that figurative canary in the mineshaft. I think the peak oil crisis, as it pertains to the economy, will start here. I believe it has already begun.

Airline's bankruptcy filing cites higher fuel costs

Jet fuel prices, which are about 16 percent of airline costs, experienced a 52% surge in the last 12 months. Many companies use financial trading strategies that hedge their fuel expenses and, where possible, slap fuel surcharges on customers' bills. Hedging effectively enables them to lock in prearranged prices for fuel, so that they are not hurt if prices jump above those levels. Some distressed airlines, needing the money for other expenses, have less than half of their fuel requirements hedged, leaving them more vulnerable to the high market prices. Delta has no hedges in place, and in the second quarter its fuel costs soared 54% from a year earlier.

The International Air Transport Association estimates a $1 per barrel rise in jet-fuel prices costs the airline industry $1 billion per year. Several of the large, conventional carriers such as United Airlines and Delta, already were in dire financial straits before this year. United, the nation's second-largest airline, has been operating under court-supervised bankruptcy protection since 2002. United sought a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the government, and was turned down. Arlington-based US Airways, which already received a $1 billion loan guarantee, says it is trying to avoid a return to bankruptcy. Delta has said bankruptcy is an option unless it can eliminate its losses.

Executive Travel Associates

The U.S. airlines have pleaded for President Bush to stop diverting oil from the market to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at a time of record jet-fuel prices. Any investor will tell you that you buy low, sell high. Unfortunately, the government is doing just the opposite by accelerating the rate at which it's filling the SPR at a time when oil prices are abnormally high. Well, we know why they are doing that, the price is low compared to what it will be.

Opec urges Bush to release oil from reserve

When the largest petoleum exporting countries in the entire world are telling you to fall back on your emergency supplies, that's a major red flag.

Soaring Fuel Costs Undermining Airlines

'Fiscal timebomb' for US airlines

For U.S. airlines to break even, oil prices must remain below $31 a barrel.

Canadian natural gas reserves continue to fall despite record drilling activity

Canada was responsible for 15% of our natural gas, which is half of their production. Well they recently peaked and cut us off.

Evidence

Opec agrees to cut oil production

That was the first production cut

Saudis reduce oil production

And here was the second one at a time of high prices and an high in demand. They're just cutting into profits now. Anything over $35 a barrel is bankroll.

International Energy Agency accepts Peak Oil

Well, I hate to say, the investments aren't being made, and with Ghawar, Saudi Arabia's dominany oil field and the biggest in the world, hitting declining production with seawater cut rates of 50% and growing, we're not going to have until 2030. It's going to hit much sooner than that. Look for Peak Oil to begin knocking at the door by the end of 2005/06 when Ghawar dies off and Saudi Arabia peaks as an oil province. They'll have to then accellerate production on all the rest of their wells, wells that are well past their prime and are already over the 50 year life expectancy and due to peak soon, to make up for some of the lost slack.

US Dept of Energy office supports Peak Oil theory

BP Executive Says World Oil Output To Peak 2010 - 2020. Lord Browne Tries To Calm Fears As Saudi Insider Issues Warning

Trouble in the World's Largest Oil Field-Ghawar

^From Geologist Glenn Morton.

It turns out that they have been flooding the wells on Saudi Arabia. For some time now, it would appear.

Remember these facts:

- Ghawar supplies 5.5% of worlds daily oil production.

- Ghawar supplies up to 70% of Saudi daily oil production.

- The average life of an oil well is 50 years. Ghawar started producing in 1951. Look at the numbers.

- Ghawar is declining production at 8% per year and that number is increasing every year. Ghawar production numbers could drop off a cliff any month now due to water injection.

- In 1975, estimated ultimate recovery from the field would be 60 billion barrels. Cumulative production from the field so far is 55 billion barrels.

Oil & Gas

An oil well's average lifespan is 50 years. Most of Saudi Arabia's largest producing oil fields could collapse at any time.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Ghawar has peaked. It peaked 2 decades ago, it started declining, and they started to inject water to delay the decline and maintain production, increasing the overall recovery rate from about 60% to now, which is so far 88%.

The fact is, the Ghawar reserve estimate is 60 billion barrels, so far they've produced around 55 billion. Either some massive shock is coming very soon, or the reserve estimate was wrong, and it's actually larger than stated. I think the latter can be ruled out by virtue of the fact that most the oil is turning to cut -- the 7 million barrels of seawater per day they've been flooding the wells with to raise the oil.

Ghawar is in terminal decline and nearing death.

When Ghawar goes offline, that's it. It's officially happened then. Saudi Arabia will have peaked as an oil province, and therefore categorically the world itself will have peaked.

Assuming that the ultimate recovery figure for Ghawar is 60 billion barrels, then it should fail in late 2006/early 2007 if oil continues to be extracted at 1.8 billion barrels a year. Unless another Ghawar or several North Sea-sized oil fields are up and running, the global economy will be slammed into a recession.

When that happens, I predict Peak Oil and its implications will be seared into the mainstream public consciousness, the same way satelite photos showing the Antartic ozone hole highlighted the threat of ozone depletion. The effect of Ghawar's demise will be immediate and significant. No amount of spin can cover up a sudden 70% drop in Saudi production.

When Ghawar shuts down, the other wells will be extracted from much faster in an effort to pick up some of the slack since the big daddy king of Saudi Arabia went belly-up. That is going to accelerate depletion on these already mature wells, and the individual wells will be headed toward their peak capacities even faster, assuming they aren't already there, and then terminally decline.

When these other wells start terminally declining, then Saudi Arabia will cease to become a swing oil producer altogether. If you've been following along, it's necessary for me to illustrate the ramifications of that happening.

Where's the Crude?

"So where is the remaining oil?" you may ask.

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65 percent of the remaining oil is in the Persian Gulf. Whoever controls that region militarily controls the vast majority of the planets dwindling supplies, and in turn controls the world and the global economy. With the coming oil crisis, politicians will have to have some way of obtaining more of it to defend their countries from stagflation.

There's obviously a tremendous vested interest in controlling those reserves, a-la Carter doctrine (The oil in the Middle East is of strategic importance to the U.S. and we will use our military to defend our access to it).

Alternatives

Alternatives to Oil: Fuels of the Future or Cruel Hoaxes?

The more and more you research this issue, the more you see that there is no combination of alternative fules or energies that are going to allow us to run things the way we are running them now and go about our merry way.

Worst Case Scenario

I'm pretty skeptical of the resources we're going to have to convert our energy systems, even if we do find some renewable source that's as cheap, easy, and efficient as fossil fuels. Here we were in this tremendously affluent and oil-rich period, and we didn't invest in the future. It's a little late for that now. We've gone far too long even addressing the issue. This is clearly on the third rail of politics - noone wants to touch it. The political will to confront energy depletion is nonexistent. There is a tremendous opposition at the political level to the idea of conveying the need to change lifestyles.

In America, we grew up with the idea that the American way of life was non-negotiable. Consuming resources at a frenzied pace has become a perfectly normal thing, and it's become pretty much accepted that this sort of lifestyle arrangement is what we should expect for our children and our children's children. People don't think about energy, it's just something they take for granted and pay a bill for monthly. But when you start to look at the details and analyze the scientific geologic data and figures like the energy advisor to the President: Matthew Simmons and the rest of the geologists and scientists have been doing, the reality of the situation is made manifest. This is not a sustainable form of living and it can't last much longer.

The day of plentiful cheap energy was a very prosperous era, and it had a good 7 decade run, but the big money days are gradually going to draw to a close unless we have some unprecedented scientific breakthrough like the advent of sustained cold fusion, which still hasn't made much progress into becoming a reality.

We don't practice things like crop rotation anymore due to petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.

The Green Revolution, which brought along all of that and exploded the quantity of food we could grow, is responsible for the world population numbers as they are today.

Without petrochemicals, the progress of the Green Revolution is reversed and we go back to old production capacity at best.

So what happens to billions of people when food production can't sustain the population? Geologist Glenn Morton responded with the following:

In other words, A massive die-off. One which is usually prefaced by turbulent political instability, rioting, looting, and impromptu survival behavior.

If this issue doesn't get confronted, The suburbs are going to become the graveyards of the 21'st century. Everything that comes into the suburbs is produced somewhere else and transported to them, all thanks to cheap oil. The Suburbs have little to no prospects as self-sustaining environments. Especially cul-de-sac subdivisions.

What Can We Do?

Alternative energy sources are going to be small lifeboats at best. We're going to have to downscale everything we do in this country. Economies are going to have to take place on the local level. Energy grids are going to have to be compartmentalized so that if there's an energy crisis, it's a problem for your village and not the problem for your entire country.

Food production and distribution will have to take place locally. Food production will become a lot more labor intensive and people are going to be more involved in the production of what the consume. People will have to band together for survival.

These kinds of changes are going to have to be made, whether we like SUV's or not. People are going to have to take initiative and prepare for tough times. That's the only way the human race is going to survive.

 

There ya go Slotty spoken truly that's a fact!.

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My father owned an oil company in Texas, I've worked in the oil fields for several years, when Regan came to office and our industry whent to shit, my dad was very pist off. He claimed we were just barely scratching the surface. He should know he hired many ecologists that seem to have had a nose for finding the black gold. My father eventually moved to Saudi Arabia, and worked there for the rest of his life till he died.

It's all political motivated, companies make billions of dollars soaring up the prices on crude, claiming that the cost of excavation, exploration, etc... what have you is too high, BS!! is all BS these sob's are making billions on your ingnorance. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the plannet and all and we should also find alternative fuel. But if I were to invent an automobil that run on water I would be killed, mained and silenced to keep the crude companies making their fucking billions!!.

Godless.

 

Texas used to be the oil capital of the U.S.. Oil in Texas was cheaper than drinking water. So what happened?

The United States peaked as an oil province, just like Dr. M. King Hubbert predicted would happen, and has been producing less and less oil since then.

All oil, whether it's a single well, a country, or the planet as a whole follows a bell-curve. When you drill your first well if you hit high pressure you get a gusher. You drill more into the well, the pressure table goes down. So you extract more and more of the oil out until you hit this peak, or plateau. Once that happens then you go into what's known as the arc of decline where you produce less and less until finally it takes more energy to pull oil out of the ground than you are getting back, and you are in what's known as an energy sink because and you suspend operations at that area and look for a new source.

Well the U.S. is all tapped out. Sure we still have some oil, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be.

If you go back and read the U.S. petroleum history, the thing that Hubbert critics said with glee is "Remember that old guy Hubbert that said we were going to run out of oil? We've never produced more oil than this year!" which was in 1970, the year we peaked.

Sure the oil companies make their money, but there is a real problem on the geologic level with oil and natural gas. It is important to understand that there is a growing deficit between discovery and demand. We consume 4 barrels of oil for every 1 we find.I'll elaborate.

This figure shows the growing gap between discovery and consumption as we move from surplus to deficit. The yellow curve shows exploration drilling:

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Note that the level of drilling activity barely affects the discovery trend.

Another big source of misinformation are oil reserve claims. The only figures we have stating the reserves of oil in most the Saudi wells are the figures they give us. The books on oil in Saudi Arabia are as cooked as the books at Enron. OPEC law states that Saudi Arabia is immune to auditing, so we really don't know if their figures are correct. In fact, there is good reason to suspect otherwise, because back in the late 70's to early 80's when new OPEC laws were formed, stating that a country could increase it's rate of production commensurate with it's proven oil reserves, all of a sudden out of nowhere they started reporting additional reserves of 50 to 100 percent, and it wasn't related to any major oil finds. They had a vested interest to report increased reserves so they could expand market share. The reserve statements are political and not scientific, since they are unsubstantiated and there is nothing to corroborate their radical increase claims.

That was their trick. It did get them bigger exports and hence more money, but it also accellerated the depletion.

BP Reserves

This demonstrates how BP reports reserves, failing to backdate the revisions. It has misled many analysts. The large increases in the late 1980s were simply due to the OPEC quota wars. Nothing was actually added, as I will explain.

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Spurious Revisions

I should explain this large increase in greater detail.

· Kuwait added 50% in 1985 to increase its OPEC quota, which was based partly on reserves. No corresponding new discoveries had been made. Nothing particular changed in the reservoir.

· Venezuela doubled its reserves in 1987 by the inclusion of large deposits of heavy oil that had been known for years.

· It forced the other OPEC countries to retaliate with huge increases

· Note too how the numbers have changed little since despite production..

But it is not quite as simple as that, because the early numbers were too low, having been inherited from the companies before they were expropriated. Some of the increase was justified but it has to be backdated to the discovery of the fields concerned that had been found up to 50 years before.

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This illustrates the depletion of all hydrocarbons:

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As you can see, by 2010 we are going to be headed into some serious trouble for hydrocarbon energy altogether. Conventional oil and gas resources being the biggest problem as they are the lowest on the scale, the first to deplete, and make up the bulk of our energy sources.

Here's a video presentation of Dr. Campbell's lecture for any of you who may be interested.

Here's the webpage version, which is where I've sited the aforementioned data from.

Some info on natural gas, which is even in more of a crisis than oil right now:

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The top line shows total gas production. The colored bands show the contribution of gas wells segregated by age. The production of every gas well declines with age. But the surprising thing is that the new gas wells are declining much faster than the old ones. Gas production has remained nearly constant despite the contributions of the new gas wells.

Texas is a mature gas production province. In 1998, and in every subsequent year, it took less than a year for the production rate of a new gas well to fall 50%. New reserves were discovered in 2002 but the discoveries equaled only a quarter of consumption. It is clear; new gas wells will have to be drilled faster and faster just to keep production constant. Think of 6 straws drawing on the same milkshake.

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Man did that freaking doctor work in the oil field as a driller? I suppose not!! The BS wont get by me, show me all the freaking bs statics, and all kind of crap from scientist that have never seen a freaking oil rig, I won't believe shit!!.

The whole thing was and is political motivated, the US initiative for war strategie is to save our own oil, and buy foreign oil. The idea is to deplete international sources like S.A. and M.E. countries.

Quote: We are self-sufficient in oil, but business expansions require importing more of that black gold and it is business-as-usual to curtail exploration and for the oil companies to keep domestic supplies short to support a higher price to the consumer.
http://pnews.org/mall/oil.shtml

Another good article on oil; http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA691.htm

A bit older article but relative to our debate;

Yes, there is an inflation risk. Yes, both Britain and the US are in rate-raising mode. And yes, there are anxieties over terrorist attacks on oil installations. But the world is not running out of oil.
There may be many fears spooking the world's oil markets. But there is no oil "shortage", just as there was no oil "shortage" in the early 1970s or the early 1990s. There are our own apprehensions. And then there are the facts of the matter.http://www.gasandoil.com/goc/features/fex42298.htm

There won't always have oil, however we are not!! running out anytime soon at least not in my lifetime nor the children's of this decade.

Godless.

 

Dr. Colin J. Campbell has a Ph.D. in geology. The people that do the actual drilling aren't involved in petroleum data publications, they just go get the stuff.

We're not running out of oil. We've used half of the world's oil, but 200 years from now someone somewhere will still be pumping it.

What's happening, however, is that our need for oil is eclipsing the planets ability to produce it and we are using the second half of what is there. This means less and less oil will be able to be extracted after the peak, and it means that prices will increase drastically as supplies begin to dwindle. We can't just pump oil out at any arbitrary rate.

Cheap oil is the lifeblood of the world economy. Without cheap, plentiful oil, nothing in modern society would be possible.

I challenge you to name a single thing in modern society that didn't have oil involved somewhere in it's process. You won't be able to come up with anything. I've been thinking about it for 5 years and still haven't been able to think of one. This is how dependent we've become on oil.

For every 1 calorie of food, 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy went into producing it, not including transportation or storage.

What happend in the 1970s is that OPEC cut us off in protest of our incolvement in the Yom Kippur war. No problem, we'll just use our own oil, right?

Wrong. If you go back and read the U.S. petroleum history, what happened is that the very same year, the U.S. peaked as an oil province and domestic petroleum production declined. There was a gap between what the supply was, and what the demand was. We had swing producers like Venesuela come in and fill some of that gap. Eventually OPEC started shipping to us again. That period was refered to as the oil shock of the 70's, and it was mostly political.

Peak oil is geological. It doesn't matter how many regimes you change or bombs you drop, you're not going to be able to change geologic factors.

Lemme give you a visual of just where we're at right now with the rate of growth in oil consumption we've been enjoying and what we need to maintain it:

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By 2020, the oil we'll need will be the size of that page. Every 10 years, we consume more petroleum than all other previous 10 year periods combined. This means that we have to find enough oil equal to what we've already used throughout the entire history of oil consumption at 7% annual growth to sustain our way of life.

Economic activity is predicated upon by hydrocarbon energy. A recession is any time we have less than 3% economic growth.

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When the President of OPEC comes and flat-out says "there is no additional supply", it adds quite a bit of credibility to peak oil.

Look at where the information is coming from. The United Stated Department of Energy, the International Energy Agency, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Matthew Simmons who is the energy advisor to the President of the United States, Deutsche Bank Research, and the former Vice president of Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco.

These are the industry leaders when it comes to energy.

When the Department of Energy for the United States releases a 45 page report detailing energy depletion saying that if we make major preparations now and assume extremely optimistic figures of undiscovered recoverable petroleum that we can hold it off till' 2030 at the latest before there are critical windfalls in supply; and the highest authorities in the field are saying that it's probably going to hit in a decade or so, it's time to take notice.

To quote the International Energy Agency:

Did anyone else see the cover of National Geographic magazine for May of last year?:

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