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Has World Oil Production Passed Its Peak?
dido writes "Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has been studying world petroleum production data and has come to the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005. If he is correct, total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December. From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent. The high prices did not bring much additional oil out of the ground. Most oil-producing countries are in decline."
There are a hell of a lot of other things which do not go to waste during the production process of oil and gas. Examples include the tar/bitumen you put on roads and paths, chemcials that go into make plastics - the list goes on (just hit wikipedia and look up Oil Refinery). Point being that most of these 'by products' are all consumed at the rate they are produced... they are going into useful products. You can expect to see rises across the board for all of these products as well.
Cutting down oil use is not going to be just about cutting petrol/gas usgae - it is going to be about making more durable consumable products than are currently churned out - and being happy to pay top dollar for them (just like out parents had to). Believe it or not, the 'good old days' of 'well built products' may just come back... that should make our grand parents happy.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
It was US oil production that peaked in the 1970s, not global oil production. There's a huge difference there.
Well, what happens when you open an oil field is that it takes some time to ramp up. Start with a small rig, lay some pipelines, add more, larger rigs, bigger pipelines, more rigs etc. This provides the leading edge of the curve. This can be very steep in modern fields where many sophisticated high-capacity rigs are slapped in, as opposed to oil fields which were first exploited 50 years or so ago which used slower more incremental improvements, so different fields will have slightly different slope curves.
At some point, the oil is not under so much pressure and doesn't squirt out so much. Perhaps the oil men need to drill deeper, or sideways, or use other fancy techniques and so the take per day is reduced. This may go on for some time, forming a flattening of the peak at the top. Maybe. More often, and especially over the last 20 - 30 years, the field is run flat out for as long as possible, so production stops more quickly.
As production dwindles, other techniques come into play, like forcing in seawater under pressure to push the oil out (as in Saudi Arabia), and many of these can damage the field, reducing the long term extraction total in favour for a higher extraction rate today. As time goes on it becomes harder and more expensive to extract the oil (diminishing returns) and eventually it's just not worth it, so the field is closed down.
This is the idea, there's a curve for every well and every field. If you add all the curves together, then you get one big curve, whith "Hubbert's Peak" in teh middle (the geologist who first noticed the production bell curve).
Now the problem isn't that suddenly all the oil's gone when we wake up next tuesday, it's that this month/year we produced less than last month/year, but -- and this is the problem -- we use MORE than last month/year. Demand is growing faster than ever before, just at the time when the supply is starting to drop off. This causes price increases and countries can be expected to squabble over an oil supply which continues to become smaller.
As an aside, people like to say that "They've been prediciting this for years, it's never happened before so whay should it happen now?" The answer is that it's been predicted to happen now. I have a text book from 1954 (that's over 50 years ago) which predicted that demand would exceed supply around the year 2000 -- and you could argue that we are later that this because of improved extraction (not production, you extract oil) technology and because of a drop in consumption from teh late 70's oil shocks.
The supply/demand gap is a political and economic (and military?) problem in itself -- whether or not there's still enough oil to make all the toy for the happy meals might be a problem, but even if it isn't, the gap between supply and demand is a big enough problem all by itself.
peakoil.net is where to go to explore the argument in detail -- it's not a greenie thing, it's not a anti-american thing, it's to do with geology and chemistry. Beware of people who quote reserve figures, not only to countries lie outright about the figures, but quoting reserves is a potential -- you can't ever get every single barrel out of the ground and leave dry dust behind, lots remains and will never be extracted. As for scientists saving us, bear in mind that the warnings of peak and the warnings that alternatives like ethanol are almost useless are coming from eminent, experienced talented scientists. Science is not magic, if we're using too many joules per day then you can't just create it. I'm delighted to discuss why every alternative is doomed, try me at drose@dtlm.homelinux.net and I'll explain why I reckon population will halved in the next fifty years.
Here are some quotes from the National Center For Policy Analysis, regarding Oil Peaks and attempting to forecast oil production:
In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."
In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years.
In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.
In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.
From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.
In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.
By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced. Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unconventional resources likely will increase the world's reserves.
Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world's supply.
Rocks found in the three western states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.
Worldwide, the oil-shale resource base could easily be as large as 14,000 billion barrels -- more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.
Unconventional oil resources are more expensive to extract and produce, but we can expect production costs to drop with time as improved technologies increase efficiency.
With every passing year it becomes possible to exploit oil resources that could not have been recovered with old technologies. The first American oil well drilled in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pa. -- which was actually drilled by a local blacksmith known as Uncle Billy Smith -- reached a total depth of 69 feet (21 meters).
Today's drilling technology allows the completion of wells up to 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) deep.
The vast petroleum resources of the world's submerged continental margins are accessible from offshore platforms that allow drilling in water depths to 9,000 feet (2,743 meters).
The amount of oil recoverable from a single well has greatly increased because new technologies allow the boring of multiple horizontal shafts from a single vertical shaft.
Four-dimensional seismic imaging enables engineers and geologists to see a subsurface petroleum reservoir drain over months to years, allowing them to increase the efficiency of its recovery.
New techniques and new technology have increased the efficiency of oil exploration. The success rate for exploratory petroleum wells has increased 50 percent over the past decade, according to energy economist Michael C. Lynch.
But getting it out is tough. First, read this fact sheet from the Athabasca Oil Sands Developers. Current production is about 1 million barrels/day. This should be up to 2 million per day by 2010, and 4 million per day in 2015. That's about where the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is now. If everything works out right, Athabasca might be able to keep up with the decline of Middle East oil fields. (Incidentally, production in Kuwait peaked last November, somewhat to the surprise of the Kuwaitis.)
Money is being spent on oil sands development at increasing rates. In 1995, the forecast was CN$5.7 billion over 25 years. Spending is now at CN$9 billion per year and climbing. Payback is slow; more than a decade. This isn't a bonanza business, although at $60 a barrel, it's looking better than it ever did before. The oil sands industry got clobbered when oil prices dropped in the early 1990s. Investors still worry about that, since the actual cost of extracting Saudi oil is somewhere around $3/bbl.
Extraction from oil sands is a big job. The settling ponds are visible from orbit. Take a look at 57N 111.6W. Those aren't lakes. Those are man-made open pit mines and settling ponds. This is a far more expensive process than drilling and pumping. A ton of sand yields a barrel of oil. You don't even get oil out; you get asphalt, which has to be cracked down to crude oil, then to gasoline. Costs are running around $30/barrel.
Worse, with current technology, natural gas is used to make the steam to separate the oil from the sand. This is currently a substantial fraction of Canada's natural gas consumption. When natural gas prices go up, so does the cost of oil from oil sands. And it's a wasteful thing to do with natural gas. There's a project underway to build an oil-sands project that's self-fueling, using its own product to generate steam, but it won't be running until 2007. If that project doesn't work out, oil sands are in big trouble.
If you want a job as a heavy equipment operator, mechanic, or welder, head for Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. But apartment occupancy is at 100%, so you may end up in worker barracks.
So that's a more realistic view of Athabasca oil. It's real, but it's not a miracle.
Instead of worrying about the fact that oil has reached it's peak shouldn't we be figuring out ways of leaving the carbon in the ground? (Remember that greenhouse thingy?) The focus in these debates always seems to be on how to produce more energy not use less. And that while we could easily save almost 50% of consumption using currently available technologies. If youu're interested in more details see this link from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4633160. stm "Energy's 'low hanging fruit'" by Dr Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Peak Oil News and Discussion has a lot of info and discussion topics on Peak Oil. It even mentions the current slashdot peak oil thread.
The Saudis claim they can can ramp up production, the reality on the ground is slightly different. In the 1980s Saudi Arabia added 88 billion barrels to its reserves without drilling a single well. The reason why? OPEC allocates exports on the basis of reserves - the more you have in your reserves, the more you can pump. At the same time Kuwait added 26 billion and Abu Dhabi TRIPLED its reserves. None of these countries have allowed external experts to study their reasoning for upping reserves. A team of independent geologists could easily prove these figures, but they are not allowed to do so. Think about that - we might all be banking on a lie.
Saudi Arabia plans to up production from about 10 million barrels per day to 15 million largely by developing existing fields, not bringing new reserves on-stream. Almost all of this oil will come from the four Saudi superfields - Ghawar, Safaniyah, Hanifa and Khafji - each of which is over 50 years old - an extraordinarily long period of time for a field to be productive. Almost 5 million barrels will come from Ghawar alone.
So can they do it? Seems unlikely, Saudi Aramco refuses to open its books, but the claimed figure of 258 billion barrels seems to be very high, a former director of Aramco has publicly said that proven reserves are no more than 130 billion barrels and the remainder must be extrapolated.
Other reports are coming out of Saudi Arabia that water is entering the oil wells which implies that the fields are near the end of their lives. Even Aramco admits that huge amounts of water must be injected into fields to maintain current production.
There are also serious reports that Saudi overproduction in the past has caused serious damage to the fields and that they will never generate the normal amount of oil that can be recovered from well-managed fields.
Tar sands - okay, let's set aside (as if we could) the environmental devastation these plants are wreaking on the Canadian landscape and the hideous greenhouse emissions related to producing syncrude. Let's take a look at the energy needed to make syncrude. Tar sand extraction in Canada uses natural gas to heat water; in 2004 Canada produced about 1 million barrels of syncrude per day which consumed 0.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Plans are to go to 2.2 million bpd which would consume 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas. So how are Canada's gas reserves? Production in 2003 (the last year I had figures) was 16.8 billion cubic feet per day - a 0.5 billion cubic foot DECREASE on the previous year. Canada's gas fields are entering long-term decline, just as a significant draw on their reserves comes along. Using natural gas to make LNG would make significantly better economic and environmental sense.
Oil shale in the American West is a non-goer, there simply isn't enough water around. The only significant source is the Colorado River which is overtapped already.
And with that, I'm off to work.
HTH.
Oil discoveries have been surpassed by consumption in the mid-eighties. I remember a presentation with a simple chart at the Annual Meeting of AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) 2005, Cincinnati about this. Since the usual lag between discovery and commencement of production is about 15 years (this is what I remember from my course in energy economy), the production peak was expected already about 2000. A few factors (wars, Russian oil becoming available to the west, etc) delayed this, but it's not like people never saw this coming.
New oil fields are being found all the time, but this is not compensating enough for the depletion of previous oil fields.
In case you wondered what is going to happen, remember that US production already peaked a long time ago (in 1971 if my memory serves me). In 1973 the Saudis noticed that they held the big levers now (Americans could not flood the marked anymore), and took the chance to become the market leaders.
What this means to us is exponential growth in gasoline prices. Smart countries stopped producing power with oil long ago (think oil crisis), moving to coal or nuclear for energy security (not necessarily because they were cheaper). Coal is going to be soon the most competitive fuel for power production. Nuclear will likely stay there in the corner where its poor economics has put it, since there is enough coal to burn all oxygen in the atmosphere.
Given that most transportation and building-heating sectors are based on oil in most countries and that these are big chunks of the total energy consumption, I expect some countries will find it cheaper to steal oil invading oil-rich countries, especially those countries that are very oil-intensive and where conservation is not considered an attractive option.
Furthermore, the US now have a base of operations (Iraq) in the middle of everything in the Middle East, already up and running. Invading the whole Middle East could become a real option in the next decades (it was actually already contemplated in 1973, but then we had the Soviet Union).
Interesting book to read: The end of oil, Paul Roberts, ISBN 0618239774.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
While there are probably quite a few ANWR size fields around, they're only big enough to keep the hummers running for a couple of months. There simply are no new big reservoirs to be found.
There certainly is a lot more oil available in unconvential forms, but the financial and environmental cost of extracting these starts making even hydrogen look cheap. All that new tech can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
If you haven't already, read "The end of oil" by paul roberts. Written by an oil industry journalist, his basic conclusion in the end is that the only way to put back the inevitable is simply by using less of it. No one needs 6mpg autos, expecially not when new production cars now routinely get upwards of 70mpg in europe (without all that hybrid shit). (I'd actually like to see what the author thinks now, it was written before the current price hikes and he said that a price over $30 was unsustainable. It's now been over $50 for a year.)
I don't know where you got the idea that manufacturing energy-efficient bulbs costs $10 for a single one. Nor where you buy yours. Like you said, it's competitive, you get good-quality bulbs for half of that today, and they typically last 5 times as long as a traditional bulb.
Still, 1 low-energy bulb tends to cost say $4 more than 5 comparable-output-and-quality traditional bulbs. It lives something like 10000 hours. Lets do maths:
- Normal bulbs: 10000h*60w = 600Kwh
- Low-energy: 10000h*12w = 120Kwh
- Saved energy: 480Kwh
- Break-even point (assuming low-energy bulbs cost $4 more upfront) 0.83 cent/kwh
I don't know what power costs where you live, but most places power costs 10 times that, delivered to the consumer. Even if your $10 was correct (which it isn't) the break-even point for this bulb would still be at 1.6cent/kwh, which is still a lot less than electricity actually costs for consumers.It gets sligthly less beneficial if you live somewhere where the extra heat is needed part of the year so it's not simply wasted. In the extreme case: you live in a electrically heated house, and the ligth is *never* on without the ovens also being on, you save nothing at all.
Errrr no. Oil and gas (and water for that matter) are held in pores in the rock - just as water can be held in the pores of a sponge. Loose sandstones make great oil reservoirs, the Saudi fields are in limestone deposited as dung in shallow seas.
When you extract the oil the rock remains. No huge caverns, no need for worry.
The phenomenon of oil field replenishment appears to be a fluke in certain fields which are linked by faults to deeper reserves. Lowering the pressure in the upper part of the field forces oil up by gas and water pressure. It has nothing to do with the highly dubious theory of Mantle oil.
HTH.
I am an economist and I agree with you - but a constant percentage increase is an exponential growth!
Actually there is nothing left behind and the top collapses in. In Campache Mexico, the area is being supported by the largest Nitrogen Injection system on the planet. CO2 Sequestration is being used in some places. The situation is precarious to say the least. During well reserved "proving" blows at the Little Rock gas field in Alabama occurred the largest earthquake in Alabama History. Similarly last Saturday 2/11/2006 a 5.2 quake happened under Shell Oil's Brutus Rig. These are not natural events and they disclose the subsidence of rock due to the relief of pressure in Gas/Oil fields.
The Kuwait oil fired so severely damaged their oil fields that billions of barrels of crude were trapped under ground in the fractured rock strata due to this problem of caverns etc. Sorry for those who think otherwise, but the stuff comes out and it leaves spaces behind to collapse.
At Ache near the Shell gas works there can be seen on recent Google Earth photos (These may get taken down some time soon) at 4deg 44min 17.9 sec N and 95 deg 14 min 37.80 sec E one can see natural Gas Flares. This is massive stuff here. Such gas well proving blows can and do trigger earthquakes. This photo was taken shortly before the Ache Quake and Tsunami. Please look at the size of these flares. Some of these measure more than 8 nautical miles in cross dimension.
Such events leave us with serious questions about what is going on in the Oil Business and how much damage it is doing to our world. Mods get a life if you want to argue with facts. I am presenting fact here not opinion.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
There are NOT caverns down there, there are pores. A good reservoir rock might be up to 30% pores - 70% is still solid material. As oil is extracted from the top of a reservoir, groundwater tends to rise up from below under pressure to take its place. This is called water drive and is the main way oil is recovered from reservoirs in the early days of production. Gas pressure is a smaller component of production, but careful maintenance of gas pressure is needed, over-quick reduction can allow too-much water into the reservoir where it finds its way into the wells and brings an early end to production.
Subsidence is found in very few fields after prolonged extraction, most show no signs of the collapse you describe. The most famous subsidence is around Long Beach in California where there has been some 3m of subsidence - but no wholesale collapse because there isn't a hole to collapse into.
Campeche is receiving nitrogen injection because unlike many fields, Campeche does not receive a huge natural inflow of water into the reservoir below the oil. Water drive is normally relied on to push oil upwards; instead by injecting nitrogren above the oil, it acts to increase the pressure pushing down and keeps oil coming to the surface.
CO2 injection is a well-established technology in much of the US where it has been found that CO2 helps lower the viscosity of the crude. True carbon sequestration has been conducted by Statoil in the Sleipnir West gas field of the North Sea at a rate of approximately 1 million tonnes PA. The CO2 is recovered directly from the gas at the well-head as its concentration are above the legal limits imposed by European export limits.
Yes oil and gas extraction have been linked to Earth tremors at very shallow depth and are linked to the release of pre-existing stresses. The cause and effect of these tremors are well known from experiments conducted at Rangely in Colorado, where it was found tremors could be turned off and on by varying the rate of extraction. Similar tremors are known from fields in California, Texas and the North Sea.
The huge Sumatra 'quake was at great depth (30km) and distance from any hydrocarbon reserves. At 30km, even if oil source rocks existed, the oil would have been cracked into natural gas by a combination of pressure and heat. Furthermore, the physical characteristics of the 'quake are typical of those found in subduction zones, not the minor tremors found in oil fields.
There is no cause and effect between oil and gas production in Sumatra and the seismicity of the region - beyond the fact that the same tectonic pressures that caused the 'quake produce ideal conditions for the formation and entrapment of hydrocarbons.
The Kuwait fields may well have been damaged by a sudden release of pressure at the well-head when the Iraqis set off their explosives. This effect is well-known from oil-drilling history; many of the famous gushers of the early 20th Century that seemed to show vast resources were quickly followed by sudden collapses in production - the Spindletop field in Texas being the most famous example of what happens when pressures in fields are not controlled, it peaked in 1902 at over 17 million barrels p.a, but was down to less than 4 million in 1904.