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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.