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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."
I remember in college a geologist was invited to demonstrate a "resource simulator" for our class. By today's standards it would be considered extremely crude (this was after all, in 1978), (wow, weird unintentional pun).
The simulation was basically a giant video game with a simple graphical display of the world's known and projected resources including but not limited to:
About 20 students in the class were given controllers, each to (again, crudely) simulate usage and comsumption patterns of all of these resources. Also, some students had controllers allowing them to spend resources to explore for MORE resources.
At the time, and years subsequent that demo stayed with me -- it left an indelible image of what could and probably would be.
The results? Basically, no matter what the students did to conserve, and what they did to increase the resources, the "world" pretty much always ran out of fuel and resources by the year 2020. At the time that seemed pretty far away and I don't think many people felt the need to care. Maybe that time has come.
Another interesting piece of the simulation: there were those students who pointed out these "estimates" of known and expected future discoveries of resources were just that, "estimates". The geologist obliged, and let the students rerun the simulations with a magnitude of latitude, i.e., ten times the estimated resources were allocated! The results then?, about an additional 10 to 20 years of resources before they ran out.
Note: the results (we ran many different trials) weren't ALWAYS about running out of oil and petroleum. On a few occasions there were severe food and water crises. A very interesting lesson.
Here's the site devoted to peakoil: http://www.peakoil.net/
D E9-42BC-920B-91E5850FB067.htm
A huge chunk of Saudi exports come from one gigantic field. This means our eggs are in this one basket. Here's an article that discusses that field, and the chance that the Saudis might have screwed it by over-extracting. If you do that, you limit how much you can get out later; you might lose the reserves. [I'm guessing you might damage it, but that some future technology might make it recoverable -- just at a higher cost]
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80C89E7E-1
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
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.
The faster we use up all of the economically obtainable oil, the sooner people can stop whining about using it all up and the sooner we can get on with whatever is next.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Since Hummer owners want to drive a military-style vehicle, I think we should give them the full experience: every hummer should come with an all-expenses paid 6-month stint as a chauffeur in Baghdad. Nothing shows one's masculinity and patriotism more than Supporting the Troops, right?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
In 1956, geophysicist Marion King Hubbert predicted that _U.S._ oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. In fact, U.S. oil production peaked in 1971, so he was pretty close. U.S. production has been going down ever since. This current article is about _World_ production. Hubbert predicted that would peak around 2000.
I read a great article in the New York Times the other day (go figure... its available for free at my law school) about E85. Anyway I was shocked to read that to make a car compatible with E85 it only costs an extra $150. I'm hardly a rich man and I try to save my money, but $150 per car doesn't seem like much in the grand scheme of things, espically considering the way our modern day governments spend and tax the hell out of everything. I was skeptical, about that $150 figure, but here that price is quoute in another article http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A ID=/20060122/BUSINESS/601220310/1003 And Since its so cheap why doesn't our government mandate all (or 50% of) new cars made and imported be E85 comptabile and let the consumer/market choose their fuel? Even if the federal government won't do this, you think some of the midwestern states would. Since the #1 problem with consumer adoption of E85 is its availability, wouldn't these state economies based on farming want to hurry up its availability so they could increase demand for their own product?
If I were an Iowa Legislator I'd want to make every car sold in the state E85 compatible and mandate every gas station sell E85. If the state can succesfuly force E85 onto the market it'd only be a matter of time until gas stations in the surronding states started selling E85 by choice to get those consumers and it spreads. Kind of like how McDonald's spread across America.
Other Problems with E85:
#2 promblem: You get less energy per gallon about 10 to 15% less. But E85 is aparently cheaper than gasoline. So at some point, I don't know where, and I can't find any information on this, there is a "Cost Per Mile" equilabrium between the two. Sure you have to fill up your gas tank more often if you use E85 because you get less milage, but maybe each mile is cheaper. This is a little harder than calculating "MPG" but I'm betting a savy company can add this metric to an onboard dash. If the Prius can calculate MPG, why not be able to enter how much it cost you to fill up the tank and then you get a cost per mile read out, so you can see which is cheaper for you.
"The more efficient you are, the less they'll produce. Prices will not change."
We're talking about the survival of human civilization, not bargain hunting at the mall. If we're more efficient, the oil companies produce less, the oil lasts longer, and it buys us some time to build out the energy infrastructure to supplant oil.
cast the first stone. Sure, that's a great moral philosophy, and it would be nice if people weren't so sanctimonious, but it runs into problems when used to dissuage VERBAL criticism.
When you say that people in America or Europe who try to lesson the damage they are doing to the planet shouldn't bother trying to convince other people to do the same through social pressure, you are basically saying that it's not worth doing any good unless you can do infinte good. Your foolish rhetoric can be used to justify any amount of waste, and to (bizarrely) criticize those who are TRYING to act ethically.
If the social pressures of the Left in America were to reduce the ecological footprint of everyone from 60 times that villagers to 50 times that villagers, a few hundred million villagers would be able to increase their consumption of the Earth's resources by 10-fold with no extra strain on the environment over the current model.
Furthermore, pressures for ecological soundness would, as has been shown in most market situations, drive further innovation in that direction, the opposite of the effect that SUV purchases have.
If you are unwilling to understand that small improvements are better than no improvements, you might as well just kill yourself now, since the logical extension of your espoused philosophy would be that if your life is not perfect in every way, none of the good in it matters.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
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.
Oil from the ground is so 20th century I could care less about stories about it. Europe has begun licensing TDP tech and we have a full-scale refinery running near Kansas City. If we ever get serious about putting domestic oil production the whole idea of oil from the ground will be beyond quaint.
t ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
It works, it provides clean water and high grade deisel oil, cleans the air by providing higher octane product, less emissions from refinery gasses, can empty landfills of plastic, can clean the water supply from biomass waste. Don't as me why the hell the DOE hasn't gotten behind it. A tenth of the cost of the Manhatten project could make us the largest oil producers on the planet*.
Also check the Wiki references to plastic conversions. Say good-bye to plastic waste and ocean pollution as well. Grey water dumping would also be convertable on the cruise ship level. Plus domestic production nullifies the middle east cartels, and puts tanker accidents off our coasts to an end. The middle east argument alone is a national security problem and it's criminal that this tech hasn't gone into a crash program status.
And this blows all previous gas alternatives out of the water, doesn't require massive leaps in corn production and doesn't require an change in transportation systems or distribution.
I'm confident that we will engage in this tech at some point - but it'd be nice to hear more about it. Try googling it sometime - you'll find almost nothing in the pop-press. I've even had dialogue with MSNBC about it - and they claim they're aware of it - but never say dick. Neither did Wired and they were talking new-oil on the fricking cover of their rag less than a month ago. FEH!
* The KC Star reported that from bio-waste alone via agribusiness we could convert all organic waste-fodder into 20 billion barrels of oil. We consume 12 billion barrels at present. We could ergo go from being the largest consumers to the largest producers.
Your comment about the footprint on nature is important. Think about this, though.
I live in a studio apartment. I use energy efficient lightbulbs. I recycle. I mostly walk, but very occasionally take the bus. I haven't driven in five years.
Really, how much larger is your footprint than mine?
Now, my lifestyle is mostly maintainable because I'm young, it's true, but a Hummer still takes *five times* as much gas as an energy efficient vehicle. You don't need a Prius to get around 50 MPG.
It also reduces traffic efficiency because it's slow to accelerate and blocks peoples' view. Even apart from gas consumption, it takes vastly more resources to build a Hummer than to build a S.M.A.R.T. car.
Worse, people generally drive in SUVs alone. A vehicle that could carry four people is carrying only one. A carpool in an efficient vehicle is therefore *twenty times* as efficient as the usual SUV trip.
When you get to that kind of difference it really does become a moral imperative. You're using more than your share, and you're not even *trying* to get down to what your share might be.
"I'll never use as little as a starving villager does, so I might as well use as much as I like."
That doesn't fly.
Despite all this noise about peak oil, oil futures remain reasonable, and oil prices are coming down in light of new supplies, suggesting that our access to oil isn't nearly as stripped as doomsayers want us to believe.
China and America have already begun investing in alternative sources of energy, all while new refineries are being built to increase supply. The futures market sees this as evidence that oil is heading for oversupply, just like it did in the mid to late 1990s.
If you're convinced that the market is mistaken, well, maybe you're right. But rather than argue with me, I have some simple advice for you: buy. Prove how convinced you are by putting your money where your mouth is, and if you're right, you'll amass a fortune. You can buy us all copies of Mad Max with the words "I told you so" painted on the front in sweet rare crude. Thales will tell you, there's nothing that says "I'm smarter than you" like money.
But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?
It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.
I'm sympathetic, it's easy to get worried when you're told something is finite, though its consumption is increasing. But in a market, if consumption is increasing, that's a good sign nothing's wrong. Consumption will increase only so long as it's unproblematic, then it will slow, a market is a proportional negative feedback system.
To further allay any fears, keep in mind the imminent end of oil has been predicted routinely for the last 125 years.
Before that, the exhaustion of coal was the fun thing to predict. While we're less reliant on coal these days, we still have mountains of it to mine. Cheap oil, not depletion, brought about the end of the coal era. And likewise, cheap x, not depletion, will bring the end of the oil era.
Even if all this analysis is wasted breath, if peak oil has certainly and suddenly hit and we're all staring at a future of expensive oil, even then, I'm still not worried. [R]ising oil prices are... an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy. Expensive oil only means we shift to something else, probably something cleaner, and I'm fine with that too.
Peak oil is not about the decline of oil, it's about the decline of CHEAP oil. Some would dismiss peak oil as another Malthusian doomsday. However, one needs to consider the fact that oil is such a huge part of our lives, and the discovery of cheap oil (and the fertilizer made from petroleum products) helped stem the tide. It's not simply energy, it's also plastics and a multitude of other products. While we *may* find alternative sources of energy, can you imagine a life without cheap plastic? Go through your day today and see how often you use plastic.
Oil will always be present on our planet. The problem is that the Return on Investment (ROI) may be severely diminished. Right now, it's cheaper to find, drill, and transport oil than it is to use it. If it becomes more expensive to find and transport oil, we will have to find another source of energy. In case you hadn't noticed, energy consumption is going UP and not down.
It's not something to take lightly. There are people working on it, but we really need alot more effort behind it. I'm imagining bacteria in a petri dish consuming all of the resources. If people don't wake up soon, we could easily be faced with a situation where we simply will not be able to find a solution. Consider that research itself takes up resources, which will become more scarce and valuable. There is a doomsday possibility out there, but I like to hope that some governments will wake up and put alot of effort into finding alternatives. Humans should hopefully be able to think their way out of the petri dish.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Quite frequently recently, OPEC has been producing at 100% capacity and still not producing enough to keep the price of oil down. This is one of the oft-quoted symptoms of the "Peak Oil" theory.
All that means is that what oil is left will be efficiently allocated by selling it at $20/gallon when it becomes scarce enough.
Also, if you think the U.S. is one of the best examples of a purely capitalistic system in the world, you're still living in the pre-Great Depression era. China's current economic policies make it _much_ more capitalistic than the U.S. (although not democratic) right now, including all the bad parts of capitalism like screwing over the poor people.
...and may I just mention that you can thank the so-called European Left that there is a thriving industry developing energy conserving technologies for power plants, heating plants and transportation. I'm telling you, forget about the IT business, microelectronics, pharmaceutical companies. They won't save the world. Energy conservation is The Next Big Thing.
Oh, and by the way, we Europeans aren't all French. Actually, most of us can't stand them at all.
Not true, OPEC has always stated that oil should be in the $30 to $40 barrel range, not in the high sixties where it has been for a long time. They recognise that over $50 per barrel, it becomes economic for consuming countries to invest in alternative sources of energy such as oil sands and tar. Overpriced oil hurts producers long term plans.
What is almost unique about this situation is not that oil production is being throttled such as 1973-74 or 1980, it is that demand is running way ahead of supply. OPEC has called for consumers to cut back on consumption as there isn't enough infrastructure to get the stuff out of the ground, move and refine it fast enough to meet current let alone future demand.
Saudi Arabia is practically the only major producer that is planning on major increases in production in the near future, but there are plenty of geologists who believe that the Saudi reserves have been wildly overstated and that there is no way the country can ever meet these figures.
Your rant stinks like the new attack of 'moral relativism' that American 'conservatives' have started to throw around at everyone they don't like (themselves being among the worst offenders when it comes to bending their morals).
The idea that unless you're an African villager you can't point out great waste is beyond ridiculous.
Lets try it from a lefties perspective...
Unless you stop using the socialist, nationalised road system, you can't possibly say that Communist Russia was excessive, only someone in libertarian Somalia has the 'moral authority' to say that.
That sit nicely with you?
Of course not, but you will bend your morality to fit your argument anyway, as you have done. Now when some neo greenie comes along in this thread and screams that we *should* be living like African villagers you will argue that he is an extremist and he just goes to show how rediculous 'liberals' are, and you will have snuggly wrapped yourself up in a blanket of self righteousness smirking that your 'right' and everyone else is 'wrong' totally ignoring the issue at hand which doesn't matter just as long as you feel like you have won the argument.
Did you ever read Jared Diamonds latest book? Bottom line: civilisations collapse at the top of their power, because they rather die than give up their status symbols. So yes, if the choice is driving a hummer and starving, or riding a bicycle and eating, people will keep on driving until it's to late.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Really? I spend all my disposable income on buying tanks of CO2 and venting it into the air...
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.