Comprehensive Projection of World Oil Exports

Prof. Goose writes, "This article is a comprehensive assessment of world oil exports, defined has the total amount of liquid hydrocarbons that are surpluses in producing countries. This assessment is made by projecting into the future fixed change rates that reflect current trends in liquids production and consumption in all countries where presently the difference between the two factors is positive. The outcome of this assessment is rather worrisome." Here is the money graph through 2020.

Comments

There's plenty of Oil and the Economy is just fine

[popo]

Until after the elections, that is.

Question

[joggle]

Would people vote for a presidential candidate if he said something to the effect "I promise to increase taxes for the sole purpose of implementing whatever technology is prudent to quickly wean ourselves from foreign oil." My guess is no so we will just have to wait until the price of oil goes through the roof, crippling the economy before anything significant happens.

Silver

[popo]

If anyone cares, the world is destined to run out of raw silver reserves long, long before it runs out of oil. Dozens of analysts are expecting a COMEX default on silver futures within the next couple years. It might not seem like a big deal, but just watch what happens to the price of silver when it does...

(Silver is used in tons of medical equipment. There's a lot of nanotechnology research being done to develop a good substitute, but its still years off)

Including "innovation" is dangerous.

[Kadin2048]

Well, you really don't want to factor future technological developments into the predictions, because that encourages people to just keep doing what they're doing, and might cause the technological developments that you were counting on, to never be introduced.

The point of these predictions, IMO, is to show us what will happen if we just keep bumbling along, doing what we're currently doing.

If you assume that we'll start using more efficient cars in the future, and take that into consideration when making your graph/paper/prediction/whatever, then it might make the looming crisis look less severe, meaning that people won't actually start using more efficient cars ... and the crisis ends up being worse.

It's a self-defeating prophesy: if you make it look like we're going to do better than we're currently on target to do, taking no corrective action, then you encourage us to not take any.

Re:Including "innovation" is dangerous.

[Rei]

I agree. This is widely blown out of proportion.

First off, all of the predictions that we see in the article are from Colin Campbell. He's a geologist who represents the fringe of the "peak oil" movement, and founded the association for the study of peak oil and gas. The guy has trouble being right. In addition to being continually proven wrong about the discovery of large new oil fields (which keep turning up -- not to mention old fields unexpectedly finding new life) and the rates at which existing fields will produce, every few years he pushes back his predicted peak. First it was 1995. It's all the way back to 2007 now. Aaany day now, Colin!

Secondly, the logic that this article is based on is faulty. It fails to acknowledge the most critical factor in oil production and pricing: the price of oil influences both the demand and the rate of production of fuels (inc. alternatives). The more expensive oil gets, the slower world economic growth occurs, which drastically reduces demand. At the same time, the more expensive oil gets, vast new reserves come online. At current oil prices, Saudi Arabia doesn't have the world's largest reserves: Venezuela does. Venezuela's reserves were once dwarfed by Saudi Arabia's because they're more expensive to produce from. With high prices, a vast amount of Venezuelan oil comes online.

But it doesn't stop there. Current prices are high enough to make Canadian tar sands profitable. Shell is leading the way here, and is majorly scaling up their operations. If you count the tar sands, Canada goes up into the world leader position. But hey, why stop there? Coal liquifaction is borderline profitable at current prices. The US has hundreds of years of coal to mine; even if we start converting it to oil, it's a massive energy influx. And do we really even need to get into oil shale, methane hydrates, ethanol (esp. from cellulose), biodiesel, waste polymerization, and vehicles driven by electricity or hydrogen (which, effectively, can be powered by the grid, which means that any potential power source will work).

Yes, prices will rise. So? We've gotten a free ride on ubercheap oil for too long. At current prices, however, countless technologies are either freshly viable or near-viable for energy production -- both for producing petroleum, and for producing petroleum alternatives. If prices rise further, it makes them all the prettier for investors. This peak oil fearmongering is just silly.

Re:Including "innovation" is dangerous.

[RevMike]

Wait a minute! Let me see if I can boil this down...

When a something is in high demand and becomes scarce it becomes more expensive. Because it is more expensive, people will seek out and develop alternative sources for the product, as well as alternative products.

Is this just crazy talk? Are you saying that we didn't go back to candles when we ran out of whale oil? But instead we developed an alternative - petroleum? Or that when since cane sugar is expensive we sweeten lots of food products with corn syrup?

Holy freshman year economics, Batman!

Someone better tell these simple proven facts to the prophets of doom. I'm sure that they'd rather have a hand in informing the public of all this, rather than exploit the public with their gloomy predictions for personal gain.

Re:Including "innovation" is dangerous.

[Martin Blank]

Where are you going to get the ethanol to make all of this E85? Without some really major changes, the land required for this would be prohibitive. Some back-of-the-envelope numbers from a post I made elsewhere:

Gasoline consumed by United States annually: 140 billion gallons
Average energy of gasoline: 114,000 btu per gallon
Annual energy from gasoline in the United States: 16.0 E+15 btu

Average energy from ethanol: 76,100 btu per gallon
Volume of ethanol required to meet gasoline energy needs: 210 billion gallons
Volume of ethanol per bushel of corn: 2.7 gallons
Volume of corn required to replace gasoline use: 78 billion bushels
Volume of corn per area of farmland: 150 bushels per acre
Volume of ethanol per area of farmland: 410 gallons per acre
Area required to replace gasoline use: 520 million acres, or 2.1 million km^2

Total land area of United States: 9,161,000 km^2
Fraction of land required to meet gasoline energy needs: 23%

That fraction declines with other, more efficient stocks, but there are sometimes other expenses involved depending on the particular crop. Corn is the most widely-known and -used input, but sugarcane and sugarbeets are also possible. Switchgrass can reportedly yield as much as 1200 gallons per acre (though the energy efficiency is debated) and would thus significantly reduce the area required, but 8% of the country is still almost the size of North and South Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas combined.

To put this in further perspective, according to the CIA World Factbook, the total arable land for the United States is about 18%, so even with switchgrass, nearly half of the arable land would be devoted to fuel use, putting a massive dent in the ability of this nation to feed itself.

This is for straight ethanol use with no gasoline, but E85 barely dulls the edge of that blade.

no, that's not quite right...

[Gooseygoose]

Just an fyi, we're not one-sided, we're not partisan (I would point you to our press release: http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/4/26/121441/8 91), and we encourage empirical/scientific study of these phenomena.

In other words, we're not your daddy's peak oil site. Read the site at least a bit (and know what you're talking about) before you spout off like that, eh?

Re:Worrisome?

[Qzukk]

I know everyone loves the "running out of oil" story, but if that were true then why is oil barely above $60 when we have 2 huge suppliers threatening to cut back production, and North Korean bomb tests? If we were really running out of oil and some people threatened to cut us off plus some negative diplomatic news, we would be over 100 easily.

Because we're not running out of oil, yet. Besides, North Korea doesn't have oil, and probably couldn't nuke any of the serious oil exporters from there. Oil prices are not psychic, they have nothing to do with the future beyond what people perceive the future to be, and apparently they're perceiving the future the same way the EIA does.

Perhaps you're right, perhaps the authors are biased. It could be that the numbers they used are biased, intentionally or unintentionally. Controlling that perception is what controls the prices, so the participants certainly have a good stake in this. (I wonder what the US government's bias on oil prices would be...)

Still, if I had a penny for every person who thinks that we'll just "find more oil" when what we have now runs out, I'd have enough money to buy a metal detector powerful enough to find the pirate treasure buried in my front yard. Because it's gotta be there, I just need a bigger, better, and more expensive detector to find it.