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Leaked Cables Reveal US Thinks Saudi Oil Reserves May Be Overstated
Mr.Intel writes with this excerpt from a UPI report which may interest those of you with cars, electricity, items made of plastic, etc: "Estimates of oil reserves in Saudi Arabia are overstated, meaning crude output could peak within the next decade, leaked US diplomatic cables reveal. Washington fears Saudi Arabia overestimated its oil reserves by as much as 40 percent and the kingdom can't keep enough oil flowing to control prices, US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and published by The Guardian newspaper in London reveal."
To quote Dogbert, your comment more or less says "Hey everyone, I don't understand what fungible means."
It's unlikely that much Saudi Arabian crude ends up in your gas tank. Your car is filled mostly from Gulf, Venezuelan and yes, Canadian crude. But it's still an international market, and a shortage of Saudi Arabian crude will drive up prices everywhere around the world, as European oil companies start looking to buy from elsewhere to make up for the shortfall.
Today's top story is that Saudi Oil reserves are actually critically lo, and we will need to transition to use more renewable energy sources to replace it.
In related news, NIMBY groups are opposing the construction of everything other than oil and coal plants on the basis that everything else is ugly and might even let the poor have enough electricity to survive the weather conditions of the coming years.
Since oil is not a renewable resource, I think my pessimism is very well placed. Perhaps we won't see the oil run out in our lifetime, but it will eventually. It doesn't matter how much new, dangerous to drill, domestically based oil fields we find. It will eventually all be gone. Especially at the rate we consume it. But then again it's always easier to put off until tomorrow what can be done today, right?
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Crude isn't completely fungible, light sweet crude is but that's not the majority of current crude production. For instance all the saber rattling Venezuela was making a couple years about cutting off the US was pure bluff, no other consumer has enough refining capacity for their particular kind of sour crude and so the only thing cutting off the US would have accomplished was a complete collapse of their economy.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
At what cost? That method involves breaking rock under high pressure, by using gas, water, sometimes mixed with chemicals.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that we should be cracking rock and injecting crap into the ground, especially in a region that's already critically short of groundwater.
The fractured rock creates new pathways for water to migrate, and for pollutants to get around, and in general to fuck up acquifers in a region that may well be uninhabitable due to a lack of water in the near future.
The problem with proven oil reserves is that they (by definition) include only economically recoverable oil at any given point in time, which is a stupid way to define things but that's beside the point. Saudi Light crude (which is the 15-20/barrel stuff, or less... a lot less), is not exactly going to last long, it's dead easy to get out of the ground and makes it hard to justify the effort in anything else for the saudis (as opposed to say canada, where we have relatively little of the cheap easy to get stuff). But the Saudi's have a lot of heavy oil that at 60 or 70 bucks a barrel wouldn't be economically viable, but at 100 bucks a barrel, with bangladeshi slave.. I'm sorry, foreign worker, labour becomes reasonably profitable. (In 20 years feel free to replace bangladesh with some random impoverished muslim nation in africa, I doubt the Saudi's care where the cheap labour comes from all that much).
So then we can ask a question. As the light, cheap, easy to get stuff dries up, and then there's inflation, economic growth etc. what will the price of oil be in 10 years, 15 years, 20 etc. The Saudi's and americans almost certainly disagree on what will be economically viable to extract, in the same way two experts on the price of oil aren't going to come to exactly the same number for 15 years from now. It's hard to see the future. There are different ways to count oil recoverability too, and that will depend a lot on well... price ( and technology).
Using some measures the US should run almost completely out of domestically produced oil in less than 8 years. Does anyone seriously think that's going to happen? That's supposedly been the case for at least a decade, and yet US oil production doesn't appear to exactly be in a massive imploding crisis of supply. In 2007 the US produced 8.5 million barrels/day (http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_pro-energy-oil-production)... there's a long way from that to 0 in 11 years.
The geology question, of how much actual oil a country has, is mostly useless, since it only matters what you figure you can extract. But very reasonable people can have very reasonable disagreements on those numbers, with no one lying. Are the saudi's lying about their oil reserves? Probably not, at least, not significantly, at the current rate of production saudi arabia will run out of officially declared reserves... in 130 years (10 million barrels/day, 430 billion barrels of declared reserves). If they're lying by 40%, then they're lying about a problem that will manifest in the late 2070's or 2080's. That's a long time to hold onto a lie for relatively little gain, since shit will hit the fan either way. Can they disagree with the americans on what exactly the source of that will be? Certainly.
Essentially you could say the same thing about the US. If the figure the price of oil will be > 100 bucks a barrel (in todays dollars) then shale deposits suddenly become economically viable, given the US the largest reserves in the world, by a lot, if the price of oil is less than 70.. well then shale isn't viable to extract. Caveat: I'm not 100% sure on those numbers (100 and 70) but they're good enough to illustrate my point. Now anything in between and we have a fairly difficult calculation.
The Saudis could easily be lying about how long they can keep cheap production of 10 million barrels a day up. But I'm not sure how much of a problem that is, or how much difference it would make, since the price of oil is something like 4 or 5x the cost of most saudi oil, I'm sure for that much money they'll find something. It might be convenient to pay lip service to the americans and say 'oh yes Mr president we'll keep supplying cheap oil and keep the price down just give us more F15's' when they're still marking it up 300% (and that would still bring the cost down), but it's in their interest to convince the americans they're trying to keep oil cheap, when they probably can't do much about the price of oil anymore (by themselves), while at the same time