We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all

[MindMover]

A boom in oil production has made a mockery of our predictions. Good news for capitalists – but a disaster for humanity

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil – the decline of global supplies – is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.

Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.

Some of us made vague predictions, others were more specific. In all cases we were wrong. In 1975 MK Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell who had correctly predicted the decline in US oil production, suggested that global supplies could peak in 1995. In 1997 the petroleum geologist Colin Campbell estimated that it would happen before 2010. In 2003 the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes said he was "99% confident" that peak oil would occur in 2004. In 2004, the Texas tycoon T Boone Pickens predicted that "never again will we pump more than 82m barrels" per day of liquid fuels. (Average daily supply in May 2012 was 91m.) In 2005 the investment banker Matthew Simmons maintained that "Saudi Arabia … cannot materially grow its oil production". (Since then its output has risen from 9m barrels a day to 10m, and it has another 1.5m in spare capacity.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-wrong?intcmp=122

[NYC_SKP]

1. Ice caps melting = new possibilities! "Let's Go!"

.

[MindMover]

2. Energy sanity is desperately needed....

[NYC_SKP]

3. The willful ignorance of economists, politicians, and even scientists around this matter...

...is mind-boggling.

Any middle schooler armed with the facts can tell you that with dwindling reserves and rising world population there's going to be a crash of epic and apocalyptic proportions.

I hope you'll forgive this large graphic:

[yurbud]

12. It's now cost effective to boil oil out of rocks! Let's go!

Tar sands, shale oil, next we'll be making oil from coal and have a near INFINITE supply of carbon based pollutants.

[pscot]

4. Unless Ghawar starts to decline

We may have extended the peak, but the curve is fundamentally unchanged.

[econmagic]

5. Sanity

It is true that many peak oilers jumped the gun, mainly because they wanted to make their claims more sensational, in order to catch people's atention. That by no means should cause us to go to the other extreme that seems to be taking hold, which is the current claim that all is well. Truth is that even with the explosion of unconventional oil, the supply/demand picture will remain tight. Let us not forgetthat conventional oil, which makes up 80% of the total, is currently on an ondulating production plateau since 2005. As we will experience the upwards ondulation, we will get the kind of euphoria we see today, and as the ondulation will trend down, we will once again hit dispair. Then, one day, we will realize that the downward ondulation is permanent, with only minor breaks in the trend. At that point, unconventional oil will no longer compensate, and things will get bad. I'm not sure how long it will take for it to happen, nor can I be certain that it will play out exactly as I described. One thing is for sure, that it is a much closer description of reality, than either the most sensationalist peak oil crowd, or the optimists currently have on offer.
http://zoltansustainableecon.blogspot.com/2012/05/controversy-over-peak-oil-oil-prices.html

[bemildred]

6. There was never any question that there is enough to fry us all.

He seems to be saying that there was an argument that we would be saved from global warming by peak oil, which is a new one to me. I must admit it's a dumb enough argument that the anti-climate-change crowd might find it attractive.

[IDemo]

7. I'm going to guess that the author of this piece

believes the official Saudi Aramco oil reserve figure of 260 billion barrels, more or less unchanged since the early 90's and widely regarded as fictional by those who have performed in-depth analyses of the geology of the Ghawar field.

[MindMover]

8. There are a lot more than just one of those fields ...

Your in depth analysis is funded by whom...?

[IDemo]

9. Just one of those fields?

Last edited Mon Jul 9, 2012, 04:34 PM - Edit history (1)

The Ghawar is the king of the planet's giant oil fields, not just a sprinkling of wells. It's where the majority of Saudi crude has come from for the past several decades. Saudi Aramco has been pumping millions of gallons of seawater daily into the field for some time now to keep the pressure up, and that water is showing up back at the wellhead in increasing amounts.

I don't know whether Stuart Staniford has received any additional funding for his numerous analyses for The Oil Drum, but he is working with data from the EIA, OPEC and other sources. If Stuart's lengthy article is too technical, there is a wealth of material elsewhere under 'Ghawar'. Take a look at 'Cantarell', Mexico's giant field which is undergoing a significant collapse right now as well.

[PO Pops]

10. What part of peak oil was wrong?

There is no boom in oil, oil is virtually flat, fluctuating between 71-75mbd these last 6 years - that includes the much touted tight oil.

What there is a boom in (besides PR funded by oil companies) is "All Liquids", that new category that includes everything from ethanol to the wet stuff extracted from natural gas to "refinery gains" (nothin you can burn, basically expansion during refining).

As I peck this out Brent crude stands at $100.32/bbl, the average for the year is $114/bbl - higher in real terms than at any time since oil began. Don't believe me you can ask the head Corny himself,

IHS CERA Chairman and Author of The Quest, Daniel Yergin said.

“Quite simply, we are looking at the highest average price since the age of oil began.”

So, oil is on a plateau, the price is higher than at any time in the past and the only increase in flammable stuff we can manage is by burning food.


Here are a few facts from Kurt Cobb:
http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2012/07/how-changing-definition-of-oil-has.html

[Sirveri]

11. Peak was always about the fields and the end of cheap oil.

That's basically occurring now, we're losing the oil the we can get out of the ground for 2$/bbl, and trading it for oil that costs ten, then we'll move to the 30$/bbl oil, then on to the 50$/bbl oil. We'll dig up oil that requires a massive carbon footprint, all to maintain our reliance, but we don't seem to ever want to actually invest in the things we need to get off of it. Eventually we'll reach a point where it just isn't cost effective to extract the oil anymore, but that isn't likely to happen before we start seeing serious effects due to climate change.