Category: Peak Oil

Offshore oil platform image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org. Whatever happened to “peak oil” – the assertion that the rate at which oil is extracted from the Earth is nearing a maximum or peak level? With falling oil and gasoline prices and a boom of new oil development in the United States and elsewhere, concern about global oil supplies have faded from public view. But have concerns about peak oil really disappeared? What key factors have changed in the oil industry, and what challenges remain? Are we entering a new era of “abundance” or are the risks of the world’s dependence on oil rising? Guests: Key Questions: Cost : What are the trends regarding costs to maintain global oil production now and in the future? Are costs of developing new oil rising or are fracking and other technologies driving production costs down? Do falling prices mean that oil is […]

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The end, said a reincarnated Cassandra, is nigh. Abundant supplies of fossil fuels will end, bringing down the economic order with it. After all, she argued, at current rates of production, oil will run out in 53 years, natural gas in 54, and coal in 110. We have managed to deplete these fossil fuels – which have their origins somewhere between 541 and 66 million years ago – in less than 200 years since we started using them. Cassandra – the Princess of Troy – had been blessed with the gift of prophesy by the Greek God, Apollo. In her modern avatar, she projected how many years these fuels would last by measuring the R/P ratios (that is the ratio of reserves to current rates of production) of fossil fuels. She juxtaposed it with the World Energy Outlook study by the International Energy Agency, which estimated that even with […]

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The Texas RRC Oil & Gas Production numbers are out. They came out on a weekend this month. All RRC data is through July. The EIA data is through June. Keep in mind that the RRC data is incomplete, that is why the chart lines droop on the end. However the EIA data is from the EIA’s Petroleum Supply Monthly , the data of which the EIA says now comes directly from the states, and reflects the complete best estimate of oil production. (Click to enlarge) According to the EIA data, Texas crude + condensate peaked, so far, in March and declined in April, May and June. However the incomplete data from the RRC shows production likely dropping sharply in April, up in May then flat for June and July. (Click to enlarge) Dr. Dean Fantazzini has an algorithm that uses past and present RRC data and predicts what […]

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The Origins of Peak Oil Awareness The scientific study of peak oil began in the 1950′s, when Shell geophysicist M. King Hubbert reported on the evolution of production rates in oil and gas fields. In a 1956 paper Hubbert suggested that oil production in a particular region would approximate a bell curve, increasing exponentially during the early stages of production before eventually slowing, reaching a peak when approximately half of a field had been extracted, and then going into terminal production decline. Hubbert applied his methodology to oil production for the Lower 48 US states and offshore areas. He estimated that the ultimate potential reserve of the Lower 48 US states and offshore areas was 150 billion barrels of oil. Based on that reserve estimate, the 6.6 million barrels per day (bpd) extraction rate in 1955, and the 52.5 billion barrels of oil that had been previously produced in […]

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Fig 1: Refugees walking on Hungarian motorway towards Austria in Sep 2015. [Image via Wikipedia, Creative .20 license.] In May 2013 the Guardian had an article “Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syrian conflict” http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/may/13/1 In March 2015, a group of researchers led by climatologist Colin Kelley (University of California) published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with the title “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought” “Between 2006 and 2009, the people of Syria suffered during the most severe drought that country has experienced since the beginning of its instrumental record. As water became scarce, crops failed and cattle died on a huge scale. As many as 1.5 million Syrians, out of a population of just over 20 million, moved from the countryside to the outskirts of already overflowing cities” In this article we analyse […]

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The Origins of Peak Oil Awareness The scientific study of peak oil began in the 1950′s, when Shell geophysicist M. King Hubbert reported on the evolution of production rates in oil and gas fields. In a 1956 paper Hubbert suggested that oil production in a particular region would approximate a bell curve, increasing exponentially during the early stages of production before eventually slowing, reaching a peak when approximately half of a field had been extracted, and then going into terminal production decline. Hubbert applied his methodology to oil production for the Lower 48 US states and offshore areas. He estimated that the ultimate potential reserve of the Lower 48 US states and offshore areas was 150 billion barrels of oil. Based on that reserve estimate, the 6.6 million barrels per day (bpd) extraction rate in 1955, and the 52.5 billion barrels of oil that had been previously produced in […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

“It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast,” the Red Queen told Alice in Lewis Carroll’s novel “Through the Looking-Glass”. Oil companies have to invest heavily simply to offset the impact of natural decline rates on their existing fields, and even more if they want actually to increase production. The need for continued investment and drilling to maintain output as a result of the rapid decline rates on shale wells has been widely discussed. But decline rates on conventional oil fields are even more important because they account for more than 90 percent of global production. Decline rates on conventional fields will play a critical part rebalancing the oil market and determining where oil prices settle in the longer term. Decline rates will cut output by several million […]

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Despite the attention-grabbing economic volatility that is grabbing headlines, it’s important to keep our eye on the energy story firmly in focus. This is especially true as the headlines we regularly read about Peak Oil being dead " are "manifestly false" according to this week’s podcast guest, petroleum geologist Jeffrey Brown. As concerning as the fact that global oil production has plateaued over the past decade, despite trillions invested in trying to goose it higher, are Brown’s forecasting model for oil exports. His Export Land Model shows how rising internal consumption can swing (and has swung) countries from major exporters to permanent importers within a dizzyingly short period of time: The crucial issue to understand about what has happened after 2005 is that we’ve had a very large increase in global gas production and natural gas liquids, but a much slower increase in crude plus condensate. So, what I […]

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Read Part 1 of the series. Confusion dawns upon the smartest men in the room (photo by Rafael Matsunaga) As I began to mention at the end of the first part of this three-parter, I’ve only just recently come to the conclusion that oil prices aren’t going to have a tendency to rise due to the tightening of supply imposed by peak oil , but to depreciate. This of course flies in the face of the common logic of supply and demand, but when factoring in the method by which the majority of our money is created, a deflationary effect can be seen to come into play. This has taken me an absurdly long time to clue into, for although I’d steadfastly amassed a bunch of pieces (various information), I hadn’t realized they were actually all part of the same puzzle. With peak oil and fractional-reserve banking being the […]

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A container box is loaded on to a truck at a port in Rizhao, Shandong province, August 12, 2015. If you were looking for a bright spot in China’s dismal trade numbers for August, your eyes may be tempted to focus on crude oil imports. A total of 26.59 million tonnes, equivalent to 6.26 million barrels per day (bpd) were imported, according to customs data. While this was a 13.4-percent drop from July’s 30.71 million tonnes, it’s worth bearing in mind that July was the record high in terms of tonnes and some pullback was always likely. August’s imports were up 5.6 percent from the same month last year. What’s more important is that crude imports are up 9.8 percent in the first eight months of the year compared to the same period in 2014, at 220.67 million tonnes, or about 6.63 million bpd. A gain of almost 10 […]

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