Category: Peak Oil

General Ideas Mason Inman recently posted an excellent 2012 interview he conducted with James Schlesinger, our nation’s first Secretary of Energy, who passed away shortly before that posting. [Quotes here are from that interview.] There are some lessons available to all of us. Mr. Schlesinger was a bit more direct than I and others have been in urging more effort from the public to recognize the challenges ahead. Sometimes the truth is just the truth, plain as can be. While we’d all like to believe/hope/wish that the bigger problems can be handled by others without our involvement, life tends not to work that way very often. Reality is what it is, and if we are going to prepare ourselves for inevitable changes which will certainly affect each and every one of us even though that may not be at all clear today, then we all need to step up […]

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Advances in technology will continue to ensure that there are adequate reserves of oil and gas, as fears over supply recede, according to BP’s head of technology, David Eyton. Addressing the 21st World Petroleum Congress in Moscow, Eyton said that generally speaking the theory of peak oil has had its time. There may be other reasons for demand declines, but technology has enabled an increase in reserves. The industry has an excellent track record to increase production and replace reserves, enabled by a sustained high oil price and technology developments over the last 30 years, he said. The potential to enhance oil recovery from reservoirs is very significant, he said, adding that the average oil recovery rate from reserves in the world today is estimated about 35%. “You […]

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Advances in technology will continue to ensure that there are adequate reserves of oil and gas, as fears over supply recede, according to BP’s head of technology, David Eyton. Addressing the 21st World Petroleum Congress in Moscow, Eyton said that generally speaking the theory of peak oil has had its time. There may be other reasons for demand declines, but technology has enabled an increase in reserves. The industry has an excellent track record to increase production and replace reserves, enabled by a sustained high oil price and technology developments over the last 30 years, he said. The potential to enhance oil recovery from reservoirs is very significant, he said, adding that the average oil recovery rate from reserves in the world today is estimated about 35%. “You […]

Click here to view full article at www.upstreamonline.com

So Peak Oil is dead, yeah? Well, to a point. The Financial Times editorializes that while the “bell-curve” theory of production has been broadly disproved, the oil price remains stubbornly high because Peakists were right about the easy oil having been already found and drilled. North America is on course to produce 20% of the world’s oil supply by the end of this decade, and become a “titan of unprecedented proportions” in oil-products markets. So says the International Energy Agency, which points out that just a decade ago the U.S. was the largest importer of refined products. All this is thanks to that shale revolution, of course. U.S. crude-oil production in 2013 increased by a massive 15% from a year earlier , reaching the highest level since oil tycoons looked like Larry Hagman . In 2015, output should be close to the 1970 historical peak. The effect has been so […]

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With the June 16 release of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014, there is some continuing good news. The end of oil and natural gas is still at least a half-century or more away. The reserves-to-production (R/P) ratios for both fossil fuels are well above 50 years. The end of oil is further away than ever. Back in 1980, the R/P ratio (a.k.a., time to depletion at current production rates) for global oil reserves was less than 30 years — now it has increased to more than 53 years. In other words, over the past 35 years we have been discovering new oil reserves at a far faster rate than we have been depleting old reserves. 14 Comments on "End of Oil and Gas Still Many Decades Away" No, we’ve simply been adding things to the list of what we call “oil.” As I said elsewhere, the […]

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Little more that a year after the International Energy Agency added its voice to the chorus chiming that peak oil was dead , a new report from the uconservative adviser to industrialised nations suggests it has changed its tune. Only this time it is not peak supply that is on its radar, but peak demand. The IEA’s Medium-Term Oil Market Report 2014 has predicted that global growth in oil demand may start to slow down as soon as the end of this decade, due to environmental concerns and cheaper alternatives, and despite boosting its 2014 forecast of global demand by 960,000 barrels per day. oil comp While supply is forecast to remain strong – thanks largely to the unconventional, or “tight” oil revolution currently underway in north America – the IEA says it expects the global market to hit an “inflexion point”, by the end of 2019, “after which […]

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Production has not peaked, but prices could be volatile Peak Oil is dead. The news that US output of liquid petroleum has regained its previous peak , reached in 1970, is enough to read the last rites over the idea that a region’s oil production will follow a shape like a bell curve, rising to a peak and then inexorably falling away. Much of the theorising about Peak Oil failed to anticipate technological progress, or understand the power of economic incentives. The US boom in production from previously uncommercial shale reserves has been made possible by advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and made a reality by oil prices that 15 years ago barely seemed possible. More On this topic Editorial Yet while the strong form of the Peakists’ argument can be consigned to the dustbin of history, they were not entirely wrong. Producing oil has become harder, […]

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Production has not peaked, but prices could be volatile Peak Oil is dead. The news that US output of liquid petroleum has regained its previous peak , reached in 1970, is enough to read the last rites over the idea that a region’s oil production will follow a shape like a bell curve, rising to a peak and then inexorably falling away. Much of the theorising about Peak Oil failed to anticipate technological progress, or understand the power of economic incentives. The US boom in production from previously uncommercial shale reserves has been made possible by advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and made a reality by oil prices that 15 years ago barely seemed possible. More On this topic Editorial Yet while the strong form of the Peakists’ argument can be consigned to the dustbin of history, they were not entirely wrong. Producing oil has become harder, […]

Click here to view full article at www.ft.com

Wall Street is the government, and the New York Times is right across town.  Maybe that’s all you need to know to understand what’s happened. In January, 2011, this writer published a four-part article entitled “ The War: Did We Sacrifice a Million Lives and a $Trillion Cash Just to Hand Our Jobs to China? ”  It was long (around 40 pages) and I must admit a little confusing, because the information was so stunning that I had a difficult time understanding what I was reading. The gist of the article was that Big Oil had asked Congress in 1998 to remove the Taliban so as to allow the building of a pipeline that would let Mideastern oil go to “the right markets.”  “The right markets”?  Guess. The US and Europe, of course.  Wrong. India and China. Those, it was explained, were “the right markets” because the oil market was stagnating in the US […]

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