Peak Oil as a Function of Earth's Volume 36 comments
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I've been thinking about geological scales of magnitude with respect to peak oil. Within the mother sphere, there is approximately 1 trillion square kilometers of stuff. That's 1,000,000,000,000. And the fraction of a trillion that I estimated away is no small matter either.
And then estimating known reserves of oil here
Known reserves of petroleum are typically estimated at around 190 km3 (1.2 trillion (short scale) barrels) without oil sands,[9] or 595 km3 (3.74 trillion barrels) with oil sands.[10] Consumption is currently around 84 million barrels (13.4×10^6 m3) per day, or 4.9 km3 per year. Because the energy return over energy invested (EROEI) ratio of oil is constantly falling (due to physical phenomena such as residual oil saturation, and the economic factor of rising marginal extraction costs), recoverable oil reserves are significantly less than total oil in place. At current consumption levels, and assuming that oil will be consumed only from reservoirs, known recoverable reserves would be gone around 2039, potentially leading to a global energy crisis. However, there are factors which may extend or reduce this estimate, including the rapidly increasing demand for petroleum in China, India, and other developing nations; new discoveries; energy conservation and use of alternative energy sources; and new economically viable exploitation of non-conventional oil sources.
Ok so lets go with the biggest estimate of roughly 600 km3.
Let's also remove the obvious volume of the oceans which is given again from Wikipedia as approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometer.
So the fraction then of the stuff we kind of know about is ~0.1% of the earth's volume if my decimals are correct. Even if my math is bad, I think the conclusion is sound that we basically have very little idea what all is down there. There could be huge reserves of black gold just waiting for the right technology. Even just the "black smokers" discovered so far emit 17,000 million watts of energy roughly equivalent of the amount of energy that humans consume each year. (As quoted on the Discovery channel anyway).
Agreed that China and India represent huge increases in demand and America is just plain gluttonous (on so many levels). And I understand the consumption vs. production ratios are gloomy. But just as the computer was a hugely disruptive technology to business and communications, so is the electric car. No gas, no oil changes, no oil filters, no spark plugs, no transmission fluid, no maintenance of any kind really! (Why do you think GM killed the EV1!) Imagine plugging your hybrid into your solar panels. Slick! Once solar conversion rates improve a couple more orders of magnitude we will probably all be surprised by how much oil consumption may be displaced.
I guess the bottom line is I believe in human creativity and our ability to evolve. To me it seems obvious that evolution is real since if we didn't change we wouldn't have survived this long as a species and we won't survive much longer given our exponential growth in population. Malthusians are right. You can't go from addition to multiplication to exponential growth (thats 3 orders of magnitude, scales, paradigms, whatever you want to call them) without a subsequent down wave, just as the stock market is showing us now. So sure we may reach a peak oil phenomenom that may put our population into a long term decline, but it also could be a virus.
Short term fluctuations may cause much higher oil prices from two main effects. One being the flood of dollars flowing out of real estate to T bills to oil. The second being obvious supply and demand factors. Profits will certainly be made on the long oil bet sooner rather than later. But long term I think we will find ways to expoit all kinds of energy sources that will support our insatiable demands for ipods and electronic binary data.
Disclosure: Author is long DBA and oil.
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This article has 36 comments:
Also, in the beginning it should probably read cubic kilometers as a measure of volume.
A de-facto tax cut for American motorists. Each $1 per barrel drop in oil increases U.S. GDP by $100 billion per year and every 1 cent decline in gasoline increases U.S. consumer disposable income by $600 million per year.
The last 20 years have been characterized by rising U.S. oil consumption, but now the U.S. Energy Information Agency. incorporating the most-recent changes in U.S. consumer behavior, says there will be no appreciable growth in U.S. oil consumption between now and 2030, with biofuels accounting for all of the growth in liquid fuels.
At least you correctly identified the "bottom line" correctly. The rest of the article is just wandering nonsense. If you really want to address our energy situation, try figuring out how we can use that creativity to do so. Using your time to figure out the mass of the earth and then concluding that there "could" be lots more oil is less productive than arguing over the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin. (And forget about evolution, we've got a generation or two to figure this out.)
Shale isn't in production in a meaningful way yet, nuclear power plants take years to build, and ethanol is a proven joke. There's no way you could produce enough ethanol to offset the gasoline consumption without using the entire USA's corn crop which would mean disaster for food and livestock producers.
So in the 5-10 years it takes to produce all your nuclear plants there could very well be an energy shock.
Besides, how did we get into the last energy debacle? Why didn't your nuclear, ethanol and shale help us out then?
Peak oil theory isn't about running out of oil -- it's about running out of cheap oil. If someone discovered a Exxon station at the center of the earth, I don't think that would move the market.
I have done all my own auto maintenance over a span of 40 years. The idea that I could own a car that never needed an oil change, spark plugs, or even late night stops for gas, seems like a dream.
Bring it on! I'll buy more solar panels and charge at home.
We let other countries drill around our borders while we sit and watch. Qwack science and assumptions have led America down the road to nowhere. People like Gore are getting rich off of it and no one cares. Congress knows everything and mandate it daily. Our founding fathers never intended for our government to tell us what kind of lightbulbs we can or can't use. With Obama giving more powers to the EPA it will cost working class Americans more money. Grab your ankles and get ready folks...
For all the doubters such as "entire surface area of the continental U.S. because it has already been scoured. There is nothing left to find. The same could be said for Europe and certain other small and/or developed countries."
The entire surface area may be close to being explored but again, the correction from square to cubic is orders of magnitude difference.
Then there is this...
seekingalpha.com/artic...
"InterOil (IOC) is a Canadian integrated (exploration assets, refinery, near distribution monopoly) located in Papua New Guinea [PNG]. After having struck two earlier profusely flowing natural gas and liquids wells (flowing at 102 and 105MMcf/d respectively), they hit an absolute killer with Antelope1, which flowed at a whopping 382MMcf/d."
So that was the last big reserve we will ever find!?
On Apr 28 01:43 PM Chris Uhlir wrote:
> So that was the last big reserve we will ever find!?
Also, nobody seemed to disagree with the math which I will even bump the range up to to 0.2% (1.3 billion km3 + 600billion km3 divided by at least 1T km3). Thats not 10-20% thats one tenth or 2 tenths of a percent of earth's volume of water and known oil. Everyone just assumes peak oil without allowing for any margin due to 99.9% or 99.8% of the volume left unexplored?
"It's not helpful to compare the volume known of oil reserves to the volume of the earth. The "enough to fill a stadium" argument (so to speak) doesn't provide any useful comparison"
I'm not familiar with the "enough to fill a stadium" theory so why is this not a useful comparison?
Third generation "Oily"
The volume of earth is not a statistic, it is a fact.
And because oil has never been found deeper than 30000 feet means it never will be?? Thats just 5-6 miles out of 7000+ miles.
I never assumed oil bubbles up ala The Beverly Hillbilllies, I just want to point out that >90% of the contents within the volume of earth is not known to us humans... yet.
On Apr 28 03:02 PM enviro111 wrote:
> It is absolutely preposterous to use volume of Earth statistics and
> oil reserves in the same analysis. They have almost nothing to do
> with each other. For starter's oil has never been found deeper than
> 30,000 feet in the Earth. It is almost always found in sedimentary
> rocks, and was created as a result of a previous severe global warming
> episode on the Earth about 75 million years ago. It does not 'bubble
> up' from the core of the Earth.
Murray Rothbard once said:
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
This is as true of petroleum geology as it is of economics, and both speak to the loud and vociferous ignorance apparent in this post.
Americans eat enough McDonalds french fries in a year to fill a football stadium, so that makes us fat.
The volume of a football stadium is a neat visual, but really has no bearing on the matter.
On Apr 28 02:30 PM Chris Uhlir wrote:
> I'm not familiar with the "enough to fill a stadium" theory so why
> is this not a useful comparison?
At the rate the world uses oil, even a couple of elephant-sized discoveries would make little difference to the mid-Century deadline for conventional oil to be mostly depleted.
As for "evolution and creativity", weren't Passenger Pigeons the most common bird in the US until Man set out to show his mastery over finite resources?
1) It is about the cost to recover a barrel of oil from the center of the earth. And,
2) the cost to explore the center of the earth. And,
3) the unlikely possibility that the center of the earth contains oil.
It would be cheaper to hire former GM employees (with their pensions) to ride those stationary bikes to generate power.
Your point about disruptive technologies is valid though. Instead of the quadrillion dollars it would take to fund your plan for oil exploration, I agree that electric cars and other near-term technologies will easily solve our problem.
AND...by solve our problem I mean reduce demand for oil to the point where enough supply is available for the "hard" energy storage problems. (e.g. air travel, super tankers, plastics, etc.)
On Apr 28 05:54 PM Chris Uhlir wrote:
> How could they have nothing to do with each other when all of the
> oil we will ever know about is contained within the earth??!!
>
> The volume of earth is not a statistic, it is a fact.
>
Having said that, the main problem with the location and exploitation of fossil fuel reserves (and other energy sources) is political, not technical. Removal of government restrictions would vastly increase available sources of energy from coal to petroleum to nuclear. (And the alternative energy sources would have to sink or swim on their own merits rather than surviving only because of massive government subsidies.)
But applying a ratio of the premium oil bearing strata to the whole earth and saying we need only apply the magic of technology and time to create oil where there is none is just plain silly.
About remaining potential generally, the consensus is 3 trillion barrel endowment, of which about 25% has been produced. Exploration at the poles (both of them) might add another trillion, but I think it's pretty implausible that anyone will be allowed to drill in Antarctica or able to drill at the North Pole. That said, however, Landmark tasked us to fix their CRS nav and displays to correct for horizontal drilling at extreme latitudes in the Arctic Circle, so somebody's considering it evidently. How they propose to shoot seismic through ice, I dunno.
About remaining potential generally, the consensus is 3 trillion barrel endowment, of which about 25% has been produced. Exploration at the poles (both of them) might add another trillion, but I think it's pretty implausible that anyone will be allowed to drill in Antarctica or able to drill at the North Pole. That said, however, Landmark tasked us to fix their CRS nav and displays to correct for horizontal drilling at extreme latitudes in the Arctic Circle, so somebody's considering it evidently. How they propose to shoot seismic through ice, I dunno.