Allen Fuller

Peak Oil - Are We There Yet?

On Sep 19 10:19 PM Brian Pursley wrote:

> In response to Allen Fuller,
>
> I say oil is renewable because it is. See Eugene Island and the
> other wells that are refilling.

Oil is renewable if you are willing to wait millions of years.

The "refilling" of certain wells, most likely from reserves deeper in the crust, is an interesting phenomenon. Unfortunately, it is occurring at a rate approximately 100 times slower than our current consumption of oil. So, it's ludicrous to think we can just wait for a few wells to magically refill themselves and then suck it out again.

> Why did the US peak more than 35 years ago? Because that's when
> the radical environmentalists started their political engineering.
> The US peaked by design not by geology. We've only been drilling
> offshore in 2 states.

Your history is wrong. Oil peaked in the U.S. NOT because of radical environmentalists banning drilling etc. No, in fact, in the 1970s there was a DRILLING FRENZY as the oil industry tried to reverse the declines they were seeing. My sources show that drilling in this nation was at its highest around 1980. Yet this was unable to reverse the decline in the lower 48. Only new fields in Alaska allowed us to get a brief bump up in production, though we never achieved the rate of flow we had in 1970.

> How come this peaking pattern is seen in field after field and nation
> after nation around the world? What peaking pattern? Brazil and
> Russia certainly haven't peaked. I suspect it's because drilling
> isn't illegal there. Just a guess.

Russia is now peaking. Their production curve over the last few years shows a slowing in growth, and they are now on track for their first full year of actual declines.

Brazil's discoveries are tantalizing, but in the grand scale of things, only amount to a year or two of consumption. Besides, you have to drill through thousands of feet of rock and salt to get to it. Doesn't sound like the easy oil we have built our economy on. Some estimates indicate Brazil will peak, depending on how fast they produce, in the next decade or even sooner.

In many other nations that used to be great oil producers, we are seeing declines. The U.S., the North Sea (UK and Norway), now Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt, India, Syria, Venezuela (yes!), Yemen, and more. The full list of countries past their peak (by the way, they DON'T all have the environmental restrictions that supposedly, according to you, made the U.S. peak) now includes most of the oil-producing countries in the world. Only the true giant fields in a few nations, mostly in the Middle East, are keeping the world from hitting its peak. And even there, they are relying on old giants, not new discoveries.

> No such thing as so-called "fossil" fuel. In the history of the
> universe fossils have never miraculously or magically evolved into
> complex hydrocarbons: oilismastery.blogspot..../

The abiotic theory of oil production is pretty strongly discredited; look it up. Its proponents do NOT back their theory up with much in the way of verifiable statistics and facts. Even if it were true, again, the rate at which it supposedly gets produced in the crust, according to the theory's own proponents, is not enough to supply our current rate of consumption. So it's a red herring either way.

Peak oil is a historical fact, observable in the past at the level of oil fields, countries and regions; and it is pretty obvious to those who study the DATA and the FACTS that it is about to occur world-wide.

Peak Oil - Are We There Yet?

Also if peak oil is "garbage" then why did the US peak more than 35 years ago? How come we haven't been able to reverse this trend even with high prices and good technology? How come this peaking pattern is seen in field after field and nation after nation around the world?

Where are the mythical "400 billion barrels" in the Bakken formation? (The USGS came out and said that was a myth; real reserves are estimated at 4.3 billion, nothing to sneeze at but only a few months' worth at our current consumption.)

When are we going to see the "oil" from so-called "oil shale", and at what price? Where are we going to get all the water, and how can we possibly scale up production to the levels required? If you study these so-called solutions, they can only contribute a small part of our consumption over a long range of time.

I'm not a doomer; I believe we will have economic hardship but eventually we will move to true renewable sources like wind, geothermal, and solar. I hold out hope for fusion research as well. But it's time to admit reality regarding fossil fuels.

Peak Oil - Are We There Yet?

To Brian Pursley,

Why do you say oil is renewable? Of course, at a certain cost, a decent chemist should be able to manufacture it from raw elements or basic compounds like water, carbon dioxide, etc. But at that point you need more energy to create it than you would get out of it. Where is your energy going to come from?

All you have to do is look at the fact that DISCOVERIES peaked 40 years ago. You can't pump what you haven't discovered. If peak oil is garbage, then where is all the new oil being discovered? There's a lag time between discoveries and production too, so even if discoveries suddenly and miraculously jumped WAY up, you'd still have a gap before they can contribute to existing production, which is projected to start declining around 2010 or so.

Economists point out that higher prices will cause supply to increase. This is true up to a point; higher prices make previously uneconomic oil suddenly worth extracting. But at some point the price itself will cause so much hurt to the economy that it won't matter that we have "more" oil available at that price.

Geologist: In Terms of Supply and Demand, the Oil Peak Is Past

I agree with most of what Chris said. Even if Peak Oil is not happening in the next 5 years (it WILL happen... even the most optimistic analysts see it happening in the next 20-30 years at the MOST), the sooner we get OFF oil, the better we will be.

The free market is starting to move in the right direction, but if peak oil happens by 2010 as seems most likely, then it will be too little too late. As much as I prefer laissez faire policies in general, this is one that is too important to everything-- our economy, our national security, our prosperity, even our survival-- to leave solely in the hands of the whims of the market. The government should have been leading the market in the right direction 20 years ago, with a much more aggressive energy policy that promotes renewables and discourages waste.

We don't have 20 years so the best we can do is get aggressive now. Yet even now people want to deny what is going on.

On talk radio, I hear fairy tales of a "trillion barrels of domestic oil" that we could tap now if only the "radical environmentalists" would get out of the way. This is, to put it mildly, wishful thinking. For example, they claim the Bakken formation may have 400 BILLION barrels of oil. However, the USGS came out and pretty much said that's a myth. Their estimate of technically recoverable oil is 4.3 billion-- nothing to be sneezed at, but nothing that will save us either.

It's time to bite the bullet. It's time for electric cars and improved public transporation. It's time for solar and wind, nuclear, geothermal, and everything else that we can pursue. Postponing what we must eventually do anyways only heightens the risks.

Introduction to a Long Lecture on Oil

A very good article.

To phinsuntanning, when you say that the sea is full of tankers, I assume you are referring to a news tidbit seized upon by people who doubt that supply is the problem and who want to pin it on speculators or some other scapegoat. The news tidbit was that there were tankers full of oil in the Persian Gulf just waiting because they could not find buyers at this price.

The only problem with that story is that these tankers were full of heavy, sour crude, which no one wants to buy because it is expensive to refine and hard to use. If it were "light, sweet" crude, it would have been snapped up in an instant. That is the stuff that is easy to refine and gives an enormous energy return on energy invested (EROEI). We will eventually be forced to use more heavy, sour crude, however, in spite of its low EROEI, because light sweet crude is becoming ever more scarce as demand for it soars.