Saildog

The Global Oil Scam: 50 Times Bigger than Madoff

What a load of garbage.

Can Royal Dutch Shell's Shale Extraction Technique End 'Peak Oil' Paranoia?

Hi Jack

You say you do not believe the world as we know it is going to end. Maybe. All sorts of credible organisations tell us that our lifestyle is unsustainable. I am doing a Masters degree in Sustainability. I can tell you without any shadow of a doubt that they are right. Whether it be energy, water, soil, food production, global warming, aquifer depletion, population growth, biodiversity loss, rapidly spreading desease, ice sheet melting, dissappearing bees (mainly in the US, but Europe now as well) we are in very deep trouble.

Any one of these things would cause massive problems. Fact is, they are all happening together. The next 10-20 years are going to be very interesting as humans adjust to the these problems. The human population today is 6.7bn. Various agencies predict populations of 8-9bn in 2050. What is your prediction?

Mine is 2-6bn.

Can Royal Dutch Shell's Shale Extraction Technique End 'Peak Oil' Paranoia?

Hi Jack

Nuclear offshore? On a boat, or maybe a platform? This is a scary thought. I personally would rather have it in my back yard.

Hydrogen will not flow down any pipeline, at least not far. Being the smallest atom on the periodic table it is extremely adept at escaping. That's not all. It reacts with many metals, making them brittle and weak. There is no end point distribution network. Most hydrogen today is made from natural gas, but that is "peaking" too. So, as the comment alludes, the only other option is nuclear derived hydrogen from seawater. "Pure" hydrogen is made from water today for applications that require it, but it is very expensive.

Finally, I presume this article refers to keeping the wheels of transport turning. Hydrogen could be just about be made to work for cars (very expensively). But cars typically move loads measured as a fraction of their overall mass. Trucks, which actually power the economy, routinely carry loads several times their own mass. This is where the laws of thermodynamics bite hard. Moving all that stuff takes energy - lots of it. Diesel contains a huge amount of energy in an easy to use compact liquid form. If you wanted to use hydrogen in your heavier goods trucks you would need a tank that could easily take up half the payload space and mass of the truck. Not because the hydrogen weighs a lot, it doesn't. It is the tank itself that needs to be specially strengthened. Aircraft? Forget it.

On the doomer front. I personally do not go with the doomer scenario either. Oil production has remained flat since October 2004, since when the US, China, India and a few other countries have all increased their imports. More disturbingly oil exporting countries are rapidly increasing their own oil consumption, often by subsidizing it very heavily. They are exporting less. The result is that poorer people and poorer countries are importing much less and many have already dropped out of the oil age. The Wall Street Journal recently carried a story about hospitals in Guinea that cannot afford diesel for their standby generators. With regular power cuts (thanks to global warming - dams and hydro power are down) maternity wards are forced to remove premature babies from incubators when the power goes off, so they put the baby on the mothers tummy. Some die.

That is peak oil. All you need do is connect the dots.

Yet we in the rich west (actually I live in Australia, nearly as far east as you can go) haven't really noticed. Gas is a little more expensive, stock markets are up, everybody is predicting growth. But as the gap between supply and demand ($25 per barrel demand) grows, the price will trend upwards. Geopolitical events might make it very volatile, up and down, but the trend will remain firmly up. More and more people will join those who already have dropped out of the oil age. Our economies might move into recession, but oil won't be blamed. Cyclical factors, debt levels, structural adjustment, any old economics nonsense will be dreamt up, rather than admitting the problem is oil, or the lack of it.

Ironically, the US, being one of the richest countries on earth, may be the last to feel it. Strange how justice works.

Can Royal Dutch Shell's Shale Extraction Technique End 'Peak Oil' Paranoia?

And that is the problem.

The issue is thermodynamics. Oil in and of itself is not the issue. It is the net energy contribution to society that oil represents that is important. And there isn't much net energy in oil shale. Or tar sands. Or corn ethanol. Or anything else.

And that really is a problem.

That is why people are concerned about Peak Oil. Not about running out, because we will never "run out". There will always be oil in the ground. We just will not be able to get it to flow fast enough, and the net energy available to society will decrease.

Can Royal Dutch Shell's Shale Extraction Technique End 'Peak Oil' Paranoia?

Hi Jack

I have read several times that Oil shales are going to save us.

A few points:

Although well written, much of your article was wrong. Peak Oil is not a theory, it is an observation. Many countries have passed their own Peaks in oil production. The US is one, it did so back in 1971. So has the UK, Norway, Indonesia (illogically it remains part of OPEC, even though it is a net importer), Australia and many others. In fact 30 countries out of the top 50 oil producers have passed Peak Oil.

Peak Oil is not the point when "oil runs out". In fact it is the opposite. It is the point in time when the most oil ever is produced.

Nobody knows when global Peak Oil will occur because a sizeable portion of the world’s top producers keep their data secret. It does them no good, but they seem to want to keep the arrangement. Saudi Arabia is the most important oil producing country that falls into this category. It is also the worlds most important oil producer.

Oil production has remained static since October 2004 at approximately 84 million barrels per day. Maintaining oil production means that new oil producing projects must be brought on line faster than older fields are depleting. This seems a simple enough concept, but lots of people have trouble understanding that point. For instance, Canterell in Mexico, the second biggest field in the world and the source of much of the oil imported into the US declined 20% in 2006. The North sea declined about 8%. Saudi Arabia declined 8%. Just these three production areas total over 1.5 million barrels per day in lost production with Saudi being the most important.

What this means is that if existing production is declining at 5% per year (a conservative number, considering Canterell) that means that the same amount of oil that is being produced now must be found again in new dicoveries and field overhauls to achieve the projected demand of 120 million barrels per day. This just is not going to happen.

More disturbingly, it looks like Saudi is at that point in it’s depletion curve when the decline is still accelerating. It could be 1m barrels down in 2007. Canterell, the North sea and all the others are also still declining as well. We will know later this year if Saudi is in permanent decline. If so global Peak Oil will already have happened and life will get interesting.

A million barrels a day is a lot of oil. There is no chance, absolutely none, that oil shale will produce that kind of production any time soon, if ever. Nether will any of the other imposters such as ethanol from corn. But that’s another story.