Has World Oil Production Passed Its Peak? 1250
dido writes "Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has been studying world petroleum production data and has come to the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005. If he is correct, total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December. From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent. The high prices did not bring much additional oil out of the ground. Most oil-producing countries are in decline."
I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember in college a geologist was invited to demonstrate a "resource simulator" for our class. By today's standards it would be considered extremely crude (this was after all, in 1978), (wow, weird unintentional pun).
The simulation was basically a giant video game with a simple graphical display of the world's known and projected resources including but not limited to:
About 20 students in the class were given controllers, each to (again, crudely) simulate usage and comsumption patterns of all of these resources. Also, some students had controllers allowing them to spend resources to explore for MORE resources.
At the time, and years subsequent that demo stayed with me -- it left an indelible image of what could and probably would be.
The results? Basically, no matter what the students did to conserve, and what they did to increase the resources, the "world" pretty much always ran out of fuel and resources by the year 2020. At the time that seemed pretty far away and I don't think many people felt the need to care. Maybe that time has come.
Another interesting piece of the simulation: there were those students who pointed out these "estimates" of known and expected future discoveries of resources were just that, "estimates". The geologist obliged, and let the students rerun the simulations with a magnitude of latitude, i.e., ten times the estimated resources were allocated! The results then?, about an additional 10 to 20 years of resources before they ran out.
Note: the results (we ran many different trials) weren't ALWAYS about running out of oil and petroleum. On a few occasions there were severe food and water crises. A very interesting lesson.
Hybrids/Alternative Fuels (Score:2, Interesting)
Further articles (Score:5, Interesting)
A huge chunk of Saudi exports come from one gigantic field. This means our eggs are in this one basket. Here's an article that discusses that field, and the chance that the Saudis might have screwed it by over-extracting. If you do that, you limit how much you can get out later; you might lose the reserves. [I'm guessing you might damage it, but that some future technology might make it recoverable -- just at a higher cost]
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80C89E7E-1
Isn't this exactly what oil companies want? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ethanol (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps new cars will implement the required modifications to prevent corrosion throughout the engines from higher percentages of ethanol in petrol.
Re:Isn't this exactly what oil companies want? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ethanol (Score:5, Interesting)
Ethanol is a hell of a lot closer than the far-fetched hydrogen economy proposed by the US's current executive administration.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:3, Interesting)
I could see a freshwater crisis (we've already had some of those), but such a crisis isn't anything that technology can't solve. (Desalination stations could become a big business.) I'm much more interested in how you came up with a food crisis. North and South America already produce way more food than is necessary, with options to increase production through farming more land or (in the case of South America) improving farming technology. To create an actual crisis, you'd need a population explosion that would make the Baby Boomers look outright tiny.
As for other resources, petrol is probably the biggest concern, bar none. It's the only material that we can't recycle, replace with nuclear power, sythesize, or mine from elsewhere in our solar system. If it doesn't exist as petroleum that can be refined with far less energy than it provides, then it's useless to us. The only option I see (if we actually want to get off of petroleum, not necessarily because we've completely run out) is to move to an alternate fuel such as ethanol. Even if we accept that ethanol is energy negative (which I don't), we can at least target the harvest and production processes to obtain their energy from the nuclear power grid rather than from ethanol. That would allow us to effectively store energy from the grid in a portable fuel form that can completely replace petroleum.
What a load of tripe (Score:1, Interesting)
Oil prices drove the drilling/exploring companies to Arab countries, just like China is taking certain industries down in the US right now.
If oil prices were to stabilize in the US at a profitable level, exploration and drilling would resume.
But the US would rather let environmentalist driving SUV's sue the living SH*T out of everybody.
This exports the oil production and pollution to some other country rather than allow exploration to continue in the US. At last count only 2.5% of the "projected oil producing land-mass" of the US had been investigated.
It's not a lack of oil, it's a surplus of lawyers.
B
Re:Why the peak? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's certainly overstating it a bit, but on the other hand, most people seem to be of the mindset that 'oh this peak oil thing was just something someone made up. Don't believe the hype!' They think it's like Y2K. Scary...until it really happens and it turns out it wasn't so bad after all....
I really, really, really, wish that was the case. But I'm afraid it just isn't. A lot of people are living in fantasy land right now and assuming that any spike in oil prices is going to be like the 1970s. But after a point, it won't just come back down. Extrapolation works rather well in this case because there's no real reason to believe that the world's oil consumption is going to dramatically decrease, and considering that oil-producing countries are basically operating on the same fields they always have been (because there just aren't very many new ones). Oil price fluctuates because of the rest of the supply chain, not because there are new wells being drilled and others shut down all the time. Relatively speaking, it's a fairly predictable economy.
The problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now then, I don't know what Professor Kenneth S. Deffeyes background is, but I can see he is writing books on the subject as so has a vested and economic interest in this theory. Furthermore he seems to discount Ethanol, fuel cells, Methane hydrates, oil shale, and Nuclear power, as "shimmering dreams" so I think one needs to take what he is saying with a grain of salt since, as stated before, his vested interest to make money at this point is "peak oil".
The truth behind "rock oil" right now is that there is alot being used, and there is alot out there and there are still a good number of basins which have not been explored, including the Arctic Ocean and there is alot of oil we can recoved in "played out" areas with new techniques and with new technologies.
WorldWide Hydrocarbon Supplies Data (Score:3, Interesting)
Mr. Simmons pdfs and PPTs used with his speaches are avaialable at his website, and are incredibly detailed and convincing.
Nuclear power is the ONLY rational solution, near term.
Weak kneed leaders in the U.S. have been totally 100% cowed by irrational environmental types who do not use any of this data or statistical evidence or engineering facts to oppose anything but "green". What these so-called leaders and environmentalists miss is that they may have doomed the U.S. to great hardship, by delaying the inevitable move to nuclear fission, which other major countries have done and are expanding as we speak.
Bo
Re:Oil sands (Score:3, Interesting)
Each barrel of extracted oil from the tar sands requires the release of more than 80kg of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and about 5 barrels of waste water - not to mention the environmental nightmare caused by strip-mining. There is no easy answer to our oil addiction. It's certainly not to be found in Canada's north. It will stave off the inevitable for a few short years, at tremendous economic and environmental cost, but our world will change forever.
The good news is that we will be "forced" to rediscover local agriculture and commerce. No more "made in China" stickers on our locally made goods, and craftspeople will regain the stature they once had. Just remember that suburban "starter mansions" will be the slums of the future -- to expensive to heat, too far from shops, farmland and gathering places to be worth inhabiting. My advice? Learn blacksmithing in your spare time.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Interesting)
The big and rarely discussed impact of peak oil isn't going to be heat fuel at all - it's petrochemicals. Plastics, drugs, fertilizers... Each and every one of us probably has the equivalent of a barrel or more of oil within a few yards in these forms. Your average [Wal-Mart|huge big box retail chain] all by itself contains a non-trivial fraction of a tanker's load in these forms.
get your facts straight (Score:5, Interesting)
E85 - Ethanol (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Further articles (Score:3, Interesting)
High gas prices are the last of your worries (Score:2, Interesting)
passe oil (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
It works, it provides clean water and high grade deisel oil, cleans the air by providing higher octane product, less emissions from refinery gasses, can empty landfills of plastic, can clean the water supply from biomass waste. Don't as me why the hell the DOE hasn't gotten behind it. A tenth of the cost of the Manhatten project could make us the largest oil producers on the planet*.
Also check the Wiki references to plastic conversions. Say good-bye to plastic waste and ocean pollution as well. Grey water dumping would also be convertable on the cruise ship level. Plus domestic production nullifies the middle east cartels, and puts tanker accidents off our coasts to an end. The middle east argument alone is a national security problem and it's criminal that this tech hasn't gone into a crash program status.
And this blows all previous gas alternatives out of the water, doesn't require massive leaps in corn production and doesn't require an change in transportation systems or distribution.
I'm confident that we will engage in this tech at some point - but it'd be nice to hear more about it. Try googling it sometime - you'll find almost nothing in the pop-press. I've even had dialogue with MSNBC about it - and they claim they're aware of it - but never say dick. Neither did Wired and they were talking new-oil on the fricking cover of their rag less than a month ago. FEH!
* The KC Star reported that from bio-waste alone via agribusiness we could convert all organic waste-fodder into 20 billion barrels of oil. We consume 12 billion barrels at present. We could ergo go from being the largest consumers to the largest producers.
Re:Prius owners are as selfish as Hummer drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and by the way, we Europeans aren't all French. Actually, most of us can't stand them at all.
Pump rates at the Ghawar Field and Burgan Fields (Score:3, Interesting)
Scoff at your own peril!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
A world with no affordable oil???
As the rich and privileged hog the remaining oil and leave the masses to fight it out society will collapse, there is no doubt about that. I am just glad I do not live in a society where every man and his dog has a firearm, now that society would truly descend into a hellish nightmare.
Scoff at your peril, or learn how to grow your own food (because there will be no distribution to your local supermarket) and then learn how to defend your food, because everyone will want what you have.
Re:passe oil (Score:3, Interesting)
The wikipedia article claims a return of 85% on available input energy for offal, i.e. the system uses more energy than it gets back. The 560% figure is nonsense, as they aren't including the energy required to produce the feedstock - I could equally say that carrying a tin of petrol 20 yards is 10000% efficient.
I agree that we should be using TD for waste (and it's vastly superior to high temp incinerators, which are mostly just dioxin factories), but I also think people should be looking at real sustainable solutions, such as solar space and DHW heating. I currently collect 5kW peak of solar domestic hot water heat using $100 in parts. Considering heating is the largest domestic load in the US, ytf doesn't everyone use solar heat. I also collect 100kWh of hot air using a cheap greenhouse on sunny days in winter.
A photo test section of my soon to be installed 35kW peak (120kWhr in mid winter, 280kWhr in summer) solar array:
http://njhurst.com/solar/20060215clou/p2006021500
It collects enough heat in winter on one sunny day to keep my house warm for 2 cloudy days, plus all my DHW needs. It has cost me $350 in parts and should take about 2 hours in install the lot. It uses an average of 50W to produce 10kW, a return of 200:1. If people removed the heating, DHW, lighting and cooling portion of first world energy then TD might be viable.
Re:wow. (Score:4, Interesting)
Production will start a long, slow decline, and prices will start a long, steady rise.
I thought the whole point of the peak oil theory was that prices won't rise slowly and steadily, but exponentially, due to various psychological and economical effects resulting from the fact that "the end is in sight," as it were.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Reserves" is a counterintuitive economic term. (Score:2, Interesting)
Part of the reasoning is that the term "Reserve" does not refer to the actual, physical quantity of oil present.
From This document [spe.org]
SPE and WPC stress that petroleum proved reserves should be based on current economic conditions, including all factors affecting the viability of the projects. SPE and WPC recognize that the term is general and not restricted to costs and price only. Probable and possible reserves could be based on anticipated developments and/or the extrapolation of current economic conditions. (emphasis mine).
In other words, the "gold standard" means of defining "reserves" allows producers to take into account the price of oil and the cost of extraction. If the price of oil rises, those bodies of oil which would previously be uneconomic to extract suddenly become worthwhile.
Hence the ability to triple your reserves in a very short time, with no requirement for extra discovery or exploration. It just happens that oil fields that you were previously ignoring start to look viable because the prices are high.
In no way does this reflect an increase in actual real amounts of hydrocarbons. But it does mean that you can increase CONFIDENCE in the supply. Almost by definition, reserves will start to increase the moment any kind of shortage begins.
Of course, it doesn't account for the inevitable increase in price (remember, if prices drop, reserves will DESCREASE instantly). Most of the benefits of oil to the economy are linked to it's high energy profit ratio. As this decreases, the inherent value of the oil decreases, and you end up in an economic downspiral. And that's the real kicker of "Peak Oil". We'll probably never actually drink the oil fields dry, we'll just get to the point where the world economy is so crippled that we can't afford to extract, refine, or ship it.
Re:There's still a question of shares (Score:1, Interesting)
The point I am making: even though you conserve you can't point fingers, because there is something more you could do. I also believe in conserving, but it only delays the inevitable.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html [unh.edu]
Wired had an article back in 2002:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/mustread
This is probably the source article the parent read:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003999.html [worldchanging.com]
Re:If supply is fixed, let'd adjust demand. (Score:2, Interesting)
Many people don't realize that for a long time in the 90's oil was actually $15-$20/bbl. There are families (such as mine) that do rely on oil prices to make a living and we are not some huge cartel rolling around in piles of cash.
There is a large misconception that oil prices have always been high, because people incorrectly correlate gas prices to oil prices.
Re:naive (Score:4, Interesting)
Sweden to be Oil-free by 2020 (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sceptical that the Swedes won't be able to do it without nuclear power but kudos for attempting a difficult problem. I wonder if they'll get rid of all oil-based *products*. Replacing plastic bags with paper ones would be a start. umm. I'd like to see UK supermarkets replace their plastic bags with paper. Using paper instead of plastic for some products would encourage the planting of trees.
Will the swedes make a push in the EU at stopping tax-free fuel for air travel? Of course, that would be the end of cheap trips abroad but that's going to have to stop sooner of later.
I'd also like to see studies of mining operations in the asteroid belt and elsewhere in the galaxy. A space elevator is needed more than ever.
That first post left out fusion power (Score:3, Interesting)
Javon's Parodox? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [wikipedia.org]
No, the cat does not "got my tongue." (Score:2, Interesting)
> been studying world petroleum production data and has come to
> the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.
This is because he's a geologist and not an economist [juliansimon.org].
> If he is correct,
Don't worry, he is not.
> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.
Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? [juliansimon.org] Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?
> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent
> in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.
The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.
Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along [juliansimon.org], and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.
Re:If supply is fixed, let'd adjust demand. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, the beauty of one-dimensional thinking!
What about drilling for more oil to serve our (and emerging countries') current energy needs, while we build more nuke plants, ramp up alternative fuels, innovate with solar (a HUGE energy source), add more windfarms, research large-scale geothermal, and continue work on a hydrogen economy. Eventually we'll also get hydrogen fusion working as an energy source, which will effectively forever end energy as a bottleneck of human expansion and industrialization.
The Oort cloud is the limit! (For now at least...)
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:3, Interesting)
apparently you've never heard of bio-plastic. yes, good old plant esters can be converted into plastics too. it's just been really expensive to do so. and it's not going to get any cheaper until people demand the stuff in volume.
the extent of the 'addiction' to oil has prevented technolgies that could have 'saved' us 30 years ago (when the us oil production 'peaked' prior to new technolgies being developed) such as wide scale algea farming. do you realize how much say, desert region could be converted into a continuous algea production center? a lot. and that was just the 'on land production' they were considering in the 70's algea grows in water, cheap ways of making water more 'algea friendly' to allow rapid growth fields of the stuff over deep water would greatly increase the amount of energy we can utilize that comes from the sun.
done right algea oil might be cheaper than petrolium. afterall harvesting something off the surface should cost a lot less than drilling very deep holes to pump stuff out of the ground, and diesel engines can be converted to run on straight up veggie oil, so the energy costs in comparisions to 'cracking' petrolium hydrocarbons is far far lower. but the $ needed to design, test, and deploy a global algea field capable of replacing the 'oil' addiction would be staggering, just the capital required to replace the Us oil needs would run in the billions. and wehn all is said and done we don't even know if it would be 'cheaper' than pertolium. what if it can replace the oil addiction but is 3 times as expensive? what then?
Re:naive (Score:2, Interesting)
I may be a bit biased (my father is a shell pres/veep, after all), but I really like their diversification strategy into alternate oil sources and non-oil based energy sources (BP has invested a lot too, but they advertize it more
That said, enough with this stupid peak oil panic, for many reasons.
1) As oil prices rise, uneconomical deposits become economical.
2) There are plenty of types of unconventional oil and natural gas deposits (shale, bitumen, hydrates/clathrates, etc)
3) There's a hundred years of coal in the US; even if coal has to take up the slack, big deal.
4) There are viable alternative fuels only held back by the current low price of oil.
5) Nuclear can take up the slack as well (electricity can take over from hydrocarbons in many ways - heating, running industrial facilities, an increased share of electric or partial electric vehicles, making cheaper alternative fuels, etc)
6) If conventional nuclear supplies become expensive, breeders and seawater fissile material extraction can take up the slack for thousands of years.
7) As tech advances during the meantime, wind becomes cheaper, solar becomes a lot cheaper (it has it's own mini-Moore's law going on), nuclear becomes cheaper, alternative fuels become cheaper, and fusion nears reality (yes, it's taken far longer than initially expected, but they've made many orders of magnitude improvement from fifty years ago and have less than an order of magnitude improvement still needed)
Basically, the worst thing that will happen is that worldwide economic growth will slow. There's no possibility of crash just because of point #1 alone.
Re:If supply is fixed, let'd adjust demand. (Score:2, Interesting)
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
Ok, lets agree on one thing. Oil is a finite resource. We are going to run out eventually.
Ok, now that we've agreed, lets also agree that there are significant, exploitable reserves left in the world, and additionally, left in the United States.
If "peak oil" has truly been hit, the only reason is because those significant reserves are not being exploited. And in almost all cases, this is happening because of political reasons. And people like you.
"The sky is falling!" is an excuse not to do anything: "Why should we exploit ANWR when it will only push back the clock for 10 years?"...because it will push back the clock for 10 years. Lets draw an analogy. A patient can have surgery that will allow him to live another 10 years, or he can die today. You guys would rather he die today.
The anti-oil people are ideological relatives of the "Earth First" crowd. Their goal is a massive reduction in world population and per capita energy consumption, and along with it, standard of living. Drilling in ANWR, exploiting offshore reserves, that stuff just pushes back the date when we can usher in Gaia and all million of us go back to living an agrarian or hunte gatherer life-style.
Humanity needs time. Time to build and generate alternatives to the petro-economy. Some of us actually like the benefits of an industrial, technological society and don't want to see it come crashing down around us because environmentalist idiots think that drilling in ANWR is going to be an ecological catastrophe. So when people start starving (because we can't make fertilizer or pesticides from oil by-products, and don't have gasoline to transport the food anyway), what do you think is going to happen to the cute curry animals? Famine is a worse ecological catastrophe than polution. Forests are burned and wild animals are slaughtered wholesale to stave off starvation in the third world.
The world needs time to transition. The neo-luddites like the parent of this post don't want to give the world time. They want those people to starve to death. You, your family, your friends, your city, state, country, your race, your species stands in the way of their vision for Gaia. Think of that the next time we consider voting to drill in ANWR or opening up some of the 98% of the coast in the US that is currently off limits for exploratory drilling.
Re:naive oh yes (Score:3, Interesting)
The deal is air quality. Maybe coal can be burned cleaner than oil. My bet is on: probably not.
"Basically, the worst thing that will happen is that worldwide economic growth will slow. "
Have you applied for a job at FEMA, I hear they are looking for someone with as much vision as Brownie. If that's really the worst you can imagine, I think you're in for a nasty surprise in the next decade when China comes knocking for energy.
Re:Why the peak? (Score:3, Interesting)