Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In oil, as in other extractive industries, you have what is called the “R/P ratio”. In the R/P ratio, “R” is reserves of whatever it is you are extracting, and “P” is the production rate, the rate at which you are extracting and using up your reserves.
Figure 1. World annual oil production in billions of barrels (blue line), and years left at that production rate (R/P ratio, red line). Right scale shows the proven oil reserves for each year, in billions of barrels (dotted green line). DATA SOURCE: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2011, a most fascinating Excel spreadsheet. PHOTO Spindletop Hill Gusher, 1901
When you divide the amount you have in reserves by the rate at which you are extracting the resource, you get the number of years the reserves will last at that rate of extraction. Accordingly, I include the R/P ratio in Figure 1 as “Years Left”
A couple of things to point out. First, the “Years Left”, the R/P ratio, is currently more than forty years … and has been for about a quarter century. Thirty years ago, we only had 30 years of proven oil reserves left. Estimates then said we would be running out of oil about now.
Twenty-five years ago, we had about forty years left. Ten years ago we had over forty years left. Now we have over forty-five years left. I’m sure you see the pattern here.
Second, this is only what are termed “proven reserves” (Wiki). It does not include “unproven reserves”, much of which is in the form of unconventional oils such as shale oil and oil sands. Even discounting the unproven reserves, while the rate of production has increased, the proven reserves have also increased at about the same rate. So the R/P ratio, the years left at the current rate of production, has stayed over forty years for almost a quarter century..
Now, at some point this party has to slow down, nothing goes on forever … but the data shows we certainly don’t need to hurry to replace oil with solar energy or rainbow energy or wind energy in the next few decades. We have plenty of time for the market to indicate the replacement.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to find a better energy source than oil. In fact, the huge new sources of shale gas will substitute in many areas for things like heating oil, and will burn cleaner in the bargain. And I do think we’ll find new sources of energy, humans are endlessly inventive.
I’m just registering my protest against the meme of “OMG we’re running out of oil we must change energy sources right now tomorrow!!”. It is simply not true. We have plenty of time. We have decades. We don’t have to blow billions of dollars of our money subsidizing solar and wind and biofuels. The world has enough oil to last for a long while, plenty long enough for the market to determine whatever the next energy source might be.
w.
NOTE: Oil figures, particularly reserves, are estimates. Oil companies are notoriously close-mouthed about their finds and the extent of their holdings. The advantage of the BP figures is that they are a single coherent time series. Other data gives somewhat different results. As far as I know the increase in proven reserves despite increasing production is common to all estimates.
Estimates then said we would be running out of oil about now.
———–
Well people who had clue about the distinction between proven and unproven reserves would not be saying that.
This whole article is something of a straw man. The right conclusion to draw from this is that we use oil now because it is incredibly cheap. Any substitute is going to be used when the oil gets expensive and makes expensive substitutes more economically viable.
So wasting oil by not using it efficiently or using it where it is not needed simply hastens the time when energy usage gets more expensive.
Things like wind power and solar represent a path to a graceful transition to using other kinds of energy. This is good since no one knows how fast prices will start to increase if oil supply downward trends meets energy demand upward trends and at what point in the future this will happen.
RE: elbatrop: (December 14, 2011 at 6:47 pm)
“All these sources of energy while relatively interchangeable or fungible they are not the same especially economically. Ultimately it comes down to total energy out versus energy used to produce it, net energy. That ratio has been steadily dropping for decades. It takes a lot more volume of a crappy fuel source to replace a good one and light sweet crude in our world is at the top of the fuel food chain and it is getting more and more scarce.”
This appears to be an indication of the eventual end of all sources of carbon power unless it can be shown that the available carbon reserves increase *exponentially* as progressively lower grade carbon deposits are found recoverable. The final carbon crisis may be many decades away, but it seems reasonable that we should be attempting to find at least one, non-solar, alternative energy resource that is indefinitely sustainable right now. That does not mean a forced abandonment of carbon power because of a mythical global warming problem.
I suspect we already have all the data we need on methods of collecting energy directly or indirectly from the sun, and most of the money wasted on development of these resources has been due to attempts to force the adoption of techniques that are obviously inadequate for today’s society.
I see less of a problem in the experimental development of alternative, indefinitely sustainable energy technologies that do not require large-scale adoption unless they prove to be more practical and more economical than carbon power.
If no feasible replacement for carbon power is ever found, then there must be a population and lifestyle regression to an earlier age and this period in time will be remembered as a ‘golden age of prosperity’ when ‘gods’ walked the Earth and flew in the sky.
@LazyTeenager says:
December 14, 2011 at 8:32 pm
I guess you haven’t been keeping up on current events. Massive new resources of gas and oil (a physical concept; i.e. something exists irrespective of economics) being turned up almost weekly, some being turned into reserves (an economic concept; i.e. it can be produced with known technology profitably) today, will jigger Willis’s chart a lot in the next few years. Nothing however will be used wastefully; where did you get the silly idea that we waste resources? We only waste money, on subsidizing will o’ the wisps like solar and wind, which will never be anything but low-level, location-restricted sources of energy. Soon all that will change, beginning about November next year.
This is one of the more powerful scientific papers supporting Abiotic Oil theory:
Petroleum Formation by Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis in Plate Tectonics, by Peter Szatmari (1989)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4653669/Petroleum-Formation-by-FischerTropsch-Synthesis-Peter-Szatmari
Szatmari wrote:
“Abstract:
A somewhat speculative hyposthesis of petroleum genesis in the upper lithosphere is proposed, based on Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. This hypothesis is distinct from both the organic (biogenic) model and the inorganic model of hydrocarbon degassing from the Earth’s interior.
Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is a well-known industrial process whereby millions of tons of hydrocarbon oil resembling petroleum are produced annually from carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide and hydrogen gasses reacting on a metallic iron or iron-oxide catalyst. Like natural petroleum, this synthetic oil consists of gas, gasoline, diesel oil, and wax fractions, all rich in saturated aliphatic hydrocarbons and enriched in the light 12C isotope.
The hypothesis presented in this paper proposes that petroluem liquids form by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis on magnetite and hematite catalysts when carbon dioxide (derived by massive metamorphic or igneous decarbonization of subducted sedimentary carbonates) reacts with hydrogen generated by the serpentinization (in the absence of air) of shallow-mantle lithosphere and ophiolite thrust sheets. Oblique plate movements may favor hydrocarbon formation by creating deep faults that aid fluid flow and serpentinization. The world’s rich oil provinces, including those of the Middle East, may be tentatively interpreted to have formed by this mechanism.”
One of the reasons this paper is so powerful is because Peter Szatmari works in the research center for Petrobas, the Brazilan oil company, and Mr. Szatmari predicted that oil would be found off the coast of Brazil, right where ultimately the oil was, indeed, located over ten years later.
Correct prediction is one of the strongest confirmations of a hypothesis.
Read through the paper, Szatmari discusses isotopes and the fact that oil produced via the Fischer-Tropsch process has the same profile as natural petroleum found in Saudi Arabia.
The evidence for Abiotic Oil is substantial.
A good brief summary of the evidence for Abiotic Oil:
Inorganic Origin of Petroleum
http://www.scribd.com/doc/55489859/Inorganic-Petroleum-Origin
From the BP website
“Reserves-to-production (R/P) ratios represent the length of time that those remaining reserves would last if production were to continue at the previous year’s rate. It is calculated by dividing remaining reserves at the end of the year by the production in that year. ”
The R/P ratio has been defined to be independent of achievable production rates and instead dependent on assumed capacity. Its a feelgood figure becasue in the real world, a well’s production rate decreases with age.
as to strong evidence that the abiotic process is responsible for super-deep oil pockets…
JimF said:
“N0t in the least. These deposits off Brazil (and in the deeps of the Gulf of Mexico) are formed in sedimentary deposits laid down in rift basins. ”
HAHAH…Notice, I said *evidence*…not proof! Of course it is evidence! Addressing the statement where you state that the oil deposits are formed in sedimentary deposits laid down in rift basins, sorry, I don’t buy that either – at least as it applies to deep ocean deposits. You told me to ‘look at the globe’ so, yes, lets look at the globe. All of the oceans have, for the most part, broad, flat bottoms of constant depth (avg 10,000ft) with relatively steep slopes up to the continental shelves. If, as you say, they were formed by the sedimentary process, in the Atlantic, there would be instead, a gradual slope of the sea floor away from the continent shore down toward the central rift zone (since it is the newest section of the sea floor & it is spreading out E/W). Your theory still does not explain how, once again, all those dinosaurs were able to get together in one spot & dig 35,000ft down below the sea floor & huddle together to make an estimated 4-8 BILLION barrels of oil. Even if you want to say 35,000ft from the ocean surface, that is still around 25,000ft below the sea floor. Remember, that would have to be *after* the ocean rift opened up & would already be full of water…they have to get down below that! Think about it – for your statement to be true, the oil would have to be below the shelf level (OK) *BUT* above the deep ocean sea floor (which it isn’t even close).
Sorry, don’t buy it.
Jeff
“Your theory still does not explain how, once again, all those dinosaurs were able to get together in one spot & dig 35,000ft down below the sea floor & huddle together to make an estimated 4-8 BILLION barrels of oil.”
Ever heard of fish?
TimTheToolMan says:
December 14, 2011 at 9:01 pm
I’m not clear what your objection is, Tim. Certainly, the figure is an estimate. It estimates the amount of time to use up the resource if you continue using it at the same rate.
As you point out, the production rate may well drop … but we don’t know by how much. They might drill new wells in the same basin to keep the production rate up. They may go to enhanced recovery. So it’s very difficult to estimate that way, and we can’t compare to other sites because of the variation in production rates. So about the only number that we can use is the standard R/P ratio.
However, I don’t see how the standard R/P is a “feelgood” number. Lets say that the R/P gives us forty years. If we used the real production rates, which will be less, we might get an R/P of sixty or eighty years … so how does the forty year figure make me feel better?
w.
Willis…”As you point out, the production rate may well drop … but we don’t know by how much. They might drill new wells in the same basin to keep the production rate up. They may go to enhanced recovery.”
With all due respect, Willis, do you know what peak oil is? And why its important?
RE: James F. Evans: (December 14, 2011 at 8:53 pm)
“This is one of the more powerful scientific papers supporting Abiotic Oil theory:”
My impression is that abiotic oil, if it exists, was produced gradually by the tectonic activity of millions of years and could not be expected to sustain the 85 million barrels of oil a day that T. Boone Pickens says that we are currently harvesting.
If tectonic activity were producing oil at that rate for hundreds of millions of years, I think it would have been gushing out all over the earth for that length of time, or somewhere, a vast underground sea of petroleum would have been found by now.
TimTheToolMan says:
December 14, 2011 at 9:39 pm
With all due respect, Tim, do you know what an R/P ratio is? And why it is important? Did you notice that my post was not about “peak oil”, and didn’t mention the term once? Do you think that was accidental?
Finally, do you know how stupid it looks when you ask fake questions like that? If you have a point, make it and support it, but don’t be dicking around with cute questions about what I know and don’t know. It doesn’t redound to your credit, it just makes you look like you don’t have anything to say.
w.
PS—When anyone says “with all due respect” as you did, I know immediately that a) they are going to disrespect me, and b) they really mean “with all disrespect”. It’s like saying “no offense” when you are offending someone. Saying that doesn’t help in the slightest, it just twists the blade.
When you say that, you just confirm that you are deliberately disrespecting me, not accidentally disrespecting me. Color me unimpressed.
PPS—In answer to your question, yes, I do know what peak oil is and why it is important. I also know why I didn’t mention it either in the head post or in the comments.
JeffK says:
December 14, 2011 at 9:01 pm
as to strong evidence that the abiotic process is responsible for super-deep oil pockets…
, all those dinosaurs were able to get together in one spot & dig 35,000ft down below the sea floor & huddle together to make an estimated 4-8 BILLION barrels of oil.
————————————————————————————————–
So, oil is formed from dead dinosaurs? What is this, third grade science class? (assignment: look up type I, type II, type III oil and report back)
Spector:
Nobody knows how fast abiotic oil is produced. To be conservative & reasonable, it is best to assume Man’s production & consumption happens faster than the Earth produces “rock oil” via geo-physical-chemical processes. Although, Man has been able to produce Fischer-Tropsch oil on an industrial scale in large quantities over short periods of time. Chemical reactions can be quite rebust if the necessary feed stocks are in abundant supply, which is likely in the Earth’s crust.
The major implication of Abiotic Oil Theory is that the volume of hydrocarbons in the Earth’s crust such as petroleum & natural gas is much larger than assumed for the so-called “fossil fuel” theory.
In regards to the idea that the abiotic oil would be over-flowing, there are substantial natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico and other places in the world. In Iraq, oil actually bubbles to the surface in natural oil springs.
Anyway, if you are interested in Abiotic Oil Theory, read the Szartmari scientific paper I linked and the brief summary. If you are really interested in the subject, read the lengthy forum I linked to in my first comment at December 14 at 5:53 p.m. It’s long, but covers the subject in depth.
As a side note, it’s interesting that Willis Eschenbach’s information states that the oil supply will last for forty years. Because I’ve stated as a conservative estimate (again, nobody really knows) that oil will last for 30 years. 30 years is the “economic horizon”, meaning, anything that happens further out than that has no effect on todays prices.
@Les Francis,
oil has been found in the Lost City underwater geothermal vents, in granite basement rock in Vietnam (White Tiger field) and at depths over 4000m of the Brazilian coast. According to the best Western oil geologists none of these places would produce oil. They were all found using Russian Abiogenic Oil Theory
The smart way to find oil is to ignore the sediments and to explore near tectonic plate boundaries. These plate boundaries are where every major oil field in the world occurs.
In 40 years, there will be enough oil for 40 years. In 200 years, there will be enough oil for 40 years. Etc.
40 years happens to be a convenient “balance point” and buffer and fudge factor for the industry. That’s why it’s kept at that level..
>>Jeremy
>>Jeez…this thread, courtesy of jrwakefield, looks like a chicken
>>little CAGW thread from the eco-doomsayers or from the malthusian
>>world overpopulation scare-mongers! This hyperbole does not belong
>>on a science website.
You seem to forget that the USA has passed its local Peak Oil nearly 50 years ago, and it dependent on the good will of other nations to feed its insatiable appetite for other people’s oil. Again I will ask you, what happens if the world decides it is more important to keep their oil in the ground for a rainy day, and refuse to play ball? And there are many reasons why this may happen, including Mr I-am-a-dinner-jacket being slightly unhinged.
Oh, and in addition you throw in the ‘malthusian’ pseudo-expletive just for fun – to make yourself look clever – a word that is thrown around as if it is the new younger brother of ‘Nazi’ or ‘Communist’. But let’s look at this more logically, dear Jeremy. Which kind of world will run out of fossil fuels first – a world with a total population of one billion, or a world with a total population of twenty billion.
Answers on the back of a postcard please, to BBC Television Center, London …………
.
Just for reference: Here is an example of one of the more intelligent sounding, alarming video’s that can be found on You Tube when searching for [peak oil -climate] over the past month:
Peak oil and the future of growth
Uploaded by Aesclepius138 on Dec 8, 2011
5 likes, 0 dislikes; 195 views; 12:32 min
“RealEconTV.com”
GoldMoney Foundation
There was no You Tube information found on the identity of the speaker, but I did a little digging and this appears to be cut from Chris Martenson’s 71-minute presentation at the Gold & Silver Meeting in Madrid where he refers to the current financial system as “unfixable” because it depends on unlimited exponential economic [and population] growth.
Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WBiTnBwSWc
Willis writes “When anyone says “with all due respect” as you did, I know immediately that a) they are going to disrespect me, and b) they really mean “with all disrespect”.”
I do actually respect your opinions Willis. What I dont understand is your post because I would have thought you understood peak oil but from what you wrote it doesn’t like you do at all.
You very specifically wrote “They might drill new wells in the same basin to keep the production rate up. They may go to enhanced recovery.”
…and that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue of oil production peaking. Its not possible to keep production rates up at a site through to the end of the resource and this is very well known.
Robmax says:
December 14, 2011 at 3:24 pm
The presence of a material where you would expect to find it is not proof of cause or source. Would the absence of oil in source rock not then be proof of abiotic oil such as in a dry hole.
—
Could you show me an oil mature source rock that doesn’t contain oil then?
@JeffK or Jkrob
There’s no oil fields in the middle of oceans for the simple reason that there are no significant clastic sediments out there to act as a reservoir for the oil or any mature source rocks out there to produce any hydrocarbons.
And as mr wakefield said most of the globe has been explored with the exception of the arctic and antarctica. There will be the occasional large find in under explored areas, but these will be few and far between.
Hope that helps your understanding.
Here’s a good article on the Bakken Shale Oil deposits. The up side is that there may be 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil (the world uses 33 bbd). The downside is that the wells play out fast and there is only 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil. This is the situation we’re in folks. We find oil, but it’s not that much and it’s costly to extract.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8697
RE: James F. Evans: (December 14, 2011 at 11:01 pm)
“The major implication of Abiotic Oil Theory is that the volume of hydrocarbons in the Earth’s crust such as petroleum & natural gas is much larger than assumed for the so-called “fossil fuel” theory.”
I do not discount the possibility of abiotic oil, but I think its primary implication would be that we may be overlooking some areas where additional combustible carbon may be found.
I still think we need to look to something like fluid-state, thorium reactor technology to fend off the eventual carbon depletion crisis. Kirk Sorensen has said that thorium has a million times the energy density of combustible carbon. We should be able to obtain that energy, one way, or another. His continually cycling, fluid salt reactors promise to remove almost all the dangerous, medium-lived, transuranic wastes and achieve near 100 percent fissile efficiency.
Robmax says:
December 14, 2011 at 3:24 pm
The presence of a material where you would expect to find it is not proof of cause or source. Would the absence of oil in source rock not then be proof of abiotic oil such as in a dry hole.
—-
Lack of evidence is not evidence of anything. Basic scientific tenent.
@JeffK
The oil is formed not from dinosaurs but dead plankton raining down on the ocean floor. Over millions of years this is buried and as a result it heats up. This is what we call the source rock and as it is “cooked” through burial, produces hydrocarbons.
I’m not really sure where you get this 35,000 ft from though, the Tupi field was found in 2000m of water and at a depth of 5000m below the seabed giving about 7000m or 23,000ft in old money. You’ve also got to remember that all the sediments found at the bottom of the basin were once at the sea bed and have been buried over 100’s of millions of years so no digging is involved.
I think you are a bit confused about the basic’s of petroleum geology so have a read on Wikipedia or soething similar about sedimentary basins, source rocks etc. You might not look quite so much of a fool then.
Regards
Steve
Latitude says:
December 14, 2011 at 6:36 pm
“The problem with all algae/cyano/etc fuels….is that they can’t be grown in open cultures….
…..they get contaminated”
Correct. But that problem can be solved. Poison the open culture so that no natural organisms can survive in it and give the artificial organism a way to deal with the poison. Generally in nature this is done by structures in the cell wall which selectively admits some molecules but not others. In order to keep evolution from duplicating the poison blocking mechanism (which she does and which is how things like antibiotic resistance arise) we fashion three distinct poisons and give our artificial organism three distinct defenses. Nature won’t be able to defeat all three simultaneously in a million years.
It’s a complicated undertaking but it’s completely doable. There are no physical or engineering constraints that are showstoppers. We know this because we know what natural organisms can do and if a natural organism can do something we can do that with an artificial organism. The menu of these abilities is huge especially when one begins considering extremophiles. It’s just a matter of slogging away in synthetic biology labs acquiring knowledge and expertise and engineers improving the lab equipment making it faster and cheaper.