Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s a discussion over at Judith Curry’s excellent blog, about peak oil. I find the whole madness surrounding peak oil to be one more example of our human love for warnings of future disaster. Few people want to hear that tomorrow will be OK, that things will work out. Instead, most folks want to hear some terrible story about what tomorrow holds, whether it’s peak oil or climate meltdown or the coming ice age. Go figure.
Figure 1. Conventional oil leaking out of the ground near McKittrick, CA.
One part of the discussion of peak oil that has always bothered me is the division of oil into “conventional oil” and “unconventional oil”. Here’s why I think that division makes no sense with regards to peak oil.
I’ve lived through much of the whole peak oil deal, which near as I can tell has turned into a half-century-long goat roping contest. During the earlier years, people were shouting that the oil would run out, that the top would be very soon now, we’d hit the peak and by gosh, at that point things would turn ugly. Of course, that still hasn’t happened, so the peak oilers were left with the question pondered by failed doomcasters throughout history, viz:
How the heck do I explain the cratering of my position and still maintain some shred of my reputation?
For the peak oil folks, salvation came in the form of “unconventional oil”. Now, we’re assured, oil is still running out, so they were right all along … You see, they say, King Hubbert was right, we’re running out of conventional oil, but as it runs out it is being seamlessly replaced by “unconventional oil”, so we still have oil even though we’re running out of oil. Got it?
The strange part is, when you open a barrel of unconventional oil to see what conventions were broken in its creation, you find it is indistinguishable from conventional oil.
What is unconventional oil? Well, we could start by considering the conventions regarding oil. For literally billions of years the convention was that oil was found in small pools and seeps like you see in Figure 1. Indeed, the discovery of oil in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, the site of the first US oil well, came about because oil had been seeping out there for untold centuries, and had been known and utilized by the Early Asian Immigrants in the area before the later arrival of the melanin-deficient crowd.
So conventional oil, by ancient hallowed convention handed down through the millennia, is found in tar pits and oil seeps on the surface. Which means that people being so rash as to drill for oil, by definition, would be pumping up “unconventional oil” … but of course, life is not that simple.
As a result, “conventional oil” is not from the conventional method of dipping it up in a bucket from a seep, but by the decidedly unconventional and at that time unheard of method of drilling a hole in the earth to get it to come out …
Things went along just fine like that for years. Then “secondary recovery” methods started to come into use. These were a variety of physical and chemical methods used to squeeze more oil out of existing fields, including fracturing the rock to allow the oil to come out more easily.
Now, about this time, the whole “peak oil” story started to go south, because no matter how much peak oilers howled there was more oil discovered every year. Every year the proved reserves just kept growing. And that process has continued to this very day, with more proved reserves than ever. How were the peak oilers to explain it? Hey, “unconventional oil” to the rescue!
For example, thinner oils were “conventional”, but thicker, more tarry deposits, despite having been utilized by humans for centuries, were “unconventional” oil, so they weren’t counted regarding the peak.
The real laugher, however, the place where you can see the gears stripping, involves the “conventions” about fracturing the rocks to allow more oil to come out, what we call “fracking”. The fracturing technology was developed about forty years ago, and has been used ever since, mostly for secondary recovery. And for all those decades the oil coming from the fractured rocks has been “conventional oil”. But now people have learned to drill wells horizontally and fracture them … and now suddenly after forty years of fracturing the rock, which gave “conventional oil” when it was done from vertical wells, fracking now only delivers “unconventional oil” simply because the drill hole goes horizontally instead of vertically … does this make any sense to anyone?
The classification of oil from fracking as “unconventional oil” shows clearly the ludicrous nature of the dividing line when we are discussing peak oil. Regarding the putative peak, why is oil from a horizontal well “unconventional” and oil from a vertical well “conventional”? It is all gotten by technology, and none of it is any more “unconventional” than the drilling of the first oil well, a most unconventional act …
Calling oil from horizontal wells “unconventional” is crucial for the peak oil folks, however, because if the oil from fracking were classified as conventional oil, the “peak oil” claims and the “peak gas” claims would sink of their own weight …
Look, folks, the ugly truth is that the world is awash with fossil fuels. To start with, The largest single concentration of fossil energy on the planet is the Powder River coal formation in the Northern US. The world has several hundred years worth of coal. The Canadians have huge amounts of oil … of course it too is called “unconventional” oil, because it alone is enough to blow the “peak oil” claims out of the water. Plus now we have the “tight oil”, oil in the rocks that is, of course, unconventional.
Then we have the discovery of the shale gas resources all around the planet. Even Israel finally has some domestic energy resources. How unconventional is that? Australia just announced a huge find. China has massive gas resources. A preliminary assessment says including shale gas we have enough gas for the next couple of hundred years.
And finally, we have the wild card, the methane hydrates, the “ice that burns”. Estimates of the amount of these are all over the map, but all of them share one feature—they are very, very large, on the order of quadrillions of cubic feet. This is rivals the size of the global natural gas resource …
Finally, most of these forms of fossil fuels occur in combination and can be converted into one another. Coal, for example, can be converted to a liquid fuel, or to a gas.
Now, because there never was anyone hollering about “peak coal”, there’s no such thing as “unconventional coal”, despite huge changes in mining technology. Coal mining has changed as much or more than drilling for oil … so why isn’t there “unconventional coal”?
But in that case, since all of the coal on the planet seems to be “conventional” coal, if we convert coal to oil, are we making “conventional oil” or “unconventional oil”? Presumably it would matter whether we converted coal to oil horizontally or vertically …
In summary, once you get past the nonsense of “conventional” and “unconventional”, there’s enough coal and gas for a couple hundred years, and enough oil for a hundred years, just with what we know about now, and that’s not even counting methane hydrates. Which is why I pay no more attention to the peak oil alarmists than I do to the climate alarmists. One group claims we have too much oil and we’re gonna burn it all, the other group claims we’ll soon have too little oil to burn, and I treat those two impostors just the same.
Was the division between “conventional” and “unconventional” oil devised to cover up the failure of the peak oilers? No way. The distinction is useful in a variety of ways for analyzing the world of oil sources. I think that the concept was simply appropriated by the peak oilers because it was very useful to them, since it totally obscured the failure of their peak oil predictions. To me, oil is oil is oil, and if you claim the world will run out of oil, you can’t later say that you have redefined things, and that the oil that proves your prediction wrong is some other special kind of oil that doesn’t count as oil but walks like oil and quacks like oil …
w.
… Oh, yeah, the weather report. Late night again, two AM. The wind has changed and is blowing from the southwest, landcasting the fog and the smells of the ocean. The characteristic sea smells of iodine and dimethyl sulfide in the fog draw my thoughts back, back to the many mornings I spent getting out of bed here on the hill at 4 am and going down to the harbor, rigging the boat and setting out in the dark to have the commercial fishing gear in the water for the dawn salmon bite. Sliding out of Bodega harbor in the half-light with my gorgeous ex-fiancee and my good friend, once again motoring between the rock jetties at the harbor entrance, going out to discuss matters of life and death with the ocean. I love the ocean because it doesn’t give a damn about a man’s position and his power and his pretenses. Knowledge and experience mean nothing to the ocean. After a life at sea, if I put one foot wrong, I get just as wet as the landlubber falling off the dock … I take pleasure in that ultimate equality and justice of the ocean. I know that even if it is a California ocean it would kill me without first asking me to share my feelings, so leaving the safety of the harbor is always sobering moment …
… sneaking out between Bodega Rock and Bodega Head itself, the little shallow passage the fishermen call “between the rock and the hard place”, where once my heart almost stopped with fear, or at least it started with fear, but other emotions got involved. The channel there is shallow, the sport fishing boat “Mary Jane” was capsized in 1986 with the loss of nine souls by a sneaker wave, “full fathom five thy fishermen lie, of their bones are coral made” …
So when I heard a wave break right behind our little fishing boat one afternoon as we were coming in between the rock and the hard place, my first thought was that we were about to join the folks from the Mary Jane.
We spun around, and aaaah, dear heavens, it wasn’t a breaking wave at all, although a wave was breaking, instead it was my old friend Missus Fishbreath breaking the surface just behind the boat, and breaking my heart with the slow-moving stillness of her majestic beauty, a great gray whale dancing her way three thousand miles from the tropics to Alaska. As we turned and gaped, we were looking her right in the eye, and then she rolled our way and opened her blowhole so close to the boat we could almost look down it, it was as big as a dinner plate, we were close, close enough to count the barnacles clinging to her hull, she was the very picture of natural wildness and glorious beauty and unimaginable power, my heart leapt to see it … and she blew out a great cloud of gagging mist, a noxious enveloping adherent miasma reeking of the million vanished piscatorial souls of her most recent month’s meals, a clogging, thick effluvium that enveloped the boat and then drifted away to leeward as the lovely lady disappeared beneath the waves …
… leaving me in the strangest condition imaginable, with the boat wandering off course, my jaw hanging down to my umbilicus, a pulse rate well into the triple digits, adrenalin-shocked, awed beyond words, smelling like the dumpster behind a cheap fish restaurant, blasted by the natural beauty I had just witnessed, and uncertain whether I was going to vomit or not, but tending toward the former.
I’m not jonesing to visit that particular emotional place again, once was enough for any man. And on a cold night like tonight, I’m glad I’m not rolling out at four am. I fished the Bering Sea as well, and these days I’m just as happy to see the bergy bits and watch the Bering ice on the “Deadliest Catch” TV show from the safety of my couch … but ah, dear friends, mostly I’ve just moved my ocean madness to warmer waters, and I wouldn’t have missed it for rubies and pearls …
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.
A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length, a stone’s throw out, between the rocks and the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other
Following the cliff for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and
cautious,
Coasting all round the peninsula
Back to the buoys in Monterey harbor. A flight of pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.
Robinson Jeffers saw it … when you read those lists of famous last words, nobody ever says “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”. Don’t mail the envelope in, push the envelope, the journey will end long before any of us wish it to. Live your most impossiblessed dreams, my friends, because any other kind is just a dream. Chance the widdershins steps of the tarantella, lift the ancient curses and look under them for old coins and lost loves and dust bunnies with a vest and a gold pocketwatch, opt for an immediate increase in the uncertainty levels, stay away from the world of adrenalin deficit spending, hold your dearest warm under your heart while you dare the icy seas of life, for the night is assuredly coming …
My very best wishes to all, I’m off to sleep.
Yes but when do we hit peak stupid?
Willis writes “FINALLY, the rate of production is a function of how much is accessible at a given price. As the price goes up, the amount increases.”
As the price goes up, other alternatives (assuming there are some) look better and the amount goes down.
What’s the percentage of the planet’s surface area explored for energy deposits? Just a wild guess: 0.1%?
Greece Shows Us How Poverty Degrades the Environment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/iain-murray/greece-energy-environment_b_2506754.html
Smog has been a particular problem this year in major cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki. But high smog levels have been reported all over Greece — including the Peloponnese and Attica. Yet this isn’t the sort of smog we worry about in American cities. It’s an older, cruder, almost forgotten form here, reminiscent of the days of London’s pea-soupers. The Greek smog is a result of the increased burning of wood as household fuel, and it has massively increased levels of pollutants.
===
And:
Not only is the smog destructive of the atmosphere, it is destructive of forests. Greeks have been forced by the high prices of home heating oil — of which a large proportion is government-imposed taxes — to use wood for fuel, and much of that wood is gathered illegally. The Greek environment ministry estimates more than 13,000 tons of wood was harvested illegally in 2012.
What we are seeing is Greece retreating back up the slope of what is known as the Environmental Kuznets curve. This model theorizes that, as a civilization starts to use natural resources, it increases its impact on the environment until it reaches a stage where it becomes more efficient to reduce its impact, This is why the richest societies generally also are the cleanest. Wealthier is healthier for the environment. That’s exactly what we saw in the decreases in smog levels in the west over the last century.
Greece is regressing. As it becomes poorer, its environment suffers more. The Greek financial crisis has been a disaster in many more ways than first thought. Two particular factors have combined here. The massive overspending by the Greek state could not be corrected by devaluation as Greece is part of the Eurozone. This has led to a massive wealth contraction within Greece, which has meant people do not have as much to spend on fuel. Secondly, the Greek government, as part of its austerity program, has relied heavily on raising taxes on energy — home heating fuel and electricity especially. The result has been the increased reliance on wood and the looming environmental disaster.
Willis Eschenbach says:
February 2, 2013 at 10:15 pm
“Instead, I am saying that the size of the resource itself is a function of human ingenuity … and as a result, to speak of “peak magnesium” or “peak oil” misses the mark completely.”
Thanks, Willis. That summarizes it. And it applies to AGW as well, by the way. Even if we were to assume that the high IPCC scenarios for 2100 were correct, it still comes down to human ingenuity in dealing with it. And we have only a tenuous idea, if any, of what the limits of human ingenuity will be in 2100. What we can say with some confidence is that there will be technology available that we can’t even imagine today.
It’s so tempting to think that we can predict the future from what we know, when what we don’t know will be vastly more important.
@Stephen Fisher rasey
I don’t doubt that the different mechanisms of procuring the oil require some technical changes behind the scenes to accommodate them. Nor that some ways of extracting the oil are more energy efficient than others. Nor that some bright guys are working very hard to make it all happen.
But if the end product is the same – to the point where I can fill a car with either ‘conventional’ or ‘unconventional’ oil, or a mixture and not notice any difference – then while the split between ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ may be a useful term for oil tekkies, it is misapplied to the wider world of those who ultimately buy and use the stuff.
And – as ever – there is a strong suspicion that the technical use of the term ‘unconventional’ has been conveniently hijacked by those who wish to alarm the public.
My old Mum would be worried stupid if told she needed to run her car on ‘unconventional’ oil. Or that her favourite seascape was being ‘acidified’, not ‘neutralised’. These are emotive terms and, I submit, not chosen lightly.
Peak anything is nonsense really. However in the debate about oil I would have thought that even with rising dollar prices it is better to think in terms of how many hours work it takes each of us to buy a gallon of gas rather than the absolute cost.
You then see how much wealthier we have all become relative to the costs of fuel or power or food. That is because of the enriching quality of energy.
We have all watched and participated in reducing our gas consumption as price at the pump rises, only to fall back into our old ways as we shuggle ( old Scottish word ) about our budget allocations . Take away all the taxes and it is obvious that gas, as a proportion of all our expenses, hasn’t become more expensive at all. Unconventional oil not withstanding.
We have become wealthier thanks in large part to energy.
Willis says:
” Was the division between “conventional” and “unconventional” oil devised to cover up the failure of the peak oilers? No way. The distinction is useful in a variety of ways for analyzing the world of oil sources. I think that the concept was simply appropriated by the peak oilers because it was very useful to them, since it totally obscured the failure of their peak oil predictions.
However, I wasn’t using the terms facetiously. I was explaining how they are misused by the peak oil folks to excuse the failure of their predictions.”
Willis: From a geologist’s perspective, “Peak Oil” as M. King Hubbert defined it is the point at which new discoveries of oil sources fails to match the extraction and production of oil and the overall production declines.The truth is: we will NEVER completely run out of oil.The real question is how much are we willing to pay for it. As has been pointed out before.
“All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas. ”
— William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005[5
Willi, if you think the price of extraction is not at all an issue of some of these “unconventional” reserves you better read this
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9789#more
and methane hydrates !?? have you any idea how costly it would be to extract diffuse frozen gas from deep sea rock formations ??? If it was cost effective don’t you think it would have been done long ago?
Willis – you say “… at present, people are better fed, housed, clothed, and doctored than at any time in the past thousand years … we have done it without running out of resources, despite the fact that our population more than doubled … we’re damn good at human ingenuity …No guarantee that that will continue given fools like Obama and Chu … but so far, so good.“.
I agree with all of that. Wrt a lot of the good things – housing, clothing, etc – oil has played a very important part. With our human ingenuity we can make more good things happen for more people. For that we need more energy, and we have coal, gas, uranium, thorium, geothermal energy, and sunshine, all in abundance, and I’ve probably left a few out. If oil gets more expensive, we will work out how to use more of the others, cheapest or most readily available first.
On this we are in agreement?
Without the world’s insane politicians (you name just two of many) we could achieve it more easily. They and their ilk are misusing “Climate Change” to scare people into expensive inefficient ineffective low-volume hare-brained schemes like windfarms and ethanol.
On this maybe we are still in agreement?
I happen to think that world oil production rates will stop increasing soon, for reasons that I have attempted to explain. It’s not so much that we physically can’t produce faster, more that we won’t. On that we disagree, it seems. But either way, the fact is that unless human ingenuity is itself blocked, the world will continue to generate increasing amounts of energy as needed. All we need is politicians smart enough to let it happen.
Back in 1968 I was working in the Persion Gulf servicing Decca Navigator Stations when I first learned about oil running out in 25 years. From an American oilman. Time flies. (sigh)
Seems we know how long it takes trees to turn into fossil coal. What critters went into fossil oil? And when? Why do we keep finding more oil? Seems like A LOT of critters went into this fossil oil stuff. Makes you think.
@TimTheToolMan:
The data do not support either. There are two dominant data items.
Production. Price.
Production is directly managed by OPEC to stabilize prices at relatively high levels (but low enough to discourage too much substitution / conservation / competition). Production can only tell you what OPEC decided to produce.
Price can say nothing about Hubbert’s Peak as price is managed. All price can tell you is what OPEC wants.
Both data items tell you only “What does OPEC want the value to be?”.
in a free and competitive market that we do not have. But in fact prices did soften briefly only lately getting jacked back up.
Speculative? OPEC is speculative?
http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/2468.htm
Got that? They are watching global demand and other suppliers and adjusting their output to manage total supply and hold prices high. That is their job. It is the whole reason for a Cartel.
@John West:
That’s about the same as the last time I looked.
Guess why OPEC manages for occasional drops to about $80 / bbl…
@Stephen Fisher Rasey:
For Tar Sands it is ‘upgraded’ at the mine / well / production point to a crude oil that does not need refinery changes. (So ‘yes and no’. The overall refining process has to change to deal with it; but the produces of the ‘crude’ do it, not the refinery.)
@Grey Lensman:
Wow! That’s some fast payback!
The basic costs have been steadily driven down over the years. It started out about $80/bbl hurdle rate when oil was about $20. Then costs were dropping while OPEC was jacking… Both hit about $50 at about the same time. Then “in-situ” started and the cost point was headed for $26 / bbl while oil prices were headed for about $70. That was when things really took off 😉
The cost point continues to drop and the sands production continues to rise. We’ve now got OPEC at just below 30 M bpd and I don’t think they can cut back much from that (and stay economically afloat). The Paranoid Fantasy part of the mind wants to wonder if it was just a coincidence that about that time Iraq got knocked out of production and that lately Libya took a hit… Now folks talking embargo of Iranian oil?
As the fracking (yes, I know it is supposed to be spelled the silly looking way 😉 revolution continues to spread, OPEC is going to have more “issues”… Thus their heavy funding of AGW causes… Last thing they want is more coal fuels…
William H, Another Andy, and others upthread have made an important point: if you don’t factor in inflation, your “cost of” comments mean nothing. As far as I can tell, the ‘real’ cost of gasoline hasn’t risen in my lifetime.
Willis, your writing reminds me most of Jack London’s “Adventures of Captain David Grief.” Keep doing it!
As far as the inflation part of the price discussion goes, I will note:
When I first started (abt. forty years ago) the job I eventually retired from, an hour’s wages would buy about seven or eight gallons of gasoline. Comparing the ups and downs of gasoline prices where I live for the past year to the wage I retired at, I get from about seven and a quarter to eight and three quarters gallons. Eight gallons of gasoline are still worth about an hour of an operating engineers time.
This is like Heinlein’s quick test for estimating the standard of living in a place: “How long does it take a journeyman carpenter to earn a one kilo loaf of the standard local bread?”
No matter how you hang numbers on the prices of things, if it takes a skilled worker the same amount of time to earn them,they haven’t changed.
I’m surprised no one has brought up the issue of refinery capacity and it’s effects on price. From my understanding no new refineries have been allowed to be built in the United States in 30 years except one that was very recently given the green light. That is certain to keep prices high as refinery capacity is static while domestic oil supply is on the increase, no?
E M Smith writes “They are watching global demand and other suppliers and adjusting their output to manage total supply and hold prices high.”
That, as I said is the speculative view and not supported by the hard data which shows flat lining supply and increasing price. OPEC aren’t the only suppliers out there. Dont you think other non-OPEC suppliers would increase their supply if they could to reap the benefits of the current high prices? That’s what the free market is and how it works at its heart.
As I said, if there were a global conspiracy to keep prices high by limiting supply at a time where the world’s economies were really suffering then that’s a pretty dim view to take of the world.
From the other point of view, do you think OPEC would have said “Production levels are close to their maximum. Therefore we cant substantially increase production at the moment”. No. not in a million years would they say that in any official report.
Neither of us have any real information on those points of view. All we have is flat-lining production and increasing prices.
I don’t know anything about dimethyl sulfide, (DMS), but it caught my eye. carbonyl sulfide has a pretty long “stay time” in the troposhere. But when hit with about 200nm (UV-C) it dissociates and reacts to form sulfate. This is probably one of the contribtors to the “Junge” layer. No reason for mentioning it other than being reminded of sulfides by your excellent post.
Side note; before hydrofracking, there were oil well “torpedos” that used nitroglycerin to remediate wells.
@TimTheToolMan says:
February 2, 2013 at 11:28 pm
Are you just trying to be obtuse?
Willis is talking about production. When price rises, so does production.
You are talking about consumption. When price rises, consumption drops.
These meet at an equilibrium point. BOTH can move at the same time.
Well, about 70% is in the “not” category as it is “ocean beyond the shelf”. The rest depends on “to what degree?”. Most all of it has someone who has looked at a map. Large parts of it have been seismically measured. Much of it had holes drilled to some depth.
Yet many depths have not been drilled, so if you want ‘deepest knowledge’, the answer is ‘nearly none’. If you want “likely oil” the answer is “more than 1/2” (of land) with poor resolution.
@MorningGuy:
Methane Clathrate is typically not in ‘hard rock’. It usually is in soft mud. The hardest part of getting it out is doing that without having it destabilize and all bubble out of the muck. It can be removed with gentle heat, or even shaking…
@Richard111:
Mostly marine algae (aka “Pond Scum”) and not dinosaurs…
E M Smith writes “Willis is talking about production. When price rises, so does production.”
Not according to the data.
Just for fun, how about this one?
Can’t see much peak in that …
w.
MorningGuy says:
February 2, 2013 at 11:55 pm
MorningGuy, if you believe that I think that you better provide a quote, I don’t ever recall saying “price of extraction is not an issue”.
w.
@TimTheToolMan:
OK, you are just trying to be obtuse. Got it. Thanks. No need to pay attention any more…
Willis writes “Can’t see much peak in that …”
Oil is a fossil fuel but “fossil fuels” includes coal and gas.
It goes on to say “their use is expected to grow in absolute terms over the next 20–30 years in the absence of policies to promote low-carbon emission sources.”
And this is accurate. China is building coal fired power stations like nobody’s business. Use of gas is on the increase too. Neither are oil and neither come out of your petrol pump. Nobody is building significant infrastructure to convert them to petrol yet either. If they do, they’ll be considerably more expensive than oil is now.
I suspect some of that will be done to stave off the decline when the time comes.
E M Smith write “OK, you are just trying to be obtuse.”
I wrote “As the price goes up, other alternatives (assuming there are some) look better and the amount goes down.”
Demand reducing is implicit in the “other alternatives” …or so I thought you’d note. When demand reduces the amount reduces.
@The rest of the folks:
TTTM is confounding a price managed production managed real set of data with production and consumption functions. Willis is talking about generic economics and how normal commodities respond to price signals.
Willis is absolutely correct in how typical energy commodities respond over time to prices signals. Raise the price, more total production comes into existence.
We can actually see that on a dynamic basis in Canada. When oil prices were below about $45 / bbl there was effectively no production of tar sands (other than some ‘learning projects). Now with price over double that, they are busy building productive capacity by the Million bbl chunk. Higher price, more production.
In response to those market forces, OPEC is trying to hold prices up (with reduced production if need be). This is what Cartels do. They are trying to run the price / volume curves backwards to hold prices up.
I probably ought to also add that oil is often price inelastic in supply and demand. Neither side changes volume much on price signals. This can cause prices to take wide swings without much change in volume of production in the short run. Yet longer term, price elasticities do have time to work. Raise oil price a lot, now, and I still buy gas to get to work. Over the next year, I may swap to a cheaper car, or get a job nearer to home…. So ‘how long’ matters.