Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Dramatis Personae:
The “EIA” is the US Energy Information Agency, the US agency in charge of data about energy production, consumption, and use. It has just released its January 2014 Short Term Energy Report, with current and projected oil production figures.
And “M. King” is Marion King Hubbert, the man who famously predicted in 1956 that US annual oil production would peak in 1970, and after that it would gradually decrease.
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So why is the King meeting the EIA? Figure 1 shows why.
Figure 1. US crude oil production. Data from 1965 to 2013, projections for 2014 and 2015. As is customary, “crude oil production” includes what are called “natural gas liquids”. Data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy and the EIA.
Now me, I see that as a testament to human ingenuity, as fantastic news for the planet, and as another example of the futility of betting against said ingenuity. As my dear dad used to say, “Imagination is free.”
I don’t really have much more to say about this great news, other than I see it as a huge opportunity for the poor. The implications are clear. Cheap energy is the salvation of the poor, and this can only be good news for them … not to mention good news for the rest of us as well.
Best regards,
w.
PS—Folks, don’t bother telling me it is “unconventional oil”. That is a meaningless distinction, invented by supporters of Hubbert’s peak oil theory, to try to salvage Hubberts moribund claims. For example, when fracking was done in vertical wells for fifty years, it was counted as “conventional oil” … but now that the drilling is done horizontally, suddenly fracking produces “unconventional oil”. And given that for many centuries oil was collected from surface seeps, in historical terms all modern oil production is “unconventional”. See my post Conventional Wisdom, Unconventional Oil for a full discussion.
PPS—If you disagree with something that I or someone else said, please QUOTE EXACTLY WHAT THE PERSON SAID in the comment where you discuss your objections. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been attacked over things that I never said … so quote it if you want to discuss it. I’m going to get more hard-headed on this one, I’m tired of picking spitballs off the wall. I’m happy to defend my words if I know which ones you are talking about … but I can’t defend your interpretation of my words. Quote it or lose it.
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Odd though, for someone that made a prediction in 1956, he didn’t do to bad. He was right from 1970, until now. I am not sure how much they knew about the abundant shale formations back then?
L. Fletcher Prouty was absolutely correct again. Although by being correct all he did was to quote a petrochemical insider.
When all sources of oil, coal and gas, conventional and unconventional, are exhausted, the USA will still produce petroleum.
Why?
Because petroleum is an awfully convenient way to store large amounts of energy, for small scale use. Petroleum produced by a nuclear reactor will still run your car.
Eh, thas a hockey stick….
i enjoy the “no smoking” sign, with smoke blowing over the rig from what looks like a furnace to power a steam pump in the shack on the left!
w – I never thought I would see the day when you accepted a model prediction instead of waiting till raw data was available. (This model probably is right, though).
I did not know we were producing so little after 1960’s until recently. Imagine if we were allowed to drill federal lands. Just imagine!
This is good news Willis. We don’t need to buy oil overseas if we weren’t so thick headed with Federal policies.
All we need to know is just how bad is it going to get and is it worse than that?
The whole idea of “unconventional” oil is simply and completely ridiculous. If it is an energy source that walks, talks, and is USED for the same purposes there should be no distinction or difference.
Willis said it well: “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.”
Willis, not sure its quite this simple. Hubbert’s argument was that for a given type of extractive industry, there is a typical curve. What happens is that reserves are found, and extraction proceeds apace, however the industry then starts to find diminishing returns and so we go over the peak and it falls.
Its quite unlike other economic phenomena, for instance the experience curve in manufacturing.
Hubbert would probably argue that exactly the same pattern will follow with natural gas, extracted through fracking or whatever.
To argue the contrary you’d have to argue that reserves are essentially unlimited. Its a possible argument, but it seems a bit unlikely. If you look at the great finds, for instance North Sea, or Saudi, their production does seem to follow Hubbert’s curve. So for instance did UK coal. So probably did South American copper, don’t know the stats.
The case that there is no peak depends on continually finding new fields as the curve on any one particular one goes over the top. There has to be a bound on it. Now, it may not matter economically. We may well find substitutes. But if you think about the increased demand from China, India etc its surely a bit hard to believe that there is going to be enough oil and gas to continue increasing production to meet their demands indefinitely?
The “unconventional” thing exists for 1 reason only – to give Greens a second bite at banning it; they’d love to ban all oil, but can’t get even the low info public to buy into that. (By “low info” I include Obama – who ever heard of banning a pipeline because the oil is coming from Alberta sands rather than from Saudi on ships??)
Dear Willis, the graph says it all… All the doomsdayers underestimate human inventivity to overcome problems now and in the future.
I once read a “new” book in our library that was published in 1901 and that they forgot to discard from the stack, about all the “new” inventions of that age, like a “dust sucking broom” (a vacuum cleaner!) just invented then and lots of other things that we now take for granted. If you look at the electronics revolution of the last decades, nobody would have imagined that if you had told them in the 1950’s…
The same for oil and ore exploration…
I once believed in the dire predictions of the Club of Rome, which all are surpassed by reality in the past decade. All predictions were wrong, from the first to the last one…
Brilliant news. Now will this translate into concrete action to help the poor, or will the wealth percolate upwards as usual to the 1%s, & their bankster bosses?
Will the mad US Govt start to make amends for it’s “banning” (through denial of “foreign aid”) of DDT, which was a cheap & most effective anti malarial agent, & not a carcinogen as the murderous head of the EPA, Ruckelshaus claimed. This action has cost in the region of 2 million lives in the 3rd world per year since 1972. That’s ~82 million people, more than Hitler killed.
The mad Marxists of our so-called “green” movements remain true to murderous form.
When/if sanity returns to this world, this will be seen as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.
& every American who puts Ethanol in his/her gas tank, from land which should be growing food, is complicit in a crime against humanity, right up alongside George W Bush.
Micheal Crichton’s bestselling novel : State of Fear, pages 580-581.
Wildavsky Aaron. But Is It True? A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health & Safety Issues.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. A professor of political science & public policy at Berkeley, he turned his students loose to research both the history & the scientific status of major environmental issues: DDT, Alar, Love Canal, asbestos, global warming, acid rain. The book is an excellent resource for a more complete discussion of these issues than is usually provided. Pages 55-80 deal with DDT. Wildavsky concludes that nearly all environmental claims have been either untrue or wildly overstated. He argues that resilience is a better strategy than anticipation, & that anticipatory strategies (such as the precautionary principle, so firmly enshrined in the Eugenicist UN Agenda 21) favour the social elite over the mass of poorer people.
Neither book is difficult to get hold of. Both are couched in laymans’ terms that non-scientists such as myself can easily understand, & should be read by all with a claim to a conscience, & passed around to friends, family, workmates etc.
Nice one Willis.
michel says:
January 12, 2014 at 12:52 am
++++++++++
You’re saying essentially that eventually, finite resources will be depleted. No one said there was an unlimited about of oil. However, that is not what the debate is about. It is in fact true that claiming peak oil would occur back in 1970 was incorrect. It was incorrect because the peak has yet to be seen –that is all. Will it peak in the future some day? Yes or course. Just not now and not for a long time.
You write “So for instance did UK coal” That’s because of government sanctions. England has a lot more coal that could be taken, but it is not allowed from what I understand.
Willis,
I have frequently enjoyed your contributions and admired your insight – but in this case I am sorely disappointed, especially since you seemed to have stooped to the “straw man” argument, which I have previously associated with alarmists.
M. King Hubbert never stated that the oil production of the USA would reach its peak in the 1970s and thereafter decline. He estimated that the oil fields of the lower 48 that have been in production in 1956 will reach their peak (production) between 1965 and 1970 – and that prediction turned out to be correct. If you want to invalidate Hubbert’s prediction, you should start by subtracting oil production in Alaska, the Bay of Mexico (US territory) and all other fields that have not been producing oil in 1956 from EIA data on contemporary oil production of the USA.
M. King Hubbert’s discovery was that production of “naturally flowing” oil (i.e., outflow of oil due to internal pressure) follows a Gaussian curve (see equation e.g. here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curve), his conclusion was based from quite geophysical reasoning. By calculating the Gaussian function constants a, b, c and d from (at least 4) measurements during increasing field production, one obtains the shape of the bell-curve and therefore determines the peak of production. While M. King Hubbert’s method has seen some minor seen some corrections since first proposed, the basic reasoning remains valid and the method is routinely used by oil companies to assess the remaining oil reserves in a producing field.
Unfortunately, M. King Hubbert’s name has become associated with predictions of global peak of oil production from all possible sources, including undiscovered fields, shale oil, etc. – I am sure that Hubbert himself would not have been flattered by such “fame”.
The EIA curve of US oil production does not invalidate Hubbert’s conclusions, but it does indicate that Julian Simon’s victory in the famous Simon-Ehrlich wager (see e.g. here http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Simon-Ehrlich_wager.html) was not just a lucky guess.
Mario Lento,
I’m saying like the next poster that the Hubbert argument is probably valid for any particular field. Like North Sea. Yes, there is quite a lot of coal left in the UK, but the problem which makes production follow the Gaussian curve down is that its deeper and deeper and less and less economic to extract. We will never run out, but we have already run out of coal that can economically be used to heat houses, for instance.
I’m just pointing out that the argument globally that there is and will be no peak depends on a premise, that there are more fields to discover. Because it does seem to be true that each field follows Hubbert’s curve.
The key point is that you cannot use Hubbert’s argument to forecast national production unless you are sure there are no more fields to be discovered. And in the US and UK this has probably turned out not to be true. But there is going to be a point, maybe quite soon, when we will have discovered all the big ones, and the Saudi Fields will inevitably turn down, and then what?
fig 1 As is customary, “crude oil production” includes what are called “natural gas liquids”
So what does the graph look like if you don’t count gas as “oil” . Was Hubbert including gas as oil when he made his predictions? Predictions which seems amazingly accurate to me in view of when he wrote it.
If we start converting coal to “unconventional” oil will that again mean he is wrong about oil running out?
Great article, Willis.
Some people praise Hubbert because there was a local peak. I’m not so convinced. The problem with peak theories is that there are so many people making predictions all the time, if natural fluctuations cause a local peak to occur, someone would have “predicted” this.
It’s a bit like a stopped clock being right twice a day. And like most doomsday cults, the peak oil crowd have an awfully large number of “stopped clocks”.
The AGW cult is little different and the continuous failed predictions will just be kicked down the field with the old “prediction was right, timing was wrong” claim. Never once considering that the timing is single most important part of the prediction from a policy perspective.
Michele: What exactly is your point? I responded to exactly what you posted, not what someone else posted. Clearly, we are not running out of oil to the point where production is diminishing right now or in the near future. We are not running out of coal to the point of reduced production either –except that laws don’t allow it in many areas. The way you wrote your post was simplistic and insulting since your argument had nothing to do with any claims made.
Re Willis’s PPS on precise quotation, I can testify to what he says. A few months ago in a really long thread I didn’t keep tracks of exactly who said what and in a comment on the “scientific method” I mistakenly included Willis’s name along with someone else’s. And now I am stacking shelves in the local supermarket…
Rich.
A large part of the case for biofuels was that the US was running out of petroleum, and so its price would rise and it would be necessary to find less expensive substitutes. Now that the US is on its way to petroleum independence, the ethanol mandate percentage should be cut in half.
To Mario Lento above.
The Federal resources are being saved for the 1%s, for the future.
See – owe to Rich says:
January 12, 2014 at 1:41 am
” I mistakenly included Willis’s name along with someone else’s. And now I am stacking shelves in the local supermarket…”
Misquoting Willis gets you a job?
Reblogged this on pdx transport and commented:
Pretty good evidence that peak oil is about to be disproven by reality.
Another prediction of doom crashes to reality.
Man cause global warming is likely next.