by Rud Istvan
I decided to draft this possible guest post, based on my three ebooks, (all available very affordably on iBooks and Amazon Kindle) because newbie poster MI will not go away on WUWT, and keeps posting OT false peak oil stuff partly directed to his blog, all the while not responding to my several comments to him. I for sure cannot direct any one anywhere, even to my published eBooks. So, here is a simple WUWT ‘peak oil’ fact summary gratis drawn from those. May Dave Middleton forgive my geological layman’s possible detail errors in the big picture portrayed here, for which he certainly has better SME knowledge than I. Plus, I know from previous comments that there are those reading here since years who think no such peak oil thingy exists. Sort of like no GHE, or no ECS. This post is mainly aimed at those who still don’t, in addition to MI.
Peak Oil
It surely must exist somewhen, since almost nobody claims oil is not a fossil fuel. So somewhen, current rapid extraction must exceed all past slow accumulation, producing some eventual peak in annual production. The two abiotic oil ‘hypotheses’ (Gold 2001 and Ukraine 2011) have both been objectively disproven. The only remaining questions are when the peak in fossil fuel oil production occurs, and how sharp that post peak decline in production will be. These simple questions relate directly to two NOT so simple questions. First, how much more fossil fuel oil remains to be discovered? And second, how much of that can be usefully extracted? There are for the second question two further subquestions: at what price; and all at any price? I do not address those here.
Peak Oil Discovery Models
There are three basic statistical modeling methods to estimate this almost certain future peak in fossil oil DISCOVERIES. The most familiar is Hubbert’s for the US using a logistics (fat tail) symmetric probability curve. He was about right for US conventional oil, and about wrong for everything else. There are also the probit transforms and the by basin hyperbolic creaming curve methods, the latter illustrated below by the North Sea. (All explained in my ebooks, but not here.)
The problems with Hubbert’s originally hypothesized logistics curve method come in various parts.
First, the conventional oil field recovery curve is NOT his logistics curve. It has a long fat tail thanks to secondary and tertiary oil recovery. Technically it is a gamma function curve. A good example is the US North Slope.
Second, his hypothesis applied only to ‘conventional oil’, defined as viscosity API>10, produced from a reservoir with >5% porosity and permeability >10 millidarcies. That ignores all ‘heavy oil’ such as in the Canadian ‘Tar’ Sands or the Venezuelan Orinoco (largest such heavy oil reserve in the world), and also all of the newly fracked ‘tight’ shale oil.
Third, his estimate by definition did not recognize at all the later technology advances of fracked shale (tight) oil. But the potential of fracked shale oil has also been grossly overstated, as pointed out in my ebook ‘Blowing Smoke’ essays Matryoshka Reserves and Reserve Reservations. Following is an image example of why the Monterey shale oil reserve went from an official over 15 trillion barrels per EIA to almost nothing per USGS Monterey Shale ‘fold’ revision:
Nothing was left in the Monterey Shale by plate tectonics to horizontally drill/frack…. a bit of a geological horizontal drill/frack oil recovery problem.
But, when you add all those things together, then figure them through in detail (in my ebooks), you still get roughly the following possible oil production peaks from the (still wrong tail) original Hubbert logistics curve:
So yup, about 2023-2025 will be for sure the peak of all oil production.
This can also be shown another way, summarized from the ebooks. For conventional oil, a 2008 IEA survey of the world’s largest about 800 producing oil fields measured an annual production decline rate of about 5.7%. Those about 800 fields comprised about 85% of that year’s total conventional oil production. So conventional oil production actually measurably peaked about 2005 per the IEA, close to the various post Hubbert projections. There is no way that unconventional oil (given low recovery factors) can make that up for many decades into the future.
But because of the oil field depletion gamma curves, it will not be a ‘sudden’ end to the world, nor even close to it as falsely depicted by this Hubbert’s logistics curve peak oil model or by newish poster MI. Just a slow decline, maybe overtaken by food even given virtual water. Like climate change, the devil is in the details.
It was 1974 when I read the first peak oil claims in the Washington Post. In reality, global energy, (US denominated) rode OPEC’s gravy train and Nixon had to seek windfall profits tax, a price celling and 55 MPH speed limit to combat OPEC’s punishment of the USA for siding with Israel in the 1973 war. Remember the TV show Dallas… boomtown. Remember the savings and loan debacle in Texas when it all collapsed? Massive collusion and politicization of the Oil market takes off at this point. Nearly 50 years later, there has been massive expansion of global Hydrocarbon fuel exploration and discovery, (Natural gas, Oil, coal etc). Meanwhile, the technological expansion predicted in 1974-1980 that was to take off to accommodate the peak oil claim, never happened! We don’t have the BATTERY (current batteries are crap, The BATTERY is the next generation battery) Without a scalable commercialized BATTERY, solar is useless in decentralized formats), we don’t have viable commercialized all temperature Superconductive products, we don’t have hydrogen fuel cells or cold fusion and so on. We have wind, solar, TEGS but no way to store and distribute the generated electricity in decentralized formats. We do have fuel cells, hydrogen, superconductive tech, and cold fusion still in development; they are not in the commercial market place, ( I can’t go and buy them at Walmart and stick them in my home). What we have is a massive supply of hydrocarbon fuel and we are burning it because there is no viable alternative, ( all the alternatives are politized tax boondoggles…. many home owners will give away their solar cells cause the boondoggle failed in some places.). What is worse, we are told humans are ruining the globe staying warm and feeding themselves. And we have gas prices rising like Obama’s first year in office. The American people should wonder why they are being squeezed psychologically, existentially and financially on bogus claims of climate change and peak oil. Eventually, the reality is oil will reach peak demand and those markets will reel and recede but probably not in the foreseeable future. I think this is because the high tech companies are focused on crap tech like Quantum computers, and communications, and faster and smaller gizmos, because they can design them to be addictive and they predict we will all want that crap in our hands and homes. They think the demand for personal tech will just keep growing, (entertaining your self to death is a kind of death right…the death of the independent fertile mind). Finally, they think everyone is convinced they need a grid. They don’t realize the big, ‘new order’, money is bringing these products, (The Battery, the Generator and distribution units for solar/TEG and microturbine inputs) to the big box stores. The tech companies are still thinking macro for energy and micro for personal tech, when they should be thinking micro for energy and realize the that personal tech (Smartphone Serfdom) is about ready to bore people to death. There are many paradoxes that few of us grasp… I don’t claim to grasp them… just putting it out there. The American people should want to find a way out of the incredibly toxic paradoxical political narrative…. .. stay way from the toxic websites, turn off the broadband and phones and get busy getting married and raising families, starting business because that is what humans do.
That was Jimmy Carter, not Nixon.
Actually, Nixon proposed a 50 mph national speed limit for passenger vehicles and 55 mph for trucks and buses, on November 26, 1973. The windfall profits tax, I believe, was finally instituted under Carter.
But then Ronald Reagan removed the long-standing price controls on U.S. petroleum, and magically, oil “shortages” vanished and have never reappeared. It was the most dramatic, incontrovertible proof of the principle that price controls cause shortages ever seen.
To be fair, Jimmy Carter was in the process of phasing out price controls. Reagan just ripped off the bandage, and we have had all the oil we need ever since.
Hubbert was modeling onshore conventional U.S. production. So offshore pre-salt and Russian Arctic and a host of forced-scarcity plays by hostile or incompetent governments are more significant factors. The fixation on limited modeling efforts in the past has been blown out of proportion by greens as pretext for moving on with policy reach and a host of other curiosity seekers. Yes, these are the same greens that won court cases based on a contrived premise of scarcity of uranium fuel (courtroom science tactics) for planned nuclear power plants in California. The conclusion for the educated and the dabblers in resource economics remains the same in that the ultimately recoverable resource base remains unknown along with the periodic large-scale tech changes beyond normal innovation gains. Similar large-scale tech advances on the demand side remain to be seen despite contrived DOE spending levels and consistent wrong-way bets.
If Hubbert had been right about the total recoverable resource, his prediction would have been right. To this day, no one knows what the total recoverable resource is. We just know that it is finite and very large.
His numbers were decent but the factorial scope of his thinking was fatally flawed and he should have realized he was way out on a limb and not published the report. This is the problem when statisticians start building models in isolation, they miss critical variables, (demand, exploration, the global market geo-politique). They miss the mark because they think their numbers are brute facts, which do not exist. It takes more than one great scientific or statistical mind to make massive economic predictions. And the dude was gullible and for 50 years it his study has been leveraged by the propagandists for consumption by the gullible hoards. He gets a big fail!! There is much about the world that is finite…. this misses the point completely. No one knows what the total recoverable resource is and if they don’t they’re not going to tell you. All it takes if for one dude in china to develop ‘the battery’, all temp superconductivity and everyone will stop talking about oil.
MKH was a geophysicist. He made important contributions to the understanding of the movement of ground water and the role of scale in models.
Resource Guy,
Yours is the money quote for this topic:
“The conclusion for the educated and the dabblers in resource economics remains the same in that the ultimately recoverable resource base remains unknown along with the periodic large-scale tech changes beyond normal innovation gains.”
………………..
New resources are linked to money spent on exploration. Exploration activity drops when there is an abundance of product. At any time and place, calculations of reserves are affected by many diverse inputs. So are calculations of peaks.
There are some of us who have worked in the industry and some who make stuff up about it.
Geoff S
My take on this, from my blog for my students: https://insuspectterrane.com/2016/05/25/the-petroleum-age-has-just-begun/
Who is the socialist?
— The one who says peak oil as the reason we need tech solutions to our energy needs due to secondary agenda: save the planet. Or to justify paying colluded prices for oil.
–The one who says the only solution is a Grid Solution.
–The one use uses their corporation for political censorship.
–The one who supports legislation to instate carbon tax and prohibit families and local businesses from using tech for off grid solutions.
–The one who says that whatever; oil, gas, nuke, wind, solar as long at we protect the grid
–The one who says tech solutions, ( increased efficiency) will eventually phase out demand for oil.
—-The family who wants tech solutions to leverage renewables and hydrocarbon electrical generation storage and distribution for their homes and business to improve their bottom line.
–The one who sees humans as the problem and seeks to control them with propaganda and political leveraging.
-The One World Utopian.
— The Libertarian Anarchist or the Marxist Anarchist both waiting to look for jobs until the pandemic
unemployment check stops.
–The one who dreams about a great electric car because it would be superior in performance.
–The one who fights like hell to protect social security, ( if all my FICA dollars since 1972 when into a stock mutual fund I would have a net work of 10 mil…. not a $1,900 a month check. The tax revenue from the economic growth would have been enough to help those who are truly in need)
— We are all socialists to one extent or another…. we have been for 90 years. Can we stop the Ad Hominem attacks and stick to the analysis and science.
Unless there were no microorganisms a billion years ago to rot vegetation on the surface and consume dead animals not eaten it seems not likely conventional energy like oil will form other than naturally.
A lot of theories have been rejected, some for good reason and some not. Tectonic plates that move, the Earth is round, the Earth moves around the Sun in an ellipse, there are witches and throwing salt over your shoulder irritates someone behind you are examples.
The success of WUWT is it is an open forum with some limits where the deep thinking and not so deep can express opinion.
Ingrown,
You are lying about uranium reserves being negligible. Estimates have 90 to 230 years of economically recoverable uranium left at current consumption rates using conventional reactors. However, already available technology (Breeder reactors, Plutonium reprocessing) can extend this by a factor of up to 100. At a 10x cost of recovery, there’s 60,000 years of uranium at current consumption rates recoverable from sea water. This isn’t nearly as expensive as it seems – the fuel cost of nuclear is only ~30% of the total cost, so increasing the price of the fuel by 10x would only increase the price of nuclear electricity by ~3x, putting the cost of nuclear in the range of what Germany now pays for unreliable wind and solar.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
You could easily have looked this up but you didn’t. You’re either pathologically lazy, have an agenda that isn’t supported by the facts, or you’re suffering from paranoid delusions. I’m guessing all three.
LOL,
you made no actual counterpoint to his comment.
Do better Mark!
From MEABS article you ignored:
LOL
Ingrown, Uranium has been extracted from seawater using a filter made of ordinary acrylic yarn. The yarn can be washed and reused. No boiling necessary. Like so many of your posts, your estimate is ignorant and WRONG.
(Please stop the name calling) SUNMOD
Sunsettommy; It’s almost always more effective to address arguments in a civil tone, granted. However, almost is the key word as there are cases where name calling can be more effective. One case is when the poster lies, invents data, or responds in a non-sequitur way. This is the case with Ingrown. He insults all the readers by making stuff up, posing as an knowledgeable authority, and by posting off-topic, so by insulting him back it lets him know that he isn’t accepted because of his anti-social behavior.
You are either a complete fool, Ingrown, or a very bad liar. You couldn’t possibly go through 60,000 years of uranium in a few months. The world already gets 10% of its electricity from nuclear so if electricity went to 100% nuclear that 60,000 years would go to 6,000 years. If the world replaced ALL energy use with nuclear, uranium would last over 1,000 years.
Peak Oil is a complete joke:
1) Hydrocarbons can be manufactured from just about any carbon source (Fischer Tropsch Process)
2) SImply look at where/what depth oil is discovered, then look up the depth at which the deepest fossils are discovered. The deepest fossil ever found was 1.4 miles beneath the surface. The Deepest Oil Field is 7.5 Miles.
3) Depleted oil fields often refill themselves
Bottom like Oil is simply a long-chain hydrocarbon. Oil over $50 barrel makes synthetic oil competitive. SASOL literally makes oil synthetically. As long as you have grass clippings and wood chips in your front yard, we will never run out of hydrocarbons.
However, Peak Crude Oil is a reality. Hubbert’s work has to be taken in context with reasonable expectations.
Something that you can take to the bank is that synthetic oil can only be cheap if extremely cheap electricity is made available. But then, synthetic fuels will only have niche applications like for aircraft.
Before WW2 Germany came up with an artificial way to produce oil: The Fischer–Tropsch process.
The process creates a suite of hydrocarbons from methane to long-chained hydrocarbons, with methane the most common and long-chained hydrocarbons the fewest. A distribution continuum.
Interestingly, oil from Brazil’s deep water offshore pre-salt fields has the same, or similar suite of hydrocarbons, a distribution continuum.
On a philosophical note: The Fischer-Tropsch process exists, can not be denied, it is fact.
So, if humans can create oil by physical processes, doesn’t make sense that Nature can do that as well, if not better?
Germany actually used the Bergius Process for production of most of its motor fuels from coal. Friedrich Bergius was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work in converting coal to liquid fuels. Fischer-Tropsch produces a different set of hydrocarbons (kerogens). Fischer constantly criticized Bergius’ ideas until he was given a personal demonstration of the process, and then became a supporter. The United States ran a Bergius process plant, secretly, between 1946 and 1948, producing gasoline of higher quality than petroleum-derived gas, at just slightly more cost than petroleum-derived gasoline. I imagine it would be competitive today.
Well done for mentioning this Michael!
That is a point completely missed by everyone in this thread, including the author:
Coal is crude oil.
There are already about a dozen coal-to-liquids plants operating, mainly in China. The cost of production is higher than the value of crude oil right now, because coal demand is high and natural crude production has increased due to technical advances. But that won’t always be the case.
As soon as the cost of crude extraction exceeds the overall cost of CTL you will then see more CTL plants constructed in places like China and India.
The amount of coal around is phenomenal, as other commenters have mentioned. For example it’s known that there’s up to 23 trillion tonnes of coal under the North Sea. That represents a lot of oil just waiting to be converted.
Peak oil is so silly. With CTL there’s several millenia-worth of the stuff available. And since ECS is low the extra pCO2 won’t do much harm. Agriculture will love it.
Uranium reserves are not a fixed indicator to arm wave. They are dependent on price signals and sustained investment plans and expectations of market growth. The geologists that no longer explore for uranium did not get laid off because that was nothing left to find–it was massive discoveries of new reserves in Australia and Canada plus energy reference price declines in related markets that ended careers. dope
Repeating what you ignored earlier:
According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today’s consumption rate in total. Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time.
You are so far off the mark it is comical since you are ignoring KNOWN reserves and estimates already made.
I guess all of my university degrees on this topic outrank your trolling certificate.
I’m an engineer with a masters from odu, you can see my publications. You are a troll.
Also, I point to those who use the term ‘crustal abundance’ as completely naïve arm wavers. I’ve said so before on this and other sites including financial sites where that term is used to sucker small investors for lithium, REE, copper, etc. Remember that for next time and share with your illiterate troll network.
“… because newbie poster MI will not go away on WUWT…” Too funny, Rud.
Actually, closer to 133 per square mile of land! However, what’s a 33% error among friends?
Your terse analysis requires we accept on faith a lot of what you have left out. Considering the low level of accuracy in your calculation, I’m not willing to accept your claims at face value.
“Falling residential gas consumption proving shale is useless.”
The above statement is false.
It can be taken as less demand, but natural gas (nor the shale) is not “useless.”
Industrial use could even increase demand.
(And silly & ridiculous AGW concern can wither, thus residential use goes up.)
There are no physical capacity concerns.
abiotic oil: compare the pumpjack position in Los Angelos with some fault lines under LA and you get the picture. I mean – not all oil is abotic, but not all oil is biotic either.
This book will have you cheering.
The moral case for fossil fuels
Conventional wisdom says fossil fuels are an unsustainable form of energy that is destroying our planet. But Alex Epstein shows that if we look at the big picture, the much-hated fossil fuel industry is dramatically improving our planet by making it a far safer and richer place.