Peak Oil? Half a trillion barrels found

KevO · **Joined:** Tue May 24, 2005 12:00 am **Posts:** 2541

Is it time to give up on the peak oil theory?

Quote:

At the end of the first day of the ASPO conference in Denver, we were treated to a fantastic presentation on the oil potential of the sub-salt basins on the margins of the South Atlantic Ocean given by Dr Marcio Mello who presented the evidence for a half trillion barrels of reserves in this new frontier province. So has a new Saudi Arabia been found?

Marcio Mello is president of HRT Petroleum, a Brazillian geological services company. Dr Mello's talk began with some background to the Tupi discovery in the Santos Basin, Brazil, and went on to extrapolate the geological and petroleum systems of Tupi to basins off southern Africa, the Amazon Basin, The Gulf of Mexico and The Congo Basin.

Dr Mello explained how the discovery of "diamondoid" structures in oil at shallow depth in Brazil gave evidence for mixing two types of petroleum, one that must have been formed at great depth below the Salt that blankets this basin. He had for many years tried to persuade Petrobras to drill deep, into the sub-salt strata, which of course they did eventually do leading to the discovery of Tupi.

The Tupi Field occurs in limestone reservoir at extraordinary depths of around 6000 meters beneath a salt layer that is around 2000 m thick. At such depths, temperatures would normally be too high for oil to survive but the secrets here are a combination of deep water and the conducting character of the salt which results in hot but tollerable temperatures at these great depths where the drill bit has proven intermediate grade crude oil to exist.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50388

Tanada · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 3:47 am

KevO wrote:

Is it time to give up on the peak oil theory?

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50388

The PO theory is about peak production of conventional oil, and by extension peak production of each of the new types of reservoir discovered since it was first theorized by Hubbert in the 1950's.

If sub-salt oil is really this common then it would increase world reserves by 500 billion barrels, which is nothing to dismiss cavalierly. On the other hand humans consume about 29 Billion Barrels every year so if nothing else changed and demand stayed steady this would be a 17 year supply of oil. That would give Humanity something of a breathing space to change our ways, but based on past performance I don't think that we will. We will just add this supply to all the others and go on with happy motoring until we can no longer afford it.

dissident · **Joined:** Sat Apr 08, 2006 12:00 am **Posts:** 711

This 500 billion barrels is the self-interested estimate of a promoter. There are not nearly enough wells to validate this claim.

JohnnyMac · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 5:39 am

Peaking does not mean running out

rangerone314 · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 5:55 am

And I assume this can be brought online and pumped fast enough to offset the continuing depletion of existing fields?

Oil hit $75/bbl Wednesday. I guess the market wasn't impressed by this.

Geodesic · **Joined:** Sat Nov 15, 2008 1:00 am **Posts:** 31

rangerone314 wrote:

And I assume this can be brought online and pumped fast enough to offset the continuing depletion of existing fields?

Oil hit $75/bbl Wednesday. I guess the market wasn't impressed by this.

The market is more impressed with the weak dollar.

ian807 · **Joined:** Mon Nov 03, 2008 1:00 am **Posts:** 254

Sigh. No, we're still going to hit peak oil.

Yes, there are lots of new finds. Do they matter? Not much.

The stuff we're getting out of Saudi is "light sweet crude" from a single nice, well-behaved field, easy to siphon, cheap to process and export.

The exciting new fields so breathlessly reported by journalists lacking either petroleum engineering or geology degrees are mostly in deep water, in many smaller scattered fields at different depths and with different geologies. The oils there are not "light sweet crude" but heavier hydrocarbons (think "tar") that are much more expensive to extract and process.

We will hit two peaks. The first is price. It's more expensive to get this new stuff out. It's more expensive to process it. When oil is $500 a barrel, we start leaving it in the ground.

The second peak is energy return (called EROEI). When you have to spend a barrel of oil's worth of energy to get a barrel of oil, it's game over for oil as a significant energy source.

That second is the one to watch. When oil was first discovered and into the 60s, its EROEI was over 100 worldwide. Now it's just about 8, and decreasing. When it gets to 1, we're done.

Pops · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 8:31 am

ASPO figured in a number called "yet-to-be-discovered", which translates to oil yet to be discovered and attached a number that I can't remember.

What will be the real surprise is when we get the big discovery of easy, sweet crude.

Plantagenet · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 8:56 am

KevO wrote:

Is it time to give up on the peak oil theory?

Peak Oil isn't based on the total amount of oil in the ground. Peak Oil is based on the maximum production rate.

The deepwater sub-salt reservoirs are difficult and expensive to develop. Its unlikely they will disprove the peak oil theory, or even be developed quickly enough to create another peak in global oil production as high as those already seen in 2005 (peak annual production) or 2008 (Peak monthly production).
:mrgreen:

mcgowanjm · **Joined:** Fri May 23, 2008 12:00 am **Posts:** 540

We can't even transfer from liquid fuels to NatGas.

Quote:

(Bloomberg) -- U.K. natural-gas storage projects face delays as companies struggle to raise financing, the Gas Storage Operators’ Group said.

per Leanan PONews

And once past peak you have to find even more to
make up for depletions. Like Cantarell going to 150 000 BPD
next year.

A loss of 2 MMBD in 4 years.

NoWorries · **Joined:** Thu Jun 05, 2008 12:00 am **Posts:** 137

re: We can't transfer from liquid fuel to NatGas

What do you mean by this, exactly?

I raised the point a few days ago that this massive NatGas finding didn't mean we were "saved", because you can't fill your tank with NatGas. Shortonsense told me that NatGas can easily be changed into liquid fuel.

Since I know practically nothing about Natural Gas, I was hoping someone could explain this better.

frankthetank · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 11:15 am

Lets just say its true and that it exists... I guess you have to look at how long it takes to get any meaningful production out of it and the price of that production... i bet it won't be cheap.

If it is true, Brazil has one heck of a payload sitting off shore! 500billionx$77...not too shabby!

NoWorries · **Joined:** Thu Jun 05, 2008 12:00 am **Posts:** 137

Agreed. This find basically makes Brazil the next Saudi.

I'm surprised there isn't more coverage of this.

Pops · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 11:35 am

NoWorries wrote:

Since I know practically nothing about Natural Gas, I was hoping someone could explain this better.

A simple conversion allows a generator for example to run off nat gas, propane or gasoline interchangeably.
http://www.propane-generators.com/

The main problem with retrofitting vehicles is storage, compressed nat gas has 25% of the umph per unit volume of diesel - but hey!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_natural_gas

pstarr · **Posted:** Thu Oct 15, 2009 11:48 am

No one really knows that such plays will be profitable, because we have neither the experience nor the net-energy analysis to guarantee it. All unconventional primary energy sources are increasingly suspect until proven otherwise.

The investor class and the cornucopian masses are always waiting for the "correct" price point to instruct them when unconventionals will be profitable. However, as we have seen repeatedly (with Green River oil shale, ethanol, Orinoco heavy, (perhaps tar sands), and probably sugar ethanol) when the selling price reaches the "correct" price point, then increasing "incorrect" production costs (a function of the extra conventional petroleum needed for production--i.e. bad EROEI) sends profits just out of reach. This is called the "Law of Receding Horizons"

Peak Oil? Half a trillion barrels found

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