[agramante]

A bit late to the topic, on Pops vs Revi's debate on EROEI--you guys were talking about different things. Pops--efficiency is not the same as EROEI, but it seems that you were confusing them. You can combine the concepts, but you didn't do it correctly. For the sake of mathematical ease, let's start with Revi's classical esimate of EROEI from Spindletop, 100 barrels out for every 1 barrel in. So we've got the 100 barrels out. Applying Pops' 80% efficiency, we're down to 80 barrels. Applying his estimate that only about 30% is actually output in an engine, that's 30 barrels of oil energy expended as thrust in an IC engine. So we're still at 30 barrels of useful energy per 1 barrel invested at Spindletop rates.

Fast-forward to now, when EROEI is more like 10:1. According to Pops' own formula, that's 3 barrels of useful motive energy out per 1 barrel in. That's still a tenfold decrease, and not good at all for our overall energy budget. Tar sands, frequently estimated at 4:1? That's 1.2 barrels of locomotion to 1 barrel in, a net gain of 0.2 barrels. Break-even isn't going to cut it.

[Pops]

Hi, ag. First EROEI is the energy efficiency of energy extraction. If not efficiency what else does it measure?

But aside from that on the one hand you can't say that oil is so eminently valuable we can't operate without it and on the other that it is so worthless that we need to obtain it without cost. My point in pointing out the cost of refining and use is that we never had 100:1 oil, it was never more than 30:1, tops. Pretending like it was free, from an energy standpoint, is the wrong way to look at it.

Last week, I for example took that 10:1 or 2:1 energy and drove a 7,000 pound pickup to the lumber yard to haul home a 1 pound box of nails, want to figure out the EROEI on that? LoL

So to look at it another way, the reason we spend lots of very useful energy to get tar rinse-water from Canadian sand is because syncrude is so much more useful than the energy inputs; the tar, the nat gas, the diesel. We spend more energy to extract oil than we receive, we've been doing exactly that since the whole thing began, it is a one way street.

[ennui2]

There is no fixed absolute number on EROEI. It can be impacted by how the process is done. That chart is from 2009, before the shale boom. Doomers shrugged off the potential of tar and shale to act as a peak oil buffer. Well, it did act as a buffer.

[ROCKMAN]

And once again the annoying reminder that EROEI doesn't directly determine whether oil development project is pursued or not. Never has and never will. It is very difficult to ECONOMICALLY justify a project once EROEI gets below 5 or 6. Consider how many shale projects have been dropped since the oil price collapse. The EROEI's of those projects haven't changed one bit. The economic analysis using half the oil price we were using a year ago killed them.

[Strummer]

Hi, ag. First EROEI is the energy efficiency of energy extraction. If not efficiency what else does it measure?

It measures net energy gain (surplus). When you give someone 1 dollar, and he gives you 10 dollars back, and you can repeat that ad infinitum, what does that say about the "efficiency" of that exchange process? With a 10:1 EROEI, the 9 surplus barrels are "free", for all practical purposes.

[ROCKMAN]

Strummer – “When you give someone 1 dollar, and he gives you 10 dollars back”. And to make your analogy applicable to oil development consider this: you invest 1 bbl or oil and get 5 bbls back. Great…an EROEI of 5. But I’m the broker on this deal and I facilitate the trade. And I charge you the price of 5 bbls of oil as my commission. So while you got 5 bbls back for every 1 bbl you put in you only got the economic value of: 1 bbl + 5 bbls – 5 bbls = 1 bbl. IOW with your EROEI of 5 you didn’t make a f*cking penny. LOL. You got back value wise what you put in. And if my commission were the value of 6 bbls of oil? You lost your ass even though you have a rather positive EROEI.

And that is how the oil patch works whether folks want to accept it or not. No company is intentionally going to invest $millions regardless of the EROEI if they don’t foresee a profit being made. Our business is run on the monetary gain...not the gain in bbls of oil.

[GoghGoner]

If OPECs current forecast is right there will be no peak in 2015. I think non-OPEC supply will fall hard next year so I don't put much faith in this estimate.

OPEC cuts its oil production forecasts for US, other states not part of the cartel

The group said Monday it had lowered its forecast for daily oil supply growth this year from non-member states by 72,000 barrels a day to 880,000 due to lower than expected output in the U.S. For next year, it trimmed its forecast by 110,000 barrels to 160,000.

[Subjectivist]

If OPECs current forecast is right there will be no peak in 2015. I think non-OPEC supply will fall hard next year so I don't put much faith in this estimate.

OPEC cuts its oil production forecasts for US, other states not part of the cartel

The group said Monday it had lowered its forecast for daily oil supply growth this year from non-member states by 72,000 barrels a day to 880,000 due to lower than expected output in the U.S. For next year, it trimmed its forecast by 110,000 barrels to 160,000.

I would like to know why they think non OPEC supply will grow nearly a million barrels at these prices? What few companies were planning to drill into the old fields around North Ohio have cancelled those plans and I can't imagine that is unque to just my area. Frack drilling is down about 50 percent from a year ago. As someone taught me here on PO years ago, depletion never sleeps.

Depletion plus slower drilling means production decline, not increase, at least I thought it did.

[Revi]

Ron Patterson has some new numbers out on Peak Oil Barrel and it looks like a decline is setting in right now. It may be just the top of the plateau, and we'll hit a higher peak, but pretty soon it will be impossible to set a new record. Check this out:
http://peakoilbarrel.com/

It starts with the Bakken, but scroll down to the Opec and non- Opec data.

[kanon]

There are reports that Saudia Arabia will import all of its wheat beginning 2016 due to depletion of its aquifer. SA has run out of ground water. Saudi Arabia’s water mystery

There are estimates that SA had gound water equal in volume to Lake Erie Saudi Arabia's Great Thirst. Here is a map of SA water resources:


Now, here is a map of SA oil deposits:


My question is whether there is any similarity in the depletion pattern.

[dolanbaker]

From what I've been reading, it's all sea water.

[kanon]

I was thinking that we may know more about the aquifer volume and geology than about the oil deposits. Then we may, through crop amounts and other data be able to define how much water was pumped and then extrapolate to the oil reserve to estimate actual oil reserves. It seems that SA aquifer depletion was a rather sudden event in terms of going dry, so I am wondering if we may find SA oil production in rapid decline in a similar manner. A side note is those who attribute SA oil production to market share battles may wish to consider the need to buy food as another motivation.

[StarvingLion]

There is lots of oil in Iran and Iraq. There will be a massive upsurge in Tarsands. Peak Oil could very well be 2085. But wait, the prices the prices the prices!!!

The prices don't matter

[GoghGoner]

The EIA changed their US forecast for 2016 from -90 kbd to -520 kbd.

I was wondering what they were thinking, I guess they are listening

[Subjectivist]

The EIA changed their US forecast for 2016 from -90 kbd to -520 kbd.

I was wondering what they were thinking, I guess they are listening

I think we might lose even more than that, but it is a whole lot more realistic than the old estimate!

[ROCKMAN]

sub - I was thinking that we might want to start making a distinction that we probably can't make: the "natural peak" vs the "artificial peak". Which themselves are difficult to define. But by example: a year ago we were producing X million bopd. So let's call that PO. But now we're producing even more. But it isn't so much that we've found that much more but the KSA and others have decided to produce the existing wells a little faster. That "excess capacity" thingy.

So next year they cut production. So now we call PO in 2015. But what if they open the wells up even more then they are producing now in 2017...or '18...or '20? Granted none of these up and down changes are very big. But jump in your Way-Back machine to 1979. Global oil production fell from the late 70's peak of 62 mm bopd to 54 mm bopd...a 13% drop. And we didn't get back above that "PO" for more than 15 years...around 1995.

As you know I don't tend to predict the future of nuthin. I'm much too smart because I know what I don't know. But look at how the cornies keep pointing out that the 2005 PO date some had predicted turned out wrong. But depending on how one defines PO maybe it wasn't wrong: maybe in 2005 the producers could have produced more oil then we're doing today. So now we're into the world of PPO and APO...Potential Peak Oil vs Actual Peak Oil.

Just what we need to confuse the sheeple: more f*cking acronyms. LOl.

[Subjectivist]

sub - I was thinking that we might want to start making a distinction that we probably can't make: the "natural peak" vs the "artificial peak". Which themselves are difficult to define. But by example: a year ago we were producing X million bopd. So let's call that PO. But now we're producing even more. But it isn't so much that we've found that much more but the KSA and others have decided to produce the existing wells a little faster. That "excess capacity" thingy.

So next year they cut production. So now we call PO in 2015. But what if they open the wells up even more then they are producing now in 2017...or '18...or '20? Granted none of these up and down changes are very big. But jump in your Way-Back machine to 1979. Global oil production fell from the late 70's peak of 62 mm bopd to 54 mm bopd...a 13% drop. And we didn't get back above that "PO" for more than 15 years...around 1995.

As you know I don't tend to predict the future of nuthin. I'm much too smart because I know what I don't know. But look at how the cornies keep pointing out that the 2005 PO date some had predicted turned out wrong. But depending on how one defines PO maybe it wasn't wrong: maybe in 2005 the producers could have produced more oil then we're doing today. So now we're into the world of PPO and APO...Potential Peak Oil vs Actual Peak Oil.

Just what we need to confuse the sheeple: more f*cking acronyms. LOl.

If you really want to get confusing try this. I used to live about ten miles from a drag race track where they did both regular events. Once a month they opened up the track for anyone who wanted to test their own vehicle against the clock or someone they had an argument with.

Anyhow the professionals mostly used methanol fuel in super high compression spark (Otto cycle) engines while a rare few burned nitro laced fuel, not to be confused with NOx oxidizer injection.

Anyhow one of the guys I went to college with modified his car to run on Methanol, installed a turbocharger to increase the compression and spent a bunch tuning his car up for drag racing. The last thing he did was learn from another racer that by adding 6 ounces distilled water to each gallon of methanol he would get a slightly higher speed.

I told that story to ask,
A few years ago the EIA started counting all liquids including alcohols and condensate derivatives as "oil". How long until they start counting that potential 5 percent distilled water as "oil"?

[ROCKMAN]

Sub - "How long until they start counting that potential 5 percent distilled water as "oil"? Good point. In fact if they are clever they'll shift away from counting bbls of "oil" to counting bbls of "fuel". Besides being able to add water to the count they could also use the refinery gains. Especially since some of those gains come from utilizing NG.

And that would really make more sense: virtually none of the consuming public buys oil...they buy refinery products. In the end the public doesn't give a sh*t how much oil is produced: they are concerned with how much motor fuel and heating oil are available.