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Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Discuss research and forecasts regarding hydrocarbon depletion.

Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Revi » Mon 13 Apr 2015, 15:24:12

Thanks Rockman. It makes sense to me, since I just finished maple syruping, and we wanted to get as much as possible once we tapped and got the season going. I'm sure it doesn't matter how much it costs, it's time to get something out of previous investment.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Revi » Thu 16 Apr 2015, 21:35:07

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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Revi » Thu 16 Apr 2015, 21:38:28

In the article I posted above Gail Tverberg lays out why oil prices can't go up any more. We aren't going to pay more for oil because what it does isn't worth it any more. The only thing it really makes sense for in my opinion is farming and forestry. I would include fishing, but there aren't many left out there, so even that is a waste of fuel. The average person really has no clue what's about to befall us. And maybe that's a good thing.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby ennui2 » Thu 16 Apr 2015, 22:02:59

I disagree. I think oil can go up a lot higher than it is now before cratering the economy. I think Gail's piece is simply meant to pump up some sense of anxiety about the future now that The Oil Drum is no more and nobody is looking at the issue anymore. These alarm-bells just seem "forced". The same is true of a lot of Richard Heinberg's rhetoric from late 2008 onward as well. There is this constant fishing around for some looming crisis or another, and it just takes on a doomsday cult feel to it when it turns out to be one bad prediction after another.

Remember what Matt Simmons said about how cheap oil was for what it did even it were to be sold at several times what it was at the time (which is more expensive than now). I just think the EROEI argument was overplayed by some. Unconventional has more of a ROI than they anticipated, and while it's true that the industry overproduced, all that proves is that there's that much recoverable hydrocarbons that we've got more available than we need, so the market corrects, and BAU moseys on along.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Subjectivist » Thu 16 Apr 2015, 22:15:11

ennui2 wrote:I disagree. I think oil can go up a lot higher than it is now before cratering the economy. I think Gail's piece is simply meant to pump up some sense of anxiety about the future now that The Oil Drum is no more and nobody is looking at the issue anymore. These alarm-bells just seem "forced". The same is true of a lot of Richard Heinberg's rhetoric from late 2008 onward as well. There is this constant fishing around for some looming crisis or another, and it just takes on a doomsday cult feel to it when it turns out to be one bad prediction after another.

Remember what Matt Simmons said about how cheap oil was for what it did even it were to be sold at several times what it was at the time (which is more expensive than now). I just think the EROEI argument was overplayed by some. Unconventional has more of a ROI than they anticipated, and while it's true that the industry overproduced, all that proves is that there's that much recoverable hydrocarbons that we've got more available than we need, so the market corrects, and BAU moseys on along.


I concur, that is why I predicted oil around $80.00 some time this year. We in America got quite comfortable with oil in the $80-110 range, so once the temporary glut caused by the junk bond Fracking bubble deflates even a moderate amount the price will resume its recent levels. I count this winter as a deflating bubble, not an outright burst, because when the price got low enough it bounced without ever going down to pre conventional peak levels. Tar sands and GOM slowed some, but didn't suffer massive cancellations because the bounce kept them profitable. If there had been wholesale declines in GOM and Athabaskan plans for 2015-2016 then things would have been much grimmer once the junk financing clears up. As is those regions can still get financing because they were profitable at $50.00 before the massive fracking boom so they are still profitable today. All IMO of course.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby ralfy » Thu 16 Apr 2015, 22:19:21

ennui2 wrote:I disagree. I think oil can go up a lot higher than it is now before cratering the economy. I think Gail's piece is simply meant to pump up some sense of anxiety about the future now that The Oil Drum is no more and nobody is looking at the issue anymore. These alarm-bells just seem "forced". The same is true of a lot of Richard Heinberg's rhetoric from late 2008 onward as well. There is this constant fishing around for some looming crisis or another, and it just takes on a doomsday cult feel to it when it turns out to be one bad prediction after another.

Remember what Matt Simmons said about how cheap oil was for what it did even it were to be sold at several times what it was at the time (which is more expensive than now). I just think the EROEI argument was overplayed by some. Unconventional has more of a ROI than they anticipated, and while it's true that the industry overproduced, all that proves is that there's that much recoverable hydrocarbons that we've got more available than we need, so the market corrects, and BAU moseys on along.


If any, the point that oil prices go up and cause the economy to crash confirms what these articles say.

Also, the point that oil prices go up shows that energy returns from unconventional production are lower.

The fact that we are now resorting to unconventional production shows that the economy did not overproduce.

Finally, if oil prices are going to go up, the economy will crash after because prices are too high, prices are high because energy returns are low, and that the world economy is now resorting to unconventional production shows that the idea of reserves is not relevant.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Pops » Fri 17 Apr 2015, 09:57:52

Revi wrote:We aren't going to pay more for oil because what it does isn't worth it any more.

I hope you don't take this personally Revi, but that is a crock.
It is simply *Preperation Justification©
Rationalizing preps by insisting what we prepped for is happening/has happened/is going to happen this Tuesday (maybe Wednesday).

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I went to the library and a couple of other places yesterday, the unleaded I used did exactly what gasoline did a week/year/decade/century ago. I'm gonna say that pretty well proves oil's intrinsic worth exactly the same as ever, its the law of thermodynamics in action, LOL.

Now, the value of money changes and the value we receive from oil changes, but the energy in oil is unchanged.

Yesterday I drove a Hyundai that goes twice as far on a gallon as my last car, so the oil I used was actually twice as useful in that case. I did a couple of errands instead of just one in the same trip so actually the value of the oil I used doubled again.

The "worth" of oil, the heat available in combustion, is the same as it ever was, how we elect to use it decides its value. The value of oil is not falling, criminy, we just spent 4 years paying the highest average price ever for oil, how can it's value be falling?

I don't know how many ways to explain it, not that explanations alter belief, or counter Preparation Justification, but oil is priced on supply and demand—exaggerated 10 or 100 fold by speculation— but S&D nonetheless; excess demand means higher price, excess supply means lower price.

$100/bbl for 100mmb/d may be the limit this economy can afford to pay. That doesn't mean the heat available in oil is falling, that is the highest average price ever, it means the utility we receive is not rising fast enough to compensate for the difficulty of increasing flow rates.

This economy can't afford to pay much more that $100 for THIS AMOUNT of oil.

But cut out a little "waste" — add a few more errands to each trip, halving the number of trips, and we could afford more: $150 for 75mmb/d perhaps?

The supply is slightly higher than demand at the moment and oil is half the price it was a year ago, less than lifting costs in places and much less that the cost of adding additional volume, all things being equal the excess supply will disappear and the price will rise to balance demand — that is "Marginal Barrel Pricing" in textbook form.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Revi » Fri 17 Apr 2015, 21:49:00

Well, okay. I began to understand what Gail is saying by thinking of it as we are spending so much more getting the oil now that we don't have as much to spend on things like infrastructure and agriculture. There are more and more people who are pretty much out of the system. The industrial machine is slowing down.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Pops » Sat 18 Apr 2015, 10:16:48

Revi wrote:Well, okay. I began to understand what Gail is saying by thinking of it as we are spending so much more getting the oil

The reason oil price rose in the oughties was mostly globalisation and the increase in demand from Asia:

Image


And the decline of the N Sea

Image


If it hadn't been for the increase from RU and lately LTO, we would be in a world of hurt.

You are right, the other "PO" elements are there, fewer places to drill and increasing cost where we can, but the argument I keep trying to make is there is no need come up with some complicated ERI argument when increasing demand against the failure to increase supply is what is driving price.

KISS

If you need more proof, you really don't need to look further than the current spare capacity, we've been on the up-side of demand for the longest run in years and as a consequence the price is down. That disproves nothing about PO, it reinforces everything ever said on the subject—except the timing.

Image
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 03 Feb 2017, 10:04:24

Pops wrote:Ron @ POB has said for a while that he thinks peak is right now, I think he said in the 12 months from last to next October. Ron is talking about peak oil, which is the same as saying maximum flow rate, in other words, inability to increase or even maintain production volume, suffice to say the point never again to be exceeded, as such it would be the highest level of extraction ever attained and never to be repeated, the apogee before the long road to happy motoring nadir, the pinnacle of the oil age, the zenith of ...

Ron's is the typical PO prediction: depletion + nowhere to drill = decline. That isn't dramatic enough to make for a good "Movie Treatment" though. Even if there were absolutely no new wells drilled and no reworking of old wells, none, decline would "only" be in the 3-4% range, (maybe a little more the first couple of years as the shales rapidly croaked). But even that isn't going to happen since supply constraint will return the price to the edge of affordability and enable some newer fields to be developed, infill wells drilled, old ones reworked, tar mined, wet gas tapped, yada yada.

EROI by most accounts is in the 12-18 to 1 to one range, not 2:1. Does anyone remember this chart?

Image

There is very little difference in net energy between 100:1 and 10:1 efficiency. Maybe 8-9% less energy out? Considering we have built the current economy on ICE engines that, at the theoretical maximum efficiency, waste 65% of the stuff we put in the tank (much, much more in a 3/4 ton coffee cup hauler or '72 Eldo), I'm thinking we have a ways to fall yet.


I was looking for something else entirely and stumbled over this post from April 2015 and I think it is worthy of pointing out and reinforcing a couple of things.

Pops is dead on target when he says we Peakers have engaged in the silly fallacy that Peak Oil means we have run out of places to drill and depletion is eating away at production causing big drops in available oil day by month by year until everything falls apart.

The problem with those assumptions is blatantly obvious, the USA peaked in 1970-71 and quite literally thousands upon thousands of wells have been drilled here since that date, and a lot of them found oil nobody had discovered before peak. Another large segment were infill drilling and reworking projects like ROCKMAN does for his company that recovered a lot of oil that was discovered a long time ago but considered uneconomic to lift when prices were low.

We now know from the 2014-2016 price crash period that Fracking wells can keep lifting oil out of the formations at very cheap rates of return. How that worked is pretty much how it has always worked in the oil industry, finding the oil, completing the well and lifting the oil out of the well are all distinctly different processes.

Exploration budgets are at or near zero across most of the industry because at $50/bbl WTI contract price it just doesn't pay off in the long run to spend beau coup cash to explore for $90/bbl oil.

Drilling the well into the formation and putting the collection point in the pay zone is a second skill set, but you only engage in that if you have too, say to keep a lease or provide short term cash flow needs, if you can't sell the oil for more than it will cost you to drill and complete the well.

Completion in the case of fracking involves taking care of the really expensive part of a tight well, fracking the formation and installing the lifting equipment so you can get the oil out of the ground and send it off to market.

Actually lifting the oil out of the ground and sending it off to market is cheap compared to the rest of the steps.

So when a small Fracker goes bankrupt and their assets are auctioned off other companies buy the already producing wells cheap, and make a good income because they are only paying lifting cost on the wells that had a great deal of money invested in the first three phases.

Last but not least, about the graph of EROEI.

Keep in mind that every number on that graph was created by someone who wanted to prove something. If they did a study to find whatever that number was they had a confirmation bias to find what they wanted to find. Two examples, this graph says the EROEI on In Situe Bitumen production from the tar sands is only 60 percent the EROEI on surface mining. I call BS on that number because with In Situ production there are a wide range of methods ranging from steam flood to flame front dynamics, to dilutent flooding to probably a half dozen more methods. For surface mining you need large trucks and large excavators and a heating and washing plant and a tailings pile and a tailings pond and when you are finished you have to do land reclamation by law. That all takes a lot of energy. It seems likely to me they took the worst case scenario for in situ and assumed it was all done that way even though some of the methods are not that different than any other oil field development. The second problem with the graph is choosing two subsidized USA biofuels, Corn Ethanol and Soybean Oil, and treating them as if they are typical supplies for biofuels. They are not typical, even in the USA they are not the best return on investment for the product they yield and farmers would not be so eager to use those two sources if not for the crazy subsidies that exist in our system. There are literally dozens of plant species that yield more ethanol per acre than Corn and more oil per acre than Soybeans, but instead of going for the biggest return on investment our government went for the most popular with the lobbyists. Switching from corn ethanol to say white potato ethanol would more than triple the yield, and Potato is not the best yield by a long stretch. We could be encouraging farmers in Louisiana and Florida to grow beau coup sugar cane instead of Iowa and Nebraska farmers to grow corn. For oil yield we could be encouraging farmers to grow oil crops like Sunflower or Peanuts, both of which yield twice as much bio-oil per acre as Soybeans do. Heck even lowly Rice produces more oil than Soybean and if you really get extreme Castor Beans produce triple the yield.

Clearly we are not desperate for biofuel when we are using crops poorly suited to produce them instead of picking the most effective choices. Therefor we have no real way to judge the ultimate EROEI of biofuels until such time as we are using them in the most efficient manner we can, and that will not happen until we need them badly as substitute fuels.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Revi » Fri 03 Feb 2017, 10:54:21

I think we are going to have to grow more of our own food, make some of our own energy and generally disconnect from the giant system that does everything for us in the near future. I am amazed that they are not encouraging more of this, but I think systems like to get as many people in them as possible in the hope that it will somehow save them. I think of the Mayan empire. They burned more and more rain forest and made more and more lime in order to paint the temples white to appease the gods so that the rains would come back. The rain forest was what created the rain they wanted. They conquered and pulled more and more people into their system, but it still failed spectacularly. Such is the nature of empires.

Peak oil might be a savior for the climate, but we are going to have some rough times as the empire thrashes about in its death throes.

Whatever happens, it's not going to be much fun from here on in...
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Fri 03 Feb 2017, 11:20:03

T - "...their assets are auctioned off other companies buy the already producing wells cheap...". Which ties to the point I've made before: probably the largest fossil fuel wealth transfer in history is underway and essentially ignored by the MSM. All the production acquisitions are guaranteed to be PROFITABLE not just at the recent price levels but even if oil prices fall 50%...or more.

There's another meatball stat we use in the oil patch: $'s per bopd. IOW if one buys 1,000 bopd and pays $30 million you paid $30,000 per bopd. Since the price bust PROVED production reserves have been selling for $20k to $40k per bopd. By contrast before the bust those same wells were selling for $125k to $175k per bopd. So much focus on drilling investments but think about buying 1,000 bopd several years ago for $130 million and today it has a market value closer to $30 million...and only if it hasn't declined which isn't likely. Especially if you bought shale wells in their early high decline rate phase. The various fund investors were typical "mullets" (the actual oil patch term we use for the unsophisticated players) of companies looking to cash out. Those funds had very hungry investors looking to make more then 1.5% interest on their money. What could be safer then buying PROVED PRODUCING oil reserves? Certainly not drilling for them. LOL. And thus the truly obscene prices much production was selling for.

Today when running cash flow economic evaluations of a producing property companies ARE NOT using $40 to $50 per bbl. Closer to $12 to $18 per bbl for proven recoverable reserves. IOW those acquisions today are generating a nice positive cash flow on Day 1. And woukd still be doing so if prices drop to $25/bbl. And consider how cash flow looks if oil goes to $60/bbl. Compare that to the $35 to $70 per bbl some companies were spending to drill up new production.

Today companies are acquiring producing oil reserves at a lower price then they were able to do by drilling for about 20 years. And certainly a hell of a lot cheaper then any time in the last 8 years. The com!panics that are cannibalizing the crippled companies are establishing some of the best profit margins seen in the oil patch for many, many years. Remember oil is selling CHEAPER...not CHEAP: the current price is significantly higher then the historic average.

So one more time: between low drilling and acquisition costs the best profit margins have ALWAYS been generated during the busts with lower oil/NG prices then during the hyped high oil/NG periods when drilling and acquisition cost inflate to rediculous levels.

Just sit back and watch ExxonMobil et al acquire production that will generate some of the best profits they've seen for a long time. XOM isn't going to go bankrupt because of $50/bbl oil...it just experiences lower revenue. And during these times it will buy not only proved reserves on the cheap but also buy back its own stock at a big discount.

IOW despite what the unsophisticated think this is not the end of life as XOM knows it but a bit of a REPRIEVE from a declining reserve base it was unable to replace by drilling.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby AdamB » Fri 03 Feb 2017, 21:08:12

revi wrote:Whatever happens, it's not going to be much fun from here on in...


That's what was said about peak oil a decade ago. Turns out a high school graduate could now be a doctor working for 6 figures in a McMansion driving a luxury SUV, as long as they didn't fall for what was being sold by peak oilers. Same with Jimmy Carter and his fireside chats in the 1970's, warning of running out, and us all needing to wear sweaters as the solution, because it wasn't going to be much fun. The solution there was to just get rid of Jimmy, him not knowing any more about resource depletion than the likes of Ruppert or Savinar, now Gail and Ugo.

The one thing that peak oil hucksters did participate in that was a overall plus for the country and world, was scare enough auto manufacturers, who themselves don't know much about resource depletion, into giving us the next generation transport solutions. With government help no less. That t least some of us can demonstrate to our neighbors that putting nasty liquid fuels into your cars to go back and forth to work is just so..unnecessary.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Tanada » Sat 04 Feb 2017, 04:32:43

There is no fate but what we make. The future is not written.

It is not the peaking of resources we need to fear, it is how people and governments will react to peaking that will be the scary thing.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Sat 04 Feb 2017, 11:29:40

T - "It is how people and governments will react to peaking that will be the scary thing." Will react??? So you don't feet the $trillions in US tax monies and the thousands of our military's lives lost in the last 25 years wasn't a reaction to peaking? The hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Syria and northern Iraq in the last 5+ years wasn't the result, at least in part, of a reaction to peaking?

Folks often speculate how the world will look when that magical PO date is reached. I think we already have a pretty good model already established.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby diemos » Sat 04 Feb 2017, 15:50:00

ROCKMAN wrote:Folks often speculate how the world will look when that magical PO date is reached.


As Madge used to say, "You're soaking in it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7BvEldVEHU
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby AdamB » Sat 04 Feb 2017, 22:35:43

Tanada wrote:There is no fate but what we make. The future is not written.

It is not the peaking of resources we need to fear, it is how people and governments will react to peaking that will be the scary thing.


Well, the other times peak happened, people were unhappy, complained, governments blamed Big Oil, prices went up, those sorts of things.

So if history is any guide, I would bet future peaks would bring more of the same.
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Re: Peak Oil to the Rescue!

Unread postby Revi » Mon 06 Feb 2017, 10:33:14

We use as much oil just driving around as China uses for everything. China has 4 x the number of people we do, and they are an exporting giant. We use ours in wave runners and monster trucks. Who is going to have to adjust more? Us at 22 barrels per person per year, or them at 2 barrels per person?

We are going to be very unhappy. The saddest thing is that we could be spending on infrastructure to deal with this right now instead of trying to revive the kind of industry that used to exist.
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