[sjn]

Whenever discussion of oil production figures comes up the concept of GROSS liquid fuels production always gets taken as akin to a valid measure of World Oil Production. To my mind there are some serious deficiencies:

1) Not all liquids are oil, nor are they directly substitutable

2) Different components have various energy densities, they are not adjusted to BOe, it's just GROSS volume

3) Any liquid fuels used in the process of liquid fuel production are still counted. In principle the data could show any number and it could all be directly used to produce the same volume of liquid fuels leaving none for the market or economy beyond liquid fuels production.

4) Over time new components are added without backdating, this may not be an issue if they were previously insignificant.

What the metric actually means or represents isn't entirely obvious to me. If it is intended to be a proxy for energy, I believe it fails on that front. These are the main issues off the top my head, I'm open to being corrected if I'm completely off-base here. Perhaps others have more thoughts on this?

[Pops]

One of the interesting things going on that even my startlingly clear crystal ball didn't foresee was that since plain old conventionally produced, flowing crude peaked we are using "unconventionals" unconventionally.

They aren't crude oil. they are overcooked, undercooked, eroded, and/or trapped somewhere other than under a nice convenient cap rock out in the back 40. As a result they are heavier, lighter, more viscous all the way to solid and of course more expensive.

But the deal is they are still hydrocarbons. LTO from fracked wells is lighter than WTI. Which doesn't mean it is worthless, just that it has fewer of the heavier fractions. Ditto the heavy crude from KSA or Venezuela, it has the same heavy factions as contained in WTI, just fewer of the light.

Again, same for NGL. It is pretty well the same as the condensate that has always been captured and added to the crude stream, we just have more of it now due to the abundance (at the moment) of fracking "wet" nat gas.

The real problem is they don't pump themselves out of the ground so they cost more to extract. And, they may not fit into the plain old production stream that has been developed on flowing crude.

Some amount of the LTO very light oil is exported north to the tar sands to dilute the tar so that it can flow back south to the refineries in the US. Other of the very light oil undergoes slight refining so that it may be exported as ethylene and other "refined product" which is the basic raw material for all the plastics that pretty well are the main building block of everything nowadays. (it likely won't even need that soon as the ban is lifted) If the LTO were not supplying ethylene it would come off the top of the WTI supply. Back in the early aughts the price was climbing pretty fast.

Not great.
But, considering the previous theory was that oil would peak and then terminally decline by 3-6% per year, leaving us down 15% or 20% from the 10% less we pumped in 2005...
I'll take it.

[sjn]

Pops, I fear there is a probable downside to extending the peak this way, even not accounting for energy content it sets us up for an even more rapid decline than would have been the case otherwise. A shark-fin shape as opposed to the familiar Hubbert curve. Many here proposed that the peak would be a plateau extended as long as we could until decline became irresistible. Sometimes it's better to take your medicine early before the symptoms become unmanageable.

[sjn]

sjn generalized net-energy analysis is so important, but I suspect impossible. We spent untold discussions on eroei back in the day but solved little or nothing. That is because every production facility is completely different. It was easy to predict the Kashagan field would be expensive to produce. Likewise it is also easy to measure the energy lost in a corn/sugar cane ethanol production system because all the production (from field to distiller) are almost identical save details.

But how do you measure precisely the difference in lost energy from very long laterals, or trucks trips to a terminal in two adjacent but very different tight-shale wells? It's impossible. You'd have to measure all the steel and wear, cement production in all the different drill strings. Or the energy-loss embodied in dragging a 1,000 ton drilling rig thousands of miles into Arctic waters?

All we have are models generalized to the overall state of the industry. Yeah oil is getting expensive. To me that is obvious but so what. Has that worked to dissuade the skeptics who don't have a gut understanding of thermodynamics? How many here recognize Hall and Cleveland's name? or Shorts' Etp?

I agree, although I think it should be possible to at least chart global fuels production converted to BOe, and even better net out what has already been consumed in production of secondary fuels. That would make it more obvious which processes are adding value (high EROEI) and which are potentially energy sinks by the time they reach the end user. It's what organisations like IEA/EIA should be doing IMO.

[ROCKMAN]

One way to get off the light oil/heavy oil/NGL/etc merry-go-round debate is to focus on what's really important IMHO: how refinery product trends gone in recent years. Not enough data from recent years yet but here is what the EIA says has happened from 2008 thru 2012:

Gasoline: 2008 – 21.4 mm bpd; 2009 – 22.3 mm bpd; 2010 – 22.3 mm bpd; 2011 – 22.3 mm bpd; 2012 -22.5 mm bpd. 2013 – NA

Distillate fuel oil: 2008 – 25.4 mm bpd; 2019 – 24.9 mm bpd; 2010 – 25.4 mmbpd; 2011 – 26.0 mm bpd; 2012 – 26.6 mm bpd; 2013 - NA

All refinery products: 2008 – 81.8 mm bpd; 2009 – 82.4 mm bpd; 2010 – 84.2 mm bpd; 2011 – 84.7 mm bpd; 2012 – 85.2 mm bpd; 2013 - NA

Bottom line: despite shale production, oil sands production, NGL production, heavy oil production, etc. the world has been consuming a modest increase in the products made from all the “liquid petroleum” production during that period. So regardless of floating definitions of “oil” etc. there hasn’t been a great deal of global variations in the consumption of petroleum based fossil fuels.

[Pops]

Pops, I fear there is a probable downside to extending the peak this way, even not accounting for energy content it sets us up for an even more rapid decline than would have been the case otherwise. A shark-fin shape as opposed to the familiar Hubbert curve. Many here proposed that the peak would be a plateau extended as long as we could until decline became irresistible. Sometimes it's better to take your medicine early before the symptoms become unmanageable.

Yeah, I agree, here is the visual I made a while back



After Ivanhoe '97



Basically the truncated peak extends and maybe even some future production is pulled forward, even if the utility isn't really there.

The result is instead of a nice easy roll over as in the idealized Hubber scenario where the steepest decline happens after we get a clue what is happening, we get the biggest decline right up front, 100 miles an hour down a dead end street.

Here is another thread on the idea from a couple years ago, with this graphic:

[kublikhan]

Perhaps instead of worrying about the EROEI of non petroleum liquids, how about just look at price instead? Price does a wonderful job of capturing a plethora of factors. Not just energy density issues but transportation bottlenecks, geopolitical risks, supply/demand issues, etc. Plus it's easy to understand for consumers. No worrying about boundary conditions and what not. We can instead look at the price rise of oil this past decade and say "Sure oil substitutes are increasing in volume, but the amount of money we are spending on oil+substitutes still dramatically increased. This is not good."

[Pops]

Not sure why I went to the effort, you don't believe any reported number anyway, LOL
Regardless you can get MTOE from BP...



I didn't look for the definitions

[Pops]

IEA has MTOE as well
http://www.iea.org/publications/freepub ... -2015.html

[sjn]

Not sure why I went to the effort, you don't believe any reported number anyway, LOL
Regardless you can get MTOE from BP...



I didn't look for the definitions

No need for the dig, man. I'm all for better data. I put this up here because almost without exception it's the figure supplied to show the state of world oil production, and I'm glad there is data available which addresses at least one of my criticisms. Of course we now need people to start using it!

[sjn]

I agree, although I think it should be possible to at least chart global fuels production converted to BOe, and even better net out what has already been consumed in production of secondary fuels. That would make it more obvious which processes are adding value (high EROEI) and which are potentially energy sinks by the time they reach the end user. It's what organisations like IEA/EIA should be doing IMO.

What good is converting different grades of oil to BOe if the process of acquiring those oil is so different? Fracting and Ghawar both produce light sweet crude, but the former burns up its oil and profit while the latter lights up the world! The energy cost to refine crude is well-known and has always been factored into the cost to the consumer. We are more concerned with the energy lost to get the crude to the refinery. That is the unknown. And I suspect it will remain so.

As we're always reminded by ROCKMAN decisions on oil extraction are never made on the basis of ERoEI, that's not likely to change at least while there still is an oil industry... I do agree with you, but specifically for this thread I was thinking more along the lines of at least improving the way liquid fuel statistics are presented to make them at least mean *something*. I deliberately left total net energy off of the list partially because it is so difficult to measure, but also because I wanted to constrain the scope of discussion so we didn't end up recreating the Etp thread!

[ROCKMAN]

Hubbert's bell shaped curve wasn't symmetric as it's so often displayed. In fact 'bell shaped curves' in general aren’t defined as being symmetric in the first place. In nature is rare to find any bell shaped distribution that isn't skewed...often significantly so. In fact in his original report Hubbert clearly says the backside of the curve won’t look like the front half: it will have a much more gradual decline then the rate of build-up. Which would be obvious to him since that’s been the nature of nearly every well, field and trend he had ever analyzed.

And as far as the shark fin curve I’ve yet to see anyone explain why there would be such a sudden increase in depletion rate of all those wells that make up the great majority of the US production. Wells which have already reached a rather low decline rate. And while Texas isn’t the only oil producer in the country it is the biggest. And as I’ve pointed out in several spots the majority of our production comes from wells producing less than 50 bopd. Yes: the Eagle Ford wells do have a high initial decline rate. But the majority of most the EFS wells drilled to date have already gone thru their high decline rate period and are now declining much slower. And again, we also have a very large base of producers that are declining an even much slower rate.

So again the simple question: what is going to suddenly cause the many tens of thousands of slowly declining Texas oil wells to suddenly switch to a very high decline rate?

[sjn]

ROCKMAN, I think Texas might be something of an anomaly. Very few locales have anything like the infrastructure or the historical and regulatory environment that created thousands of legacy wells. My country gets most of its oil from the North Sea, here there will not be any stripper wells. Once there isn't sufficient any more to maintain enough cash flow the infrastructure will be abandoned. This will happen quickly.

[Pops]

Here is a paper on processing LTO at existing US refineries.
Not that it will necessarily happen, it could be that the LTO will simply be shipped to the EU to replace ME and African light flavors from Libya or Arabian Super Light.

https://btuanalytics.com/quality-matter ... us-fields/

--
I really looked but can't find a simple API - BTU chart.
Here is this...

WTI is around 39,
LTO is 40-45
So LTO has maybe .6% fewer btus
Does that sound right?

But the bigger problem with very light and very heavy is fuels are made from the very middle. It isn't necessarily that LTO has less BTUs but that it just doesn't have enough 'tanes.

On the other hand, oil refining is basically distillation, heat until a certain faction boils, collect that portion, repeat. I would imaging you save some energy in that you don't need to seperat the light from the middle, but that may be waay off.

--
This looks interesting tho I didn't study it
http://carnegieendowment.org/2012/12/18 ... obal-oils#

Lots of links at the end...