[Tanada]

More cars is just a sign of more debt filling up the system. Do you know how the independent people of Egypt were converted into Serfs? They had a seven year stretch of abundant grain harvests during which the Pharaoh built hundreds of granaries to store the surplus. This was followed by seven years of crop failures, during which time the Pharaoh did not give his free farmers food, he sold it to them making them exchange portions of their land for food every year. By the time the crop failures ended the Pharaoh owned all the land and the farmers were reduced to being client farm labor instead of free men.

If this is it and the Government can manage to keep people fed do you think they will do so for free? If you do you don't understand human nature.

[Subjectivist]

We are in deep doo doo if the farmers can't afford to plant, harvest, and sell their crops and livestock.

[StarvingLion]

I never knew you could fill up the gas tank with debt.

Even the poor people on the street with an IQ of 15 know the Peak Oil story is bullshit. And if you tell them "Capital vs Labor is the reason you are poor", the answer is "No shit, duh!".

[Tanada]

I never knew you could fill up the gas tank with debt.

Interesting, we now know SL does not use pay at the pump and probably lives someplace like New Jersey where it is illegal to pump your own fuel.

[sjn]

I never knew you could fill up the gas tank with debt.

Even the poor people on the street with an IQ of 15 know the Peak Oil story is bullshit. And if you tell them "Capital vs Labor is the reason you are poor", the answer is "No shit, duh!".

Do you have a specific point to raise regarding what I wrote above? If you disagree with some aspect, please explain your reasoning.

[sjn]

I think that "capital" represented extra energy we had from fossil fuels. When that goes we will have to figure something else out. Back to a silver and gold based money system? It could work, and it did for thousands of years. Maybe go back to real fractional reserve banking where they only lent out 10x the amount of silver and gold they had in their vaults.

This is exactly it. Unfortunately I don't believe a different monetary system will work, certainly not at mitigating our fall from the plateau. Right now, I'm of the opinion that much of what we're doing is working to continue to extending the plateau as far as possible, which is probably the worst thing to do. We're propping it up with debt, with low ERoRI sources, with wishful thinking. This means a lot of resources (including the remaining oil) are being mis-allocated into just making the cliff steeper; further polluting the biosphere; running down critical infrastructure, it's one big final party and everybody is invited. Perhaps, after the fall, we* could rebuild with a new monetary regime, or none at all, but that's quite meaningless to us given what we're facing, it's almost like discussing what happened before the big bang.

* whoever survives the bottleneck and manages to learn anything from history (there's always a first time!)

[onlooker]

Exactly sjn. We are prolonging truly confronting our predicaments. So we are just getting further into overshoot. The planet cannot and will not suspend the "normal" ways of doing things. We continue and I mean China and India to live the consumerism lifestyle oblivious to the quickly approaching hard limits which Limits to Growth warned about. We need to totally discard our normal ways of doing things and adopt as much as possible a much less damaging lifestyle for all humans and immediately control births. I see no hint of changes much less the wholesale changes required. Truly exasperating.

[Tanada]

I feel like Wiley Coyote after he has run off the cliff but before he realizes he is about to fall.

[ROCKMAN]

We occasionally have debates between the optimists and pessimists over the future development of new oil reserves. Is it 100 billion bbls...200 billion bbls...etc? Of course reserves don't correlate to production rates: the subject here is PO rate...not peak reserves. Naturally the optimists are drawn to use the "shale miracle" as an argument point. Not as strong now of course since the collapse of oil prices and the rig count. But they still hang onto the fantasy of huge future reserve gains (and thus production increases fending off PO).
So let's look at how the shale boom, thanks to all that wonderful "new technology" has changed the game:

To date the world has produced about 1.2 TRILLION BBLS of oil. Being generous IMHO let's assume the US shale boom increased recovered reserves by an average of 3 million bopd for ten years (includes future production as the plays declines. Generous because the peak was 3 million bopd.

So what did the great shale miracle and all that new tech gain us? The rate we know but what about all those new reserves we produced...those 11 BILLION BBLS of oil (at most)? They represent a whopping gain of total global PRODUCED OIL RESERVES of 0.9%. So with 1,600 rigs drilling, many thousands of wells with very high initial rates and hundreds of $BILLIONS of accumulated debt we've increased recovered reserves by less than 1%...probably a fair bit less.

And yet some see the world developing 100+ billion bbls of new reserves. IOW more the 10X what the last boom created. A boom that did significantly increase US oil production but also burdened the oil patch with debt it cannot repay as well as the destruction of hundreds of companies as a result of the price collapse. A collapsed at least partially due to the negative impact of the high prices needed to fuel the shale boom.

So what will these future booms look like that will create 10% or more new produced reserves to the global cumulative recovery if the last great boom added less the 1/10 of that volume?

[Cog]

All of those tenths tend to add up.

[ROCKMAN]

"All of those tenths tend to add up." True but they won't add even that tiny bit until those tiny bits are developed. And given the damage done to the oil patch as a result of those enabling high oil prices that have now disappeared how many years, maybe even a decade+, before the next 0.9% is added to future new reserves? IMHO sounds like some rather slim hope for even such very small gains.

[ROCKMAN]

And another way of looking at the 11 billion bbl (probably not that much) the great shale miracle added to our produced reserve tally: the world is currently consuming 3X that 11 billion bbls PER YEAR. So we need three shale miracle (which takes about 10 years to accumulate) every 10 years just to stay even. And we just had one shale miracle in the last 6 years but that was due to high oil prices which are now gone. So the next three shale miracles won't begin to happen until the high oil prices return. And how many years will that add before replacing begins?

Tick tock...tick tock

OK folks...let's start holding our breaths now. LOL.

[Pops]

I kicked this rock over looking for the chart on the OP but there is some good stuff here from Roc, and another WAG from pops about the relative rate of extraction of liquids vs heavies.

So 3Tb total (including the 1 trillion already burned) that might be produced "fast"– before and for a while after the peak. Looking at the Magic Ouija chart of simple logistic curves in the OP, 3T gives a peak date or at least an End-Of-The-Plateau date of 2016.

Actually I hadn't done that little exercise until just now, but like any good peaker prediction it's 2 yeas later than my original prediction of '12-'14 so that must be right! LOL

[Shaved Monkey]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ox1Tore9nw
I wish I had the haxxor skills to redo this as " In The Plateau"...lol

[MonteQuest]

I kicked this rock over looking for the chart on the OP but there is some good stuff here from Roc, and another WAG from pops about the relative rate of extraction of liquids vs heavies.

Impressive thread Pops. Glad I never tried to get my head around all that modeling. I like looking at the nice pictures. We just be on a roller coaster that's running out of track.

[MonteQuest]

And given the damage done to the oil patch as a result of those enabling high oil prices that have now disappeared how many years, maybe even a decade+, before the next 0.9% is added to future new reserves? IMHO sounds like some rather slim hope for even such very small gains.

Rockman, we are on the same page on this. My thinking exactly. Seems the anti-doomers here can't get their heads around it. I've sure got a lot of guff trying to explain why this is so.

[MonteQuest]

It's not the rate oil production or the increase/decreases we see along the plateau that are critical per se. It's the effects on all the dynamics that make up our entire economic system.

Spot on. PO is an economic crisis and its' effects go back a long ways,

[Plantagenet]

Actually peak oil is defined solely on the basis of oil production rate.

The concomitant economic effects are not part of the definition of peak oil

[MonteQuest]

Actually peak oil is defined solely on the basis of oil production rate.

The concomitant economic effects are not part of the definition of peak oil

That's true...but PO is an economic crisis and not an energy crisis.

It's how it manifests itself.

[Plantagenet]

Actually peak oil is defined solely on the basis of oil production rate.

The concomitant economic effects are not part of the definition of peak oil

That's true...but PO is an economic crisis and not an energy crisis.

It's how it manifests itself.

Peak Oil is a SCIENTIFIC hypothesis that purports to predict how oil resources are depleted. It was proposed by a Phd earth scientist and published in scientific journals.

The social and economic knock on effects of peak oil are not peak oil. Rock man has proposed the term peak oil dynamic POD for these related consequences

Cheers