[AdamB]

Art Berman and SRS Rocco
Art Berman's article can be found here at Peak Oil. The oil industry globally is in deep trouble. SRS Rocco weighs in at:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-2 ... old-dollar

References matter, and you keep using bad ones. Let alone that they show up on Zerohedge, prognosticator of the last 32 recessions, 4 collapses, 8 death of empire claims, 2 alien invasions and obviously it is difficult to take anything seriously from a schizo delusion of a fictional character in a Hollywood movie....I mean reality isn't even on the same planet as Tyler.

[asg70]

I see no signs of poised

Buggy whip manufacturers probably said the same thing in 1900.
Land-line manufacturers probably said the same thing in the early 90s.
Mainframe computer manufacturers probably said the same thing in the early 70s.

[asg70]

I provide the pic of celebratory humans to all who ask, a smiling happy woman flashing the V for victory sign, her foot on the conquered sea mammal, dead under her foot. Apparently quite happy at helping conquer the natural world for her species.

Ultimately this isn't a pissing contest over who is leading a more virtuous life, despite PStarr's continual axe to grind against the suburban lifestyle. It's about determining who has a more accurate picture of oil and its impact on our future.

Every time you bring the sea mammal thing up you undercut the ability to criticize PStarr's ad-homs because he can turn around and say "well, Adam does it too!"

Let his bad behavior (and flags) accumulate and take the high road.

[ROCKMAN]

Looker - "First off by commending Tanada even as he does not agree with the Etp model conclusions he has allowed it to be discussed." And the Rockman fully agrees. One can SAY the model (BTW have you noticed the Rockman doesn't use the name?) is complete bullsh*t. But there's no value in such pronouncements. Correct or not dissecting the model and using independent data to support or deny its credibility is where the value lies.

For instance take my last big post here. How many of our cohorts understood that almost none of the energy used to refine oil DOES NOT come from the oil itself. The primary energy source is NG. A smaller portion from the "still gas" that comes from the oil but is just a marginally useful byproduct that doesn't constitute a portion of the most valuable products: the liquid portion...the motor fuel. The third biggest energy source is electricity which is often sourced from burning NG and, in some regions, burning coal. Regions like Texas, the largest oil refiner in the country. Texas that gets a significant portion of its electricity from cheap (and otherwise worthless) lignite.

That knowledge added to appreciating the price difference between the various components of the dynamic. For instance, again according to the EIA, a typical gallon of gasoline contains 112,000 Btu and diesel 130,000 Btu. As pointed out it takes 1 million Btu to refine one bbl of oil. And while it varies but a typical bbl of oil yields 19 gallons of gasoline. We'll ignore the other products for now.

So 1 mm Btu of NG (about $3.20 in Texas these days) produces 2.1 mm Btu of gasoline (112,000 Btu X 19 gallons). And again depending on the specific oil about 25% to 40% of a bbl of oil is made up of gasoline chains. But on a volume basis gasoline is one of the lowest valued components. But let's go back to the EIA number: 1 bbl of oil contains about 5 mm Btu. Which makes sense: the 2.1 Btu of the gasoline (about 1/2+ of bbl's content) plus the other fractions = 5 million Btu.

Which should be accepted by everyone since no oil Btu's are consumed in the refining process (except for that minor amount of still gas). So it takes 1 mm NG Btu ($3.20) to create 5 mm Btu of refinery products (about $60 of gasoline + the value of the rest of the products).

We could spend countless hours working out the detailed numbers. Or just take the EIA's numbers as accurate: as of 2Q 2016 US refineries were making $6 for every bbl refined. Did drop from $12/bbl in 2012. Which means that US refineries are, TODAY, making about $115 millions per day or $40 BILLION PER YEAR. And that's according to the EIA. Now compare that to the various numbers some of our cohorts here generate that indicate our refining industry is in shambles and will completely fail just a few years.

The Rockman isn't going to double check the EIA's numbers or anyone else's...life is to short. LOL. So I'll just accept the EIA's evaluation until someone can convince me they are a more credible source of such data.

Of course, the refining component of the dynamic is just a portion of the entire system. But a very large and critical portion. And many times I've explained the energy balance sheet of the other major phase: the exploration and production of oil. If someone doesn't understand or accept by now they never will. So no point in wasting space here.

[asg70]

Rockman, first you agree with this the idea of not curtailing ETP talk and then summarize by saying this:

"If someone doesn't understand or accept by now they never will. So no point in wasting space here."

The problem isn't the discussion of ETP. It's that the discussion is circular and therefore repetitive.

If you do not rewrite (or at least copy and paste) your rebuttal about refineries, then the misinformation will persist by virtue of ETPers having the same sort of stamina of, let's say 911 truthers talking about Building 7 (another perennial topic here).

This is why I characterize the ETP presence here as tantamount to a filibuster. All they need do is out-post the voices of reason and they will have the final word.

Not that I have enough time to do it myself, but I'd be interested in seeing someone go back to the first mention of ETP and count up how many rhetorical loops things have taken where the same falsehoods are smacked down by you or others. Tanada got frustrated enough to do something like this, dredging through the archives and posting a compilation of PStarr's apparent amnesia, openly questioning whether the guy is going senile.

This is why I was reluctant to ever enter the fray in the first place because I knew it would be an endless cyclical whack-a-mole game.

If (and it's a big IF) ETP advocates can incorporate new data and effectively address debunking, then the discussion will appear to be moving forward. But if all they do is sort of engage in a blind monologue of restating the same thesis endlessly and hand-waving the rebuttals away, then what value is there in giving them a forum?

[ROCKMAN]

Adam - "So Bakken sourced oil from the source rock is unconventional reservoirs and Bakken sourced oil in conventional reservoirs is conventional?" OK, let's try this from one of the largest petroleum service companies in the world...Halliburton:

"Unconventional reservoirs are essentially any reservoir that requires special recovery operations outside the conventional operating practices. Unconventional reservoirs include reservoirs such as tight-gas sands, gas and oil shales, coalbed methane, heavy oil and tar sands, and gas-hydrate deposits. These reservoirs require assertive recovery solutions such as stimulation treatments or steam injection, innovative solutions that must overcome economic constraints in order to make recovery from these reservoirs monetarily viable."

And for a little more clarity addressing where all the oil/NG originates in both conventional and unconventional reservoirs:

"Oil and natural gas that accumulates in both conventional and unconventional reservoirs come from the same original geologic formations where sediments accumulated in multiple layers in sediment basins all over the world. After millions years these sediments form sedimentary rocks also called shale or mudstone. Under the effect of the pressure in the ground and the temperature, the organic matter contained in the mud has been transformed into oil and gas."

But bear in mind the point of that post: that folks who say the nature, value and utility of an oil is different from "conventional wells" then that from "unconventional wells" are, essentially, full of sh*t. LOL.

[ROCKMAN]

70 - "This is why I was reluctant to ever enter the fray in the first place because I knew it would be an endless cyclical whack-a-mole game." But I spend all but 1 minute every 24 hours in either my wheelchair or lift chair. IOW I live for endless loops that allows me to show off my superior intelligence. LOL.

Actually for a long time I never paid much attention to discussions about "the model". As I said a while back it has no relevance to the petroleum business. But lately all this constant arguing has drawn me in. And I enjoyed the learning process: despite what appears to be an amazing understanding of the oil refining process I knew little of the details. Thanks to the Internet details of which I've been able to puke out like a drunk on Saturday night. LOL.

[donstewart]

Blocking out bad references such as Art Berman and reprints from Zero Hedge
Two points. First is that censorship is very popular right now. Britain apparently wants to run a censored internet. Liberal Democrats are supposedly pressuring Google and Facebook to use their power to limit access to 'unapproved' sources. The much admired Obama was in favor of dismissing unconventional sources of information.

Second point. Those who can get their head out of the oil barrel and look at Barrett's book on Emotions will find that the human brain generates many alternative predictions, in a process she calls 'simulation', every second that you are alive. For example, that squiggly black object I see near my foot might be a dead branch or it might be a snake or it might be a piece of rope. You check the hypotheses or predictions against the context and what you know and pick one through unconscious processes and react to what you predicted you would see. At that point you can examine error correction messages to check on your accuracy, or you can suppress the error messages and go right on about your business.

The camp that thinks that Zero Hedge is always wrong and that everything is fine in Baytown, or that the scrappy West Texas independent drillers are roundly defeating the evil Arabs, are receiving, if they will read it, a message from SRS Rocco that the financial data do not look good. They may dimly recall that the FEASTA guys in Ireland produced those same kinds of 'declining returns from new debt' charts a decade ago. They may note that things have not gotten better. They may also dimly remember from history that the price of oil crashed hard in 1929-32 in the United States. They may note some uncomfortable parallels between that period and today. They may also note what is happening in Venezuela with uncontrolled inflation. Somewhere out on the periphery they may note some dissonant voices who are predicting either a financial crash or a thermodynamic crash.

So they come to a fork in the road in their brain. Do they suppress the disagreeable thoughts, and continue to forecast that everything will be fine in Baytown and that American Ingenuity will conquer all the little niggling problems, or do they begin to rethink their commitment to the supposed laws of supply and demand?

Don Stewart

[creedoninmo]

What people are trying to avoid Don is reality. As Cathal Haughain says, to confront reality requires courage.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafH ... _MBBLD&f=W I can not get both links up at the same time, but there is EIA data showing increasing crude imports of 1.5 percent per year with decreasing gasoline outputs of 1.5 percent per year. I'm not convinced that the oil price is totally dependent on Cushing Oklahoma. There are more factors than that. The believers in eternal BAU also will not admit that if you were to include all the fiat money going into production that the system is broke. It has been for a while. Maybe Rockman makes sound financial decisions in the wells that he drills, but the banks issuing the debt are not necessarily making sound decisions.

[onlooker]

@Don. That is why from the get go, I was so drawn to Etp and its conclusions. I suspected something was amiss in the Oil Industry. I have neither experience in the Oil industry nor an engineering background. I do believe I have sufficient cognitive abilities to draw my own conclusions. I had known that the EROEI of fossil fuels had been dropping for some time and that new notable discoveries were getting rarer and not keeping up with depletion. So now comes along an extensive and in depth analysis of the energetic situation of the Oil Industry via ETP. The Hills group is putting it all on the line with their assertions and though I am not qualified to nitpick ETP, I am quite persuaded from all available info and by the uncanny precision with regards to the Oil price that the ETP is correct. I will link to this great article I found that summarizes the deteriorating energetic and economic status of the OIL and FF industry
http://www.alternet.org/environment/we- ... my-down-it

A new peer-reviewed study led by the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico has undertaken a comparative review of the EROI of all the major sources of energy that currently underpin industrial civilization—namely oil, gas, coal, and uranium.

Published in the journal Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, the scientists note that the EROI for fossil fuels has inexorably declined over a relatively short period of time: “Nowadays, the world average value EROI for hydrocarbons in the world has gone from a value of 35 to a value of 15 between 1960 and 1980.”

In other words, in just two decades, the total value of the energy being produced via fossil fuel extraction has plummeted by more than half. And it continues to decline.

[AdamB]

I see no signs of poised

Buggy whip manufacturers probably said the same thing in 1900.
Land-line manufacturers probably said the same thing in the early 90s.
Mainframe computer manufacturers probably said the same thing in the early 70s.

Doom is predicated on pretending that things don't change in the future, when they obviously do. EVs being one of those. People on this website claimed that peak oil would stop all potential solutions to peak oil from appearing. The Day of the Electric Car was used as part of that reasoning. And since peak oil was claimed to have happened? An entire new class of automobile is now being mass produced and sold to the general public...just like the original model T. And cell phones. And computers. And then the windmills were built across states like Kansas and texas and Colorado, to provide the fuel for these different kinds of transport. Which are displacing ICE powered machines, one by one, at the bottom end of the market saturation curve.

Just like the original model T. And cell phones. And computers.

[AdamB]

I provide the pic of celebratory humans to all who ask, a smiling happy woman flashing the V for victory sign, her foot on the conquered sea mammal, dead under her foot. Apparently quite happy at helping conquer the natural world for her species.

Ultimately this isn't a pissing contest over who is leading a more virtuous life, despite PStarr's continual axe to grind against the suburban lifestyle. It's about determining who has a more accurate picture of oil and its impact on our future.

Every time you bring the sea mammal thing up you undercut the ability to criticize PStarr's ad-homs because he can turn around and say "well, Adam does it too!"

Let his bad behavior (and flags) accumulate and take the high road.

Point taken. And like my pledge on the ETP clutter and ridiculous time wasting with the sock puppet salesmen, I believe I can resist the urge to respond in kind to pstarrs ventures into alternate realities.

[AdamB]

"Unconventional reservoirs are essentially any reservoir that requires special recovery operations outside the conventional operating practices. Unconventional reservoirs include reservoirs such as tight-gas sands, gas and oil shales, coalbed methane, heavy oil and tar sands, and gas-hydrate deposits. These reservoirs require assertive recovery solutions such as stimulation treatments or steam injection, innovative solutions that must overcome economic constraints in order to make recovery from these reservoirs monetarily viable."

You've just defined a reservoir by a measure of economics. Is that really the way geologists define conventional or unconventional reservoirs? Geology is all about rock characteristic, facies, rock types, traps, time, charge, unconformities, kinetics, flow path modeling from source to reservoir (or not), I find it surprising that when defining a geologic characteristic the first thing geologists do is jump to...economics.

[donstewart]

Doom is predicated on pretending that things don't change

No, most doom is predicted by studying trajectories and trying to figure out where they lead. The ETP model, for example, is full of trajectories. An EROEI study is, in contrast, typically a study of a moment in time. The ETP model DERIVES EROEI numbers for any given moment in time from the underlying trajectories.

Don Stewart

[onlooker]

It seems to me that Rockman is doing what your claiming he is not Adam. Focusing on Geological factors rather than economic with the statement
""Unconventional reservoirs are essentially any reservoir that requires special recovery operations outside the conventional operating practices. "

[ROCKMAN]

Adam - Pay attention: the Rockman didn't define anything...Halliburton did. Don't like what the say go bust their balls. LOL.

And read it again: the define it by how wells are drilled and completed. There have been thousands of wells completed in unconventional reservoirs that cost less then wells of comparable depth complete in conventional reservoirs. In fact by far the most expensive wells being drilled in the US today are the ones producing those Deep Water GOM conventional sandstone reservoirs.

[asg70]

The much admired Obama was in favor of dismissing unconventional sources of information.

Unconventional meaning alt-facts.

There is a difference between censorship and editors. Editors by their nature cut out information. That's what editing is. You used to buy a set of Encyclopedia Britannicas or subscribe to the New York Times and you knew that there were experts who made sure the information in those pages was accurate, or at least as accurate as possible. It was not necessary for people to question the validity of what they read because of this trust relationship with domain experts.

Now thanks to the internet there is NO trust. No matter what it it is, someone is telling you it's not true, a false-flag, whatever. I started noticing this ages ago when articles started allowing in-line comments at the bottom.

Then you have the rise of alt-news like Brietbart (or Zerohedge) who make it clear that their mission statement is to be anti-everything. It's no wonder they're sensationalistic since fear sells. The outlet acts like a cult by saying they and only they should be trusted. That's what I see in Onlooker camping out at Zerohedge, for instance.

So freedom of speech is great but because now everyone is plugged in with everyone else you realize how dumb everyone really is when left to their own devices.

Electing Trump is the end result of this wave of anti-intellectualism passing for freedom of speech.

Civilization's immune system against quackery is broken and something somewhere needs to come around to take its place otherwise we're going to fall into Sagan's Demon Haunted world where nobody gets vaccinated and they think the world is flat. It's bad enough that AGW denialists have essentially won and Trump has gutted the EPA. Ignorance has dire consequences in a world in massive ecological overshoot.

Do they suppress the disagreeable thoughts

Perma-doomers can always fall back on the "your brain can't handle inconvenient truths" canard. That in and of itself can be a rhetorical crutch. The only thing that matters is the data.

[ROCKMAN]

Don - "The ETP model DERIVES EROEI numbers for any given moment in time from the underlying trajectories." Interesting observation. And since you've studied the model in more detail then I have you can tell us: did the model predict the significant INCREASE in EROEI of wells being drilled today as a result of the lower oil price? IOW a very improved trajectory? For the moment, of course.

[asg70]

Doom is predicated on pretending that things don't change in the future, when they obviously do.

Not entirely true. Doom itself IS change, so they're predicting change, just in a regressive direction known as collapse. And of course, collapse as a term has broadened to incorporate so many things, like the widening gap between rich and poor and the federal deficit, things that have occurred in one shape or form in many countries and many time periods independent of the energy situation (followed by recoveries). So the debate around doom is mostly a case of trying to have us buy into truly massive causal relationships that could easily be due to other more mundane factors.

On a day-to-day basis what people whine and mutter about isn't whether they can fill their gas tank. It's things like raising the debt ceiling or CEO pay. So doom has adjusted in order to answer the cosmic "why" for these more petty questions.

When doom tries to tackle macro-economics, for instance, it is way out of its element. It should realize that there are many other theories out there, like the Kondratiev wave.

[asg70]

BTW, another facet of doomerism is the way it sees scientists as cornies who don't understand limits to growth. While it's true that many buy into the singularity or other low-probability futures, a great many do see finite limits to technological innovation in addressing limits to growth. But doomers continue to render them all as caricatures.

For instance, Stephen Hawking is considered by most as the smartest man alive, and he's quite sanguine about earth's future.

https://www.cnet.com/news/stephen-hawki ... ext-earth/

Not only that, but Musk, who so many here despise, gives time during his keynotes for fearmongering about global warming and even a nod to the finite nature of oil.

The reason why doomers have an antagonistic relationship with techies is that they feel that technology (like the industrial and green revolutions) are what got us into this mess and so at some point we should somehow collectively "submit" to die-off.

However, this is only a fringe ideology which runs counter to human nature. For better or worse, we insist on increasing our population and using ever more advanced technology. I'm not entirely happy with this state of affairs but when predicting the future it seems far more likely that we have robotaxis and sexbots than to retreat from technology into population-limited permaculture enclaves.