THE 'How much oil is remaining?' Thread (merged)

[DirtyGrapist]

Hi guys, I am wondering what your thoughts are on this statement by ExxonMobil Australia's Chairman

Link

[mekrob]

"According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional, recoverable oil resources. "So far we have produced one trillion."

First welcome to the site. It's good to have you aboard and willing to listen to us ol' men (although I'm only 19).

Secondly, this quote means that there is only 1 trillion (actually 800 billion) barrels left to find which isn't a huge deviation from what many think. Current reserves are about 1.2 trillion barrels. Some say 2 tril is all we'll get while others more realistically put it at 2.5-3 trillion.

we have every reason to be sure that the end of oil is nowhere in sight."

Easy quote to ease the idiots. Of course the end of oil isn't in sight. Even by the Peak Oil theory, it is a hundred and fifty years away. If the peak oil theory didn't exist, then it'd be about 25 years away!

Anyway, they make these statements all the time, especially IEA, CERA, and XOM. I've learned to tune them out since they are so childish (then again, that's what you get with the media).

As far as the extra trillion or so barrels, what they mean by this is extra heavy oil, tar sands, artic, deep-sea and shale which probably will drive the reserves very high due to the prices. But the peak oil theory is about the production rate of oil, not the reserves. With those sources I cited just above which they will use to 'debunk' PO, the production rate is extremely low and the ramp-up rate is even slower thus you can't depend on it to even offset declines from current fields nor account for increases in demand.

It's kind of like being trapped in the desert. You have 100 gallons of fresh water, enough for quite a while. But you can only get the water out at a very slow rate (say a mL per hour). That massive amount of water won't do you any good if you can't get it out faster, now will it?

[Gazzatrone]

Hi guys, I am wondering what your thoughts are on the statement by ExxonMobil Australia's Chairman

Link

He's lying.

That's about as blunt as I can get.

Judging by your joining date you've been here about a month, not sure about your awareness of Peak Oil. If this is all new to you and a bit overwhelming I wrote this post on the need for simplicity. The links might not work, though I know th barlett one does. Before you do anything or start preaching about oil depletion watch that video. It will be the most productive, inciteful, rewarding and terrifying 45 minutes or so of your life. But it is essential viewing in understanding the basic tenets of Peak Oil ie the impossibilty of maintaining sustainable growth by utilising a finite resource.

And then you will have answered your own question and you'll think yep "He's lying".

A useful link is this one at wolfatthedoor.org.uk. on the left click on the MISCELLANY tab and click on OIL MAP link. It's pretty self explanatory as to what it is.

[venky]

It's kind of like being trapped in the desert. You have 100 gallons of fresh water, enough for quite a while. But you can only get the water out at a very slow rate (say a mL per hour). That massive amount of water won't do you any good if you can't get it out faster, now will it?

This the best analogy I've seen to describe the fundamental issue of Peak Oil. Not heard of it before.

[grabby]

With the United States domestic decline in oil production, it is important to research possible tar sand production in America (Alaska). Our consumption continues to increase, as well as our dependence on oil imports. Today, about 59% of the oil consumed in the United States are imported. The deposits of oil sands (oil shale) in the United States are massive. The processing of oil shale has gone through cycles of development and commercialization, all without achieving a competitive cost of production. As well, tar sands are processed on a limited basis. An engineering study was done between the University of Alabama and the Department of Energy. This engineering study provided a preliminary design of a commercial processing facility to beneficiate 39,956 tons per day of run-of -mine eastern oil shale to produce 4.38million tons per year of concentrate. The report included a process plants design recovery of kerogen at 92%, which with `hydroretorting' would produce approximately 20,000 barrels of oil a day. - matt Sexton.

4.38 million TONS per year.

a ton is 7 barrels

that is 28 million Barrels per year.

Well, we need 23 million barrels per DAY in Amrica alone.

so the large process in Canada needs to be multiplied by a thousand times to meet our needs.

[rwwff]

recovery of kerogen at 92%, which with `hydroretorting' would produce approximately 20,000 barrels of oil a day. - matt Sexton.

4.38 million TONS per year. a ton is 7 barrels
that is 28 million Barrels per year.
Well, we need 23 million barrels per DAY in Amrica alone.

so the large process in Canada needs to be multiplied by a thousand times to meet our needs.

As wild as the multiplier you site seems, it is perfectly reasonable for a company as large as Chevron to say, lets build a thousand of this, or a thousand of that. What is important however, and probably the true limitter, is they left out how much it cost per barrel in dollars and energy to produce those alternative sources. If its profitable in money and energy, we could end up having tens of thousands of them; if its profitable only in money; there could be a pretty harsh limit to the amount of scaling; if its not profitable money wise, regardless of energy, you'll never see it outside the research establishment.

[mekrob]

It's kind of like being trapped in the desert. You have 100 gallons of fresh water, enough for quite a while. But you can only get the water out at a very slow rate (say a mL per hour). That massive amount of water won't do you any good if you can't get it out faster, now will it?

This the best analogy I've seen to describe the fundamental issue of Peak Oil. Not heard of it before.

Sadly it's not mine although I extended it a bit. I wish I remembered whose it was- most likely one of the elders here. It is very good.

[Ayoob]

We will burn as much oil in the next doubling time as we have in all of recorded history. At what rate is oil consumption growing, and at what date will we double oil consumption again?

If we have burned one and have three left, then we have two doubling times left until the very last drop is gone.

See the Albert Bartlett video for a more thorough explanation.

[americandream]

Hi guys, I am wondering what your thoughts are on this statement by ExxonMobil Australia's Chairman

Link

I've been around for a while DG....am over in Nelson....Peak Oil......mmmmmm..........I'm not sure......it's driven by a strong American rank and file, at a time when Chindia are competing for resources Americans have taken for granted for yonks, they happen to be ensconced in the Middle East in a war that would ordinarily be very unpopular, by folks who strike me as being parochially nationalist, anti-globalist or rather close to the establishment.

Oh.....I do subscribe to the view that capitalism will clean out the larder....I'm not sure that it will be as fast as these guys make out. We've some strange goings in the oil regions but the US appears none the worse.

These are strange times indeed but let's say I smell a rat. I'm inclined to sit back and let globalisation reach its logical conclusion.

[grabby]

When all our pumps are finally dry, there will still be always 2 trillion barrels left.

There was 2 trillion barrels left in 1920.
There was two trillion barrels left in 1970 and now there is still two trillion barrels left.
There will always be two trillion barrels left no matter what happens and when civilization ends, they will write on our tombstones,
"But there were two trillion barrels left."

[kjmclark]

It's kind of like being trapped in the desert. You have 100 gallons of fresh water, enough for quite a while. But you can only get the water out at a very slow rate (say a mL per hour). That massive amount of water won't do you any good if you can't get it out faster, now will it?

This the best analogy I've seen to describe the fundamental issue of Peak Oil. Not heard of it before.

Here's a proposed improvement.

Imagine you move to the desert and find a 100,000 gallon tank of water there. You quickly decide to use some of this water to grow food, and the water flows easily and quickly from the single hole in the tank. However, you want the water to flow faster for your garden, so you punch a few more small holes in the tank. There, now you can grow your garden.

In punching one of the holes, you notice there is something in the tank besides water. Turns out there is a giant sponge in the tank, that completely fills the tank, along with the water. "That's odd" you think, but ignore it for now.

You continue punching holes in the tank for more garden space, but realize that the water isn't coming out of the holes as fast as it did before. Each hole you punch initially flows fast, but then starts to fall off as well. "No matter", you think, "I'll just keep punching new holes to keep up the flow."

One day, you realize that even though you're punching holes like mad, the total amount of water you get out is less than the day before. Then it hits you. The sponge is holding much of the water and only slowly releasing the rest. In fact, the sponge is holding about half of the water that was originally in the tank. But sponges drain fast at first, and then more and more slowly as they dry. Welcome to peak water.

This means that from that day on, you have less water than the day before. Unfortunately, your garden requires all of the water that came out on that peak day, and you had even expanded the garden a bit assuming that you would have more water tomorrow. What do you do, let part of the garden wither and die, or give everything in the garden less water? Hope you weren't relying on all of that food.

[Cynus]

Exxon is relying on the US Geological survey's 2000 results for their 2 trillion barrels remaining estimate. Those results have been roundly ridiculed as vastly optimistic, and have proved to be wildly inaccurate in the 6 years they have been released.

[pstarr]

you are dying of thirst in the desert. The water is two feet under the sand. you dig and sweat and sweat and sweat but the sand keeps collapsing just as you get a drop of water. Do you dig frantically or enjoy your last minutes gazing at the distant palms and thinking beautiful thoughts?

this analogy has particular value when applied directly to energy return. so here is a variation.

Here's a nice way to look at eroei and biofuels:

You are in a desert (a cornfield) and there is water (energy) under the sand (in the plant material).

You dig furiously (plant, harvest, and ferment the crop) but the sand (crop residue) falls back into the hole (to feed the soil so it grows stuff).

All the while your are perspiring (running the farm and fermenter machinery) and loosing water (energy).

You die because you use more water digging for water than you get from under the sand.

hope you all enjoyed me promoting my own quirky "elder"-type humility

[DantesPeak]

I’ve reviewed a number of stories about this speech, and most seem to highlight the fact that ‘we are not running out of oil’. For the moment, that is true. POers will also agree that there are maybe 1 or so trillion barrels of oil left in the earth. So what else is new? What I gather is that executive sees that technology will be able to maintain oil production – albeit probably at higher price levels. On the other hand - I don’t specifically see it being stated that oil production will increase, although the implication is that higher oil production will come on line with the right combination of higher prices and technology.

Seems that all we have here is the same old ‘free market’ theory – unless there is something more we don’t know about. If anyone can locate an actual copy of the speech, please post. It doesn’t seem like there will be an official press release coming.

[kjmclark]

Hi guys, I am wondering what your thoughts are on this statement by ExxonMobil Australia's Chairman

Link

Let's use the low-hanging fruit analogy, though most people these days have never picked fruit from a real fruit tree and won't really understand. I'm working on a better analogy.

The low-hanging fruit is that fruit that you can reach from the ground, that you can easily tell is ripe, that is easy to pick, and that tends to be plentiful, since most of a fruit trees' branches are close to the ground. So, that fruit is good quality, easy to pick, abundant, and easy to transport. There is much more fruit on the tree than the low-hanging fruit, but it gets higher up the tree, less abundant, often lower quality, and harder to transport to where you need it. (Think climbing up the tree and climbing back down - no cherry pickers allowed in my analogy!)

What would the oil version of "low-hanging fruit" look like? Well, it would be abundant, high quality, easy to get to, and easy to transport. This description fits Texan and Middle Eastern oil fairly well. It was abundant, high quality, easy to get to, and because of nearby water transportation, easy to transport.

So we started picking that fruit, and we still are, but the low-hanging branches are pretty much picked at this point. Since we didn't like having all of the fruit on our neighbor's side of the tree (since we had picked most of the low-hanging fruit on our Texas side of the tree), we developed a ladder and started picking some of the harder to get to fruit on our side of the tree. This was Alaska. We even started climbing up the tree and reaching fruit we could get to from the trunk. That's the GOM. Our neighbor did the same things on their side of the tree.

Now, we have a technological advance! We created a fruit picking pole! Now we can reach fruit up to 20' up in our 40' high tree. We call this pole Jack2. But Jack2 cost a good amount to make, and it is hard to use and slow. It turns out the fruit higher up is smaller than the fruit closer to the ground, there is less of it (our tree is conical), and the fruit isn't as big and juicy as the stuff nearer the ground. Between the fruit close to the ground, the fruit we can reach from the trunk, the fruit we can reach with the ladder, and the fruit we can reach with the pole, we have picked about half of the fruit on the tree.

It's getting harder and harder to pick the fruit, and our fruit picking rate isn't increasing as much as it did before. Heck, when we started, the fruit practically fell of the tree into our bags. There's plenty more fruit up there, we're sure of it, though we can't see all the way up there easily and can't tell which branches will have a lot of fruit and which will have those worm infested dwarf apples we keep finding.

Unfortunately, we can't climb out on limbs to get the fruit, though people have tried. The ladder tends to fall over if you try to go higher than 10' or so. The picking pole works well from 10' to 20', but it's slow to use and branches keep getting in the way. More than a 20' pole and you can't aim it easily enough (or hold it up, a 20' pole is heavy!) to get much fruit. People are thinking about using poles while on ladders, or while climbing the trunk, but that probably wouldn't work well and would be even more dangerous.

Even though there are obvious problems here, there are people running around with horns-of-plenty chanting "Fruit is abundant, we still have half the tree!" Some people are claiming that the tree is really 60' high and we just can't see high enough to realize it. Some even say the tree goes on to heaven and the fruit comes from God himself. Most of the community is having a fruit feast, making and getting drunk on fruit wine, building apple-core houses, and planning for a future of ever-increasing fruit supplies. Our religious book even says to be "fruitful." Who could imagine a future with less fruit? Perish the thought.

[shortonoil]

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Here is the problem with US Geological survey's estimate. The world’s conventional oil production presently has an ERoEI of about 17 - 18 to 1, and falling. The ERoEI on gasoline is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-6 to 1. Meaning that the ERoEI loses 12 to 13 points in the processing and transportation of the crude. If we start pumping, squeezing and mining sources, such as the tar sands, that have ERoEI's of less than 10, we will get negative energy returns on the finished products. The question is not about how much oil is in the ground, (presently world oil reserves are about 6 trillion barrels), the question is, how much energy is available from the oil. This is simple Thermodynamics 101, First and Second law stuff. You would think that these buffoons could figure that out!

http://www.oilcrisis.com/cleveland/OilAndCulture.pdf

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[rwwff]

Negative energy return is however, economically OK; as long as the energy inputs into the system come from fixed, non-transportables like coal and nuclear. The point of tar sands and all the others isn't to get energy, it is to get liquid energy.

[ClubOfRomeII]

Exxon is relying on the US Geological survey's 2000 results for their 2 trillion barrels remaining estimate. Those results have been roundly ridiculed as vastly optimistic, and have proved to be wildly inaccurate in the 6 years they have been released.

The USGS study you reference was for undiscovered resources ( including growth of existing reserves ). Not what is remaining in discovered accumulations or current reserve estimates.

The results are worldwide and probabilistic in their answer, and are used by companies like Exxon because it is the most thorough geologically based study done on the planet in the last decade?

Unless of course you have another geologic study which involved smarter people, more of them, working longer hours for more years than it took to the produce the 2000 USGS report?

[pstarr]

the guy is head of exxon or mobile or whatever and probably knows nothing about petroleum. He is a 'manager' a 'delegator,' someone with vision or understands the hard work of consensus-building and team leadership.

so who gives a rat's ass about URR and Proven and Probable and all that other pointy-headed snob stuff. that is for engineers and we buy and sell engineers like paper lanterns.

18 holes anyone?

[ClubOfRomeII]

.

Here is the problem with US Geological survey's estimate. The world’s conventional oil production presently has an ERoEI of about 17 - 18 to 1, and falling. The ERoEI on gasoline is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-6 to 1. Meaning that the ERoEI loses 12 to 13 points in the processing and transportation of the crude. If we start pumping, squeezing and mining sources, such as the tar sands, that have ERoEI's of less than 10, we will get negative energy returns on the finished products. The question is not about how much oil is in the ground, (presently world oil reserves are about 6 trillion barrels), the question is, how much energy is available from the oil. This is simple Thermodynamics 101, First and Second law stuff. You would think that these buffoons could figure that out!

.

I've never seen the USGS even mention EROEI, could you post a reference to them saying anything about it?

And current world reserves of oil are maybe a trillion barrels, tops? Otherwise you would be suggesting that we've used a trillion, have another 6 trillion to go, and somehow Peak which happens around the 50% line isn't going to be reached for another couple of decades. Which most people around here would disagree with.

Unless you have different reserve numbers than those which pop up around here or at the Oildrum?