Peak oil - true or fiction

[LateGreatPlanetEarth]

What's the latest consensus; were we duped by 'The party is over' or is the theory still valid or miscalculated? And is shale gas the game changer that renders the theory obsolete? Just asking about were we stand last half of 2012.

[ralfy]

Valid since 2006:

"Running dry"

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailycha ... onsumption

[pstarr]

Valid since 2006:

"Running dry"

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailycha ... onsumption

the picture? it makes no sense?

[Keith_McClary]

When this graph turns down you can "party on".

[seenmostofit]

What's the latest consensus; were we duped by 'The party is over' or is the theory still valid or miscalculated? And is shale gas the game changer that renders the theory obsolete? Just asking about were we stand last half of 2012.

Last half of 2012 will probably be similar to the last half of all the last halves of the past decade. Good for some, not so good for others, and will be so with an utter disregard for peak oil, whether it has already happened, or is still off in the future. Perhaps same-old same-old is the shorthand answer.

[LateGreatPlanetEarth]

looks like production is waning but other energy is coming on line to make up the difference. therefore, conclusion is: production has peaked but that's okay since consumption requirements are being met and will continue to be met.

[Logic]

What's the latest consensus; were we duped by 'The party is over' or is the theory still valid or miscalculated? And is shale gas the game changer that renders the theory obsolete? Just asking about were we stand last half of 2012.

'Peak Oil' is 100% a fact, not theory. The fact is that there is a finite amount of oil available.
The big question is "when will we hit peak"? By some accounts we have already. By others, not so, but soon.
The much more difficult question is what affect will it have on societies across the globe.
Many things other than a physical peak can (and have) affect availability of oil. All you can do is be as prepared as possible, and try to soften the blow.

[ralfy]

the picture? it makes no sense?

Read the paragraph below the pic.

[Pops]

That oil is finite is established and that production will therefore peak at some point is obvious. I'd suggest that the average price at all time record highs is pretty conclusive evidence that either production can not increase much more or that some someones have a pretty good scam going. It looks more and more like the former to me.





I'm not sure what "other energy" is coming online. Coal, that newfangled 18th century energy source, is making a huge resurgence and still spewing crap into the atmosphere - no such thing as clean coal. Just like the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, the coal age didn't end because we ran out of coal, we just found something better. Now the supply of better stuff is becoming constricted and coal is once again about to take over as king of fuels. Smells like peak oil more and more.

Other energy coming online certainly doesn't include nat gas, it's use is increasing at almost exactly the same rate it's been for decades.

You hopefully haven't bought into the pump and dump fracking hype, if I were a believer in evil conspiracy theories I'd guess Chenny's buddies at Halliburton dreamed up that whole scam to keep drillers in business, ol' Dick certainly played his part:

In 2005 Congress—at the behest of then Vice President Dick Cheney, a former CEO of gas driller Halliburton—exempted fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

A 70% decline the first 12 months it's makes for pretty consistent work for drillers, at least until all the E&P companies go broke.

There has been an uptick in renewables, the category however is still led by that even more newfangled energy source: camel chips




So I think the news isn't that "everything's OK", a quick look around the economy puts the lie to that:




The big news is that not only are high oil prices killing demand for oil, they're killing demand for all the stuff we "make" to earn a living and impacting our payments on all the crap we're on the hook already - could be why people and governments are going belly up right and left.

Here is a picture of GDP minus total debt, the bounce at the bottom is where we hit our credit limit:




And if you include the fact that government transfer payments are 28% of the GDP...


Well I think its pretty obvious that everything isn't OK but don't let me interrupt the tune you're whistling past the graveyard.


http://www.businessinsider.com/politics ... 012-6?op=1
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ing-second
http://sustainablejohn.com/?p=213
http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2011/ ... fairs.html
http://www.bp.com/sectionbodycopy.do?ca ... View=chart

[sparky]

.
Something funny happened on the way to the peak !

the cornucopians theory was that as classic old fields would be insufficient to fulfill the supply
prices would rise making new sources economical

So far so good

first was the off-shore , then eventually the tar sand , tight oil , pre salt , etc etc
wringing hydrocarbon out of stones and washing dirty sand is all fair and good

each new prospect is up the cost ladder , its exploitation made possible by the rise in prices

this leave two problems
1- .....what next ?
2- ..... all those resources are pretty hard to ramp up to the gas guzzling level
a millions barrel a day equivalent here and there to be sure
but that's piddling stuff compared to the full glory of the Texas or Middle East fields at full production
so don't worry about Peak Oil , for those expecting the END keep holding the pack of caddles
for those who believe in a decade long in deeper and deeper "recession".... welcome home .

[ian807]

Peak oil has probably come and gone, but to focus on that is misleading.

The real resource problem we're seeing is continuously declining energy return from hydrocarbons.

In the 1960s, we were seeing, for example, returns of 100:1 in West Texas oil fields. Production was cheap. Profits, both economically and energetically were huge. Fast forward to 2012. These days a good energy return is 10:1. A 10-fold decrease in 50 years.

In 2005, a funny thing happened. Energy prices started to climb, and they're still climbing, even during a global financial crisis ( http://inflationdata.com/inflation/infl ... _chart.asp ).

The reason is straightforward. Oil, for example, contributes 160 exajoules a year to the world. It now takes much more money and energy to generate that 160 exajoules than it did 10 or 20 years ago. The oil that's left, is harder to get, entails more risk (and more insurance), is in many separate scattered small reservoirs, making it more expensive to drill. The end result that we see is higher prices.

Eventually, prices go high enough to start breaking supply chains, including the supply chains that provide energy. That decidedly nonlinear, nongradual break is something to watch out for. When it happens, there will still be plenty of oil in the ground, it's just that we'll never be able to use it.

[MD]

Don't forget that most of what's being consumed is still the "cheap" stuff. Legacy fields producing what... 80% or so of the whole pie?

What happens when it's only 40%?

That's a question that's never been adequately addressed, so far.

[LateGreatPlanetEarth]

but looks like the supply of shale ng and the conversion to it is taking up any shortfall oil is experiencing due to peak oil. so we have production peak oil as predicted with no energy crisis.

[dorlomin]

so we have production peak oil as predicted with no energy crisis.

oh my sides.

Food and fuel prices have been key drivers in instability across the world over the past 4 years. Many westerners have abandoned the ICU and are undergoing modal shift to public transport.

The gulf between your "I am not experiencing a crisis" and an awareness of the rest of the world is pretty huge.

[meemoe_uk]

>Peak oil - true or fiction?
Anyone one reads the skeptic posts or blogs would see this question was answered years ago, and that evidence against TEOTWAWKI induced by peak oil is now is a continuum.

Even the peakers most solid argument : oil reserves are finite, so production will peak someday is somewhat dodgy : -
Yes it's true reserves are finite, but the ingredients to make oil : CO2, H2, sunlight and life, are pretty abundant in our part of the universe. Only CO2 is arguably in desperately short supply. Why? Its locked up in fossil hydrocarbons.
When we burn hydrocarbons into the atmosphere we create food for plants to make new hydrocarbons. Doomers like to think we are 'losing' something irreplaceable when burning a fossil hydrocarbon, but that's totally false. Nothing fundamental is lost by burning hydrocarbons, it's all being recycled. It's much more correct to say plant food is lost when hydrocarbons get buried and fossilized by geology. The active biosphere becomes poorer when this happens.

Supreme Saviors of all life the planet
In fact it's possible in the last few million years things were getting pretty close to the limit of sustainability wrt atmospheric CO2. Plant photosynthesis begins to shut down when CO2 levels dip below 220ppm. Consider that CO2 is usually above 1000ppm and it got as low as 270ppm during recent cold periods of the last few thousand years.
Just in the space of a couple of hundred years we've seen a distinct rise is world biomass due to increased atmos CO2 levels. This may not be due to human burning of fossil fuels, but due to the 20th century warm period, which causes the oceans to warm and release CO2.

Peak oil - the reality
So, lets assume we use up a significant amount of fossil hydrocarbons. Then what?
We've have an atmosphere packed with plant food, similar to the atmosphere in commercial green houses, like 1000-3000ppm. The biosphere would be super charged, into a new golden age of life, producing hydrocarbons at a mad rate. We wouldn't need to dig up mineral oil any more to make fuels like gasoline. We could make it from plants, much like today, except the biofuel plantations wouldn't need excess resources pumped into them.

How close are we to this reality?
Currently we are at about 0.04% atmospheric CO2. We need at least 0.1% atmospheric CO2 to get this golden age of life.
Also, the original Earth's atmosphere was about 20% CO2, and was 6 times thicker than today's atmosphere. That means their is something like 10,000 to 100,000 times more lost atmospheric Carbon still stuck under the ground compared to what so far has been extracted.
We don't need to extract more than 1% of total of world reserve fossil fuels to create the new golden age of life, and become independent of fossil fuels.

If you read oilfinder's thread on oil discovery you'd see geologists are finding some of this other 99.999% of lost atmospheric CO2 still to be retrieved from the ground.

The day of Peak mineral oil will come. It will be a great day, not an harbinger of doom day. On that day the worldwide CO2 cornucopia we'll'ave created will be booming with life and prosperity and ready to last for potentially billions of years. It will be our on going job as custodians of Earth CO2 to see it through. We are currently doing a great job by increasing fossil fuel consumption.

Back to today
Over the past 10 years the doomers have claimed every scare and hype economic headline to be a symptom of peak oil production induced civilization collapse. Such people have cried wolf like this for hundreds of years. I think their credibility is used up. Such false ideas can only continue to exist thru religious zeal, and a continual influx of impressionable new minds who're unaware of the cult's 0% track record in correct predictions.
Oil production continues to soar. This website is suppose to be focused on world oil production. I've been here 5 years, but I still haven't seen a peaker post a link to new oil production data when it comes out.
The only members poised for new data as in comes out are skeptics like myself and OF2.
Peakers will propound every outlook from the IEA and the EIA, because those outlooks are always doom laden. But the data? They aren't as interested in soaring oil production with record figures every other month.
As the late peak oil leader Matt Simmons used to say " data beats projections every time ". Maybe someone from the community should add " not if there's no doom in the data ".

[Quinny]

Peakers will propound every outlook from the IEA and the EIA, because those outlooks are always doom laden. But the data?

Are you having a giraffe!

[pstarr]

Peakers will propound every outlook from the IEA and the EIA, because those outlooks are always doom laden. But the data?

Are you having a giraffe!

Quinny, that means you read the entire thing. Me too. Pretty amazing. Meemie has aggregated his ignorance of climate science, geology, and penmanship, into one sweeping Grand Idea-- a single Paranoid Unified Theory of Denial. Never in my life.

[sparky]

.
Meeemo , brother ( sister ?) I'm totally listening and nodding head on what you say

one tiny problem
"Yes it's true reserves are finite, but the ingredients to make oil : CO2, H2, sunlight and life, are pretty abundant in our part of the universe. Only CO2 is arguably in desperately short supply. Why? Its locked up in fossil hydrocarbons. "

Hydrocarbons useful component is not the chemistry ,
it's the energy stored by this chemistry
having a box full of empty food cans is not the same as having a box of full food cans

oil is being made today with the same ingredients , it will be ready in a few millions years

[pstarr]

Only CO2 is arguably in desperately short supply. Why? Its locked up in fossil hydrocarbons. "

CO2 is in short supply? This amazingly ignorant statement leaves me breathless, short of O2. I thought excess CO2 was cooking the planet? Does that make me a Democrat?

[Roryrules]

Only CO2 is arguably in desperately short supply. Why? Its locked up in fossil hydrocarbons. "

CO2 is in short supply? This amazingly ignorant statement leaves me breathless, short of O2. I thought excess CO2 was cooking the planet? Does that make me a Democrat?

Actually, it's not at all ignorant though perhaps a little simplistic. In the grand scheme of things current CO2 levels are very low and during the last Ice Age they did get dangerously low. In fact, without our recent intervention plant life would probably have ended on earth within a few million years from CO2 shortages. Basically ever more CO2 is being locked away underground and that's depriving plants of the stuff they need to photosynthesise.

So yes, our release of CO2 is probably extending life on Earth but these higher levels of CO2 will most likely warm the planet a little too, if they're not already.