[DesuMaiden]

I heard some estimates say there is only 1 trillion barrels of oil left in the ground. If that is true, we are screwed because we will use that up in about 30 years, given that our current rate of consumption is 30 billion barrels every year. But given that world population will increase during the next 30 years, the rate of consumption will also likely increase. Meaning that our current supply of oil will likely be consumed in less than 30 years.

So you better come up with a survival plan for what to do when oil runs out because it is going to happen SOON. Of course, if you are already 80 years old, it might not matter to you because you will likely be dead before oil completely runs out. But if you are only 20 something years old (like me), you BETTER prepare for the worse as our oil supplies continue to dwindle. I will probably only be 50 something years old when the oil supply completely runs out. And all hell will turn lose when that happens.

Either way, how much oil is REALLY left in the ground? I'm pretty sure my predictions are right...probably only 30 years MAX worth of recoverable oil left in the ground. After that, there will still be oil left in the ground, but the EROEI for recovering the oil would be so low that it would not even be worth recovering it. Once we run out of RECOVERABLE oil reserves, we are truly screwed. Even if there was plenty of oil left in the ground, it doesn't matter, if it requires more energy to recover it than you get from using it. If it requires more energy to recover it then you get from using it, then it would be worthless.

Alberta tar sands has a poor EROEI or only 1.5 to 4. If we are left with only tarsands or shale, we are screwed because the EROEI would be so poor that we would essentially be totally unable to live our modern way of life. Once the last bit of easy-to-recover oil is gone, we are truly screwed, as the remaining reserves will be much more difficult to recover. In fact, some of the reserves will not even be worth the effort to recover.

Let me repeat my question again...how much recoverable oil is left in the ground?

[Tanada]

It all depends on your definition of oil. There are a couple Trillion bbl of Orinoco heavy oil and its equivalents outside the Orinoco belt. There is a trillion or so recoverable bitumen in the Athabasca sands and other 'tar' sands. There are 3-5 Trillion bbl of Kerogen locked up in the Green River shale and likewise formations in places like Estonia. Thene there are about a Trillion bbl of conventional oil. If you get really desperate there is about 10 Trillion bbl equivalent in coal that can be made into syncrude with underground gassification extraction.

[ROCKMAN]

Maiden - It's as T explains. And IMHO it's best to focus on production rates and price than any volumetric someone throws around. In that sense how many bbls are left in the ground isn't relevant. I suspect what you're asking is how much oil is there left to produce and at what rate/price. First, look where we are today: we’re producing a record amount of oil but at near record average yearly prices. The huge ME fields are decades old and while producing a lot of oil they are also producing a lot of water proving they are in the final stages of depletion. The Deep Water fields collectively contain huge amounts of oil but can take 5 to 10 before they begin producing. And once they start producing their commercial life often last only 7 to 10 years. The shales and, to a much greater extent, the oil sands in Canada, Venezuela et al contain huge amounts of oil but produce at a rather slow rate compared to conventional reservoirs and also require higher prices to justify development. But again, as far as EROEI goes, you can forget about that metric: long before the numbers get as low as you offer the economics will kill a project. Just a rough estimate but as far as drilling oil wells once IMHO the EROEI drops below 5 or 6 the poor rate of return will shelve a project. No decision to drill or not drill a well was based upon EROEI. And never will IMHO.

So the future? IMHO you're watching the future today. The dynamics will shift around a bit but I see no reason to expect the POD to be any different going forward then it is today.

[eugene]

I agree with Rockman. How much is in the ground is, largely, irrelevant but makes great headlines for the fanatically optimistic or those who make a living stating/writing wonderful stories. It's all about cost, production, where it's at, exporter internal consumption, politics, production rates and more. At 20 something, I'd spend a good bit of time looking at the energy variables, climate change and economic instability. Then make some decisions based on assumptions, your best guess, etc. It is not going to be a pleasant time to say the least.

[ROCKMAN]

"It's all about cost, production, where it's at, exporter internal consumption, politics, production rates and more". Maybe someone will come up with a shorter way of saying the same thing. Like the "POD"...Peak Oil Dynamic. LOL. To be honest during much of my career I just focused on the geotechnical side of the dynamics. Since there was nothing I could do to affect those other aspects of the POD I just stuck with what I could have some impact on: the finding cost of oil/NG.

But having hung around spots like this and the Oil Drum I’ve developed a better Big Picture of the process. A process that isn’t nearly as controlled by geology as it is by the combined effects of the other POD components.

[GHung]

The more important question is; how much oil will be left in the ground? How long before the cost/benefit ratio breaks down, capex (credit) dries up, or the environment kicks our asses? While the increasing cost of bringing oil to markets is becoming a ball and chain firmly attached to economies, It'll likely be other dynamics that bring the age of oil down, and the industrial age with it. The global economy isn't a one-trick-pony, but we're running out of tricks all over; systemic decline. The primary problem isn't oil; it's humans and their behavior patterns.

[Keith_McClary]

I heard some estimates say there is only 1 trillion barrels of oil left in the ground. If that is true, we are screwed because we will use that up in about 30 years, given that our current rate of consumption is 30 billion barrels every year. But given that world population will increase during the next 30 years, the rate of consumption will also likely increase. Meaning that our current supply of oil will likely be consumed in less than 30 years.

The message of "Peak Oil" is that the remaining half of oil will not be produced at a constant rate for 30 years and then drop to zero. Production will peak near the halfway point (about now) and then decline. Even if there are 2 trillion barrels left, the peak will only be a decade or two later.

[MD]

10 trillion or more, as stated up thread somewhere.

What's more important is the production rate during this cycle of extraction. It's declining now due to "decreased demand", which is in reality driven by the peak oil dynamic.

This cycle will likely go quite low at its tail, because we are into some serious global overshoot.

No one knows what the next cycle will be like. It's fun to speculate, and we do a lot of that here. But we don't know any more than anyone else does.

What you can say with near certainty is that there will be another cycle, sometime in the future.

[Sys1]

How such questions can still occur on a peak oil site? There's no point at looking how much oil is left since half of what is left will be kept in the ground forever.
Moreover, the more oil will cost, the less it will be consumed, and the more we will have officialy decades of oil reserves... and people claiming "we have 40 years of oil".

Actually, we already lack oil. The 2008 crisis is the direct consequence of peak oil. Since 2008, global economy is going down.
It will go down, down and down until capitalism and industrial civilisation collapse. Look how "cheap" oil is, and how much it worries economists. In 1999, oil was at 10$ a barrel, now in 2014, cheap oil is 80$. How crazy you are still thinking like it's business as usual...

[copious.abundance]

I heard some estimates say there is only 1 trillion barrels of oil left in the ground.

Oh pul-eeze! I can show you individual rock formations which, all by themselves, have a trillion barrels of oil in place. Now, if you want recoverable (which isn't really known I might add), mulitply that trillion by many other rock formations that have a trillion barrels or so of oil in place, plus a whole ton of other rock formations which have hundreds of billions of o.i.p., and so on, and once you start adding them all up, you're talking about a lot of oil.

Newbie doomers are so funny.

[ralfy]

"The only true metric of energy abundance: The rate of flow"

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013- ... te-of-flow

[Keith_McClary]

if you want recoverable

Recoverable would be good, preferably economically recoverable.

[copious.abundance]

if you want recoverable

Recoverable would be good, preferably economically recoverable.

I'm not sure why a guy with over 5000 posts on this board needs to have this explained to him, but anyway ...

There is no real fixed amount of recoverable oil, and there is even less of a fixed amount of economically recoverable oil.

Thirty years ago, the oil in the Bakken shale wasn't really very recoverable, economically or otherwise. Maybe a few burps of the stuff here and there. Now they are pumping a million barrels/day of the stuff.

So we've got newbie doomers like DesuMaiden here who are convinced the world will run out of oil in about thirty years. Never mind that, thirty years ago, lots of people were saying the exact same thing. I suppose some people never learn, or maybe this newbie doomer is another naive youngster who knows nothing of the history of this.

Now, I could scout the internet and find stuff like the USGS's conventional oil endowment which says there's 565 billion barrels of undiscovered, conventional oil in the world. But that's just conventional, and it's just an estimate of undiscovered. Add to that 345 billion barrels of shale/tight oil resources, per the EIA. Add to that 1.4 trillion barrels of world proven reserves of oil. Add 'em up and you get over 3 trillion barrels of either proven reserves, or some sort of "technically recoverable" resource. And we haven't even gotten to the tar sands/very heavy oil (except that which is already in some nations' proven reserves).

Of course it doesn't end there. After all, check out the link about the shale/tight oil estimate. In just two years they went from estimating 32 billion barrels worldwide to 345 billion barrels worldwide. Does that sound to you there is a fixed and known amount of recoverable oil in the world, and that what they estimate now is the end-all and be-all, and they are never going to find more oil and figure out how to get it out, if someone wants or needs to? Hardly.

It's really kind of a dumb question, because there is no real answer.

[copious.abundance]

Oh pul-eeze! I can show you individual rock formations which, all by themselves, have a trillion barrels of oil in place.

How will you do that? Show him? With your googlely-eyes?

Another intelligent response by p-the-starr. Not.

Here's some nice reading for ya. But of course you've seen this one before. I suppose you've already forgotten it.

126 trillion barrels of oil equivalent biomass in Bazhenov Oil shale in Russia

[MD]

The range in discussion (how much oil in the ground?) is from one to hundreds of trillions of barrels.

We have extracted approximately one trillion barrels during the current oil age.

The analogy that I have used in the past is that if the earths crust were a teenager's skin then we have popped about half the zits so far. We have the other half to go, and have started on the blackheads that infest many regions.

Teenager Earth has a real acne problem...

[ROCKMAN]

“How long before the cost/benefit ratio breaks down, capex (credit) dries up, or the environment kicks our asses?”

“Peak oil is one manifestation of over-population”

“What's more important is the production rate during this cycle of extraction. It's declining now due to "decreased demand"

“…the more oil will cost, the less it will be consumed”

“…multiply that trillion by many other rock formations that have a trillion barrels or so of oil in place, plus a whole ton of other rock formations which have hundreds of billions of o.i.p”

“The only true metric of energy abundance: The rate of flow"

“Recoverable would be good, preferably economically recoverable.”

“There is no real fixed amount of recoverable oil, and there is even less of a fixed amount of economically recoverable oil.”

All valid observations IMHO. And all part of the POD. Some thought the POD concept was too inclusive to be useful. As repeated debates/discussions ensued they ranged over the entire spectrum of the POD. And nothing wrong with focusing on individual components. But in the end we’ll end up where the combined effects of all those variables lead us. So OTOH saying the POD will lead us to X is a quick way to express expectations it doesn’t show how one weighs the individual components. Some put more weight on consumption/population growth. Some of geotechnical aspects. Some on geopolitical factors. Some on alt development. Etc. But even with divergent opinions about the individual POD components many end up painting a similar picture of the future. Even copious acknowledges there are factors that screw with his expectations. While they may try is piss on each other with over individual POD components gloomers and cornies aren’t really that far apart with respect to the POD in general IMHO.

[Keith_McClary]

if you want recoverable

Recoverable would be good, preferably economically recoverable.

I'm not sure why a guy with over 5000 posts on this board needs to have this explained to him, but anyway ...

There is no real fixed amount of recoverable oil, and there is even less of a fixed amount of economically recoverable oil.

I know that there are a few of you folks who cannot grasp the concept of finite/infinite.

You think the amount of oil recovered will increase without limit (that is the definition of "infinite").

[copious.abundance]

You are completely clueless as to the Cornucopian view. That is all I can say, LOL!