[Revi]

I did a little back of the envelope math and came up with 233,000 miles left of gas for each of the vehicles on the planet. What do you think? Does it seem reasonable?

Are we on our last cars?

[Revi]

I am assuming about a trillion barrels left and that we are at or around the peak, but I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption considering that we are getting more and more vehicles on the planet.

[Pops]

That's good, Revi. Funny you mention it because I was just talking about buying a diesel pickup because the particular engine is good for 300-400k miles. It easily has 175k left. LOL

[Revi]

Revised:I did a little back of the envelope math and came up with 233,000 miles left of gas for each of the vehicles on the planet. The way I came to this conclusion was 1 trillion barrels divided by the 1.2 billion vehicles = 833 barrels x 42 gallons in a barrel, divided by 3 (refined about 1/3 comes out as gasoline), times 20 miles per gallon = 233,000. Now if we go Seneca Cliff then we will get a lot less, and maybe we are on our last vehicles, as we may be looking at less than a hundred thousand miles left for every vehicle. What do you think? Does it seem reasonable?

Are we on our last cars?

[Paulo1]

Shoot, I'm driving an '86 Toyota PU, which is about as comfortable as a covered wagon. However, this year I am springing for a new MC to augment my fleet(2) of 35 year old Honda ct Trail bikes. They are worse than a covered wagon, but primo for hunting and fishing.

I expect there will be FF powered cars for many many decades. How many folks will be buying them is another case to consider.

[Subjectivist]

That math only works if we share equally. The military will take a lot of that fuel, and government projects like police, fire, ambulance, road maintanence.

[basil_hayden]

I thought that to be true 2 cars, 7 years and 400,000 miles ago. I think I have a pickup and a car still left before I get to the last car.

[Whitefang]

Diesel power is the way to go!
If fuel is hard to get and most are driving gasoline, you can borrow from a truck in case of dire need......I got robbed last year, somebody stole 50 gallon or so from my truck in France just before getting cheap diesel in Luxembourg, now still a euro/liter.

Just sold my mom our Ford Taurus in case some repo guy or girl comes at our doorstep.
I'd love to get a small truck to move to Africa and start business there, or a normal size one, two beds for the family.....sold my Dodge 3500 with standard Cummings diesel from 1997.
Down to the last vehicles, bank already took possession of income, at the end they cannot take your bed, clothing and 30 days supply of food.

I'd love to have a 5th wheel ready to go near Vancouver, with a standard diesel and engine break, crew cab of course.....

[eastbay]

And don't forget 50 million new vehicles are being built annually. Even considering the 12 gallons of diesel fuel each bbl offers, this otherwise accurate estimate, Revi, may prove wildly optimistic.
At 15,000 miles per year this wild gas party will end really soon, soon enough that even those of us in our 60s will get to see the cops show up and kick everyone out.

[viewcrafters]

The time will come when we will have gas shortages when trying to fill our new vehicles. shortly after that we will not have petro for our new vehicles. They will issue a type of credit card that will allot us a few gallons every week.

[dolanbaker]

The oil supply isn't going to decline that quickly!

I expect that we have another decade or so before car ownership starts to show any significant decline, as it is fewer young people are driving (depending on location) than in the past.
The car has lost its crown as the key to freedom that it used to have, these days social media has taken away the social isolation that many used to feel due to the lack of transportation.

For an ever increasing number of people the car is just a means of getting from A to B and less of a status symbol than in the past.

[Pops]

The oil supply isn't going to decline that quickly!

How quickly?
A trillion barrels (3T ultimate) at 100mm per day is 10,000 days or 27 years

An estimate that assumes oil will flow just like it is today until 10,000 days from now where it drops to zero overnight.

That ain't gonna happen.

If there is a trillion barrels left is mostly not-crude, it doesn't flow, it certainly doesn't bubble up under pressure. It is bitumen and kerogen; undercooked, overcooked, weathered, eaten and evaporated to sludge long since. It isn't crude, it isn't even drilled for, it must be manufactured: mined and processed basically, therefore it will never flow at the rate crude does today. It will have a separate curve and peak of it's own and as Laharerre points out, it will be much lower and longer than the crude curve was.

Just as Peakers have said all along, conventional crude it the limiting factor to BAU. It probably peaked years ago. If you want to understand what is going on, watch conventional crude oil, everything else is just an expensive imitation.

[h2]

That seems reasonable, data online suggests average US 9000 miles per year per vehicle, Europe has to be less, and the third world less, couldn't find anything on china averages yet.

So that's about 30 years at current consumption rates assuming the actual reserve numbers are connected to reality, though of course you have to slice off the end of that production curve because supplies would probably be controlled more as suggested above towards the end, ie, military, ag, etc, but that seems realistic, 15-25 years if consumption remains the same or similar as now, probably miles per vehicle will drop and number of vehicles will rise for a while more.

I doubt electrics really change this much, hybrids can stretch it out a bit more if the norm, ie, most cars sold and used are hybrids.

I was and am always astounded by the relative inefficiency of bus/passenger trains, they don't really change the situation much in terms of miles per person per gallon/energy unit, only rail freight is an order of magnitude different in efficiency over trucks etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_eff ... sportation

an alternate view, not totally sure about his logic used, but it's interesting
http://www.theicct.org/blogs/staff/plan ... ing-carbon

This seems much more realistic in terms of time frames than the stuff I've seen by wishful thinking doomers like Nature bats last Guy M., who predicted too many years back to remember that by 'next year you won't recognize the world around you', lol.

It will be interesting over time to see how the actual global decline looks, I guess it's getting quite close. I don't see a Seneca cliff, the US peaked and didn't have one, not sure why it would appear globally if it doesn't appear locally, that doesn't make much sense to me, so a gradual bring down seems logical.

[Pops]

15-25 years if consumption remains the same or similar as now, ...

I don't see a Seneca cliff, the US peaked and didn't have one, not sure why it would appear globally if it doesn't appear locally, that doesn't make much sense to me, so a gradual bring down seems logical.

I thought I made a good case that production won't simply continue at this level then abruptly stop.
Guess not.

But you give me an excuse to add an argument to my argument:
The US is different in a number of ways than The World. First, half the oil wells in the world are in the US, second, the average production for most is about 10 bbls/day (the average is higher right now due to the LTOs). Since the US only produces 10 or 15% of the world's oil but accounts for half the wells, obviously, wells outside the US are producing much more per well and will last much longer than those in the US..

Or will they? What happens I'd guess is all those wells elsewhere produce like US wells, but they quit sooner. The thing that is different is mineral rights here are owned by individuals rather than the government like most everywhere else (afaik). Because many of those "stripper wells" in the US are owned and serviced by mom & pop operators that can get by on a few barrels a day, they continue to produce long after a well owned by a government or International Oil Co will have begun to lose money and been capped.

So the take away is wells in the US have a much longer productive life than those outside the US that are drilled, pumped and capped and the operator moved on. Using the US as a model for the world then is a mistake.

So then because of both of those reasons, a high percentage of slow producing unconventional oilish stuff in the remaining reserves and an unfavorable climate for long-tailed stripper wells outside the US, I do see a steep decline with a long tail extending out decades.

[h2]

Nobody says that production will continue at 75 mbpd or so and stop, it's about the amount of miles driven per vehicle as a useful way to visualize the finite nature of future oil supplies assuming the reserves listed exist and will get produced. I thought it would be interesting to expand that a bit to average miles driven per vehicle to make it even more mentally graspable and concrete, ie, if you take each car today it can drive x miles as a percent of remaining reserves, and that number is highly finite, even using best case outlooks, which is the real takeaway I think.

As production declines, the time frame elongates I would say, since you're going to take longer to reach that 233k miles per vehicle globally since there is less available per day as time goes on, aka the long tail of miles driven, lol. Using the absolute yearly miles driven, which match oil decline data better in terms of two lines on a graph matching up is a bit more clear, obviously the number of miles driven total would have to match the oil produced as long as we use oil to run vehicles mostly.

The clever notion of putting the remaining oil into something everyone can relate to, ie, miles driven per vehicle has little to do with time frames, just gives a good mental tool for seeing what is left.

Obviously once decline sets in, it will take longer to reach that 233k per car, and as more cars are added, the actual available per car would decrease since the underlying reserves aren't expanding, so you'd expect average used per car to decrease over time, while number of cars increases. So maybe in 10 years, the expected average miles driven available per car might be half what it is today, or something like that.

It's very realistic to assume there will be cars driving around in 15 to 25 years I would say, though what will be interesting is to see what happens as production decreases globally, and how our societies adapt to that situation.

It's risky I think in peak oil circles to let wishful thinking replace historical trends and logic, tempting as that can be. If you break down the major producers most are doing ok maintaining production during these plateau years, though at the cost of pulling from the downside, the main argument for the seneca cliff model. Russia is doing ok, Saudi Arabia has done very well, much better than for example Matt Simmons thought they'd do in Twighlight in the Desert, some vaporware drilling isn't happening at all right now, like the deep Salt Brazilian deep water stuff.

On the more interesting side, I just heard that the 1% now own for the first time in modern history half the total wealth of the social systems they feed off of parasitically. So they are clearly doing better at directing resource flows into their own hands than we are, makes me wonder a bit about the oil prices of the last years.

so a gradual bring down seems logical.

If you're going to try to say I said that production will just continue at the current level and then stop it's probably not a great idea to quote me saying that production won't continue at the current level, rather a gradual bring down, as I noted, in the quote you quoted. Something tells me that when someone pushes against the doomer scenarios which have consistently failed to materialize in short term your mental off switch is triggered, must be otherwise you wouldn't quote me agreeing with you to suggest I don't agree.

[jedrider]

I like to just sit in my car. That will still work after the oil age. It may become a popular pastime as well.

[Pops]

I was trying to say there will be neither a long plateau and cliff nor a gradual slope - more a shark-with-a-long-tail -
The shark fin being the pretty steep drop in conventional of 4% per year as these countries are exhibiting:



Then the long tail as we slowly mine the x heavy.

Basically the Ivanhoe:

[Revi]

Here's Tverberg's latest projection. it looks a lot steeper than the Ivanhoe!