Colin Campbell was given an opportunity to disavow Stanton's proposals. Ms. Caryl Johnson wrote to Colin Campbell on July 8, 2005:



In response to this, Colin Campbell wrote the following in an e-mail dated July 18,2005:



That's it. No apologies, no disavowal.

I would turn the question back to you Father. What good can come from supporting a person who is publishing fascist screeds, and refusing to renounce them? Is furthering the agenda of fascists the price we have to pay for "getting the word out"?

why JD are you turning this into an exercise in Campbell-bashing when you have your own Priest of Anti-Doomer Methodology right here in the same room. You need to ask Mr. Lynch, before he leaves in disgust, some very very important questions. Now! Don't ruin this for the other cornucopians.

Back to the original subject:

We can criticize Lynch, but so far his predictions were far more accurate than those from Campbell:




Of course, the more contentious prediction is the following one:



src: CRYING WOLF: Warnings about oil supply

First, a quick note on cry wolf. When I was a child I was told a story about a child who cried wolf just to get a reaction out of people. Eventually the people ignored the child. Then, the wolf actually came and there was a bit of a disaster. My point is that in the story I was told, the wolf did eventually arrive.

My understanding is that the geophysical processes that create fossil fuels do so at a rate that is very small compared to the rate at which we consume them. Correct me if I am wrong.

We are consuming fossil fuel resources that were created over a period of many millions of years. Correct me if I am wrong.

This means that in the long run the production of fossil fuel resources MUST eventually drop to an average level that corresponds to the rate at which they are being produced by the earth. Correct me if I am wrong.

This means that a curve that represents fossil fuel production as a function of time that is currently way above the earth's rate of production must eventually go down.

If this is too difficult to understand allow me a simple example. You have a cage with some mice. You put in a one-time lump of five pounds of food. You then add 0.1 pounds of food each day. My contention is that the mice will feast and multiply on the five pound lump and then, as time passes, adjust their numbers and eating habits to consume 0.1 pounds per day. A graph of daily consumption would rise and then fall.

Now look at the last graph presented by Khebab forcasting World Oil production. Campbell's curve goes up and then down. This basically fits reality as mathematicians and engineers know it. Look at Lynch's curve. It just goes up. That is preposterous. Surely a Ph.D. from MIT can understand basic concepts like finite, consumption, rate of replenishment, etc. The curve has to come down. The wolf will come.

I am sitting in an office right now in Fort McMurray, Canada. I am trying to get my share of the tens of billions of dollars being invested right now in the oil sands all around me. What is amazing is that the tens of billions of dollars needed for this development will only produce a relative trickle of a few million barrels per day. The quantity of natural gas required for the production is enormous. The investors in these projects are betting that the age of cheap oil is over. I am betting that too and I am willingly risking my time and money on that forecast.

In Lynch's defense, I do not think he says there will be no peak. He probably just adheres to the more optimistic predictions that are post 2020 (and thus not on the graph.)

PS
Off topic, but CalgaryEng don't forget, there are other fuel stocks (different forms of the bitumen itself - MSAR, or THAI) that can be used to seperate the oil and for upgrading) Only THAI has the ability to significantly increase production rates, but it's still in its pilot phase.

I tried to reply to this before, but don't think it went through. The software on this system is new to me.
1) High oil prices right now are due to investors like mutual funds piling in. The supply/demand balance is getting increasingly bearish. Non-OPEC supply is estimated to rise 1.5 to 2.5 mb/d the second half of this year.
2) I'm almost finished an article on Simmons' book. His analytical skills are lacking.
3) Hirsh et. al. assume peak oil, and appear to be exaggerating its impact. (I haven't read the full report carefully yet.)
4) I'm not sure who you mean when you say "SA", but presume it was some Saudi official. To my knowledge, they don't have an official stance on that. Also, for nearly 25 years, the IEA and others have projected a need for a steep increase in OPEC supplies (long-term), and it hasn't happened, so the Saudis are somewhat skeptical (as am I).
5) US gas is a different situation from world oil. It is a mature proviince. But the jury is still out on production direction; new plays could contribute enough to see production increase over the next 5 years.
Mike Lynch

URR is cumulative production plus proved reserves plus undiscovered oil, all of which is recoverable under existing economic and technological conditions.
Mike Lynch

You mean here that you don't expect Saudi Arabia to increase production, or at least, not as much as would be needed to meet demand, as projected by IEA? And if the oil won't be coming from the OPEC, where will it be coming from?

According to resource economic theory, you exploit the "best" deposits first, then the next best, then etc, etc., so that field size should decline, all else being equal. However, all else is not equal, infrastructure and technology play a big role. Politics is huge.

Infrastructure: A small field near a pipeline can be worth more than a big field in the middle of nowhere. This is why some people still drill in W. Virginia.

Technology: Being able to drill in deepwater (for example) means you can suddenly access much larger fields, so discovery size will grow.

Politics: In the 1970s, the Middle East countries nationalized foreign operators and kicked them out. With higher prices, demand began dropping, and those countries had a huge surplus of reserves, so they cut back on drilling. That is a major reason why discovery size dropped so sharply at the time. (Not the only, of course).

The most important thing is that over the past ten years, reserve additions (not discoveries) have replaced production, according to IHS Energy.

Mike Lynch

I don't think the EREOI is very useful. Some studies suggest it is near negative for, for example, US oil. (Cleveland and Kaufman had projected it would become negative in the late 1990s.) I don't think there is really a reliable measure, that the estimates are very biased.

For example, to drill and oil well in the US (shallow, onshore) requires significant equipment and labor in addition to the energy content. Yet people do it and make a profit. This implies that the energy must be a small component of the overall cost.

In the case of tar sands, gas-to-liquids, shale oil, there is a heavy energy component and it makes up a significant amount of costs (20-30% at a guess). So higher prices make them costlier. But the output is correspondingly more valuable, so there's a direct offset.
Mike Lynch

Well, right now production is soaring, so that seems to be the answer.
Mike Lynch

Wow. I hadn't noticed that. (Isn't Campbell an immigrant?)
Bearing in mind that some have suggested that the myopia of the 'optimists' is dangerous, this is a good rejoinder. Paul Ehrlich has had similar views, I think, and also has suggested that disagreement with him is dangerous.
The first (and only) time I saw Campbell, he opened by comparing those who disagreed with him to Neville Chamberlain at Munich, ignoring looming disaster.
Subsequently, he has claimed that I have attacked him personally. Hummm.
I have little patience for anti-immigrant, population doom and gloom views, especially when they come from some tangential point of view, like peak oil.
Mike Lynch

West Virgina went into decline a century ago, US went into decline 35 years ago, and so what?
If all these countries are in decline (and Mexico isn't yet, Cantarell is about to decline), then how is it that production keeps growing?
Decline and depletion are the norm in the industry, and it has been overcoming it from the beginning. There is no evidence that such has changed.

Positive evidence: the density of drilling in the US in 1970, when it peaked, was about 30 times that of the rest of the world now. Field size and well productivity levels around the world are still far above the US level at peak, and reserve additions have been replacing production.
Mike Lynch

Mr. Lynch, again, thank-you for continuing to contribute.

Let's take a different tact on this. Hopefully you aren’t a believer in the theory of abiotic oil. Given this,

1) When you do suggest peak oil will occur?

2) At what point in time will society have to begin transitioning away from oil in order to prevent mass economic shock? Do you concur with the IEA’s recent report that we require 20 years, 10 years if it is a crash course? Or in other words, will relying on the market be insufficient given the amount of infrastructure changes needed?

3) What energy source will we be transitioning to?

Isn't US well density a function of our unique pioneer industry-smaller, independently owned operations with a greater number of wells? So fewer wells elsewhere doesn't necessarilya correlate with higher remaining reserves. As to your second point, conventional wisdon here at PeakOil.com is that at Middle East reserve additions in the 1980s were just quota-based data manipulation.