Will the U.S. Surpass Saudi Arabia in Oil Production?

Recent news reports said yes, based on the Executive Summary of a big international report by the International Energy Agency. Columbia University geologist Peter Kelemen takes a closer look at the full document, and what lies ahead for energy demand and fossil fuels.

Last week, major news outlets reported on bullet points that accompanied the recently released World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris. Those new stories emphasized one of the Outlook’s predictions: that domestic U.S. oil production might exceed that of Saudi Arabia from 2020 to 2025, leaving us “all but self-sufficient” in meeting our energy needs. This seemed to be shocking news for uncritical devotees of the theory that “Peak Oil” in the United States occurred around 1970, and has already occurred or will soon arrive worldwide.

It will take some time to digest and critically evaluate the huge 672-page IEA document. The first thing to understand is that energy production, and the IEA Outlook, are much more complex and nuanced than most news reports indicated. The Outlook contains an ensemble of predictions with different underlying assumptions. But for simplicity, the Executive Summary focuses on a “central scenario,” and that’s what most news outlets used for their news stories. However, many other outcomes are also evaluated, and the IEA stresses that not all of the predictions in the central scenario will be correct.

Here’s what’s clear: While we debate and ponder the consequences, global energy consumption continues to grow exponentially. This was evident in the final figure of Vaclav Smil’s 2005 masterpiece, Energy at the Crossroads, demonstrating that energy use had grown at 2.8 percent per year throughout the previous century. Similar data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy yield an annual rate of 2.2 percent growth for the period 1970-2011. Predictions in the IEA World Energy Outlook are consistent with the BP trend, implying a doubling time of about 30 years and – if it continues – a factor of 10 increase over the next century. If it seems unimaginable that we’ll be using 10 times as much energy a century from now … well, it must have seemed just as unimaginable in 1900—but it happened.

Growth in energy consumption over the past 150 years was fed almost entirely by fossil fuels: first coal, joined by oil, and now increasingly by natural gas. Our appetite for energy rose partly as the result of a five-fold increase in population, but also due to increasing per capita energy use, which grew by about a factor of 10 in industrialized countries. In this century, population growth and per capita energy use are declining in the developed world, growth in developing countries more than compensates for that. Most people still lack refrigerators, for example, and seek to acquire such necessities in a global economy.

If energy costs do not increase too much, relative to worldwide GDP, then this increasing demand will probably be met. The IEA projects that energy will cost the equivalent of $100 to $150 per barrel of oil in 2020, though perhaps less for natural gas generation in areas with a well-developed pipeline infrastructure. This seems reasonable barring conceivable but (one hopes) unlikely game-changers such as intermittent closure of the Persian-Arabian Gulf during the next 20 years. The IEA’s projected, moderate increase in the real cost of energy is likely to facilitate large, affordable jumps in per capita consumption for a growing number of people in developing countries.

One big question is how much of the continuing increase in energy demand will be met via increasing extraction of fossil fuels, versus alternative energy sources such as nuclear power and renewables. Current trends are contradictory. Installed capacity for wind and solar energy generation has grown at annual rates exceeding 24 percent for more than a decade. Yet these sources continue to supply a small percentage of total energy consumed, and trouble lies ahead: In regions where they account for more than a quarter of total energy supply, smoothing out the intermittent nature of wind and solar electrical generation requires expensive energy storage. Government incentives are likely to be phased out. And for the foreseeable future, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, electricity generation using “combined cycle” natural gas combustion will remain somewhat less expensive than an equivalent amount of wind power and much cheaper than solar energy, even when the estimated cost of carbon capture and storage included.

Meanwhile, it has become feasible to increase the production of oil and gas worldwide, and particularly in the United States. This is not due to continuing exploration for offshore oil, which is a minor factor. Instead, it arises mainly as a result of evolving horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracture techniques, popularly called “fracking,” which have allowed industry to access sources that were previously out of reach. While a lot of media attention has focused on “shale gas,” these technological innovations have also allowed industry to access “tight oil.” Horizontal drill holes precisely follow target strata in sedimentary rocks deep below the surface, and fracking creates pathways for oil, as well as gas, from formations that have an initially low porosity and permeability. This is currently exemplified by the Bakken oil field in North Dakota and surrounding areas.

According to the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, oil production from the Bakken field has increased from about 1000 barrels per day in 2004 to almost 1 million barrels per day in mid-2012, corresponding to 12 percent of current U.S. output. For its projections, then, the IEA notes this dramatic, recent increase, and then extrapolates forward, including estimated reserves in several other tight oil formations. In their central scenario, tight oil and related “natural gas liquid” production in the U.S. will reach more than 6 million barrels per day by about 2020, tripling from current values, offsetting continuing declines in conventional oil production, and accounting for more than half of total U.S. oil production from 2015 to 2030.

If that happens, then the 2020-2025 peak in U.S. oil production, of about 11 million barrels per day in the IEA central scenario, would be approximately the same as the famous 1970 peak in U.S. production of oil and natural gas liquids that was predicted by geologist M. King Hubbert.

Don’t misunderstand. The amount of oil on Earth is finite, and it could become depleted some day— in practical terms— particularly if consumption continues to increase exponentially in the near term. However, if the IEA prediction proves accurate, it ain’t over yet. Price increases and technological innovation still matter, a lot.

The IEA’s estimate for the U.S. is a bold prediction. It may be close … or not. Although wildly successful since 2004, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracture to recover tight oil and shale gas remain relatively young technologies whose long-term outcomes are unclear. It is worth considering a widely cited, though somewhat controversial, evaluation of the Bakken field in September 2012 by Rune Likvern at theoildrum.com. Likvern notes that “the estimated breakeven price for the ‘average’ well is $80 to $90 per barrel,” just barely profitable at today’s prices. And, “the ‘average’ well … experiences a year over year [production] decline of 40 percent”, two to four times the typical rate for conventional oil wells.

In 1976, Saudi Arabia overtook the United States to become the world’s largest oil producer. The dramatic prediction that the U.S. will pull ahead again is based on predicted growth in this country, discussed above, combined with nearly constant Saudi production. The IEA bases this on the stated (and historically stable) Saudi policy to control output, and the observation that increasingly intensive, enhanced oil recovery techniques are being implemented in many large Saudi oil fields to offset declining conventional production. This estimate stands in contrast to IEA and other estimates just after the turn of the century, which projected substantial growth in Saudi production from 2010 to 2020.

While the IEA’s central scenario may be the best guess on this topic—as on most others—in this case it seems to be the median within a broad range of uncertain outcomes. Relatively soon, the Saudi Arabian government is likely to undergo substantial transformation, in contrast to the political stability of the past 40 years, and priorities may change. If they chose to pursue unconventional oil resources with the same vigor as North Americans are now doing, Saudi production could increase quite substantially.

In summary, there are large uncertainties in any future scenario, but the IEA projections for U.S. oil production seem as probable as any, and less improbable than many. In addition, in considering global resource distribution, one should not overlook exponentially increasing Canadian oil production, from both tar sands and tight oil reservoirs. And, the IEA Outlook and many other sources predict substantial growth in natural gas production as well, globally but especially in North America.

There is one more factor to consider. None of this is good news for controlling atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Most oil supplies, and an increasing proportion of gas, are used in cars and trucks running on liquid fuel. These distributed sources are beyond the reach of methods for CO2 capture from smokestack gases. Various proposed methods for “air capture” of CO2 remain untested at industrial scales, while ideas about geological capture from shallow seawater—and hence from the atmosphere—are still at the basic research stage.

As Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren likes to say, in facing the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions we will choose to do some mitigation, we will be forced to undertake some adaptation, and we will be subjected to some suffering. At the moment, the economic and political momentum seems to be moving us away from effective mitigation, towards adaptation—such as giant sea gates to protect New York City from rising sea level and the threat of increasingly powerful storms—along with a big dose of suffering. How big, no one really knows.

The IEA scenarios are based on a relatively sunny economic outlook, with real growth in global GDP of around 3.5 percent per year. If fossil fuel supplies are depleted sooner than the IEA predicts (or interrupted by conflict), before significant implementation of alternative energy sources, this will have a large, negative impact on the economy, with feedbacks on demand for fossil fuels that will be too little, too late. We’d better hope this doesn’t happen. Similarly, if the impacts of climate change on food supply and coastal economies are larger than in the median scenarios described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this too could reduce energy demand in very painful ways that almost everyone would prefer to avoid, for ourselves and our children.

Under the circumstances, widespread implementation of a substantial, effective carbon tax in developed and developing countries just seems like a conservative precaution, similar to paying insurance premiums. The IEA describes some likely, desirable outcomes of such a dramatic policy change in its “450 scenario.” It is practically achievable, it could be done, and it’s worth working for, but it is not the direction in which we are currently headed, so don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen. Meanwhile, hang on tight—the future is coming at us fast.

Popular Mechanics