tita wrote:AdamB wrote:Define conventional oil please.
Very good question. Why do we label LTO unconventional when the final product is the same? I'm not an expert, so I ask wikipedia:
These oil sands resources are called unconventional oil to distinguish them from oil which can be extracted using traditional oil well methods
Voilà. If you just drill a well and pump oil from a reservoir where it was accumulated, this is conventional oil.
Wikipedia doesn't know any more about conventional oil than it did peak oil apparently. I remember back in the day when they considered Richard Heinberg an "industry expert" rather that what he really was trained in.
But the question remains unanswered, because of A) your belief that wiki knows much of anything and B) the question, it was about conventional OIL, not the technologies involved to reach it or produce it.
tita wrote: If you have to do anything else to get that oil (like fracking), then it is unconventional. And we can argue about EOR, and if it means that reserves developped with it are unconventional or not...
You aren't described anything about conventional, or unconventional, oil.
tita wrote:Well, I just wanted to put LTO and oil sands apart to see how the "cheap" and "easy" oil is doing right now. And I didn't created this subdivision in the first place. I read frequently that conventional oil peaked 10 years ago, and wanted to understand what it meant and if it was true.
The subdivision was created when peak oil didn't happen as expected, because peak oilers don't know much about petroleum geology. Or economics. So they invented another category so they could say that peaked, in order to make a distinction without a difference to the consumers. Who, at least in America, are now running around appreciating the current glut caused by new supply, regardless of source. Because really, they don't care, and it doesn't matter.
"Conventional" also has a time component, "conventional" oil as defined only by the producing technology used to get it ended in 1901 when the rotary table unleashed spindletop, using a new and more efficient method of drilling than had previously been the primary provider of crude oil.
Peak oilers tend to miss this one as well, because the history of the industry they misrepresent isn't known to them either.
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."
Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"