[Pops]

I'm not convinced we've reached peak. What with the various political and market manipulations afoot, a pandemic, possible resultant recession, ongoing shale troubles, etc, etc, the fog is deep.

Having said that, for the purposes of discussion, let's stipulate that peak is past. Seems reasonable since outside KSA, RU, USA everyone else seems to have peaked and since 2017 have declined about 6%, Ron says C+C is past, EIA and IEA projecting it not recovering next year at least.


http://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-january-p ... on-data-3/

Let's further stipulate that this from EIA (h/t globalpeak.info) indicates the nature, if not the reality of the future, namely demand exceeding supply—notice the red bars indicating continous stock draw all next year.



And IEA


And finally, lets just say that supply never catches up to demand. In the real world, that's all that matters. When the market wants just one more barrel than can be supplied, the bidding war starts and doesn't stop until enough buyers are eliminated to balance the market. The "want" is still there, it's the ability to pay that is the limit. Of course with high price comes increased capital for drillers to drill and frackers to frack but let's just imagine the point of diminishing returns.

No other stipulations, just high price on limited supply.
What happens?
What do "people" do?
What do you do?

.

[AdamB]

I'm not convinced we've reached peak. What with the various political and market manipulations afoot, a pandemic, possible resultant recession, ongoing shale troubles, etc, etc, the fog is deep.

I'm not convinced either. All the current demand side effects, while substantial, aren't a guarantee of peak oil today. But for awhile (as with the others before), it will certainly look like it.

Having said that, for the purposes of discussion, let's stipulate that peak is past. Seems reasonable since outside KSA, RU, USA everyone else seems to have peaked and since 2017 have declined about 6%, Ron says C+C is past, EIA and IEA projecting it not recovering next year at least.

As we all now know, past peaks are not indicative of a lack of future ones. However, as it is an operative assumption at some of the higher levels of academia, government, and think tanks, I'm good to go, operating with this stipulation.

Let's further stipulate that this from EIA (h/t globalpeak.info) indicates the nature, if not the reality of the future, namely demand exceeding supply—notice the red bars indicating continous stock draw all next year.

If we are arguing peak demand as the cause of recent peak oil, it is difficult to then claim a reversal without breaking the stipulation of no more peak oils. The EIA is bound to their international model used for the IEO estimates. That model is based primarily on GDP and population, and at the last release of said IEO document they were asked about modeling peak demand, and they said that they do not do that. Might be can not do that, if independent variables are GDP and population. You would have to predict those go down to reverse the growth trend built into a system like that. The IEA does back of the envelope type calculations, so they aren't bound by basic modeling rules. Throw out independent variables and anything is possible.

And finally, lets just say that supply never catches up to demand. In the real world, that's all that matters. When the market wants just one more barrel than can be supplied, the bidding war starts and doesn't stop until enough buyers are eliminated to balance the market. The "want" is still there, it's the ability to pay that is the limit. Of course with high price comes increased capital for drillers to drill and frackers to frack but let's just imagine the point of diminishing returns.

No other stipulations, just high price on limited supply.
What happens?
What do "people" do?
What do you do?

So this is just a artificial "lets talk about the doomer porn we used to when we thought this was all going to be real" exercise. The answer is obvious of course. Locking down a particular supply/demand profile allows only the variable of price, and in your scenario is designed to drive price higher, at least initially. What happens next is exactly what is expected. Conservation and substitution.

I would mention that demand isn't consumption, in the economic world. So consumption will be capped at whatever your supply profile is, even if the demand remains high and becomes higher with time, continuing the expected price pressure.

I'll keep driving my EV, powered at least in part by the solar panels on the garage roof. In order to avoid higher fuel prices, I'll get an EV with longer range, and put up with the charging needs at 200-300 mile intervals during my cross continental travels.

[Pops]

I'm thinking people will do nothing at first, just absorb the spike. If 2021 looks like EIA/IEA forecast oil might get to $$80. People won't notice much.

After the second and third year, if fracking hasn't rebounded and OPEC and Iran haven't come back, oil in storage will have fallen below 5 or 10 year averages and the price might get to $100-125—that is if the economy is otherwise recovering. We were there in -08-'14 and I think most folks will still be thinking this is a result of the pandemic and fracking will catch up soon. But they'll try to conserve some, drive a little less, parking the coal roller and taking the Vega sometimes. They'll adjust the budget, starti to combine trips, buy more online and gripe about the fuel surcharges. Just like 2008-14 basically.

Demand has been climbing an average of 1%/yr since forever, so just average growth expects 5% more supply by 2025. If no relief—remember, the period from 2017-2025 could have seen at least 25% of production continuing to decline a couple percent per year, and of course the world will be continuing to deplete at 80-100 MB per day. So it wouldn't be surprising to see prices climbing above $120 to...whatever the limit is at the time.

Hard to guess beyond that, but even holding supply steady should see the price rise.

Personally we're getting a little long in the tooth, not over the hill yet but the horizon is shortening. We'll sell this place probably spring of '23 if the tax situation is the same. Depending on oil production we'll likely either buy another fixer or if the above PO situation seems to be unfolding, build a little tight cabin-ish (ish because I'm still married, LOL) somewhere cheap. By 2026-27 I'll be approaching 70 so will need to be in place.
.

[Plantagenet]

I the period from 2017-2025 could have seen at least 25% of production continuing to decline a couple percent per year, and of course the world will be continuing to deplete at 80-100 MB per day. So it wouldn't be surprising to see prices climbing above $120 to...whatever the limit is at the time.

Could well be. A lot depends on whether the US fracking industry really is going to keep slowing down or even be phased out, as Biden suggested during the campaign, or whether the financial subsidies start flowing again and the fracking companies come back to life and US oil production starts upward once again in response to higher oil prices.

Personally we're getting a little long in the tooth, not over the hill yet but the horizon is shortening. We'll sell this place probably spring of '23 if the tax situation is the same.

If Biden gets the tax increases he campaigned on, the capital gains tax could be going up a lot. It all depends on whether or not the Ds take the two Georgia Senate seats. We'll have some confidence about which way taxes will go pretty soon

Depending on oil production we'll likely either buy another fixer or if the above PO situation seems to be unfolding, build a little tight cabin-ish (ish because I'm still married, LOL) somewhere cheap. By 2026-27 I'll be approaching 70 so will need to be in place.
.

Good plan...and good luck to you.

Cheers!

[Ibon]

Almost no tourists have come for the past 9 months. My garden has never been more productive. Is this practice? Maybe. Good riddance to all those demanding tourists needing and wanting and consuming nature...... our coffee production is up...... even in a peak oil world folks will demand high elevation coffee........

You guys remember the End oF Suburbia documentary by Heinberg and how that was such a lightbulb moment for so many of us? Damn, that was 15 years ago.

Foolish to make any predictions at this point...... even with all those fancy graphs!

I don't have a fucking clue!

[AdamB]

Demand has been climbing an average of 1%/yr since forever, so just average growth expects 5% more supply by 2025.

Well...sorta. Supply, and by extension consumption, was 62.2 mmbbl/day in 1979, during one of the prior global peak oils. In 1996, the world demanded/consumed more, at 63.8 mmbbl/day.

So for 16 years, no, demand didn't grow much at all. 5 years ago Amy Jaffe began discussing a change to exactly this profile, and CSIS was talking about demand deceleration at the global level 2 years ago now, and recently WoodMac, Rystad, BP, and DNL-GV are all focused on the idea of peak oil consumption. Environmental factors, EV personal transport, EV medium and heavy trucks, increased efficiencies, and so on and so forth being some of the reasons mentioned.

So the folks who study this aren't so bullish on ever increasing oil consumption anymore. The world certainly not needing more oil while the global economies grew from 1979 to 1996.

Also, by the definitions you outlined in the original question, no increase in supply doesn't allow an increase in consumption. Without more to consume, you can't increase consumption, even if you are "demanding" it. Therefore the only dependent variable left is price, so if demand increases, but consumption cannot, price goes up.

Then all you've got left is conservation and substitution. And high prices, how high becoming a question of supply decline rate and speed of increasing conservation and substitution. If conservation and substitution outruns field declines, prices will mitigate downward from wherever they started.

[AdamB]

You guys remember the End oF Suburbia documentary by Heinberg and how that was such a lightbulb moment for so many of us? Damn, that was 15 years ago.

I certainly do.

There are better quotes in there than when Art Berman, standing on the steps of the Dept of Energy building in Washington DC back in 2011, declared that the US didn't have enough oil in tight formations to make a difference in US production. End of Suburbia is chock-a-block full of even better material.

Foolish to make any predictions at this point...... even with all those fancy graphs!

Not foolish to make predictions. Foolish to make them without information, experience, or understanding of the science fields and industries involved.

I don't have a fucking clue!

A good starting point for anyone to accept when guessing into the future. End of Suburbia relies on folks who didn't start out from this point. Couldn't learn from the past either, as everything that has happened since then, had happened before. Learn some history, otherwise you'll repeat it.

[coffeeguyzz]

There is a vast amount of known oil resources around the world that can, and will, come online when the demand calls for it.

Just the Canadian Oil Sands alone can economically provide North American demand for many, many decades.

What is presently overlooked is how innovations still continue apace which is both lowering the cost of unconventional production ("shale") while greatly increasing the recovery rate.
Skeptics claimed ~8 to 10 years ago that those predicting vastly increased output were "Cornicopians" for anticipating strong production numbers.
Really, now.

The cold hard fact is that - in the aggregate - viable acreage for hydrocarbon development is INCREASING in size.
The fact that EOG just announced a 21 Trillion cubic foot (!!!) recoverable resource (calling it Dorado) in their Eagleford and Austin Chalk holdings should alsrt people as to what to expect in the coming years.

Alternatively, different energy sources - hydrogen being an excellent candidate - are on track to disrupt our century long preference for hydrocarbons as the premeir source for our energy.

So much is unknown.
Oil scarcity should most emphatically not be a serious concern.

[Pops]

Foolish to make any predictions at this point...... even with all those fancy graphs!

I don't have a fucking clue!

Nor I, hence a thread of speculation. A little: what if—then what. Two heads are better they used to say, before the internet anyway.
Sounds like you've been speculating already, my friend, you and your little burro packing down some of that mountain grown.

--
most of Bidens tax increase are on upper incomes, capital gains as regular income happens for over $1mil income as I read it, homeowners exemption remains—not surprisingly it was the gop who wanted to eliminate the exemption—but gaslight is the new sunshine, is it not?

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Under existing tax law, if you sell your primary residence, you will not be taxed on the first $250,000 in profit you make from the sale, and if you are married, the exemption is up to $500,000. Biden has not proposed changing that. His proposal would increase taxes on capital gains to 39.6% only for those making an income of over $1 million.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checkin ... 9503116950

But the end of homeowners exemption or extending it to 5 years like the GOP wanted would be a kink for me. We try to buy only places we like in places where prices are already growing—the IRS can just decide you aren't a homeowner but are really an investor.

--

As for the happy talk, had I believed the first person I talked with here at PO back in '04 or whenever I would have clicked off and gone back to perusing adult videos. Turns out there were about 10 years in there - more for some - that weren't at all happy, my penchant for doom saved me some pain and actually built my nestegg. But thanks for the pep talk, and don't worry, I still have my 7.3 PowerStroke 4x4. Speculating about happy motoring into sunset goes on another site.
.

[mousepad]

Not foolish to make predictions. Foolish to make them without information, experience, or understanding of the science fields and industries involved.

Who said this?

Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success

A man with information, experience and understanding of science. Not everybody who makes a wrong prediction is a fool, because nobody can have ALL information. Do you have ALL information ?

[AdamB]

Who said this?

Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success

A man with information, experience and understanding of science. Not everybody who makes a wrong prediction is a fool, because nobody can have ALL information. Do you have ALL information ?

Of course not. Who in their right mind would ever think that in a stochastic universe that anyone has ALL the information? Some just have more than others. And understand the stochastic nature of their future estimates, anchored in the additional understanding that there are no facts in the future.

[Tanada]

I don't think we have quite hit peak, but it is a good starting point for discussion.

We used to say frequently "We will only be able to see the peak in the rear view mirror after 3-5 years." I still believe this because every time the price has shot up in the past supply gas gone up after a delay for drilling and/or newest techniques to deploy. When I logged in here the first time in 2005 we were all looking at world supply+demand climbing in lockstep and in turn driving prices up. By 2008 this past $100/bbl the first time and rapidly climbed to $147/bbl before the economy crashed hard in August 2008.

But here is the kicker. Even as the economy crashed dropping demand and along with it prices the nifty new Hydraulic Fracturing technology was getting a massive roll out. Simultaneously with the fracking arrival China switched over from being a net oil exporter to being a net oil importer. Through 2009 prices recovered to the $90-$100/bbl range and Fracking really took off without anything resembling restraint. As we around here may remember this resulted in supply growth exceeding demand growth creating the 2015 glut and crash. That set off the whole ETP craze claiming that oil would be so cheap it would be worthless within five years. Clearly that cooky prediction was shown to be as useless as most of us recognised as soon as it was introduced within three years.

Meanwhile as OPEC and Russia made production cuts starting in late 2016 prices climbed back up a bit and American fracking temporarily dropped. Then the Fracking craze really kicked into high gear in 2017 and we started seeing the USA break all time peak production records that were 47ish years old. We broke the record over and over as the months passed until the COVID panic killed the economy and cut demand. Fracking has been falling off again reminiscent of 2016 and production right along with it. At first this was hardly noticed because prices were down ad the media gives no attention in low price periods.

So here we are December 2020. Prices are moderate, fracking is still being done in the best producing most profitable zones. In 2018-19 Canadian Bitumen sands made its own quiet recovery. Baring an actual shooting civil war the economy will recover at some point. So if this is real peak the recovering economy will bring up demand and thus prices will support more fracking and more bitumen sands production. So that raises the key question, will new environmental policy prevent growth from returning in Fracking and Tar Sands, or will fiscal policy support supply growth? It is not the simple supply-demand=price equation we like to pretend it is because ecological and economic government policies have a huge impact.

Time will tell.

[JuanP]

And if it weren't for geopolitical reasons Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Lybia, and, maybe, some other places could increase production, too, IIRC. I am not calling a peak until we've had continuously high prices, declining production, and no geopolitical bottlenecks for a decade, but this COULD be it.

[AdamB]

I don't think we have quite hit peak, but it is a good starting point for discussion.

We used to say frequently "We will only be able to see the peak in the rear view mirror after 3-5 years."

"We" not including all the folks who called it in advance, or as it happened? As opposed to those, like the IEA, who called it 4 years AFTER they said it happened, and still got it wrong?

It strikes me that when 2nd or 3rd peak oils can happen as much as a century after the first (Ohio) and large regions as much as 40 years (the world) or 50 years (the US), maybe 3-5 years is a bit premature?

But here is the kicker. Even as the economy crashed dropping demand and along with it prices the nifty new Hydraulic Fracturing technology was getting a massive roll out.

Did you know that the USGS documented that as of around 2015, 3/4's of all hydraulic fracturing had happened in the PAST century, and not this one? For those of us doing it back in the 80's and early 90's it was amusing, when other people discovered it and decided it was all new and exciting. I was happy when it turns out that real live scientists had documented for me a reference I could use to prove something folks didn't seem aware of.

So that raises the key question, will new environmental policy prevent growth from returning in Fracking and Tar Sands, or will fiscal policy support supply growth?

Ooooooo....good one. Good enough to be a point of contention in how to handle such things while building out future estimates.

It is not the simple supply-demand=price equation we like to pretend it is because ecological and economic government policies have a huge impact.
Time will tell.

One way is that you can drop in economic measures to reflect the consequences of fiscal issues (capital constraints on new development), environmental costs (new, or increased current regulatory ones), and so on and so forth.

[Plantagenet]

...that raises the key question, will new environmental policy prevent growth from returning in Fracking and Tar Sands, or will fiscal policy support supply growth? It is not the simple supply-demand=price equation we like to pretend it is because ecological and economic government policies have a huge impact.

Time will tell.

I've been wondering the same thing. It all depends on whether Joe Biden and the Ds are telling the truth when they say they are concerned about climate change and they want to "end the oil industry" and "transition away from oil and gas."

Biden-end-oil-industry

Personally, I don't think Joe has very strong convictions on the matter. Joe had to say he was worried about global warming and fossil fuel use to win the D primary, but I really don't think he'll take significant steps to end the oil industry and reduce fossil fuel production in the US once he is president.

I expect Joe will have an energy and climate change policy much like Obama's......remember Obama also said he was going to stop climate change but under Obama the amount of fracking grew and grew and grew and US oil production reached new record highs. I'm looking for the same kind of flip-flop to more fracking and higher oil production to happen under Joe Biden as well.

Cheers!

[suxs]

Plant, why do you feel compelled to offer a predictable and non-objective personal opinion when your biases are so well known?

Instead, try telling us something we already didn't know.

[Plantagenet]

Plant, why do you feel compelled ...

Clearly you don't understand what is going on here.

No one is compelled to post anything here....just as no one is compelled to read anything.

Its all entirely voluntary.

try telling us something we already didn't know.

That would take too long.

Wouldn't it be much simpler and quicker for me to tell you what you already know?

Cheers!

[suxs]

Plant, I understand all too well what's going on here.

You throw out a straw man to avoid the question and that's OK. The issue is your narrow definition of "compel." You see, one must read the entire sentence to recognize a word's meaning. "To force" is one of several iterations of "compel"; however, the context infers "to drive or to motivate or to oblige."

I hope this helps you.

Cheers back at you!

[JuanP]

I don't expect Biden to want to do much about fighting Climate Change. He will NOT be up for reelection in 2024, unless a cure is discovered that reverses aging and cognitive decline. The people behind him, like Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party may have more of an interest in this, but I would never underestimate the power of the fossil fuels lobbies in Washington. I expect any decisions or actions taken to be mostly window dressing, like Obama and the Paris accord.

The US economy is fucked if we stop shale oil extraction and have to start importing a significant amount of our oil consumption to replace it. Today's USA is not the USA of 20 or 30 years ago. The US Dollar could not take it, IMO.

[REAL Green]

I don't expect Biden to want to do much about fighting Climate Change. He will NOT be up for reelection in 2024, unless a cure is discovered that reverses aging and cognitive decline. The people behind him, like Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party may have more of an interest in this, but I would never underestimate the power of the fossil fuels lobbies in Washington. I expect any decisions or actions taken to be mostly window dressing, like Obama and the Paris accord.

The US economy is fucked if we stop shale oil extraction and have to start importing a significant amount of our oil consumption to replace it. Today's USA is not the USA of 20 or 30 years ago. The US Dollar could not take it, IMO.

Biden is not elected yet. The US is as good or better than many other nations including China. Take of your anti-American glasses for once.