Tanada wrote:Hubbert did not write that the USA would produce 10MM/bbl/d in 1970 and never produce more oil than that under any circumstances. He specifically wrote that the USA would produce 10 MM/bbl/d of conventionally produced oil and that conventionally produced oil would decline from 1970ish onward. In that prediction he was 100% correct.
Can you find the term "conventional oil" in Hubbert's seminal work on the topic, circa 1956?I haven't been able to. To some extent it is logical, how could he be using today's terms if they are new, because they were invented recently to try and pretend that oil coming out of the ground is different over THERE, from over THERE. And, as it turns out, they have the same combination of carbon and hydrogen molecules, but no no no, THAT is conventional, and THAT one isn't...sorta...I think.
And I should mention that I have used what is believed to be Hubbert's reference for his historical production information contained in that paper. (We all need to have a national class local geoscience library!) And it has the shale oil production contained within it, from as far back as the late 1800's. And I also didn't find in that 1956 paper any description of him excluding that oil from his totals...because back then..it was an obviously regular oil as anything else.
I blame this semantic nonsense on Campbell when he needed to find a way to exclude oil volumes from his 1989 peak oil prediction, and the smaller the resource base the better. And everyone has fallen for it ever since, without asking even the most basic question. What is conventional oil, if it is chemically identical to the other stuff? Easy answer..it isn't about the oil, but non-standard definitions to try and exclude volumes to make a point.
A point, I might add, that the consumer doesn't see or care about. They just want gasoline, and don't care what it is manufactured out of.
Tanada wrote:People love to quibble over the fact that total oil from all sources is greater than what was predicted, but if you look at conventional oil defined as oil that will flow under its own pressure or gravity through a geological formation to an extraction well then Hubbert is completely correct.
You've just described all the shale oil produced from shales in the original sweepspots in the data I mentioned above. So sure hubbert was correct...he was counting shale oil right on through 1956 when he used it in his totals. But he didn't call it conventional, as best I could find in his seminal work.
Tanada wrote: He was simply the first petroleum geologist to point out that (much like the current boom in fracked shale) there are a limited number of formations around the world or in the USA specifically that produce oil which can be recovered by drainage through the natural geological deposit with relatively simple technology.
J.P. Lesley probably gets credit for that, in 1886 during a talk in Pittsburgh PA.
Backed up by arguably the REAL first petroleum geologist. And by 1919 the USGS was doing it as well, in the form of David White (I've got one of his old reference works, with his name on it, isn't that cool?). The first reference I can find to Hubbert proclaiming the end was 1938. He was calling for peak oil in the US by 1950 back then. And Hubbert never said "simple" technology either. By the time he did the 1956 work he could count, and he had participated in, at least 2 of the new technologies that allowed his reserve growth work (circa 1968) to be something he KNEW he needed to account for. Larry Drew of the USGS wrote about that moment with Hubbert in his book.
Tanada wrote:Fracking allows humans to use technology to alter the geological layers deep under the surface that do not flow naturally at anything above a very slow rate or not at all.
That is just ONE of the benefits of hydraulic fracturing. There is another of equal importance. It allows HIGHER PRODUCTION RATES from formations that didn't require hydraulic fracturing at all. Shale oil and gas falls into this category as well. Those original shale sweet spots were real humdingers! Success in the industry is based on discounted cash value, and getting the same amount out sooner makes better wells. Even if the amount retrieved is the same.
Tanada wrote: Yes people drilled into shale beds over a century ago and recovered petrochemicals, especially Natural Gas, but those wells were always very slow producers which is why some of them are still as productive today as they were 100 years ago. Different techniques to frack deep shale formations to increase gas recovery rates have been tried for a very long time, starting out with simple systems like putting a charge of dynamite near the bottom of the well and fracturing the rock within its damage radius all the way up to project gassbuggy where they stacked three small nuclear devices in a well shaft at great depth and blasted underground cavities that filled with gas they then recovered.
The patent for torpedoes (that is what they called them) dates to 1865. The first was arguably used in 1857 (58?) by arguably the first petroleum engineer. And those experiments generated the same kind of order of magnitude flow rate increases as they did with the new systems. They might have been simple, but on a scaled basis were just as effective. Project Gasbuggy was a riot. I loved reading the DOE proclamations of how successful it was...in creating radioactive natural gas. Gotta love government success stories.
Tanada wrote:Just because humans use technology to alter geological layers at great depth to recover hydrocarbons does not make those formations 'conventional' producers. Yes the petrochemicals recovered are indistinguishable from the same chemicals that come from conventional natural flow wells, but that in no way changes the fact that those wells are unconventional themselves.
Your original contention was all about conventional oil. And you keep describing techniques that are used to retrieve the same oil and gas. When might you detail the difference in OIL, as opposed to discussing the multiple technologies we have invented along the way to make more and hard to get stuff easier to get? See why "conventional oil" doesn't work? But you are discussing all the cool ways people fought their way out of various scarcity claims in 3 different centuries now...and it has nothing to do with different oil types, but just run of the mill Moore's Law in computing type stuff.
Which begs the question...how many more technological changes can we come up with, to continue to disappoint malthusians? Ever hear of SPL gels? My current favorite.
Tanada wrote:As those conventional formations continue to decline in number, and deep water formations that are exploited are no different aside from the fact that they are far off shore from land, the absolute quantity of conventional formation oil production will continue to decline in its proportion of the world total. Fracking has given us a breathing space by offsetting that decline in free flowing formation supply, but compared to conventional reservoirs frackable hydrocarbon rich shale beds are in limited numbers just like conventional naturally flowing reservoirs are. They appear from everything I have read on the topic to be far more limited than conventional reservoirs in economically viable number of locations.
To make that claim, economic viability, you need someone to have produced a resource cost curve to examine. And that isn't easy, and there are REASONS why peak oilers want nothing to do with making them. They are revealing. And NOT in a good way to peakerville claims. I know the IEA has them. I know the EIA has them. Are you thinking of either of those?
Tanada wrote:
Fracking however is a much different story because the amount of cash invested in drilling and fracking a well before the first barrel of oil is produced is a very high hurdle. Nobody is going to drill and frack a well unless there is a very good chance it will produce enough oil to pay off. That is to say, pay back the investment and produce a profit for an extended time after the investment is paid back. Fracking costs are high enough that a small operator like the ones I was just writing about can't make the step up because one dry hole, or even a hole that doesn't pay a hefty profit and they are out of business.
Your "hurdle" is called CapX, and it was no different when a well is completed open hole and natural. Drilling has never been a cheap proposition. So the CapX is higher because we now have a completion in there? Good thing the completion allows order of magnitude changes in flowrate to make better wells then, but the risk doesn't change in the least. Neither does the calculation for payback. Read the definition provided by the USGS for continuous accumulations, they explicitly lay out a lower risk for these kinds of plays, because you don't get many dry holes. Whereas when you do your risk adjusted value of that offshore well, you had BETTER get your dry hole risk figured out right.
Your entire statement revolves around different costs for different types of development, nothing more. And this one the industry has had clocked since before you and I were born. But to answer the core of the question you are circling around, which gets done first, how much of this one will delay how much of that one, you need those resource cost curves again.
Tanada wrote:The basic facts remain, we live on a finite world with a finite quantity of petrochemicals that we can extract and consume to drive our economic system including the agriculture and transportation of food to feed the soon to be 8 Billion humans on this world. I don't see a fast crash barring an existential event, but I do see a continuing slow grind down as energy costs ratchet upwards to the next level of quasi-stability. I expect that when conventional decline exceeds fracking increases, OR world economic growth demands more oil than both conventional and fracked formations can provide, OR something happens to badly disrupt OPEC production for a moderately long period, people will once again accept the fundamental reality of Peak Oil, the cost of using a finite resource on a finite planet while ignoring its fundamental limits.
You will be happy to know that the conference I attended this summer (the one I use to bash the random number generator modelers) had some clever folks building exactly the kind of systems needed to answer some of your questions. A complete accounting of how much in the ground, how much extractable at what cost, transportation, refining and distribution to meet demand, on a global basis. They appear to have advanced beyond Hubbert's geo-analytics understanding based on some sort of technically recoverable metric, dumped in the engineering, economics, geopolitical costs, who in the world is buying and what they are willing to pay, it was quite the modeling exercise, which is why they were at the IEW. Good for them, you don't go there to hide from people telling you how you can do it better.
Still can't handle a random black swan event, but they can model what they will look like, if you dropped one into their systems.
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)"