untothislast wrote:Staniford's overall take is that we're in for a long, slow economic 'squeeze', which he optimistically sees as being more than manageable - at least in the short term.
killJOY wrote:I've read thousands of pages of this stuff over the last two and half years as a professor of writing and Lit. concerned about the oil situation. I've come to the following conclusion:
It's all a bunch of pretentious babble. No one knows a goddamn thing about what's going to happen, near term or short term.
BabyPeanut wrote:I found it difficult to locate an explanation as to what WOCAP was on this site so I thought I'd add one: link
THE WORLD OIL PRODUCTION CAPACITY MODEL
A paper presented by A.M. Samsam Bakhtiari at the International Oil Conference (Copenhagen, Denmark --- December 10, 2003):
INTRODUCTION
The 'World Oil Production Capacity' (WOCAP) model was developed over the years 1997-2000 [1]. The first test runs were made in 2000 and early simulation results became available in 2001. The model was duly revised in 2002 to introduce politics in OPEC countries; and in 2003 an attempt was made to usher in geopolitics.
THE WOCAP MODEL
The WOCAP model is a simple mathematical model of the iterative type, with the year as its basic computing step.
At its very foundation are conventional oil's global 'Ultimate Recoverable Reserves' (URR) of 1,900 billion barrels developed by Dr. Colin Campbell [2]. Other relevant inputs are taken from either the BP PLC databases [3] or the author's personal sources.
Within WOCAP, the international oil industry is divided into OPEC and Non-OPEC. OPEC is further subdivided into its eleven member countries; and Non-OPEC split in eleven regions.
WOCAP's overall structure is presented in Figure 1. As shown, the price of crude oil is of paramount importance in providing necessary funds for investment in productive facilities. It goes without saying that both domestic politics and global geopolitics directly affect the amount of available oil export revenues eventually allocated to the respective oil industries. And, in some cases, political considerations overshadow all other factors.
In consequence, WOCAP's five major factors influencing oil production capacities are:
(1) Adequate upstream maintenance of existing installations;
(2) Timely projects of enhanced oil recovery (EOR);
(3) New oil field discoveries (from yet-to-find reserves);
(4) Annual withdrawal from known producing fields;
(5) Political intangibles.
(6) Geopolitical intangibles.
It was the two latter intangibles which were the focus of the twin 2002 and 2003 revisions, as attempts were made to introduce the impact of such factors into the productive process --- a very demanding task, as dealing with intangibles always is a rather cumbersome process.
WOCAP TEST RUNS
The initial test runs were made to fine-tune major parameters within the WOCAP model. For OPEC, the study cases of Iran and Kuwait were chosen for being amply documented; and, for Non-OPEC, the North Sea region and Russia were selected --- both entities having rather good sets of supportive production data.
All the tests subsequently evolved into full-scale simulations and those for the two Non-OPEC cases were duly published [4,5].
WOCAP WORLD SIMULATIONS
The latest WOCAP Base Case simulation is shown in Figure 2. The main feature therein is the oil production peak predicted for the years 2006/2007 at around 81 million b/d (mb/d). This peak can also be interpreted as being part of the "bumpy plateau" stretching over the period 2005 to 2008.
Moreover, the Non-OPEC output comes to peak towards the close of the present decade, after plateauing just below 50 mb/d. As for OPEC, it peaks in the midst of the next decade at around 35 mb/d.
In Figure 3, the Base Case simulation is shown with the error margins added in. As shown, errors could take the global oil peak to a level ranging between 79.5 and 82.5 mb/d.
CONCLUSION
All in all, the WOCAP model was developed to predict global oil production levels and capacities for the 21st century. Its main simulation results clearly show that global oil production should come to peak during the present decade --- inevitably leading to a revolution in worldwide energy consumption and societal matters.
References
[1] The WOCAP model was developed by a small team under the leadership of Miss Behdis Eslamnour.
[2] Dr. Campbell's ASPO databases are to be found at http://www.peakoil.net
[3] The major BP databases are available at http://www.bp.com
[4] A.M. Samsam Bakhtiari, 'North Sea oil reserves: half full or half empty ?', OGJ, August 25, 2003, pp.24-32.
[5] Ibid., 'Expectations of sustained Russian oil production boom unjustified', OGJ, April 29, 2003, pp.24-26.
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