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Should this site be shut down?

General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.

Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby Ibon » Wed 06 May 2020, 03:03:03

asg70 wrote:
Everyone has to realize that shale has been there waiting to be exploited since the start. Even if we had all of 2020's technology, I doubt much of it would have been developed as long as there was easier to drill oil available.


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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby Darian S » Thu 07 May 2020, 00:55:04

asg70 wrote:
ralfy wrote:Product cost will still go up because of physical limitations and gravity


And product cost can not go up without cost at the pump eventually following suit. Point being that the invisible hand of the market does indeed self-regulate.

Everyone has to realize that shale has been there waiting to be exploited since the start. Even if we had all of 2020's technology, I doubt much of it would have been developed as long as there was easier to drill oil available. The factors that delayed the exploitation of shale then are not that different from the shuttering of shale now. In both cases all it does is pause things until a time when demand for oil drives prices back up to a level that is economical for shale. Also remember that it was The Oil Drum who completely miscalculated the economics of shale back in the day, leading to it being discredited and going defunct. But today that phenomenon of being overly pessimistic about shale's prospects persists. History has proven that while it IS more expensive to recover shale, it remains viable to do so while keeping oil safely in-the-pocket to persist BAU as we know it. Unconventional blew up the eschatology (yes, eschatology) of Hubert's conventional oil curve and so we are now in territory where classic peak oil concepts and assumptions are no longer useful.

The end result is that the much anticipated day of peak oil reckoning shifts further and further into the future to the point where one might question the validity of having a forum hosted on said domain.

BTW, I remember the old IEA chart where peakers mocked at the zone labeled "future discoveries" or "unconventional" meant to compensate for conventional oil depletion. This leaning on unconventional was also a hallmark of Daniel Yergin's book The Prize. All of this was mocked, mocked, mocked. Well, it turns out they were right all along, at least in the short to medium term.

The problem is after the peak in conventional of 2005, and the following crash of 2008, the U.S. never recovered. And massive debt was undertaken to keep things going, the fed used quantitative easing to prop the economy in the slowest nonrecovery ever.

All over the world debt has been ballooning signalling nonviability of current model.

The EROI of many producers appears to be below that which would sustain civilization, and the few that have high EROI are near peak or have peaked and will be experiencing drops in production. Overall average EROI of oil has been dropping, some other sources suggest we are at or below 10 in average EROI already, at the edge of the cliff of net energy.

Image

Image
The industrial society experiences Net Energy, not EROI, decline. As shown in the graph above, there is a strong non-linear relation between Net Energy and EROI. For a long range of EROI values, say from 100 to 10, the Net Energy is declining very slowly. Presently although the EROI decline is quite clear the Net Energy is still well above 90%. The society feels pretty safe. The problem is that we are walking along a cliff and it is increasingly urgent to make an energy transition, before finally ending up in the abyss.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019 ... -imagined/
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby ralfy » Thu 07 May 2020, 02:45:27

Cost went up while price swung up and down.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby sparky » Thu 07 May 2020, 05:26:03

.
Let's face it this site has become a plaything for greenies and porn doomers
very little posting relate to the oil industry and its future
I could accept some variations on the theme of energy as a social concern
certainly current news are legitimate , a bit of horsing around is OK
but this site is totally loosing focus of what its core purpose is
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby REAL Green » Thu 07 May 2020, 06:30:34

sparky wrote:.Let's face it this site has become a plaything for greenies and porn doomers
very little posting relate to the oil industry and its future


Green and Doom is the future so maybe you are just not getting with the times. I am a doomer lite so in my opinion acting like doom is not a risk issue is not covering all the basis. Not all of the green talked about is green. A significant amount of green talk is fake green when all issues are included. This is a highly relevant topic because it is the future of energy. Fossil fuels are greatly impacted by this green talk that turns into real policy. Green new deals are in my opinion a huge danger to the stability of the global economy that feeds us all. I am green but a realistic green. I do not like globalism but I like my daily meals. I don’t want to lose my way of life because some people want to turn fantasy into policy. This needs to be discussed in places like this where people who know oil meet. Oil is our lifeline now so it must be respected as such.

sparky wrote: I could accept some variations on the theme of energy as a social concern certainly current news are legitimate , a bit of horsing around is OK but this site is totally loosing focus of what its core purpose is


There was a time when peak oil was the doom issue and it appeared imminent. After events and study, it is now understood peak oil has dynamics that pose risk factors but the dangers were and are not as dramatic as peakers thought back in the early 2000’s. Peak oil is alive and well and time is running out for affordable oil and a habitable climate. That is my opinion but it is excellent place for debate. Renewables are not going to save us. EV’s are a niche. Shale a retirement party. High quality conventional oil depleting and already peaked. Social issues are relevant to energy because they influence policy. Look what the virus did to the oil complex. I visit and comment on other places like reliance dot org but I like this place also mainly because there are lots of engineers and science types who give me a good technical information. Resilience is more concerned with the social side of what we talk about here.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby ralfy » Thu 07 May 2020, 09:30:25

sparky wrote:.
Let's face it this site has become a plaything for greenies and porn doomers
very little posting relate to the oil industry and its future
I could accept some variations on the theme of energy as a social concern
certainly current news are legitimate , a bit of horsing around is OK
but this site is totally loosing focus of what its core purpose is


It's the other way round.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby sparky » Fri 08 May 2020, 03:15:31

.
@ real Green .......thanks for your cogent reply , I will think about it
@ ralfy ....could you explain "the other way around " I'm not being smart arsed , just puzzled

there certainly has been a sea change between the original "imminent " supply disruption of Peak Oil
now it seems less an issue of supply as one of demand
in the next twist , affordable supply might emerge
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby ralfy » Fri 08 May 2020, 07:00:51

sparky wrote:.
@ real Green .......thanks for your cogent reply , I will think about it
@ ralfy ....could you explain "the other way around " I'm not being smart arsed , just puzzled

there certainly has been a sea change between the original "imminent " supply disruption of Peak Oil
now it seems less an issue of supply as one of demand
in the next twist , affordable supply might emerge


In case you didn't notice, take a look at the title of this thread. The argument is that this site should be shut down because the price dropped. It's like saying that global warming is a hoax because it's snowing.

There are more examples throughout the forum, from claims that we won't face energy problems because we have thousands of years' worth of uranium, to beliefs that we can get more oil and material resources by simply creating more money, that we can easily transition to using less oil through a global government, or that peak oil involves "twists" such that diminishing returns can be reversed in the long term.

None of these are related to "greenies" or "porn doomers" but to techno-optimists.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby asg70 » Fri 08 May 2020, 10:58:47

Darian S wrote:All over the world debt has been ballooning signalling nonviability of current model.


And what is the "current model"? I am not seeing the sort of strong linkage of debt to oil that peakers do. What I see is a correlation = causation going on in order to try to keep the topic relevant. Debt bombs happen regardless of oil. Anyone who has a credit card knows how easy it is for debt to get out of control. That's what happened in Argentina back in the day and that's what happened in 2008 considering that it was the housing bubble and collateral debt obligations. And the fracking boom was instrumental in pulling the US out of the recession. QE and fracking worked, plain and simple.

ralfy wrote:None of these are related to "greenies" or "porn doomers" but to techno-optimists.


Well, as a thought experiment, imagine that websites like this existed back during the neolithic. And imagine a select few back then realized that agriculture was not sustainable and that left unchecked we might face a global malthusian catastrophe thousands of years down the road. How might that sort of distant threat catalyze day-to-day discussion? The answer is it wouldn't. Nobody would feel any sense of urgency. It would be a purely academic discussion that only autists care about.

That is why the peak oil content of this site is currently worthless. It's not really credible to spin a short or even medium term doomer narrative out of the oil landscape. The best that's being done is to suggest that oil is the invisible source of "all bad things(TM)".

That dog doesn't hunt.

Meanwhile if you hit up google news on any given day it's hard not to stumble over a few new reports outlining how global warming keeps getting steadily worse.

But no, let's keep trying to sound the alarm on peak oil (or more appropriately the debt bomb masquerading as peak oil).

I simply can't imagine a scenario that would usher in Mad Max at present. Even if Saudi Arabia started hitting empty in the next few years all it would do is cause the transport sector to transition to BEVs at maximum speed.

If you can't have Mad Max then you can't really generate enough dread to fuel a forum like this. What you get in its place are, like I said, those tunnel-vision types who frame the world as being nothing but the direct product of oil. Your ETP and POD nonsense. There's a reason why so few people believe that, but that won't change those who do from feeling they know more than everyone else.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby evilgenius » Fri 08 May 2020, 22:24:08

Or, what we are really seeing, is how man twists and turns as he makes his way along the unknown path of history.
This site just tries to say that one form of how that works, energy, is more important than another along that path. It does not, necessarily, try to say that energy is more important than the other inputs. It merely stakes a place among which the other inputs can compete for importance. But, in doing so, we begin to see the world in different ways.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby MonteQuest » Sat 09 May 2020, 13:44:58

Might be premature. Back in December of 2008, I posted The Eye of the Storm. Here’s an excerpt:

“Like a passing hurricane, this “eye of the storm” in gas and oil prices is setting us up for an even more painful energy crisis in the very near future. We must consider that, should oil prices and demand remain low for an extended period, new investment in oil production — not to mention renewables — will fall to such an extent that, with worldwide depletion of existing fields at 6.7 percent a year, there simply will not be enough new oil, or oil replacement energy, to power an economic recovery.”

Of course, much to many peakers surprise and chagrin, fracking came to the rescue. Now, it may come back to haunt us.

“I actually believe that in, let’s say, 18 months from now the oil will hit $100,”-- Orascom Investment Holding Chairman and CEO Naguib Sawiris

He says this because demand will be back up, but supply will not be where it normally would due to the fracking shut-ins and the lack of investments and drilling. The shale industry may well vanish for at least one year, and any start-up is going to be difficult because banks are going to be very reluctant to finance them. Even many traditional oil facilities have closed down. I don't see demand coming back quite that fast, either. Not even close. But I do see a demand/supply crunch coming down the road.

Remember, peakoil was never about running out of oil, rather supply being unable to meet demand. Like the GFC that took millions of barrels of demand off the charts and gave us a reprieve from hitting limits while we exploited unprofitable shale oil, will this demand destruction usher in another reprieve or bring on a peakoil moment?
Last edited by MonteQuest on Sat 09 May 2020, 14:21:58, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby asg70 » Sat 09 May 2020, 14:07:52

Fine by me. #GotBEV?

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby ralfy » Sat 09 May 2020, 22:56:46

evilgenius wrote:Or, what we are really seeing, is how man twists and turns as he makes his way along the unknown path of history.
This site just tries to say that one form of how that works, energy, is more important than another along that path. It does not, necessarily, try to say that energy is more important than the other inputs. It merely stakes a place among which the other inputs can compete for importance. But, in doing so, we begin to see the world in different ways.


What most wish is that. What's happening is the opposite.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby Darian S » Sun 31 May 2020, 18:39:28

asg70 wrote:
Darian S wrote:All over the world debt has been ballooning signalling nonviability of current model.


And what is the "current model"? I am not seeing the sort of strong linkage of debt to oil that peakers do. What I see is a correlation = causation going on in order to try to keep the topic relevant. Debt bombs happen regardless of oil. Anyone who has a credit card knows how easy it is for debt to get out of control. That's what happened in Argentina back in the day and that's what happened in 2008 considering that it was the housing bubble and collateral debt obligations. And the fracking boom was instrumental in pulling the US out of the recession. QE and fracking worked, plain and simple.


Energy is the foundation of the economy, it is the basis of money. Wages have stagnated in part despite increased automation and productivity, because there is insufficient energy to provide enough wealth for everyone(as that would require more real assets and activity than the energy can provide for). Debt is a promise of future repayment, future resources, future resources that won't be there. We barely got back with anemic recovery, and fake inflated growth outside the real economy.

Fracking and QE merely delayed the inevitable. Fracking wells aren't multidecade century+ producers. They produce most of their output within a few years and by the third decade need to be shut down.
we find that roughly 500 (about 1% of the total number of world oil fields) are classified as giants. Their contribution to world oil production was over 60% in 2005, with the 20 largest fields alone responsible for nearly 25% (Figure 2). Giant fields represent roughly 65% of the global ultimate recoverable conventional oil resources (Robelius, 2007). Many studies have pointed out the importance of giant oil fields, for instance Campbell (1991), Hirsch (2008), Meng and Bentley (2008).-energyskeptic


Most giant fields are experiencing around 6~% decline. Outside 2 or 3 countries the rest of the world is in decline.

At that rate of decline the giant fields in just ten years will produce around 50~% of their output. That is tens of millions of barrels per day production will be gone. US shale will have also peaked and be on decline. Many of the fields have seen modern technology used to produce more than they otherwise could, a technique that delays decline but seems to produce an even sharper decline eventually.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Mon 01 Jun 2020, 00:14:37

Fracking wells aren't multidecade century+ producers. They produce most of their output within a few years and by the third decade need to be shut down.


OH, is that right. Please show us examples of this. The theory, best described by Terry Engelder and now shown to work pretty well with much of the longer history tight oil and gas production has the late-stage decline rates very, very low. If we use the Antrim shale as an example of how long naturally fractured shales with nanodarcy porosity can produce that would be around 5 decades so far. Oil wells can be produced at very low rates if price remains above lifting cost. If oil becomes scarcer it is a guaranty that price will remain above lifting cost for most of the unconventional wells that actually have pretty low operating costs. What that means is that a well that came on at 500 boepd and then eventually declined to 100 boepd when it shifted from hyperbolic to exponential decline might produce at 25 boepd for a number of years. The length of time of the well's production is mainly based on its EUR and the average for most wells (averaging in the real long laterals with the normal length laterals) is around 250 K bbl. At 50 bbls/d that is a 7-year life assuming 80% is produced in the first 24 months. And there are virtually very few individual conventional wells that are century producers. I was in the business for many decades and as far as I remember there was one in Mexico (Cerro Azul 4) which they keep producing mainly as it is symbolic (it was at one time the largest producing well in the world and probably has the most reserves ever produced from a single well).

Most giant fields are experiencing around 6~% decline. Outside 2 or 3 countries the rest of the world is in decline.

At that rate of decline the giant fields in just ten years will produce around 50~% of their output. That is tens of millions of barrels per day production will be gone.


When you get into the discussion of total potential future production you should not be talking about individual field decline (or the rate of decrease of output from the field) but rather total depletion. In Ghawar, as an example, they have increased the ultimate recovery from 30% to 70% over the past 25 years. That is what governs how much oil will be available ultimately. In the case of unconventional tight oil and gas fields in the US current recovery rates average much less than 10%, increasing that recovery to 15% (still half of what wells with no natural water support encounter) results in a significant increase in ultimate oil available.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby Darian S » Mon 01 Jun 2020, 13:40:49

OH, is that right. Please show us examples of this.

How long does a shale oil well last?
20 to 40 years
AFTER DRILLING
After completion, a well can produce for as long as 20 to 40 years–providing energy and long-term revenue to governments and mineral owners and sustaining local jobs.
https://www.cred.org/how-long-does-fracking-last/

How long will Eagle Ford Shale last?
thirty years
Eagle Ford shale well life expectancy could be as long as thirty years, according to a recent report from EOG Resources. According to that report, 40% of an Eagle Ford shale well's production will come in the first five years, followed by a long decline curve lasting perhaps as many as thirty years.
https://www.tidalpetroleum.com/operatio ... evelopment
How long does fracking well last?
Those wells, the firm found, are actually declining by roughly 15 percent a year — a significantly larger drop than expected and an ominous sign for any companies projecting wells can last 50 years.Jan 10, 2019
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/01/10/f ... et-journal


It doesn't matter anyway. The giant oilfields will cut production by 50~% in ten years at current decline, that's at least 20-30+Mbpd drop. I've heard the world was expecting an increase of about 20Mbpd above current production. Total deficit is 40-50+Mbpd that will have to be added from somewhere if supply is to meet future demand, unless there is a persistent long term global economic contraction.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Mon 01 Jun 2020, 14:59:50

well first off the longest producing fracked long horizontal in the Eagleford is 8 years old so projections forward (whether that is EOG or anyone else) from that are subject to wild variation (it depends on the decline curve they chose to use). Please demonstrate what unconventional fields or wells from those fields have been producing for three decades and are now shut-in. Given the shale revolution didn't really start until 2004 and it wasn't until 2009 that long horizontals with multi-stage fracs became standard I think you are out of luck.

The giant oilfields will cut production by 50~% in ten years at current decline, that's at least 20-30+Mbpd drop. I've heard the world was expecting an increase of about 20Mbpd above current production.


Where are you getting your field by field decline rates....Wood Mackenzie is probably the only company any longer that does that sort of detail so you must have access to that information. Or maybe you just took that statement from something Colin Campbell wrote 10 years ago?

Well by well declines are based on Proven Reserves. There are still fields and countries with considerable amounts of Probable and Possible Reserves and even Contingent Reserves that will at some point become Proven Reserves. This is why Saudi Arabia has reported essentially flat Reserves figures for more than a decade...they continue to replace Produced Proven with Unproduced Probable reserves. It is also noted in the US where the top 50 oil companies have on average replaced their Produced Proven reserves annually by >100% over the past half decade according to E&Y. You cannot look at current production and somehow try to suss out how much oil is left to produce. If that were the case you would have said back in 2006 that current US oil production should be essentially zero. As I said current average recovery factor in US shales is around 8%. If that recovery factor were to rise on average to 15% that is another 80 billion bbls or so. It is the rate of drilling that affects the production rate. Oil is indeed a non-renewable resource but to properly model future production it requires a lot more information than is even available to the experts.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Mon 01 Jun 2020, 17:08:58

Just my own personal anecdotal life but for 40 years I made a good living producing UNPROVEN reserves from old fields. In fact, in a few cases we produced more oil in the first 5 years we operated the field then the first 5 years of initial production. Not often but enough times tp make $100's of million. But yes, there was a catch: enhanced oil recover methods were used. But EOR tends to be very expensive and you better be very good at it. But that's enough: you need high oil prices to make it work. My last big project we took leases (about 10 years ago) in a field. Didn't need to buy the field since most of the wells had been plugged and abandoned. My first horizontal well (no, not shale well but in a conventional sandstone reservoir) came in at a rate 4X greater then the typical original vert. wells. Would probably had recovered more oil then the field cumulative of 30 million bbls...if we had kept drilling. But then oil prices fell. My new wells would have still made a small profit despite the high cost of my horizontal wells. But my billionaire owner wasn't interested in small profits. Probably why he's a billionaire. LOL.

And setting all humility aside I was the first geologist to develop this EOR method in one of these old fields that had recovered 3 BILLION bbls from this trend of similar fields. And I was never allowed to publish a report on the method: my owner did not want share the success. Only one other geologist was successful copying the method. Now I'm too worn out from my MS to publish.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 02 Jun 2020, 18:36:54

ROCKMAN,

Sorry the MS is keeping you down. I appreciate you experience.
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Re: Should this site be shut down?

Unread postby C8 » Tue 02 Jun 2020, 19:35:38

ROCKMAN wrote:J
And setting all humility aside I was the first geologist to develop this EOR method in one of these old fields that had recovered 3 BILLION bbls from this trend of similar fields. And I was never allowed to publish a report on the method: my owner did not want share the success. Only one other geologist was successful copying the method. Now I'm too worn out from my MS to publish.


Sorry to hear that, but you should be rightfully proud of what you accomplished anyway- not many could do what you did.
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