Peak Oil News and Message Boards

jedrider wrote:I told you all that we were at PEAK Oil already in 2019. Now, just as demand is picking up, prices are rising as well to keep oil consumption in check.

That's how economics work. FOR EVERYTHING. Supply and demand is very much "a thing", and price helps keep them in balance, plus maximize revenue for self-interested producers of economic goods. Same as it ever was.

What does that have to do with "peak oil"? (That's not generally a temporary condition as the usual doomer types around here frame it). If the price rises high enough, more effort will be made to produce oil that has been shut in, previously deemed uneconomic at lower prices, etc.

Oh, and of course, if the price gets high enough, it makes BEV's, PHEV's and even HEV's look MUCH MUCH better, to the extent they can save a hell of a lot of gasoline burning by owners using their cars in certain ways. Like mostly city drivers for HEV's -- it doesn't take long to make the cost case compelling for, say, Toyota HEV's with a small price premium over the ICE's, if gasoline is at $5 or more. And if it's at $3 in central KY, it sure as hell could get there in quite a few US cities if WTI gets well over $100 in time.

At that point, demand would be meaningfully lowered over time, even as people continue to drive a lot. It's wonderful for consumers to have more choices.

Outcast_Searcher wrote:What does that have to do with "peak oil"?

Everything. We are just waiting for the moment that 'peak oil' occurs. Nothing more.

'Peak Oil' is NOT the moment that we CANNOT produce more oil. It is just the moment that we DO produce peak oil.

Because, Oil is NOT really produced, but is extracted from a limited and 'most essential' resource.

Ah, yet another debate over the definition of the term. How useful.

aadbrd wrote:Ah, yet another debate over the definition of the term. How useful.

Well, we're going to discover whether money can substitute for oil in propelling economic growth.

Of course, there is electrification which is a substitute for oil, but how far can that take us?

jedrider wrote:

aadbrd wrote:Ah, yet another debate over the definition of the term. How useful.

Well, we're going to discover whether money can substitute for oil in propelling economic growth.

As it turns out, that is exactly what old school peak oilers said could never happen.

And then, when it did happen, blamed their bad peak oil predictions on it.

You sure you want to establish that peak oilers can't be bothered to learn from their mistakes...again?

There was a rare news about oil industry in local mainstream media. They told oil production will increase in August to ease gasoline prices and world may have reached a voluntary peak oil due to environmental reasons.

IEA and EIA both sound pretty confident that global will surpass 2019 by end next year.


Surprising that there aren't more active rigs in the US, they look to be increasing much slower than '16/'17

jedrider wrote:Well, we're going to discover whether money can substitute for oil in propelling economic growth.

That is the point I was trying for in the surplus energy thread. Oil went from $20/bbl or less for 90 years in the last century to $40 under OPEC to $60 +/- after conventional peak in the oughts. Since the great recession every entity on earth has been trying to pump GDP with free money rather than pumping near-free oil.

https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market-report-june-2021
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48376

Tuike wrote:There was a rare news about oil industry in local mainstream media. They told oil production will increase in August to ease gasoline prices and world may have reached a voluntary peak oil due to environmental reasons.

Sure, and any moment now Satan will be skating to work while hogs sprout wings and take flight!

Right now it is easy to forecast just about anything from short term data. Even seemingly intelligent people like Tyverberg do it. Here from a recent post

...Furthermore, prices have been unacceptably low for oil producers for several years. Not too surprisingly, oil production has started to decline:

She has been preaching that low price will lead to peak oil for years now (since the price fell on the frack-glut). How convenient for the shutdown of the economy due to covid to come along and 'prove' her point. LOL

From watching these various threads I have the impression that oil remains quite volatile in the short term.

Yet in the long term it will peak and demand will constrict, I see nothing to contradict that idea. WHEN that constriction hits and WHEN it is discernible from short term volatility is not so easy to see.

Local newspaper writes that Opec negotiations to raise oil production have failed and therefore no increase in oil production for August.

Fracking has shown itself to be a driller's scam, it did make a lot of oil but never did make much profit... so the money boys are pulling back and trying to unwind. Frack spreads are half of 2019 (230 vs 407) and rigs are as well, 376 vs 775. Private companies seem to be finally switching from growth to profitability as a financial goal.

This is a good thing, high fuel prices add cost to renewables deployment but they are the best incentive for alternatives. They add urgency to RE deployment and EV sales the public sees and feels every day.

And eighty percent of the American people want more RE. Not surprisingly however, the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill contains only 10% of the amount for EV rebates and recharging infrastructure in Biden's plan. Why? One party finds fossils very lucrative. And since we are a republic and we elect leaders smarter than we lowly serfs, we get what they want... and they want contributions;


https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/ ... ?ind=E01++

https://www.aogr.com/web-exclusives/us- ... count/2019
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daneberhar ... abccdc1dc8
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/202 ... n-climate/
https://daily.energybulletin.org/

Pops wrote:Fracking has shown itself to be a driller's scam, it did make a lot of oil but never did make much profit...

And the consumer benefitting by the companies driving themselves to the bottom of the profitability barrel bothers us....why? The geopolitical effect alone was worth a bunch of folks with more cheap money than oil sense going belly up, from a national perspective.

And if a 70 year old completion technique were really a scam ( as opposed to US E&Ps soaking up as much cheap cash as they could in order to expand and become masters of the universe in their little corner of the patch), they would have stopped after doing it the first 100,000 times....which happened back around 1955 or so.

I think that SHTF will occur before we see peak oil in the distance in the rear view mirror.

Ranger,

I suspect that is about correct. We will not recognize it at the moment, on once we get some distance and see the inevitable downward trend.

And the peak could he flattened by any number of events, Covid for example did some demand destruction.

AdamB wrote:And if a 70 year old completion technique

Why do you keep repeating this? LTO production has as much to do with horizontal drilling and slickwater formulas as simply "fracking". Heck, they were probably tossing tnt down holes since way back. But getting a mile of contact is what made shale.




In other news, sales over the fourth might have surpassed 2019, so much for peak demand. Shale drillers are not quickly expanding production, even with $75 oil, for once. If OPEC+ starts to tacitly include shale, prices will rise fast simply because there aren't many prospects out there besides Iran. Once the rest of the world gets immune (one way or the other) demand will come back stronger than ever.

Pops wrote:


In other news, sales over the fourth might have surpassed 2019, so much for peak demand. Shale drillers are not quickly expanding production, even with $75 oil, for once. If OPEC+ starts to tacitly include shale, prices will rise fast simply because there aren't many prospects out there besides Iran. Once the rest of the world gets immune (one way or the other) demand will come back stronger than ever.

Indeed, once again the meme of "Peak Demand" proves to be an illusion. I can not for the life of me figure out why so many apparently intelligent people keep falling for the same silly idea? If you want to really strain an analogy you can say Buggy Whip makers suffered a peak demand problem when the Model T started rolling out so fast they became the larges make and model on planet Earth around 1913. But so far at least there is no competing technology replacing petroleum on the world market. China is still producing and internally consuming on the close order of 20 MILLION new ICE vehicles every year. That doesn't count a million or several more they import. At the same time the number of ICE they are scrapping is a very small fraction of that number. This is a built in demand increase no matter how hard people close their eyes and wish it away. In the USA we build and import around 14 MILLION ICE per year and scrap the same number. When demand was a new thing we were much more like modern China, we had to build or import enough to meet demand and that took all the way up to the 1929 Wall Street Crash, nearly two decades after the Model T put the price of a private car in reach of the mass population. Even growing at 20+ million per annum it will take Chine a very long time to meet internal demand. Somewhere around 2030 the number of vehicles scrapped in China is going to rise substantially as the ones built in the 2000-2010 decade reach the ends of their useful lives and have to be replaced. That is assuming demand for private cars in China does not continue to grow as it did in both the first two decades of this century.

Pops wrote:

AdamB wrote:And if a 70 year old completion technique

Why do you keep repeating this?

Because not understanding a thing then leads to words demonstrating it, and you keep saying something you probably don't mean. Fracking isn't drilling. Drilling companies, i.e. service companies who rent you their rigs to drill, have nothing to do with the hole type you drill or the completion technique you use, if you use one at all. And fracking companies don't produce oil and gas, E&Ps do that. Fracking companies are also service companies, they make tons of money off of doing their services (one of which is hydraulic fracturing) and that money isn't dependent on the price of oil, but what they are paid for doing a service.

The moving parts matter, otherwise the next thing you know (and resilience.org said this somewhere once) "hydraulic fracturing is drilling a well horizontally and blasting open rock with high pressure chemicals and sand". Hydraulic fracturing is done in a well sure, but it isn't drilling any more than it is putting on makeup.

Pops wrote:LTO production has as much to do with horizontal drilling and slickwater formulas as simply "fracking".

Then write it that way when mixing the terms. I was multi stage slick water hydraulic fracturing vertical wells back in the 80's. Didn't need no stinkin' horizontal well to do it in, and my entire industry career was spent at <$20/bbl and < $2.00/mcf. What happened next was taking those ideas done by private companies bootstrapping themselves along for decades, mitigating decline at a slow rate, and turned into what became Saudi America using borrowed money. So no, horizontal drilling isn't required for LTO production. But it can make it more profitable for the big boys who don't have a cost structure that can be supported at 50 bbl/day initial flow rates from the procedure.

Pops wrote:Shale drillers are not quickly expanding production, even with $75 oil, for once.

And as it turns out, raining cash all over themselves. Such is what happens when project economics designed for $45/bbl oil suddenly get $60-$70. Record cash flow no less.

Tanada wrote:Indeed, once again the meme of "Peak Demand" proves to be an illusion. I can not for the life of me figure out why so many apparently intelligent people keep falling for the same silly idea?

It isn't a meme. And we know this far better than when Amy Jaffe began discussing it in 2015, because for a minute there even peak oilers could see it. The idea that people choosing, or required, to use less is the second mechanism via which peak oil can happen. So, just as peak oil MUST happen, so too MUST it happen by 1 of 2 mechanisms, scarcity or changes in consumptive behavior.

Every argument that Tony Seba used in the video that once was in my sigline still applies, absolutely nothing has changed (including his prediction for peak oil in 2020 because of it). Much like peak oilers he will undoubtedly get the timing wrong, but the continuation of the pattern he discusses is still chugging along in the background.

tanada wrote: China is still producing and internally consuming..... .

Yup. And once upon a time there wasn't a single EV on my suburban block. Now there are 7 (two are mine). Once upon a time you couldn't charge outside your house. Now the county courthouse has charging stations, the local malls, the wife's work put in 6 stations, department stores including Walmart and the bank.

One cool thing about market economic forces, they don't tend to stand still just because of how things are now, or in lesser markets. Do you really want to argue that China isn't changing as well?

AdamB wrote:Fracking isn't drilling.

If one were giving a seminar outlining extraction techniques it would, but the 6 guys reading this know exactly what I'm talking about, as do you. If you don't have anything to say on the point, it's OK. Attacking my semantics is just a distraction.

LTO hasn't returned profit to investors. Private money is hesitant to go back. Companies are finally concentrating on cash flow. That will slow down the return of production.