Peak Oil News and Message Boards

It matters because its important to compare apples to apples.The devil is always in the details.

AirlinePilot wrote:It matters because its important to compare apples to apples.The devil is always in the details.

Fair enough, in light of the comments here I think a more accurate unit of measure would be energy than volume. Doesn't matter if you use ergs, Joules, BTU's or some other unit so long as it is consistent across the various molecular formula's for the petroleum and alcohol molecules produced and fed into the system.

In Technical terms a barrel of extra heavy oil will have more energy than a barrel of condensate recovered from a Natural Gas 'wet' well. However the refining process to convert either barrel of mixed molecules into vehicle fuel will require different steps and my understanding is the extra heavy oil needs a couple extra steps to break the long molecules into shorter molecules and stabilize them at those lengths by reacting them with free hydrogen gas.

Then again I have also read about Diesel engines for large ships that can directly burn that extra heavy petroleum without refining, so that creates a whole new spectrum of confusion over what is useful and what is not. It all boils down to what your end goal is, if you want to move a huge diesel powered ship them raw extra heavy crude petroleum or even heated asphalt can work just fine. If on the other hand you want to run a Moped with a little four cycle gasoline engine on it that same extra heavy crude has to be extensively modified before the engine can operate on its energy content, but the condensate from the 'wet' natural gas wells in the Utica in Ohio will run it almost without modification.

If we take a step back and think about it early oil crude was mostly the medium grades that flowed relatively easily. We learned how to refine those into all grades of fuel above and below the medium weights and it was easy because they were a thorough mixture of all grades from methane to super long extra heavy asphalt. Now we are using more of the light and heavy ends of 'crude' in our mixture because there are not as many sources of the medium grades as we desire to refine and use, so we are struggling to fit modern blends into concepts that date back over a century of refining. It is no wonder we have so much contention over what is or is not 'oil' when even the blends we call gasoline and diesel are much different from what they were in 1917. Heck the first generation gasoline formula included Propane as one of its constituent chemicals, but outside of the far north in Alaska or Siberia propane forms bubbles and escapes out of the tank before it can be used by the engine. Next up the chain is Butane and modern gasoline formula's limit how much of that you can have in the blend in summer time because it does exactly the same thing, in a hot summer environment it evaporates right out of the gasoline in places like Atlanta, Georgia or Los Angeles, California. On the other hand it is 2F outside my house right this moment and without at least 10% butane in my gasoline tank my little Honda Civic would not want to start or run. A century ago this was not well understood and you got whatever blend the local refinery made from whatever crude it happened to have available to process. Now this is all regulated fairly tightly, at least in the USA and Canada where I have driven vehicles.

AirlinePilot wrote:It matters because its important to compare apples to apples.The devil is always in the details.

True. Would you say that this is a reasonable theory for why peak oilers screwed the pooch so badly a decade back? They didn't understand even the most basic details of resource economics? Or just never understood geology very well, because some posters on this website were talking about resource plays like shale way back when, and were laughed off. Turns out, they knew these types of details, and the devils in them.

The devil may be in the details but there's also seeing the forest through the trees. And the forest is that BAU continues apace.

asg70 wrote:The devil may be in the details but there's also seeing the forest through the trees. And the forest is that BAU continues apace.

Yup. And there is an advantage to the Happy McPeakers systematically declaring global peak oil, and that is on the far side of that claim (like now) we can look back and gauge credibility contemporaneous to the time. The EIA kept theirs in this regard, not falling for the underwhelming evidence of bloggers and beat cops, whereas the IEA bit and fell for it. And the peakers of course, well, there is a reason my pet name for them sounds like a happy meal fed to children.

The Obama administration changed the legal definition of oil to include biofuels etc by issuing new regulations that lumped all liquid fuels together as oil.

apparently the EIA didn't get the memo because "crude oil" as defined by them which shows up in all the production, consumption data and forecasts is :

Crude oil:  A mixture of hydrocarbons that exists in liquid phase in natural underground reservoirs and remains liquid at atmospheric pressure after passing through surface separating facilities. Depending upon the characteristics of the crude stream, it may also include 1. Small amounts of hydrocarbons that exist in gaseous phase in natural underground reservoirs but are liquid at atmospheric pressure after being recovered from oil well (casing head) gas in lease separators and are subsequently comingled with the crude stream without being separately measured. Lease condensate recovered as a liquid from natural gas wells in lease or field separation facilities and later mixed into the crude stream is also included; 2. Small amounts of nonhydrocarbons produced with the oil, such as sulfur and various metals; 3. Drip gases, and liquid hydrocarbons produced from tar sands, oil sands, gilsonite, and oil shale. 

Liquids produced at natural gas processing plants are excluded. Crude oil is refined to produce a wide array of petroleum products, including heating oils; gasoline, diesel and jet fuels; lubricants; asphalt; ethane, propane, and butane; and many other products used for their energy or chemical content

When they reference "petroleum and other liquids" then that includes biofuels. Invariably when folks here post production and consumption it is crude oil numbers (EIA, BP etc). Petroleum and other liquids comes into play when you are trying to look at balances between input and output at the refineries.