<DrumBeat: March 4, 2007The Oil DrumDrumBeat: March 5, 2007>

26 comments on Gazprom is Still At It, Oh Yes They Are (or, "Gas Pressure")

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WebHubbleTelescope on March 5, 2007 - 12:31am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Off-topic but a significant article on NYT for tomorrow:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/business/05oil1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slog...

As it may disappear behind a pay-wall, I reproduced it here:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2007/03/sludge.html

There is still a minority view, held largely by a small band of retired petroleum geologists and some members of Congress, that oil production has peaked, but the theory has been fading. Equally contentious for the oil companies is the growing voice of environmentalists, who do not think that pumping and consuming an ever-increasing amount of fossil fuel is in any way desirable.

The despicable Matt Drudge is playing it up which guarantees that it will get placed into the rethug talking points memos.

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Heading Out on March 5, 2007 - 2:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thanks for drawing attention to this, which I hadn't seen yet. The steam injection that they talk about is not new, it is being used up in Canada, among other places, to get some of the oil from the sands up there. The process is called Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) and we talked about it here and here , to name but two places. Dave Cohen has talked about the new technologies on several occasions including here and in detail here .

As several of us have noted, the claims for large investments in the personnel to develop these new technologies further, and the technologies themselves are not held up by the actual numbers to date.

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Francois on March 5, 2007 - 2:14am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The article discusses how technology and higher prices will make more oil in existing oil formations recoverable. I find this ironic - that the article starts by dismissing the peak oil community, but then comfirms what "retired geologists" are saying - Cheap Energy is over.

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Luis de Sousa on March 5, 2007 - 4:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Incredible, Saudi Arabia can produce more oil than it has on the ground.

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Cid Yama on March 5, 2007 - 6:05am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Incredible, as in 'Lacking Credibility' is the right word.
Downright lying is a better description.

toilforoil on March 5, 2007 - 2:30am
Are Jad Mouawad and his editors at the New York Times lazy?
Perhaps, they are simply a few cards shy of a full deck.

They appear to confused by the difference between funds (oil in the ground) and flows (oil production rate).

The article finishes with this line: "“That’s why peak oil is a moving target,” Mr. Hatlen said. “Oil is always a function of price and technology.”"

Mouawad cites the Kern River field in California and a project in Indonesia to provide evidence of the power of technology.

It took me five minutes to establish that the Kern River field saw its production peak in 1985, about 20 years after steam injection was introduced. Production peaked in 1985 at 141,000 b/d. It has since declined by 40%, or just under 2% per year. California's production peaked in 1983. It dropped by 23% from 1996 to 2005. Isn't technology wonderful?

In another five minutes, I discovered that Indonesian oil production peaked in 1977 and is now down over 37%, and continues to fall, despite all the tricks of the oil companies.

All the real issues around peak oil are missed in the article. It is a piece that might have been lobbied onto the pages of the New York Times during dinner at the club. It certainly is the type of propaganda that oil corporations seeking to keep government away from the economic (quasi) rent would approve.

This, editor-approved, Jad Mouawad article should be framed and hung in a gallery alongside artifacts of the period of Soviet Realism and Nazi Heroic Realism.

I especially like the bit about hundreds of billions of barrels of oil yet to come from Saudi Arabia. It's kinda like the big tits on the heroic blonde Russian worker: something to go to sleep with.

http://www.bakersfield.com/special/oil100/timeline.pdf
http://www.energy.ca.gov/2006publications/CEC-600-2006-006/CEC-600-2006-...

https://aspo-ireland.org/newsletter/newsletter61.pdf
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/merquery/mer_data.asp?table=T11.01a

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BabyPeanut on March 5, 2007 - 11:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Are Jad Mouawad and his editors at the New York Times lazy?

Looks more like they are working overtime.

I like this quote:

"Ironically, most of the oil we will discover is from oil we've already found," said Lawrence Goldstein, an energy analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, an industry-financed group.

Ironically, we can't find any new locations with oil.

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DelusionaL on March 6, 2007 - 9:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I was just going to comment that steam seemed far to old and simple to be "new" technology and you beat me to it. I guess modern news writers think steam is something "new".
I'm now waiting for them to start washing out oil wells with WD-40 or some such solvent. Water and oil do not mix but WD-40 is a great cutter.

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Engineer-Poet on March 7, 2007 - 11:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

That's what CO2 injection is about; supercritical CO2 is a pretty good non-polar solvent.

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