<DrumBeat: October 3, 2007 The Oil Drum UK Government Response to Peak Oil Petition>

99 comments on Geopolitical Feedback Loops in Peak Oil

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Will Stewart on October 3, 2007 - 10:59am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Excellent delineation of political and market forces and motivations.

Nationalism could be extended into Regionalism, where contiguous states join together to buy/sell energy products and perhaps enter into mutual critical infrastructure protection arrangements.

Also ethnic and/or religious entities in different nations (or even different regions) may seek to form similar energy pacts or privateering (with some seeking to disrupt instead of distribute).

Note that Saudi ARAMCO has been recently reported as establishing a 35,000 persons security force, so the ROI calculation will vary greatly depending on whether protection of CI is sought to ensure production income and market stability, or whether disruption is sought for price spikes with the possible result of market instability.

The above ground issues mentioned above are certainly factors limiting oil production (in addition to field declines), though I believe some oil execs combine these types of events with the slow rate of tar sand and oil shale infrastructure establishment and petroleum production for obfuscation purposes. The latter are really partly 'in ground' if we refer to THAI and other extraction methods for non-conventional oil. Refinement of non-conventional would be above ground.

So we should help establish a vernacular that helps the average interested person understand the issues. Perhaps we could say the issues are;

- Political Factors: includes Mercantilism, Nationalism, Privateering, and Cartel actions.

- Peak Net Export: includes the ELM in its various sensitivity analysis forms

- Above Ground Technical Factors: Transport and refinement of non-conventional oil, both technical challenges as well as rate of infrastructure establisment.

- In Ground Technical: Methods to extract non-conventional oil and the rate of infrastructure establishment; methods to extract a higher percentage of conventional resources.

Thoughts and suggestions?

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jeffvail on October 3, 2007 - 1:38pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I think that Saudi Arabia's 35,000 man security force is an interesting point. There are several ways to view it. One is that it represents probably in excess of one billion dollars a year in expenditure on security in the absence of any actual investment in an attack. I'm not convinced that it will have much preventative effect, as it is quite possible that it is really a PR move and works program for unemployed Saudis, but who knows. Having spent some time in critical infrastructure protection, there is a fundamental problem at work. There are functionally infinite valid CI targets. If you pick the top 10, 100, or even 1000 to protect, then, assuming that you make these invulnerable to attack through your protection (which doesn't happen), the net effect is to push adversary targeting down the list to the 11th, 101st, or 1001st target, respectively. In most CI scenarios, it is economically impracticable to protect all valid targets. It is the fundamental flaw in a reactive notion of CI security versus a proactive notion of CI security (which is much more difficult, especially for governments, to implement). That said, there has been an unexpected (in my view) calm in Saudi Arabia lately, so who knows?

Regarding your proposed vernacular, I think it is a great idea in the sense that it may help bring the reality of geological versus "above ground factors" more into the awareness of the public. I'm not sure about the specific labels. Several of the comments down thread suggest (and RR's post yesterday) that quite a few TOD readers and contributors (myself included) have recently finished reading Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan." We should be careful to avoid applying inappropriate categorization to these matters--I think it is reasonable to categorize in this way for the purpose of raising public awareness or separating two commonly conflated issues, but we should avoid it in the quest for actual understanding. For our purposes I think it is important to view these phenomena as inseparable and part of the "system" of Peak Oil.

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PeakPlus on October 4, 2007 - 4:02am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thank you Jeff for changing the discussion from "depletion rates" and "mitigation/subsitutes" to the systemic analysis of Peak Oil.

I would even make the claim that the PO-System was born in the early 1970s once the USA geologically peaked. Just remember that the USA had been the world's largest producer and a mojor exporter!!

As evidence for this, the world production curve left the logistics (Hubert's) curve at the end of the '70s - making Hubert analysis and reliable predictions increasingly difficult. The "typical" event demonstrating this change(apart from OPEC's actions) was the overthrow of the Shaw in Iran and the ensuing Iran/Iraqi war.

We are currently entering Phase II of the SYSTEM of PO, now that the world is at peak.

The US seemed to have forgotten in the late '80s and through the '90s that this system exists. Living in Germany since the beginning of the '90s, I would however hardly imagine that most of the rest of the world was not aware that this system and the constraints of our FF resource base. Especially the Germans have kept "The Limits of Growth" in the back of their heads and are painfully aware that energy subjects will most likely dominate the future.

Cheers from Munich,
Dom
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Just remember the Golden Years, all you at the top!

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99 comments on Geopolitical Feedback Loops in Peak Oil

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