The third world ha been duped into believing that they can all live the American model, They are reaching or this goal in india and china, the reality is that the world can not support another major first world economy based on the current model of buy bury and waste resources.

A perfect example of this is made in a recent TV show in Ireland Future Shock: End of the Oil Age at http://www.rte.ie/tv/futureshock/

While Ireland is not a poor country anymore, it was so just a generation ago, the country has so emulated the American model that it is has gone to a very different place than it was. From a country that while poor was basically starting from scratch in the 70s and 80s, the road that they went down was one of suburbia and sprawl Dublin is getting bigger than la with a 7th of the population. As a tabla blanca the planners and government could have gone down the other path but there was no obvious need to do so.

The blame goes to the planners and oil execs who knew as far back as the 70's that peak oil was a reality. How much of the suffering that is going to occur in the future could have been avoided if big oil had let onthat the future was not as energy rich as they let on.

Well then, which "earlier" forecasts do you think he would be talking about? The ones in the early '90s?-)

md solar
Chris,

There's lots of oil in the world. But what makes an oil field economic to produce is the speed at which it can be recovered from the ground and the cost of drilling and production.

When deciding whether to invest in an oil and gas project a company looks at how quickly they will get their money back from drilling and completing the well and the total expected profits from the well. As prices for oil go up, lower volume wells become more profitable.

Right now stripper oil wells in Texas sell for approximately $50,000 per barrel of oil per day, which should pay out in about 48 months. There's some other considrations, too. Low volume wells are very hard to sell unless someone has some other wells located close by because of the labor involved in operating the wells. Somebody needs to check the tanks and repair equipment as it breaks down,call for the salt water disposal truck and generally at least look at a well every day.

But looking for overlooked and bypassed oil is what our friend WesTexas does for a living. I'm looking in old oil fields for oil that has been left stranded when the wells became uneconomic about 50 years or more ago when oil was $2 or $3 a barrel. there's plenty of oil left, but its not able to be produced in volumes big enough for the car culture to continue using internal combustion engines. Bob Ebersole

Cool graph.

This seems to show that the swarm effect I've proposed for smaller fields is real esp the offshore developments.

Basically since the 1980's-1990's a lot of the production has been from small generally offshore wells that are produced quickly and shutin when at best secondary recovery is finished. These well will never be produced to the extremes seen in Texas. In this graph you get a beautiful example in my opinion of the swarm effect acting in aggregate as a giant field. And its clear from your graph that the swarm of small offshore fields developed of the last few decades may in aggregate be in decline.

So not only do we have the big fields in decline which will ensure that we are probably past peak. But also I believe we are facing fairly serious declines in this swarm of small offshore fields which make up a significant amount of production today.

The key point is that these fields decline quickly but new discoveries and the support of the giant fields has allowed us to grow. With both of these exhausted the aggregate decline rate of the small offshore fields should be very steep and play a large role in the overall global decline rate as we past peak.

I also see two peaks in the UK North Sea discovery curves. One strong one and a later broader blip. This plus the disturbance the 1988 Piper Alpha platform fire can cause a purely extraction limited valley between the production peaks.

Perhaps, in some cases, this is what the "dog-leg up" pattern is really showing...the addition of smaller wells all at once.

probably but unfortunately Norway and the UK are the only countries in the world that are providing complete datasets per field.

Yes you're right, you can actually split the datasets in as many peaks as you want. The main point here is that 10% of the fields are responsible for 50% of the total production (what Simmons calls the oil pyramid) and that these fields are usually exploited first.