101 comments on The Disconnect Between Oil Reserves and Production
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Memmel,
I've recently seen a comment by someone (can't find it now) that the world peak in light sweet oil was in 1998.
I would love to see this backed up by evidence. Any idea's?
I'm pretty sure many disagree with your assessment. However to those I would like to say that Russia at the moment is producing full throttle, 9. something mbd, while at the same seems to be depleted for something in the range of 85%.
From peakoil.com, courtesy of the ever vigilant Steam_Cannon. We've had a number of threads on LSC peak there:
It's Official! Light Sweet Crude MAXED OUT: OPEC
Have non-Opec, and global light sweet crude oil both peaked?
Lloyd’s List – Past Peak for Light Sweet Crude
Great! Thanks. You are one cool dude, man.
Am I correct in the assumption that once light sweet peakes and declines, EROEI goes down?
The dude continues to abide.
Glad you like the chart. Says it all. The peak in LSC is a keystone of my rather infrequent peak oil rap - tying that in with the constant reports of refinery shutdowns we hear about. Would like to see an article charting the history of those, too.
Staniford contributed a small piece on LSC peak here, too, when he was still a guest contributor.
Ahem. The quote is "The Dude abides." This misquoting aggression against one of my favorite movies will not stand, man. (:
Thanks, Gary.
EROEI goes down, just because of the rising water cut and adding new smaller wells in higher to reach locations. Things that would add to the processing after production (higher sulphur, lower gravity) would reduce EROEI further.
The mix of oil types is moving to the ones that trade at a discount to the light, sweet types. Thus, the funds oil companies are receiving from the sale of oil will tend to lag indexes of a particular type of light, sweet oil (say WTI or Brent). The amount spent on processing goes up, so the cost to the consumer doesn't get much benefit of the price spread to lower grades.
Relative to average price of crude, the price of consumer pays probably goes up, because of lower EROEI.
Thats the other part of the problem. We seem to have figured out how to keep production rates high even though overall depletion may be well past 50%. Symmetric HL models give the peak at around 60% URR if you remove the symmetric constraint peak at 70-80% of URR is not unreasonable. Note that per field depletion rates as high as 20% or even higher is no uncommon only new finds and the magic of reserve growth keeps the overall depletion rate low. So regions like the GOM that had been bringing on new smaller fields until the last ten years or so would see the depletion rate climb from say 8% to 20% very quickly once the basin is fully developed.
So if I'm right about whats going on we will see production in the GOM start to drop off fairly quickly this already seems to be happening. Same of course with the North Sea.
Since the reserves in the ME are in general not backed by new discoveries then they should follow the same trend although at a later date.
So believe it or not the key is US and North Sea production if I'm right we will see a acceleration in the production decline rate for these regions as the underlying depletion rate grows to the field depletion rate because of lack of new fields.
As long as you could bring on new fields or use technology like horizontal drilling water/gas injection to revive older fields the overall production decline rate follows HL. However once you have saturated the basin the decline rate deviates from HL simply because the underlying depletion rate has increased over time and HL assumes a constant depletion rate.
As far as Russia goes a lot of the fields are watered out and production rate is controlled by the water handling rate. These fields follow a different depletion model. More in line with HL. I don't know the break down in production in Russia between old fields produced at the maximum of water handling and new fields produced at maximum depletion. I think they have also saturated some basins. In general I expect Russia should remain fairly close to HL but I don't know enough about its basins and how they are produced. However the recent increase in reserves and the fact they are still decline shows that the expect increased production from technology and are not getting it.
So the fact that Russia is now deploying new methods and is unable to increase production lends credence to the assertion several people have made that technology mainly increases depletion rates.
http://www.eni.it/wogr_2007/oil_production_quality-world-18.htm