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164 comments on Last Week's EIA Conference

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alan on April 18, 2008 - 11:11am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Total all year production is shown as 1.92 trillion for peak oil forecasts; 2.93 trillion barrels for what appears to be CERA's forecast of conventional oil; and 3.61 trillion barrels for conventional plus unconventional. ( I have seen higher CERA amounts quoted in the press. This article claims the CERA's amounts are 3.74 trillion barrels remaining for conventional, and 4.82 trillion barrels remaining on a combined basis.)

The total all year production appears to be the production until 2070. At least thats what I estimate from the area under the curve.

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Gail the Actuary on April 18, 2008 - 11:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Good information to have. Then my comparison of EIA to CERA is not right, if omits the numbers past 2070. The CERA graph is not well labeled.

The USGS 2000 estimate for conventional oil are given in this Table.

The P50 number they give is 2,659 oil + 324 NGL billion barrels = 2,983 billion barrels of ultimately recoverable conventional oil and natural gas liquids.

They do not give totals for P5 and P95. It is not quite theoretically correct to sum up the various amounts in the table, but it is fairly close. Summing the amounts, we get

P5 = 3,536 oil + 524 NGL = 4,060 billion barrels
P95 = 1,924 oil + 183 NGL = 2,107 billion barrels

If CERA expects a lot more beyond 2070, they would be up in the P5 range or higher, relative to USGS 2000.

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half full on April 18, 2008 - 11:47am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Gail,
Is there a trend in historical USGS ultimate yield estimates? Are they revising down over time? I am thinking of Dave Rutledge's graph of U.K. recoverable coal. The estimates began to converge with real production several decades ago, but prior to that had been orders of magnitude high.

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Gail the Actuary on April 18, 2008 - 12:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The USGS has a long history of producing inflated estimates of available oil. This is an article by David Strahan about this problem.

The USGS’s reputation goes back a long way. When the Shell geologist M. King Hubbert published his now legendary paper in April 1956, with its startling prediction that American oil production would peak and start to fall within 15 years, the Survey’s Deputy Chief Geologist Vincent McKelvey was among those who tried to discredit the forecast by promoting an estimate of the US oil resource that was almost three times higher than the biggest number used by Hubbert. This mattered because the central hypothesis of Hubbert’s work was that oil production tends to go into terminal decline at about the midpoint of depletion, when half the oil that will ever be produced from a given region is still underground. So the bigger the resource estimate, the longer the peak would be deferred. As I describe in The Last Oil Shock, this may have been McKelvey’s aim.

My impression is that their view of what is available is generally trending higher. At one point, I had a link to some data showing the figures over time - I don't see it right now.

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Starship Trooper on April 18, 2008 - 4:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Gail and I had an intersting conversation (if not surreal) after the "Conversation with the EIA Administrators."

In his view, all resources (and used the word "resources") including those not yet discovered (they are "out there, like the X-files, we just don't know when they'll show up) about 8 TRILLION barrels of oil and we've only used about 1.1 trillion barrels of that so far.

He also tried to make an argument as to why there is still so much oil left in the KSA. Basically, he was saying We've seen the data and have been doing this longer than anyone else.

I don't know whether he was surprised when I could recite, chapter and verse, the production numbers from Prudhoe Bay and the North Slope, but he was trying to prove that recovery numbers (as percentages were getting better and better) were going to provide more oil. I reminded him that initial (wild) estimates were on the order of 100 billion barrels and that there was talk of a second pipeline because the volume was thought to be so large.

And I think he was decidely taken back when I pointed out that peak oil was not about the size of the reserves, it was about the rate at which the oil can be supplied. It apparent that a number of people think in terms of resources (if only we could get to them) and not flow rates.

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Aniya on April 19, 2008 - 3:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi Star,

I wish I could have been there when you and Gail were conversing.

What does "he" imagine would happen to other resources were the 8 trillion to really exist? (and come online at approximately current flow rates, as you so correctly point out - ?)

Have they not heard about water scarcity, collapsing fisheries, lack of arable land, overcrowding, etc.? A rhetorical question, I realize.

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Starship Trooper on April 19, 2008 - 10:05am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Well, I was quite stunned by this statement. Earlier we had seen similar numbers in a different presentation that would have no problem and continuing growth out to nearly the 22nd century.

I can't account for why this is so. As an engineer, I tend to ask a simple question: "and you are going to accomplish that how?"

Now, I would point out that this is exactly the same thinking that got the EIA into trouble with the IEO documents. If you want an example (and there are quite a few) go back and read the International Energy Outlook on oil production. Pick the North Sea in particular. Now in the earliest version I think you can find online it seems like they correctly projected the peaking in 1999-2000 (might be a previous version hardcopy). Then notice that all of a sudden they are pushing the peak date well into the first decade of the 21st century.

It wasn't until the IEO 2006 that they finally got around to admitting that the North Sea might be in decline. The UK peaked in 1999 (the second peak with ~110 fields in service compared to the first peak with ~30 in service) and Norway peaked in 2000.

Nor do they seem to get that an "undulating plateau" is death to a system that is entorely dependent upon growth for it's own self-defined "health."

I'll be looking at my notes this weekend and putting some thoughts together for a Forum I manage. I place some additional thought here, as well. I recorded some of the presentations (audio and video) for accuracy.

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Aniya on April 19, 2008 - 11:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Hi Star,

Thanks for responding and for the example. I hope you can write this up as an article for TOD, perhaps.

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netfind on April 20, 2008 - 10:41am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Your point about future oil supply not being about reserves and being mostly about flow rate is the thing most people can't seem to grasp about peak oil. The beauty of Hubbert's analysis method is that it cuts straight through the bull and confusion about politicized reserve estimates and how oil should flow out of rock and gets to the heart of the matter, which is the real life flows produced considering all the complex factors. By doing this, it solves the riddle of who's lying about reserves and how certain rocks will behave.

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Gail the Actuary on April 20, 2008 - 9:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

In an earlier post of mine, this is the way I define peak oil:

On a worldwide basis, the phenomenon of peak oil can be thought of as a crisis in resources needed to produce oil. It's the size of the tap, not the size of the tank. As we deplete the large, easy-to-produce fields and move to ever-more-difficult fields, it takes more and more drilling rigs, more petroleum engineers, and more investment dollars. Eventually we reach a point where we are out of equipment, out of trained personnel, and the investment cost for expanding production becomes prohibitive. When production begins to drop because of all of these pressures, we reach "peak oil".

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164 comments on Last Week's EIA Conference

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