The Oil Drum

53 comments on Rembrandt Koppelaar's Oil Peak

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Rembrandt on September 10, 2005 - 11:01am

Thx for giving the attention to this. I hope you guys can carry this to the next level. I am willing to help and i hope you can use my analysis as a small basis.

As you know it is a draft version and i intend to incorporate any errors i can find. The whole idea so far was not to make an exactly correct model but to give a general outline which makes it quite certain that the peak will be within now and 10-15 years.

The problem that i have is mostly lack of data.

On a point by point basis:

Error bars -->

i wanted to do that but i don't have enough time to make different graphs for it. That's why i incorporated 2010-2015 as a peak range. I don't think that economical,political and natural factors will shift the peak as much as people say. These things are also countered by increased investement because of high prices and stuff.

Unconventional oil -->

Big question how these forms of oil will develop. Venezuelan developments are a weak point didn't do much with that. Canadian tar sands are factored in (4-5 mb/d eventually), as for oil shale i think those will only come into development much later (around 2020) which could increase production. Except that we have no clue on the EROEI of oil shale. Is it viable to produce it?

Type II and III depletion -->

Correct, i have no data on past increases so it is quite hard for me to be able to factor in the exact depletion rate. As a counter argument i would like to say that because we are dealing with a variety of factors (possible fields coming online, depletion increases and decreases because of potential EOR etc..) it might not matter that much.

Depletion suprises -->

This is the big thing as to what is going to happen... Don't know i am quite concerned about depletion in the Deepwater from what i have seen lately.

I intend to rework the North Sea, thx for pointing out the major errors that i made there.

Production Profiles -->

only for the period 2005-2010, not for the extrapolation part (which is based on an entirely different method (SWAG as you call it :D)

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Stuart Staniford on September 10, 2005 - 8:28pm

Rembrandt: On the oil shale, this article says it has EROEI of around 3 (roughly similar to tar sands). There is massive quantities of it (as there is of tar sands). I think cornucopians are going to point out that there will be massive pressure to develop these resources - why won't they get developed far more than you indicate post peak? Clearly the bad EROEI means that it will be capital intensive. But I think we need a much more solid way of estimating how much or how little they can be developed, since it seem critical to understanding the long term picture.

Thanks again for all the hard work you put into your analysis.