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61 comments on Oilwatch Monthly August 2009

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gneiss1 on August 17, 2009 - 9:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Could the early falls in consumption have been triggered by something other than a latent recession or high prices? Like mandatory efficiency standards, carbon trading or green consumption trends? The reason I ask is that consumption seems to have been declining as early as 2004 in France, Germany, Italy and Japan. But others like the UK and Spain show a later decline beginning around 2006 which is more easily attributable to price rises.

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Gail the Actuary on August 17, 2009 - 9:53am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Actually, the oil price run-up began much earlier than most people remember--2003 and onward, so the earlier drop does make sense. This is a graph Rune Likvern did, from this post.

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Buster Cagney on August 17, 2009 - 11:14am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Rembrandt, excellent analysis and presentation of the IEA, JODI and other data as usual. Thanks!

Chart 7 (World Production in BTUs) is an interesting chart showing that world liquids production currently contains less energy on a gross basis than in 2005.

A deeper analysis of this chart could be revealing.

In chart 7 the BTU content of "crude oil" is fixed at "a barrel of crude oil contains around 5.8 million British Thermal Units".

However, this assumes that the BTU content of "crude oil" has not been changing. The global average produced oil barrel is becoming lighter at one end with additional NGLs (containing less energy but requiring less to process) and heavier at the other end with oil sands and other heavy oil production (containing more energy but requiring more to process). Do these offset?

An interesting chart would be the average API gravity of the global average produced liquid barrel on a gross and net (net of processing losses) basis. This could be a level of precision which is not available in any dataset at the moment (maybe it is). It would be a great addition to your monthly analysis as a support to Chart 7.

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Rembrandt on August 18, 2009 - 5:14am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

@Buster Cagney (17 aug,4:14pm)

Thank you Buster I am always glad that this effort is a useful one. I did some work in the past on the change in sulfur content and API gravity of different crude blends across the globe. The data is not comprehensive enough though to state anything about the energy content as a consequence of this change (next to the indirect costs of drilling which is not taken into account in the BTU content). My conclusion based on several sources which did keep track of the average API gravity of global average produced liquid barrel (gross I think) was that the sulfur content and gravity in the coming 5-10 years will not change that much after the recent change to more heavier/sourer crudes, so your hypotheses that the different sources of new production offset eachother seems to be true. I don't have access to this data anymore (from PIRA/CERA) though and it is only updated once a year so this makes it difficult to add it into the oilwatch.

If you send me an email at contact @ peakoil.nl I can send you more information about this subject.

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61 comments on Oilwatch Monthly August 2009

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