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35 comments on Projecting US Oil Production

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Nate Hagens on January 12, 2006 - 10:17am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Great work Stuart (rain in San Fran correlates to detailed oil analysis on TOD).

I am going to do a quick check on the major 20 or so oil companies in US to look at what they claim to have as proven reserves in US - your analysis assumes we have 218-192 = approx 26 billion barrels left. My gut tells me adding the proven reserves up will be way higher than that.

Which gets back to EROI. Is it possible that one of the mystery reasons why linearization works so well (as compared to other methods) is that it implicitly accounts for eventually reaching a point of EROI of 1-1, even though there is 'oil' left, it just doesnt make energetic sense to get it? Whereas other more aggresssive approaches see 'geologic' oil and just assume it will be pumped?

Hubbert pre-dated EROI but that may be an underlying principle he observed on individual wells and areas.

Incidentally, need I point out that 26 gb doesnt last long when the country in question is using 8gb a year...

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Nate Hagens on January 12, 2006 - 10:46am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I meant proven and PROBABLE - proven reserves for US are about 22gb
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Stuart Staniford on January 12, 2006 - 12:59pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I tend to just ignore reserve numbers because of all the various problems. However, 22gb does not sound wildly inconsistent with my estimate.
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JN2 on January 12, 2006 - 10:55am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
EROI: doesn't it depend on the type of energy invested? For example, might it not be worth a boe (barrel of oil equivalent) of solar to create a barrel of highly useful liquid fuel? Obviously it's not worth burning a barrel of oil to gain a barrel of oil; that would be consuming capital to no net effect. But isn't using solar/wind more like living off income? (conveniently ignoring CO2 and climate chaos considerations...)
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GreyZone on January 12, 2006 - 1:26pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yes it depends on the energy invested, but the value of that liquid fuel is likely to be very high in the marketplace if the EROEI is less than 1. So, for instance, it might make sense for certain uses to have and continue using some petroluem fuel products even after EROEI drops below 1.0 but the general public won't be that consumer. It would likely be very restricted to the ultra wealthy and/or government services that absolutely had to have such to operate (military?). The net effect to the economy is the same - the gasoline-powered automobile-driven suburban culture we've created can't be sustained in that scenario without switching to an entirely different energy base.
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