The Oil Drum

Here's a question for you all:  What do you think of Matt Simmons?  What makes him tick?  Is he being fully truthful in everything he says?

the thing about simmons that surprises me is that he's the ultimate insider , with lots to lose in terms of credibility,and yet he keeps pounding away. the aspo crowd, in juxtaposition, are all retired for the most part. whistleblowers seem rarely to come from his station in life.

I mean he is a member of the CFR... but I'm willing to believe that its not a grand conspiracy (even if that would be more fun).

I think one big reason simmons is speaking out is because he has kids and realizes that the rapture is not upon us (or if it is, that's really bad).

Simmons adds a lot of weight, experience, scholarly approach and credibility to the Peak Oil debate. He mixes extensive research, astute "big picture" observations with a lot of open questions and directional comments.  He has raised hugely important issues.

The use of the word "may" is key his forward-looking comments -  which sometimes end up distorted in the press and appear to be "over the top".

I believe that he senses a "large" role for himself in the evolving energy crisis, much larger than selling his book. I for one am very glad that he is willing to fill that role.  He may yet come to be a person of some historic significance.  I wish him well.

Dunno if this has been noticed, but Chris Skrebowski just published an updated Megaprojects (PDF file, 152KB) report in Petroleum Review. The conclusion: plenty of new additions to capacity in 2006-07, but not enough to ease the prices:

This latest update - based on public sources of information - identifies a total of 16.65mn b/d of new capacity due onstream by 2010. This, in turn, is made up of 6.34mn b/d of incremental Opec capacity and 10.31mn b/d of non-Opec capacity additions (see p2 for basis of tabulation). This is directly comparable with the 16.5mn b/d identified by the consultant CERA in its recent report. However, CERA's happy conclusion that potentially price depressing excess supply was about to emerge does not appear to take project slippage and depletion fully into account and, therefore, appears highly optimistic.(...)

The world has now reached the point where the volumes lost to depletion are much larger than the levels of likely new demand. This means total increments requred (new demand plus depletion) are running at around 7%/y, while the largest supply increments in 2006 and 2007 are contributing 3.6% and 3.5%.

It would seem most unlikely that small projects and infill drilling could account for the remaining required 3.5%. The inescapable conclusion is that oil prices will have to remain high enough to destroy demand, bringing supply and demand back into balance.

Great news! Kiwi inventor has a simple process that converts water so it will run a standard internal combustion engine. Pour it through a special box, put it in the engine, and you've got energy. http://www.biosmeanslife.com/  We can all go home now, as peak oil is solved.

Question for everyone? Can NG be produced instead NGL by companies considering the very high price of NG compared to NGL? IS it easy to do so? If So it could add to woes in oil over here.

The Oil Drum is still not really available via google's index.  Are the google bots sweeping the entire site?  If not then can you compare the robots.txt file to that of other scoop sites.  Your's wasn't exactly identical to any of the others when I poked around a bit a few weeks ago - so that might be a clue.

On the topic of new energy sources, has anyone studied quantum nucleonic reactors at all?

Such reactors appear to be safe, do not involve creation of weapons materials at all (hafnium-178 is used), and the reaction shuts down entirely if gamma rays are removed to initiate the reaction. Because of these features, the Air Force is considering prototyping an aircraft to use a quantum nucleonic reactor engine for flight power.

All told, this looks like a promising energy source for not only aircraft but perhaps for rail as well. A rail system powered off quantum nucleonic reactors would help immensely in allowing people to travel and in shipment of goods instead of by truck.

Here's a reference article from the University of Texas at Dallas that discusses the Essential Fundamentals of Quantum Nucleonics. Note that they are very careful to emphasize that this is not a nuclear reaction.

We installed our pellet stove a few weeks ago, and ran it for the first time last weekend.

http://www.eventempinc.com/stcroix/stoves/stoves.html

The Prescott is rated for 800 to 1800 SF spaces (quite a range!); we have about 950 SF.  We installed the stove between our Dining and Living areas, and vented it right next to the brick furnace chimney.  It was a demo so we didn't have to break it in.  The controls are very simple and it starts and stops easily.  The blower makes a bit more noise than I was expecting, but is nowhere near as loud as the NG furnace intermittently blowing air through the ductwork.

At the lowest pellet feed setting our thermostat showed about 74 degrees on a chilly, windy weekend.  The stove housing gets hot, but not enough to burn your flesh.  I do have to get a battery backup because w/o power, smoke can backup into the house.  

From Friday to Sunday afternoon, we ran it only a few hours at a time because it put out much more heat than we needed.  I was adding insulation to the basement on Saturday, and warm air seems to make its way down there, too.  Sunday night was chilly, so we ran it all through the night and awoke Monday to a very warm house.  We are pleased so far.

Re:  "Hubbert Linearization" Revisited

I just finished a P/Q versus Q plot of the North Sea.  The results are referenced below in the following essay.

In Chapter Three of Kenneth Deffeyes' recent book, "Beyond Oil," Dr. Deffeyes outlined a simplified version of the technique that M. King Hubbert successfully used to predict the peak of U.S. Lower 48 oil production.

There are two knowns:  annual production (P) and cumulative production to date (Q).  One plots P as a percentage of Q versus Q (P/Q versus Q).  After some initially noisy data, the plot settles down into a steady linear progression.  One can extrapolate the plot down to where P is effectively zero, which gives us total estimated cumulative production (Qt).  

As expected, Lower 48 production peaked at 50% of Qt.  Texas peaked at 54% of Qt.   The North Sea peaked at 52% of Qt.  By the way, North Sea oil production is crashing--now down 20% since its 1999 peak. North Sea oil production is critically important since they produce light, sweet crude oil.

Saudi Arabia is currently at 55% of Qt.  The world is currently at about 50% of Qt.

The Oil Drum Blog had a lengthy discussion of the Hubbert/Deffeyes method, at:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/9/29/3234/46878

So far, once a country/region has decades of serious production, we have seen no exceptions to the "Hubbert Linearization" discussed above.  Also, we have generally only seen production declines significantly prior to the 50% of Qt mark because of political problems, e.g., the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

So far, what we have never seen is increasing production beyond about 55% of Qt.  This implies that Saudi Arabia--and the world--are right at the cusp of production declines.  Interestingly enough, the Saudis appear to be desperately trying to ramp up their drilling program, and world crude oil + condensate production is basically flat year over year, showing essentially zero increase in oil production.

We tried an aggressive drilling program in Texas after production peaked in 1972.  When oil prices went up by 1,000%, we saw the biggest drilling boom in state history.  As a consequence, the number of producing oil wells in Texas increased by 14% in the 10 years after 1972.  However, oil production fell by 30% over the 10 year period after peak production.   The bottom line was that the smaller fields that were being found could not make up for the declines from the old large fields like the East Texas Field.

If you wish, I can send you PDF files showing P/Q versus Q plots for Texas and the North Sea.   Basically, once you have seen one P/Q versus Q plot, you have seen them all.

Based on the P/Q versus Q plots, at current rates of consumption, North Sea reserves will only last for 10 years, the Lower 48 for 14 years and Saudi Arabia for 23 years.  What this obviously implies is that all three regions are going to show sharp production declines.  Two of these regions are already showing--exactly as predicted--ongoing production declines.  The question is Saudi Arabia, and as Matt Simmons pointed out in his recent book, "Twilight in the Desert," almost all of the Saudi's current production is coming from old oil fields.

What about the widely heralded tar sands?  Since 1999, for every three barrels of new oil production per day from Canadian tar sands, conventional Canadian oil production has fallen by one bpd.  Also, it takes the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to process tar sands into three barrels of usable oil.   Therefore, the Canadian oil industry has to produce three bpd of oil from tar sands to have one net incremental bpd of oil, on a net energy basis.  Each incremental bpd of new oil production probably represents a total capital investment by the Canadian oil industry of well in excess of $100,000 per new net incremental bpd of oil production.  This gives us an idea of just how hard--and expensive--it is going to be to materially raise oil production.

For example, on a year over year basis, total Canadian oil production has fallen slightly.

FYI--Matt Simmons and James Kunstler will be presenting a seminar on:  "The Unfolding Energy Crisis and its Impact on Development Patterns"  in Dallas on 11/1/05.  

More information and ticket ordering at:  www.smu.edu/esp

Jeffrey Brown

While looking at a totally different project (water consumption in the Arizona desert) I came across some interesting information. I came across a chart detailing the useage of water across the nation by category in 2000. What startled me was that 48% of water in the whole country was under the heading "Thermoelectric Uses". The first thing that sprung to mind was nuclear reactors and massive steam turbines. This in turn reminded me of an interesting fact. A previous post detailed the additional power required from the electrical grid if all vehicles were converted to electricity. The post mentioned that if the gap in supply is made up by building new reactors, somehting over 800 new reactors would be needed across the United States. I then found that there are just over 100 currently in operation. Here is my point: even if nuclear power uses only 25% of the national water supply, that means that 400 reactors (half the amount needed) would consume ALL the United States water. Granted, alternatives are possible, and it is unlikely that even 10 new reactors will be constructed in the near future, but has anyone yet considered this dimension to the electricity solution?