"There is an element to American culture that never ceases to amuse me. Even when grappling with the idea of economic disintegration, Americans attempt to cast it in terms of technological or economic progress: eco-villages, sustainable development, energy efficiency and so on. Under the circumstances, such compulsive techno-optimism seems maladaptive. I love the new advances in organic farming, which I find fascinating and very useful, but why do people seem incapable of doing the simplest things without making them into projects, preferably ones that involve some element of new technology? Thousands of years of happy composting using heaps and pits are behind us: now we need bins - and plastic, oil-based ones at that!"

"Contrary to the impositions of the whiz-bang-blinded and the gadget-addled among us, living off the land is not about projects, or systems, or organizations, but about shovels and buckets and hoes, and it is not even so much about skills or techniques, as it is about habits. Yes, you too can pick up the healthy habits of growing and gathering your own food, storing it, cooking it, eating it, excreting it, and, yes, even composting the end result. The temporary bounty of fossil fuels has allowed a lot of the former peasants to live like nobles for a time - residing in mansions, moving about in carriages, and having people serve them. Once these sources of energy are depleted, many of these former peasants will be forced to revert back. They will once more have to live in huts, travel on foot, wield their ancestral scythes and sickles to provide their sustenance, and do their own chores."

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/LATOC/OurVillage.html

I've read the info here on directional drilling and also on Wikipedia. I roughnecked in West Texas for a year in the mid 70's, so I have a little knowledge of driiling.

But I don't get how directional drilling works. It sounds like from the readings that you drill straight down a bit, then slant off. If this is so, then how do you get the pipe in/out at the bend?

Or do you not drill straight down, then angle - just angle from the start?

As of October 3, there are 21 natural gas processing plants, with capacities equal to or greater than 100 million cubic feet per day, in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi that are not active. Ten of these plants with a total capacity of 5.4 billion cubic feet per day are not active owing to external factors, including lack of electric power or gas supplies. Eleven of the plants are inactive because of damage to the facilities themselves. These plants have capacity of 7.7 billion cubic feet per day.

Meanwhile, the latest MMS report shows a slight improvement in shut in energy; today 92.80% oil / 74.95% gas;  Friday's numbers were 97.85% oil / 79.41% NG for comparison.

And now attention turns to the next potential storm. Early days... but some tracks taking it into the GOM near the... danger zone.

http://euler.atmos.colostate.edu/~vigh/guidance/atlantic/early1.png

Latest Tropical Weather Outlook:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATWOAT+shtml/032112.shtml

Based on a Simmons & Company chart, I estimate that the world uses--from nuclear + fossil fuel sources--the BTU equivalent of one Gb of oil every five days (200 million barrels equivalent per day)

To put this in perspective, if we found an entire new Saudi Arabia (SA)--which won't happen--it would increase our daily nuclear + fossil fuel energy extraction rate by less than 5%.

We burn through the BTU equivalent of the East Texas Field every 30 days or so.  In less than a year, we burn through the equivalent of the cumulative oil production to date of the Ghawar Field.  In 500 days, we burn through the equivalent of the cumulative oil production to date from all of SA.  

The message that comes loud and clear from these charts is that, despite the concern here with oil and gasoline, those commodities are not a problem. The market stubbornly refuses to care. Oil is about where it was pre-Katrina, and gasoline is pretty stable at about 15 cents up from where it was. Rather than a sign of stupidity of the markets, I take it as a sign that there is no major shortage of these commodities in the near future.

Natural gas is another matter. Katrina made the price jump from $10 to $12; Rita sent it up to $13; and last week it jumped again to $14. Those are high prices and the markets expect them to stay high all the way into spring.

This is where most of the media attention will probably be for the next few months. Peak Oil will not be the story, natural gas shortages will be what everyone is talking about. That's my guess, anyway.

Fortunately this is a commodity where it's pretty easy to conserve. It's not a matter of being warm vs freezing to death. People can easily turn down the thermostat a few degrees. Wear a sweater indoors or throw another blanket on the bed.

In the article in World Oil:-
http://www.worldoil.com/Magazine/MAGAZINE_DETAIL.asp?ART_ID=2655
there is a graph, Fig 1, which shows the modest increase in the number of exploration and appraisal wells that have been dug in the UK continetal shelf and in Fig 3 shows the strong decline in the success rate of of this drilling, dropping from 43% or so for much of the 1980's to 20% in 2004.

I would be interested to know if anybody has comparable figures for other parts of the world.

Venezuela is pulling their money out of the U.S.; this follows a similar move by Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago.  

I wonder what they know, that most Americans don't know--at least not yet.  

Today's tech is mostly human-scale. When we develop the ability to build machines at molecular scale, they will have several key advantages over today's machines. Far higher power density and functional density (means they use less material). Higher operating efficiency (less friction). Stronger materials (again, you need less).

For manufacturing systems, you get several advantages: Rapid prototyping, meaning it's a lot easier to develop new products. General-purpose manufacturing, meaning you can build a wide range of products with one manufaturing system.

Perhaps most importantly, fast and inexpensive construction--including construction of the manufacturing systems. A manufacturing system should be able to build products of its own weight and complexity in a few hours from cheap feedstock. (If this sounds impossible, remember that bacteria can do it.) That implies you could scale production from kilograms to megatons in a week, if you had enough feedstock prepared.

Now, if these capabilities are used to produce solar collectors and a few other energy-related technologies, our energy problems would be solved almost overnight. Think again about the ability to double manufacturing capacity in hours instead of years. Develop a solar concentrator, built a million overnight, at a cost of pennies per square meter.

Of course, if molecular manufacturing is used to produce vast quantities of unwise products, or fuels a breakneck arms race, we could face worse problems than peak oil.

I expect this to be developed within the next 10-15 years, maybe sooner. Others expect it to take a few decades. A few loud skeptics who haven't studied it claim that it's impossible. Unless the loud ignorant people are right, we should probably add it to peak oil scenario-making.

See http://crnano.org for more information. (Disclaimer: I'm co-founder and director of research of that site).

Chris

What does it cost, in terms of money, oil/gas, non-agricultural land, and agricultural land, to set up?

Once it's running, what does it require, in terms of labor, oil/gas, other forms of energy, and other costs, to produce a certain amount of energy in usable form?

Can it produce transportation fuels?

How far up does it scale: How much energy is available from this source?

How far down does it scale: Can it be installed a bit at a time, or does it require large infrastructure investment?

How much development (time) will it take to become ready for large-scale investment?

How long does it take to install capacity? (Perhaps permitting time and funding delay should be included in this.)

What does it do to atmospheric CO2?

Does it have any other significant environmental benefits or problems?

Does it require "pre-crash" resources to build and maintain?

Is it a political favorite, or could it be made one? Conversely, will it be politically opposed? (Recognizing that politics includes many different interest groups.)

(I posted an earlier version of this at the end of a thread that's about to scroll off the front page. http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/9/30/204456/113#45
I hope it's not rude to repost an improved version here.)

Chris

This is a link to a story about falling oil production in the North Sea, especially UK production.

The UK and NCS P/Q Versus Q plots that Stuart provided show estimated combined remaining (North Sea) recoverable reserves of about 15 Gb.  

The North Sea is currently producing 4.8 mmbpd.  This is a reserve to production ratio of less than 9 years.  This suggests a very rapid decline rate ahead.  This is critical since the North Sea produces light, sweet crude.

I love to suggest projects for other people to do, so here is a suggestion.  

How about if someone does puts together P/Q versus Q plots of the top 10 oil exporters?  FYI--the UK is not even an oil exporter anymore.  This would provide a Hubbert estimate for remaining reserves in the principal oil exporting countries.  

A key point:  a country can only export what is left over after domestic consumption.  For example, consider a country producing two mmbpd, consuming one mmbpd and exporting one mmbpd.  A 25% drop in production would result in a 50% drop in exports.  

The plots that Stuart provided for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Norway show combined remaining recoverable reserves for these three oil exporting countries of only about 150 Gb.  When these countries see the handwriting on the wall, do they continue producing at a maximum rate, or do they start cutting back?  For the sake of argument, let's assume that 50 Gb will never be exported, so the Hubbert estimate for the remaining export capacity for these three countries, based on the above assumption, is only about 100 Gb.  

"The only hope for humanity at this point is a supernatural one.  I speak of the "Blessed Hope" of the Gospels, the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ to rule the world, and usher in an age of universal peace, bliss, and prosperity.

To those of you who think I am joking, I am not.  I am deadly serious.

To those of you who think this comment is off-topic, I respectfully and emphatically disagree.  Everyone who reads and writes into this site is, on some level, doing so with a view to searching for a basis for some kind of hopeful future.  In response to this issue just having been explicitly raised, I am offering in deadly earnest what I believe is the true basis of hope.

On a purely natural level, humanity is doomed.  There is too much evil and corruption afoot in the world for any of the idealistic visions for the future that are of a purely natural sort to be viable.  I refer here to things such as forming a society based on sustainable living, or one based on the equitable distribution of scarce resources, or one approaching a hunter-gatherer ideal of living in perfect harmony with nature.  Human nature being as corrupt as it is, these are all vain chimeras.  Does a critical look at history tell us any different?

Only an influx of grace into the world, brought upon by Christ's return in glory, offers the basis for a geniune hope.  But this hope is a sure and solid one!  Christ's supernatural intervention WILL transform and save the world, turning it into something beyond the wildest hopes of all the purely naturalistic visions that one runs into among peak-oil types.

Maranatha!  Come Lord Jesus!"

[The following is new material added to the present post:]  I think a debate on this point is badly needed among the Peak Oil community.  Specifically, those who are willing to place their faith in humanity alone being able to make something of the current predicament - something that I think is widespread on this site among those who DO have hope - need to think seriously about whether whatever ideal they envision REALLY IS possible in the absence of Divine Grace.

Richard Heinberg, if you ever contribute to this site, I would be very interested to learn of your response.

I would feel a lot more comfortable with this statement if there was good data to back it up.
I no longer put any serious belief in EIA, IEA, or BP data, but what else is there ?
So is there a spreadsheet somewhere with historical production data for crude oil,
with the quantities broken down by API crude type ( light, intermediate and heavy ) and sulfur content ( sweet and sour )
so that we can chart the data and see six peaks at various stages of completion
with light sweet crude leading the way.

This would be a powerful visual display of Peak Oil happening,
if it turns out the way I think it should.

But DailyKos had an intelligent response to the story that raises a number of important questions to Governor Schweitzer's Panglossian view of the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Meanwhile, the Times had an accompanying op-ed piece about natural gas. This article claims natural gas supply is down because E&P was suppressed in 1978 when Congress buckled to the coal industry. Interesting idea. But the lead-in to the piece is more interesting:

IN the early 1600's, the Flemish alchemist Jan Baptista van Helmont planted a willow sapling and measured its weight as it grew. After five years the tree weighed 169 pounds.

Where had the solid bulk of wood come from? Not from the soil, which had lost only two ounces in all that time. Rather, Helmont's measurements led to the discovery that a tree's new wood comes from tiny bits of carbon that float in the air, in the form of carbon dioxide.

That simple insight tells us a great deal about the problems that bedevil American energy policy. Coal and oil ultimately derive from ancient vegetation that soaked up carbon in the planet's primeval atmosphere. Breathe in car exhaust or the air near a coal plant today and you are inhaling the earth's ancient geologic atmosphere, in the form of carbon that accumulated over millenniums. But the carbon dioxide we release as we burn fuel builds up in the air, leading to global warming.

Another catch is that even in the short term, the petroleum that is recovered is not going exclusively to the United States or even Canada. The Chinese have been very busily inking contracts for substantial gobs of it. Is George Bush going to send the 82nd airborne into Alberta to secure access to the tar sands?

FYI, I subscribe to the point & figure charts in all my financial decisions.
For NYMEX Crude Oil, on the P&F chart, it has a vertical price objective of $87.00-it currently sits at $66.50
For Natural Gas Continuous, on the P&F chart, it has a vertical price objective of $22.60-it currently sits at $14.10

"What people wanted six months ago and what they want today has changed rather dramatically," said Ken Bernhardt, a marketing professor at Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business.

"Japanese cars, in particular, benefit from the perception of being highly fuel-efficient, which is what consumers want right now."

Japanese automakers' image has been helped by investment in technologies like gasoline-electric vehicles and Honda's redesigned Civic compact car, which gets 40 miles to the gallon, or 6 liters per 100 kilometers, on the highway, double the average mileage of most sport utility vehicles.

Honda's shares set a record high on Tuesday, ending up 1.5 percent at ¥6,610, or $57.90. Nissan's hit a 12-month high and were up 1.6 percent at ¥1,330.

Japanese and South Korean companies sold 507,597 cars and light trucks in September, up 10 percent from a year earlier. That included a 10 percent gain for Toyota Motor, Asia's largest automaker, and 9.1 percent for Hyundai Motor, South Korea's biggest assembler.

Industrywide, however, sales fell an estimated 7.6 percent, to 1.33 million vehicles, Autodata said. Sales declined 18 percent for light trucks, including sport utility vehicles, pickups and minivans, while rising 6.3 percent for cars. Final U.S. data were unavailable as Volkswagen had not yet reported.

Sales by General Motors, the world's largest automaker, fell 24 percent last month, and Ford Motor, the No. 2 U.S. carmaker, sold 19 percent fewer vehicles. However, DaimlerChrysler of Germany lifted its sales of Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz vehicles by 3.7 percent.

Toyota, the fourth-largest carmaker in the United States, said it sold 178,417 Toyota, Scion and Lexus vehicles last month, up from 161,793 a year earlier.

Toyota's market share rose 2.1 percentage points to 13.4 percent in September.

The average U.S. retail price for unleaded gasoline surged to a record $3.06 a gallon on Sept. 5, with a current average of $2.94, according to the AAA motoring association's fuel-price Web site.

Toyota sold 13,021 gas-electric hybrids last month, including 8,193 of the Prius and 4,828 SUVs. The company sold a record 106,978 hybrids in the United States this year, more than the 2004 total for all automakers of 84,181.

Nissan sold 93,540 Nissan and Infiniti vehicles, Jed Connelly, senior vice president of its U.S. unit, said in an interview. Higher fuel prices seemed to spur demand for the Sentra, midsize Altima sedans and Murano sport utility vehicles, Nissan's most fuel-efficient models in their respective categories, Connelly said.

Nissan's market share was 7 percent last month, up from 5.6 percent.

TOKYO Demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles lifted U.S. market share at Nissan Motor and Honda Motor in September, driving their share prices higher Tuesday.

The automakers' combined market share rose to 38.2 percent last month, the second-highest level on record, compared with 32 percent a year earlier, Autodata said this week. The gains included a 16 percent jump for Nissan, Japan's second-largest automaker, and 12 percent for Honda, the third-largest.

"What people wanted six months ago and what they want today has changed rather dramatically," said Ken Bernhardt, a marketing professor at Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business.

"Japanese cars, in particular, benefit from the perception of being highly fuel-efficient, which is what consumers want right now."

Full text at link.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The chief executive of the nation's largest car dealer has come down in favor a tax increase on gasoline, calling it long overdue.

Gradually hiking gasoline taxes will create the demand for greater fuel efficiency, Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, commented in Automotive News.

"The truth of the matter is: If you want people to smoke less, you tax cigarettes. If you want them to drink less, you tax alcohol. Guess what you should do if you want them to consume less gasoline? That's right: Tax gasoline," Jackson said in the commentary.

With gas prices rising above $3 a gallon, consumers have been more conscientious about their gas use. But, Jackson said, prices need to reach $6 a gallon to have the same effect on consumer behavior that they did when they reached their peaks in the 1970s and 1980s.

In the report, he proposes a gradual increase of 10 cents a gallon a year on the federal tax on gas, which has been unchanged at 18 cents a gallon for more than a decade.

The goal of the proposal is not to raise taxes but to change the consumer mindset, he argues. Critics argue that raising the price of gas would put a disproportionate burden on the poor, but Jackson proposes an annual energy tax credit for those whose incomes are below a certain level.

"Since we all agree that America's addiction to oil is an issue of national security, we need an energy policy that encourages conservation," he said.

---

I'm assuming the 'open thread' means you can post kind of whatever you want?

He said, "soaring oil prices have again spotlighted the old question. Are we running out of oil? The doomsayers are again conveying grim messages through the front pages of major newspapers. `Peak oil' is now part of the general public's vocabulary, along with the notion that oil production may have peaked already, heralding a period of inevitable decline."

Yet Mandil dismissed the idea that this situation is worrisome by stating, "the IEA has long maintained that none of this is a cause for concern."

However not too far later on in the report, the IEA admits that most countries outside of OPEC "have passed their peaks in conventional oil production, or will do so shortly."
What "peak oil" supporters might find even more strange, is the use of the Hubbert Curve within the report, which is the mountain-shaped curve, showing increasing then declining production. It was created by the former Shell geologist M.K. Hubbert, to illustrate the theory of "peak oil."

In a special section entitled just "Peak Oil" the IEA actually present the theory to its clients. They sum up by saying that

"The striking success of Hubbert in predicting the peak of U.S. production suggests that such conditions were more or less met in the U.S. during that time period."

They then appear to question the current relevance of Hubbert in today's oil market. Because they move on to say that "the controversies surrounding peak oil in the literature revolve around four main points. Does the Hubbert model apply to oil production worldwide? If the Hubbert model does apply, when will the peak in worldwide oil production be? What happens after the peak? How fast will the decrease of production be? What role does technology play in such models?"

The basic counter thrust of the IEA's argument is that new technologies and increased investment can overcome any production inflection. But the level of investment that requires is truly astronomical. Repeating a figure they first used in the IEA World Energy Outlook report they estimate that the total necessary investment cost "for worldwide upstream operations and transport [of oil]" by 2030 will amount to "$5 trillion."

That works out at roughly $564.5 million dollars a day, between now and 1 January 2030. Not surprisingly, they conclude that "neither private enterprises nor national companies necessarily have the incentive to assume the risk of tackling new types of resources such as oil sands or oil shales. Such players might choose, for example, to focus instead on maximising returns from their investments in deepwater in a high oil-price environment."

The IEA goes on to say that "It should be noted, too, that there does not tend to be great interest in new types of resources among service and supply-sector players...they need to have ready customers for their new products and cannot easily justify developing products for a market that does not yet exist. Furthermore, private industry cannot be relied upon to invest in research on technologies that are too far from being economical."

Indeed the report does throw up a great deal of questions: Questions of funding, or reserves and questions on the role of governments. But in doing so, has the IEA unwittingly opened a Pandora's box of debate by answering its critics so directly?

http://www.nwherald.com/BusinessSection/303023549722256.php

Some quotes:

Of the gulf's 4,000 platforms, the storms destroyed 109 offshore drilling platforms, including a major platform, and severely damaged 31, 4 of them major ones, Ms. Norton said. About 91 percent of oil production and 72 percent of natural gas production was out of service, and workers have yet to return to 42 percent of the gulf's manned platforms and 13 percent of rigs, according to the Minerals Management Service.

The recovery has been slower after Rita than after Katrina, and after Hurricane Ivan last year, because there was greater damage to ports, natural gas processing plants and other operations that support gulf production, Ms. Norton said. . . .

There were signs Tuesday that another oil producer, Royal Dutch Shell, experienced worse-than-expected damage in the Gulf of Mexico. The giant offshore Mars oil platform, which is run by Shell, may not be operational until the second half of 2006, the pipeline company Enbridge told investors during a presentation.

More cuts in reported production are likely as oil companies report third-quarter earnings, analysts and investors say. "The damage from Hurricane Rita has been significantly underreported," said Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Company. Oil companies have been trying to play down the storm's impact, because they do not want prices to rise any higher than their already unpopular levels, Mr. Gheit said.

RIVETED by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes, I think that we have crossed it.  Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again, it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do.  But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end - riveted, as it were,
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are our lives,
and because they are ours.

from page 179 in Great Poems for Hard Times
by Garrison Keillor, ©2005 by Garrison Keillor
Viking / Penguin Group USA
375 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014