San Francisco Passes Peak Oil Resolution
Posted by Glenn on April 14, 2006 - 1:34pm in The Oil Drum: Local
San Francisco on Tuesday became the first major U.S. city to pass a resolution acknowledging the threats posed by peak oil, urging the city to develop a comprehensive plan to respond to the emerging global energy crunch.
Wow, I'm impressed. So how'd they do it?
The resolution, which won unanimous support by the board was sponsored by supervisors Aaron Peskin, Jake McGoldrick and Sophie Maxwell. It cites an influential study commissioned by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, known as the Hirsch Report, which raised concerns about the nation's ability to avert a major crisis from the peak and decline of oil production.
This was enhanced by the local Peak oil meet-up group's grassroots campaign.
The measure comes on the heels of an increasingly effective grass roots campaign by groups such as San Francisco Oil Awareness, Post Carbon San Francisco, and SF Informatics, who have sponsored mailings and meetings targeting Bay Area elected officials for more than two years. San Francisco has been making strides in the area of energy independence, energy watchdogs have reported. The group Sustainlane.com says that San Francisco was voted third best city to withstand an oil crisis.
They generated a local media buzz about the subject through the spotlight that the Salon article put on them:
Members of the SF Post Carbon group were featured in a recent article in Salon.com surveying the growing movement.
And they used a great visual, the Oil Poster.
Among the high-visibility tools used by the groups is a colorful poster called The Oil Age, created by SF Informatics in association with Global Public Media. The poster traces the history of oil production worldwide and displays relevant energy statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, BP Statistical Review and other industry sources. The poster was hand delivered to dozens of Bay Area elected officials in January, including the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, The Department on the Environment and the Communion on the Environment.
Here in NYC, I know there are many people trying to break through the clutter (including myself) to get on the City Council and Mayor's radar screen, but so far it hasn't really resulted in more than a few nods that yes we should improve efficiency and become less dependent on automobiles, etc. Hopefully, the energy solutions conference later this month will start that process.
So, let's turn up the volume across the nation. Let's get the word out. The time has never been better to talk about peak oil or at least responding to the higher energy costs we are already experiencing.
I would love to hear from some of the SF folks what they think about this.
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http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm
And great job by San Fran. As suggested in the bokk American Mania, by Peter Whybrow, the progressives and novelty seekers genetically moved west and california was all the farther they could get. East coasters more traditional..(though we do have good conferences)
And what about all the gas we borrowed from Europe and Japan after Katrina? Aren't we supposed to pay it back? How do we do that?
Last time I checked TWIP (This Week In Petroleum) I found that cumulative refinery runs were approximately 55 million barells behind the same periode for 2005.
Partly explains the build in crude storage.
Gasoline imports are up 20 % (or 200 kb/d) on a year on year basis.
Gasoline storage draws are presently high, and even if refinery runs on average is running only approx. 500 kb/d below 2005, it suggests to me that refineries are turning out less gasoline.
Could this be due refineries using heavier oil and/or lack of lighter oil like Brent and WTI?
Could this be due to refineries now using heavier oils and/or insufficient supplies of lighter crudes like Brent and/or WTI?
This could say something about present availability of sweet crudes.
US oil production according to TWIP is down approx. 400 kb/d relative 2005.
http://www.petrostrategies.org/Graphs/refineryutilization.html
RR
The same with viscosity
Clearly since 1985 there has been a deterioration in both areas - how significant this is, is unclear.
If production is shifting toward these heavier sour grades, "Houston we have a problem" [an appropriate city from a quote coming completely out of context. Depending on your degree of faith in the U.S. Government feel free to substitute "Washington" for "Houston".] :-)
There is always Occam's Razor, i.e., why not the simplest explanation? We are past Peak Oil, and the top four net oil exporters are farther down the depletion curve than the world is overall. And there is the little matter of the second largest oil field in the world, Cantarell, right at our back door with a decline rate probably in excess of 40% per year.
Remember, we have no idea what the quality is of the crude oil inventories and imports. We do know that we are seeing historically high spreads between light, sweet and heavy, sour. We also know that light, sweet prices are up about $10 since late December.
What if a continuing build in heavy, sour inventories has been obscuring flat to declining inventories of light, sweet crude oil?
"We are deeply concerned that the world is probably facing an imminent and catastrophic collapse in net oil export capacity because of declining production and increasing domestic consumption in the top exporting countries."
Coincidence or not, both crude oil and total net imports are now down (4% and 8.7% respectively) from late December, based on the four week running average.
Note that the four week period ending in late December bracketed Dr. Deffeyes' prediction of 12/16/05 for the peak of world oil production, so I think that this is a good baseline to compare recent data to.
M. King Hubbert's Lower 48 Prediction Revisited
http://www.energybulletin.net/13575.html
I've always thought about the idea of fungibility when you make this point about the exporters. An pure economist would say that as world market prices go higher, less will be consumed internally and countries will shift more of their production to export. The problem is that these are exactly the countries that subsidize their domestic consumption significantly. If they stop doing that, they will have to deal with domestic political/economic problems which for any politician/ruler, elected or not, is not something easily offset by more export income. I'll write longer about this when I can collect my thoughts and find the hard data, but this seems a critical point. In fact, ultimately it means that higher prices will result in less and less fungibility of oil exports over time. I can almost envision an oil/refined product smuggling market as the differential between domestic prices and world prices widens.
I've always thought about the idea of fungibility when you make this point about the exporters. An pure economist would say that as world market prices go higher, less will be consumed internally and countries will shift more of their production to export. The problem is that these are exactly the countries that subsidize their domestic consumption significantly. If they stop doing that, they will have to deal with domestic political/economic problems which for any politician/ruler, elected or not, is not something easily offset by more export income. I'll write longer about this when I can collect my thoughts and find the hard data, but this seems a critical point. In fact, ultimately it means that higher prices will result in less and less fungibility of oil exports over time. I can almost envision an oil/refined product smuggling market as the differential between domestic prices and world prices widens.
Indonesia subidizes (or use to subsidize) product prices. The UK taxed products pretty heavily.
It would be very interesting to plot their oil produciton, consumption and net exports for the past 10 years or so.
You might also add the US to the list.
In any case, I suspect that net exports are going to fall a hell of a lot faster than most of us think.
Question: What type of crude oil is stored in the Reserve?
Answer: During the quarter century that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has existed, crude oil has been acquired from 25 countries. The oil is categorized as either "sweet" (with a sulfur content not exceeding 0.5 percent) or "sour" (with a sulfur content greater than 0.5 percent but less than 2.0 percent). Today, approximately two-thirds of the oil inventory is sour, and one-third is sweet.
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/spr/spr-facts.html
I will be ordering to give to sceptics and naysayers all around.
I have found that the poster works quite well when presenting the subject to people who are new to it. I got mine for free by attending that thing that Roscoe Bartlett did last fall (and there is a little sticker in the corner to prove it - that sticker may give it just a little more credibility).
One question that did come up though - the poster was printed in 2005, so they only had production numbers for 2004. Do they plan to update it sometime to include 2005 data?
www.oilposter.org
I echo your sentiments. Good for SF! Now, if I can only get Arizona govt. officials to respond to my emails. Still flogging away!
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Even focusing on cities, San Francisco (like Berkeley) is quite its own "People's" republic (I should know, I live in SF). Now maybe, if cities like Houston, Detroit, Mexico City or L.A. or Mobile, Alabama put out such a statement it would be a true testament to a mainstreaming of peak oil awareness.
Until then...let's not get too excited by this.
The actual supervisors who co-sponsored the resolution were: Mirkarimi, McGoldrick, Maxwell, and Daly - the press release had Aaron Peskin listed incorrectly, and Daly was a late sponsor so he initially was not listed.
We anticipate the resolution is going to a committee which will hold hearings over the next few months, the goal of which is to get funding for the study we requested in our resolution.
Documents concerning this as well as other projects are available on our media page at: http://www.sfbayoil.org/sfoa/sfoamedia.html
Do you have a copy of the actual resolution passed? The link from the press release is broken.
As I browsed through the information of said poster I noticed the following;
1) Mexico had a high in 2004 of 3,38 Mb/d (crude oil and lease condensate) and 3,33 Mb/d in 2005. This is based on the most recent data from EIA. As Cantarell has entered decline it could now be expected that Mexico "peaked" in 2004 and not in 2007 as suggested by subject poster.
2) Denmark "peaked" in 2004 according to data from the Danish Energy Authority (DEA), who in their latest forecast projects declining oil production from Denmark. The poster suggests Denmark will "peak" in 2007.
3) NGL's (Natural Gas Liquids) has been running flat since 2003 according to the most recent data from EIA. (I am not yet aware of anyone else reporting NGL's to such a detail as EIA). EIA's data has a high in 2003 of 7,53 Mb/d and 7,49 Mb/d for 2005. Be aware that ASPO is using a very simplistic model for their NGL projections, and Campbell seems not to be fully familiar with that GTL is a conversion process (to my best knowledge GTL is a conversion process normally using methane (CH4) as feed) as he in his Newsletter of January 2005 describes GTL as proceeds from the well stream.
Could it, based on the above, be that the "peak" is closer than suggested by subject poster?