The Oil Drum

The Norwegian blogspot

http://energikrise.blogspot.com/

Has in two recent posts with diagrams in English (based upon BP Statistical Review 2006) shown the developments in net (oil) exports for the years 1985 through 2005 and declines in oil production from countries that have seen declining trends in oil production through the last 5 years (2001 - 2005).

Though production during 2005 increased by 0,9-1,0 Mb/d, net exports increased with less than 0,4 Mb/d. As net imports by countries within OECD and China increased in 2005, this suggests that the other countries collectively must have decreased their imports due to price increases during 2005 (demand destruction). This has been illustrated with a supplementary diagram within the post.

Some of the oil producers and exporters have been increasing their consumption, explaining why growth in production has been stronger than growth in net exports.

The more recent post illustrates how production has been declining for the countries that have a documented decline through the last 5 years (2001 - 2005).

Could this give an idea of how global oil production declines when it starts?

Nearly three football fields long, the ship appears to be sitting idle on the turquoise blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps even abandoned.

Beneath the deck, there's no such tranquility. A 200-person crew of geologists, engineers and technicians work around the clock at dimly lit keyboards, controlling every move of an adjoining oil rig as it uses an 16{-inch (41-centimeter) pipe to bore through the ocean floor.

The Chevron Corp. crew is developing a deepwater oil field 190 miles (305 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast projected to produce 100,000 barrels a day by 2008 and 500 million barrels overall. Each well willreach more than 26,000 feet (7,800 meters) below sea level.

It's the kind of deepwater discovery once thought to be out of reach, but with improved technology and climbing global oil prices, companies are spending billions developing oil fields the Interior Department says will substantially boost Gulf production.

Deepwater exploration _ done in depths of 1,000 feet (300 meters) of water or greater _ is also volatile, as companies face increasing development costs, a battle with the federal government over royalty payments and continued rig shortages

Gross display of power!

The thrusters help the ship withstand 20-foot (6-meter) waves, 80 mile(130-kilometer)-an-hour winds, and currents that would prevent traditional rigs from operating. The amount of power used to keep the ship stationary and drilling would light up 40,000 homes.

Another interesting tid-bit

Already there is an almost four-year waiting for drilling ships, according to a recent report energy consultant Howard Weil. The backlog prompted Chevron to have Transocean build another ship, to be ready in three years.

-C.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/15/AR2006061502062.html

The whole world is talking about energy shortages, but for the moment, the U.S. natural gas business is looking at a potential glut.

Thanks in part to a warm winter, inventories of natural gas have built up to levels far greater than normal for this time of year. And terminals built to handle imports of liquefied natural gas from other countries are operating at about half of their capacity.

Sadly the article doesn't talk about anything beyond a year out.  

I have Johnathan Darley's book "High Noon for Natural Gas" sitting in my pile of books to be read..

Here is a fascinating article from last year. There are apparently a bunch of people out there who are convinced that the rate of innovation is slowing drastically.

One of the strangest portents of the end of progress is the recent discovery that humans are losing their ability to come up with new ideas.

Jonathan Huebner is an amiable, very polite and very correct physicist who works at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He took the job in 1985, when he was 26. An older scientist told him how lucky he was. In the course of his career, he could expect to see huge scientific and technological advances. But by 1990, Huebner had begun to suspect the old man was wrong. "The number of advances wasn't increasing exponentially, I hadn't seen as many as I had expected -- not in any particular area, just generally."

Puzzled, he undertook some research of his own. He began to study the rate of significant innovations as catalogued in a standard work entitled The History of Science and Technology. After some elaborate mathematics, he came to a conclusion that raised serious questions about our continued ability to sustain progress. What he found was that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation -- which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year -- is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024 it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, the period between the end of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.

This does not bode well for the techno-cornucopian position that we will be able to innovate our way out of the Peak Oil box - for instance by developing fusion reactors that fit in the trunk of an electric car or something.

This contrasts starkly with Ray Kurzweil's notion of an imminent "Technological Singularity", a spritual/technological notion that a transcendence of the human condition through technology is both possible and desirable. Needless to say, Kurzweil disagrees vehemently with Huebner's conclusions.

The linked article goes into this in some depth, touching on such disparate topics as capitalism, globalization, ethics and the nature of progress. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the future of the human race.