DrumBeat: September 6, 2006
Posted by threadbot on September 6, 2006 - 9:12am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Although the discovery suggests that the undersea region holds more oil than previously thought, experts say the crude will be expensive to extract and years in coming.What's more, growing demand in the U.S. and elsewhere could quickly eat up the production gains. And there is the uncertainty that comes with trying to figure out how much oil lies so far beneath the surface.
"It's phenomenal, if it's there," said Matthew Simmons, who heads Simmons & Co., a Houston investment bank that specializes in energy. "But until you get a field on production, you don't really know what's there…. It's a roll of the dice."
Simmons said the gulf had yielded several highly touted oil finds over the years that fell short of expectations.
Peak oil theorists don't know Jack
“The industry is still very capable of coming up with new ways of producing oil,” says Michael Lynch, a prominent opponent of the notion of peak oil — that global supplies of crude are set for a marked decline.
Meet Vinod Khosla, ethanol evangelist
BP appoints ombudsman to hear complaints
As eco-friendly energy becomes more cost-efficient, convenient, and feasible, the time may be right for a growth spurt
Dip in gas prices may lift entire economy: Gasoline prices fell by more than 30 cents a gallon last month, and everyone stands to benefit.
Tories want road pricing for all lorries driving in Britain
Heavyweight harangues Japan on oil law reform
Watari, chairman of the country's biggest integrated oil company, warns that unless the Alternative Energy Law and the New Energy Law are replaced they will "obstruct and crush all of the energy technology developments we could see in the foreseeable future".
Oil-rich Iraq forced to import fuel to beat shortages
BANGLADESH: Load-shedding deepens in city. Dsepite protests, the blackouts are getting worse. Supply is 39% short of what they need.
Power Shortage Cuts Alcoa, Ghana's Aluminium Output
Cairn delays India oilfield start
Cairn Energy has again put back the start date for production at its main Indian oilfield.The firm blamed the delay on slower-than-expected pipeline building.
The Mangala oilfield should now come online in 2009, rather than in 2008 as predicted. Cairn had initially forecast it would start pumping oil in 2007.
Chad eyes bigger share of its oil profits
DAKAR, SENEGAL – Describing Chad's profits from a multibillion-dollar pipeline as "crumbs," President Idriss Deby is trying to grab a larger slice of the petrodollar pie, joining the trend of "resource nationalism" in vogue from Algeria to Venezuela.
Dr Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari and the four phases of transition
"The fact of being in 'Post-Peak' will bring about explosive disruptions we know little about, and which are extremely difficult to foresee. And the shock waves from these explosions rippling throughout the financial and industrial infrastructure could have myriad unintended consequences for which we have no precedent and little experience."
Advocates laud safety of new nuclear reactors
Energy costs force server rethink
For most of the history of commercial IT, servers have been measured largely by one metric: performance related to cost of acquisition. However, that equation, often known by the Americanism “bang per buck”, is now being challenged by a new metric called “performance per watt”.The rise of performance per watt as a concern among IT buyers is a recognition that energy costs and, in particular, the power required by volume servers, have become important contributors to overall IT expense, even if the bill is still more likely to be handed to facilities managers than IT chiefs.
The Hubbert Parabola
In that post I experiment with 50 different regions of the world. For each one I do two plots:
"In the first one we will place all the data points (Q(t),P(t)) until year 2005 (both measured in
Giga-barrels) and then find the parabola that passes through the origin that better approximates
the data points (by the least squares fitting method). The intersection of this parabola with the
x-axis will give us the estimated URR. In the second plot we want to show how this estimated URR
has changed through time. For this plot, we define the function URR(t) as the estimated URR by the
prior method if we had used the data points up until year t, and discarding later years. In the
second plot we place points at (Q(t),URR(t)). Clearly Q(t)<URR(t) (just note that with a very
strange data set this could be false). So all points in the second plot should be above the URR=Q
line. The dashed line URR=2Q has an interesting property. If point (Q(t),URR(t)) lies above this
line, then according to the logistic model t is before the peak year (as calculated at year t),
i.e. Q(t)<URR(t)/2. If (Q(t),URR(t)) lies below the dashed line then we are after peak year."
Just a couple of plots here:
Doesn't this curve suggest global URR of 1650 Gb?
How is that credible? It's at least 20% beneath even Deffeyes lowball number.
The parabola method is not good at all at predicting URR before peak year. And we are not past peak year.
The strength of the method IMO is at predicting URR after peak year, and many areas of the world are in this situation. If you go to Graphoilogy you will see that there are 20 countries where the estimated URR has stabilized. There are 21 bad cases like the world case, and there are 9 where it is too early to say.
Of the four plots I have posted, the estimated US URR has stabilized for years, maybe increasing slightly. This tells you that the estimate is quite robust. Mexico has just stabilized at peak year. South Arabia is a very bad case, the estimate is highly unreliable. UK has stabilized recently.
My next project will be to compare HL with this method. I think that we rely to much in the HL, and it is important to have an alternative to compare.
until then, this model predicted that they had already peaked. But that was a false
"impression" because both started to increase production and then the estimated URR started to
climb.
To say it in another way, this model was "tricked" and thought both countries had peaked,
but they hadn't.
thanks,
Asebius
"An opportunity like this only comes once every few decades," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Massachusetts.
So that's it chaps - no more discoveries until the 2030s.
On a more serious note, the official releases by Chevron, Devon and Statoil do not mention reserves. The discussion about "reserves" is not for the Jack prospect but is a guestimate for the whole of this deep water play based on press interviews.
The fact that the field was discovered last year, the well test just reported was conducted during the second quarter of 2006 - does leave me wondering about the timing of this press release - and the media hype surrounding it.
On a different topic, this link goes to the oil market update by Clive Maund - for those who like technical analysis.
http://321energy.com/editorials/maund/maund090706.html
I went on to point out if it were on the high end at 15, & we were able to MAX it flat out, then we would use it up in less than 2 yrs. He quickly understood how little this is in the BIG picture.
He thanked me for pointing out the discrepancy and started asking questions. I told him to google peak oil and choose where he wants to start. He wrote it down and I hope to talk to him tomorrow night and see if he followed through. Demonstrate your knowledge in a non condescending way to people and they'll do all the talking for you.
I introduced a very good friend of mine to the ideas and lent him a copy of End of Suburbia. His wife scolded me for turning him into a worried doomer (not her phrase), and eventually he turned to a 'negotiator' which means he looked inside himself and found faith in ethanol, although in general he has just put the whole issue out of his mind, so I don't bring it up any more.
Last semester we had a debate in our brand new auditorium for legalizing cannabis and the high times editor stopped in to argue for while we had a retired DEA agent against. I'm currently trying to organize a peak oil debate in this same vein to stir debate among my college. I've started asking around as to WHO could organize this since I just want to get it started rather than be in it. It's my last year so I kind of want to do something since I've taken all this information on PO in and truly appreciate the seriousness and dire circumstances we will be facing without action at all levels.
Any one of my parents age and up, won't buy it. I know there are plenty of you here, but you're able to think independently and actually examine facts rather than advertising and marketing.
Do you ever wonder why we consume so much? After taking some marketing courses I've come to the firm belief it's marketing's fault. They are THAT good at what they do. They use what we've learned from modern Psychology and used it to push the right buttons (hmmm...just like a robot). Ralph Nader warned against consumerism and he is looking more and more right.
I'm 29 and father of two young boys. My wife is fairly accepting that we just don't know what lurks around the corner. I've told her I'm a doomer. She gets it. She's less interested in making changes and more interested in enjoying the time we've got. Like Dan Ur said, "Have fun, and do what you need to do to have fun and stay as sane as you want to, and don't worry about it."
I've laid it all out for my parents as well (they are in their late fifties). They logically understand it all. They understand the arguments for peak oil, global warming, overshoot, etc. However, they are not interested in subscribing to it. My dad is an engineer, my mom a public health officer. They are bright people. But I think their experience has been that of better returns each year, with the prospect of improvement each year. They have been told that life can only get better. This is a message they've heard since they were babies, and it continues to be a strong message that they are receptive to. There have been few experiences in their lives to refute this prospect.
I don't want to make this an essay on age-ism, because that is short-sighted and without merit. There are plenty of baby-boomers involved in the debate, with voices on each side of the issue.
But I can identify with your statement about having the rest of your life ahead of you. I feel that to be true, and moreover it is true of my kids. It makes me sad in some ways (the idea that they will experience a lot of turmoil), but I don't think it saddens me as much as it saddens my mom (their grandma). Perhaps I'm just not as entrenched in the idea that life will always get better. Life is what it is. It is what you make of it. Life is impermanence. Accepting that this is true makes it easier to live happily.
I have a sibling 5 years older than I am, and it's amazing, they're a Boomer and I'm an X'er. We're quite close, but there are fundamental differences in how we think and see the world, how we believe. Their experience has been Onward and Upward, because after all, as a Boomer with tons of influential Boomer friends, how could it be otherwise?
I gave my 82 year old father a runthrough of my wake-up-the-sheeple Powerpoint last weekend. He got it instantly, and it scared the heck out of him. He immediately started thinking who else I ought to give the poresentation to - our family has good left-wing political connections that need to hear the message. My mother isn't all that interested - she understands the concept, but has enough to worry about in her life already, and the timeline is too long for her to get worked up over.
I then gave the same show to my 19 year old niece and her boyfriend. They also got it, and even knew a fair bit about it already. Their reaction was very matter-of-fact. Sort of, "Yes, we know it's going to happen, but when you're our age life is all about change anyway, so what else is new?"
A fascinating set of reactions.
I myself had seen Hubbert curves earlier in life but dismissed them as Chicken Little doomerism. It was only when I accidentally ran across a Matthew Simmons lecture that I realized this guy knows his tech and is not kidding. Went through the usual psych coping mechanisms: denial, anger, bargaining. Still in the bargaining stage and grudgingly sinking into acceptance.
Technology will get us out of the Quicksand!
If that doesn't work, The Market will throw us a Life Line.
It always ends happily. 10,000 movies can't be wrong.
Of course, I was exposed to ideas of Peak Oil over a decade ago, when I worked for the Energy Analysis Program at LBNL. I didn't understand the full consequences then (I just thought in terms of rising gas prices and how they would effect me). So perhaps my situation is somewhat unique.
-best
That said, I am happier now than I have been in a long time. Go figure.
I copied the ASPO graph from the front of their newsletter pasted it into a Word document, and then added three rectangles underneath it. One for my mothers life 1926 - 2010, one for myself 1965 - 2040, and one for my first son 1999 - 2080. I aligned then to the graph and there it is; mum has only ever known growth, I'll know both, and My son probably wont remember growth an only know depletion. I now cut Mum a lot more slack.
I am shooting for 1965-2050.
I am one who has been gathering the knowledge to be dropped anywhere in the USA and be able to survive at least a little while. With just the clothes on my back. Trisha could not due to medical issues.
Teach your kids fun projects. Growing and storing foods found in your yard and surrounding countryside and grown by you. Teach them how to make fire without matches, All the basic old school boy scout things. Teach them to repect the earth and the people that live on it, even if they don't always agree with their dieties or politics. Teach them how to cook new foods and how to eat new foods. Get out of your box and into the world around them.
I thank GOD that my dad taught me to love cooking, and to try foods even if I had not a clue waht were in them. I am living with my parents dad 70, mom 76, and teaching them things I learned out there in the wilds of the world.
I have no childern of my own, neither does my brother, we are the last of my dad's line, His older brother had 2 boys as well and they have 4 kids between them. A zero sum gain on my uncle's side and a negative gain on my dad's side.
Keep talking to your wife and keep having fun, its better to laugh than to cry, though crying is okay, but remember to get back to being positive, even if you feel the world is comeing down around your ears. It's your Character that matters to your kids, and your wife and to others.
Boomers like you told me all about the extensive set of reasons I am only good for sweeping floors etc while H1B's and affirmative-action babies get the training and jobs. And it's all OK with you, because all the Righteous are going to Heaven right? Just like all those little Lebanese babies killed with American bombs, it's all OK cos Gawd sez so. Oh wait, the Lebanese kids didn't get a chance to get Baptized or hear Pat Robertson on the radio or whatever it takes, and they were in the way of Gawd-fearing American imperialism, too bad, they go to hell.
Yeah I know they are main stream and we have to listen to them say stupid things, and have stupid ideas and they taint the rest of us Christians. But I am not one of thier ilk.
And Though I could never get a true answer If I am a boomer or not. I would have never told you :::
<<<Boomers like you told me all about the extensive set of reasons I am only good for sweeping floors etc while H1B's and affirmative-action babies get the training and jobs.>>>
You are good for what you are good at, and its up to you to get there. And along the way If I can help you get to where you are going just ask, I will offer you any help I can.
Everyone is created Equal, no one should be left behind.
I guess in the end , I will be out there helping anyone I can till I can't help anyone else. Just ask former neighbors of mine, > 608 Kennan Rd. Huntsville Alabama, ask them about Charles or some knew as Bear, ask them they can be my witnesses, black or white I treated them all as fellow humans..
Judge me for what I have done, not for what the guy on TV does.
That said, when I explained peak oil to her, she took it very seriously and when we got to EROEI, her eyes got big. I think she gets it but doesn't see what she can do at this point in her life (no assets, not a lot of choices but to decide which kid to move in with), so her response is philosophical.