Articles tagged with "IEA WEO 2008"

Peak Oil Media IEA 2008 WEO Edition

The 2008 World Energy Outlook recently released by the International Energy Agency (IEA) continues to garner comments. The Energy Bulletin pointed to a video of George Monbiot interviewing Fatih Birol, the Chief Economist for the IEA, on the 2008 WEO. Monbiot asks some rather pointed question about why the outlook presented this year is so much more dire than last year. He asks for an apology. Next is an audio roundtable with host Jim Puplava interviewing Matt Simmons and Robert Hirsch. Topics include the 2008 WEO as well as the current financial malaise and its implications for oil production and prices. Direct links to these are below the fold.

IEA WEO 2008 - NGLs to the Rescue?

According to the IEA World Energy Outlook 2008, p. 261:

Output of natural gas liquids — light hydrocarbons that exist in liquid form underground and that are produced together with natural gas and recovered in separation facilities or processing plants — is expected to grow rapidly over the Outlook period. Global NGL production is projected to almost double, from 10.5 mb/d in 2007 to just under 20 mb/d in 2030.

One can see from IEA's chart of World Oil Production by Source that the growth of natural gas liquids, or NGLs, is being depended on as a significant contributor to total world oil production:


World Oil Production by Source, Reference Scenario, shown as Figure 11.1 on page 250 of IEA WEO 2008.

In this post, I will document that there is good reason to believe that the IEA WEO 2008 projections in the reference scenario overshoots the likely world production of NGLs by as much as 35 - 50 % by 2030.

One way of estimating expected NGLs is as a ratio to natural gas production, representing the wetness or dryness of gas. One would expect this ratio to decline over time, based on what normally has been observed from fields, areas and regions with good quality data. Instead, the IEA is forecasting that this ratio will increase in the future.