The Oil Drum

This is a guest post by Jeffrey J. Brown, known on TOD as westexas. Jeff is an independent petroleum geologist in the Dallas, Texas area. His e-mail address is westexas@aol.com.

Building on prior work by many people, including Matt Simmons and Kenneth Deffeyes, and largely based on great technical work by Khebab, I have been intensively studying the Net Oil Export issue for more than two years.

The simple mathematical model I have been using to talk about our export situation is called the Export Land Model (ELM). Recently, data and media reports have shown that the concerns I have expressed about our export situation are growing more valid each day.

Venezuela and Mexico are critically important to the US because of their proximity to the refineries on the Gulf Coast. From what I have been able to discern, it takes an average of about five days for a tanker to get to the US from Venezuela and Mexico versus about 30 days from the Persian Gulf. Based on recent news reports, it certainly appears that the overall net export decline from Venezuela and Mexico is continuing into 2008.

So, what has happened to net oil exports from Venezuela & Mexico to the US and what effect has had this had on Gulf Coast crude oil inventories, and why am I concerned?

This is a guest post by Friend of TOD Jeffrey J. Brown, an independent petroleum geologist in the Dallas, Texas area. His e-mail address is westexas@aol.com.

You can also check out Jason Bradford's recent interview with Jeff for The Reality Report over at Global Public Media here.

Building on prior work by Matt Simmons and Kenneth Deffeyes, I have written a number of articles on Net Oil Exports, often with my frequent co-author, “Khebab,” most recently, “Net Oil Exports and the Iron Triangle.” We are going to present a quantitative assessment of future net exports by the top net exporters at the ASPO-USA (Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas) conference in October, in Houston, Texas, and we will be doing a preview of the paper in late September.

While writing the recent piece on home heating, I was surprised to calculate many different numbers for the energy return on firewood. Though the outputs were only slightly different in quantity of BTUs, there was a wide range of inputs. But the primary reason for the return disparity was the presence of the market economy - those processing firewood for their own use had higher energy returns than those selling wood for profit - the accelerated drying time to process large amounts of wood required an additional wood input which dropped the energy return. Graphically this showed up as a tradeoff between maximizing energy return on TIME versus maximizing energy return on ENERGY. This reminded me that energy return is not a hard-and-fast principle, and also that society, obviously, will optimize its resources based on what it perceives to be its most limiting input(s). However, in an upcoming world constrained by energy, or any limiting variable other than time/money, we can increase our energy available by reducing the return on other inputs, such as time.