The Oil Drum

When the weather in the mid-West gets hot and humid, as it does at this time of year, it is pleasant to have the chance to head up to Maine, (along I might note with two solid streams of traffic from Boston all the way North). Thus it was that I could get up, this morning, and pick fresh raspberries for breakfast from the bush outside the window. Raspberries are, like cherries, one of the transient crops that one savors each year when they are in season and then waits until they appear on the bush again next year.

In this way they are a food resource when they grow, but if we don’t put additional work into their condition, they cannot be considered as a reserve for the longer haul. Unless that is, we are willing to make the time and money investment, by canning them, or making them into jam, they don’t count much toward the family food reserve (and note that I have, in the past, helped make raspberry jam).

The difference between a reserve and a resource is a relatively important distinction that often gets overlooked in the debate about our energy future. Some sources of energy are fairly easy to describe and to understand. Place a wind turbine in an area with a recognized wind pattern, or a solar collector array in the American South-West, and we can run tabulated data through simple calculations to understand the value of the returning energy on the initial investment. It is however, the amount of heavy oil that can be justified as a reserve volume that drives today’s post, and with very heavy oil we have to go the other way - in other words turn the consistency from something closer to jam back into something closer to juice.

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?

In advance of the European Union – Latin America and Caribbean summit, the Portuguese prime minister, José Sócrates, visited Venezuela. During two days, more than twenty economic agreements were celebrated between the two countries, where energy had a major role.

Among the entourage where representatives of some of the largest companies operating in Portugal, with the objective of firming protocols in the vein of “oil for goods”, towards which the Venezuelan executive has been showing great openness.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080212/venezuela_us_oil.html?.v=9

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Venezuela's state oil company said Tuesday that it has stopped selling crude to Exxon Mobil Corp. in response to the U.S. oil company's drive to use the courts to seize billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets.

Exxon Mobil is locked in a dispute over the nationalization of its oil ventures in Venezuela that has led President Hugo Chavez to threaten to cut off all Venezuelan oil supplies to the United States. Venezuela is the United States' fourth largest oil supplier.

Have at it.

Late last week, ExxonMobil won a court order to freeze PDVSA (the Venezuelan national oil company) assets overseas, up to a value of $12 billion, as part of a dispute over oil fields in the country that Venezuela has nationalised, but for which Exxon has refused to accept the compesantion proposed by the Venezuelans. 6 oil companies are in that situation, and 4 of them accepted Chavez's terms, Conoco being the other holdout with Exxon.

Today, Chavez hit back, by threatening to cut off oil deliveries to the USA

"If you freeze us, if you really manage to freeze us, if you damage us, then we will hurt you. Do you know how? We are not going to send oil to the United States," Chavez said on his weekly TV show.

[editor's note, by Prof. Goose] This is a guest post by lads.

This article is a first simplistic (but comprehensive) assessment of World Oil Exports, here defined has the total amount of liquid hydrocarbons that are surpluses in producing countries. This assessment is made by projecting in to the future fixed change rates that reflect current trends in liquids production and consumption in countries where presently the difference between the two is positive. The outcome of this assessment is worrisome.

Bless my socks! I had popped the Hel post into the hopper a couple of weeks ago, when I left, and am now back, although still trying to catch up on the information that was posted while I was away. One thing that has struck me, which related to the last post, has been the speed with which wind seems to be catching on as an alternate energy source. The NYT had a piece on the growth in India and China this past week (but since I was traveling I failed to tag it). And turbines are appearing when least expected, showing that the investment is now considered worthwhile.

By the same token, while driving around Poland we were, at least once, carried in a car powered by gas, and these are fairly common, though when our host said two million such, I am not sure if he was correct on the decimal point.

I listened to the recent interview with Matt Simmons and am not sure that I completely agree with one point that he made. In talking about production, he suggested that we had (as Khebab pointed out) reached a point where there has been some slight decline in production over the past months, and that this might signify that we have passed the peak.

Along with most who have read it, I was much impressed with the Chicago Tribune special segment on oil this weekend, and, if you have the time, would highly recommend that you both read the articles and watch the video (which takes about an hour). It does not have the fictionalized aspects that we have seen in other coverage from the BBC through Fox, and CNN about the problem, but rather, in a series of facts, lays out the situation. For those who don't have the opportunity, I thought I would give a summary, with some comments.

Sheesh! There I was, just quietly slipped out of town for a quiet week at one or two of those conferences and westexas slips this little spark-emitting fizzy sounding thing into the comments. The FT story requires subscription, but the Mosnews seems to have most of it. The basic story itself is a dash of water in the face...all of it suggests that we are definitely entering one of those "interesting times", if we weren't in it already. (much more under the fold).

I doubt they did it in on purpose, but the title "Beating the Oil Drums of War-Part I" is just precious. [editor's note, by Prof. Goose]and we also forgot to mention this post over at econbrowser. JDH, always a good read.