Peak Oil Realities
Kurt Cobb reminds us that world oil production has been flat for six years. And yes he has graphs and numbers to back it up. Even with the sorry shape of the world economy the price of oil remains stuck in the mid $90 bbl range. Any economic expansion will drive it even higher. For those who think this could all be fixed with more domestic drilling Cobb has some data for you too.
The media loves to announce new seemingly large discoveries of oil as if they are the solution to what is really an unfolding liquid fuels crisis. They point to the Tupi field off Brazil which is purported to have 8 billion barrels of oil in it. And, they point to discoveries in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico thought to contain between 3 and 15 billion barrels. And, they point to the 4 billion barrels in the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. It all sounds like a lot. When I ask audiences how long a billion barrels of oil will last the world at current rates of consumption, I often get replies that range anywhere from three months to 5 years. The correct answer is 12 days. Just multiply these multi-billion-barrel discoveries by 12, and you’ll realize right away that they are not going to overcome the constraints we are experiencing in oil supplies.
I’ll do the arithmetic for you – assuming the numbers are correct that’s 27 billion barrels. You mutiply that by 12 and you see it represents 324 days of world oil consumption. Since the numbers are probably all high it’s probably more like a six month supply.
25 Responses to “Peak Oil Realities”
Well yes and no to that Ron. Assuming those sources were the only ones you can boil it down and say its no big deal. But lets look at the numbers from another perspective. Say we were to drill in ANWR, upping our production of domestic oil by 1 million barrels a day. We use roughly 20 million per day, 8 of which me make ourselves, the other 12 million imported. So our domestic production went up 12%, overall production goes up 5%. Now since we are only using 1 million per day, that same 1 billion from a new source lasts almost 3 years per billion barrels.
Now when production goes up or down 5%, the costs moves more than that. If we had a 5% shortfall prices would not increase 5%, they would double. If we had a 50% shortfall in production, the price would not double, you’d only be able to afford gas if you could also afford a Bentley to put it in. When we are talking about a ubiquitous commodity single digit differences between supply and demand have very big effects on the price.
So while we are both in agreement that extra drilling is no long term solution, the short term effects would be more significant than you imply. My theory, is that its in the ground, we can use it, sooner or later its coming out of the ground to serve our needs, lets not pretend its not. Tax it, regulate the operations so they don’t make more of an environmental impact than they have to, but get it. And at the same time lets push harder for a long term solution.
Who is Mr. Cobb?
Agree with you, Slamfu…drilling now is no longterm solution, but we need to increase domestic production of both oil and NG to decrease dependence on imported product.
Perry might be goofy, but one thing he has right is creating jobs by opening up drilling.
This is truly a no brainer.
Moreover, what are we supposed to do, besides bewail Peak Oil and Beyond? “We” didn’t do anything wrong to put ourselves into this position, and time and again it’s an obligation upon activists: Show us something as economical and practical, or more so, than current energy sources.
Oh yes ANWR again. Estimated reserves 7.7 billion barrels – the US currently consumes 6.8 billion barrels a year. So it’s slightly more than a years supply. The major oil companies are not interested in ANWR because it is such a hostile environment and becoming more hostile everyday as the permafrost turns into a bog because of climate change.
It amazes me that conservatives are opposed to mortgaging our children’s future by borrowing money but don’t seem to have a problem with exhausting their resources.
John Johnson asks: Who is mister Cobb? He is someone who has data – facts and figures. Of course people in denial deny data.
Well, we’ve seen lunatic McKibben, with hurricanes and “global warming” (certifying him as a lunatic, not your average, activist). He joined people protesting the new pipeline project, if you all recall.
Now, if you want to see a lunacy industry, consider the opposition to nuclear power plants (for electrical power creation).
ROTFLMAO
Why? we’re just pointing out the problem.
Whether activists have a solution or not does not stop the fact that we are running out of
oil, in the same way conservatives denying global warming does not stop it from occurring.
I have good news and bad news for you:
The bad news: global Warming is happening, Peak Oil is occurring, and our elites have no idea how to deal with the problems, basically we’re
The good news: The Conservatives Southern & South-Western Red States are even more than the rest of the country. Good Luck with those droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes & Wild Fires.
Mr. Beasley…everyone seems to have data these days. Much of it is skewed. Your badmouthing, for instance, does not take into consideration how much natural gas we would be going after, as well as the crude, and the long term potential it has for curbing our reliance of foreign imports while we methodically find a means of weaning ourselves away from the organic fuels.
We need the jobs the increased drilling and the pipeline would create…and when the pipeline has run its course as far as transporting crude in concerned, we might need it to move fresh water.
Please get out of the way, Mr. Beasley…you are one of the ones that are going to do in my grandchildren if you get your way.
As for you, QF…your words will get no comment, nor deserve any.
“It amazes me that conservatives are opposed to mortgaging our children’s future by borrowing money but don’t seem to have a problem with exhausting their resources.”
Ron, your observation is dead on the mark. Sad to say, it will fly right past those who are in need of grasping it the most. As I commented earlier this morning, our capacity for rationalization as a species may be our greatest liability. There is no greater evidence for this than our rapacious consumption of and willful dependence on natural resources with almost zero regard to either supply or consequences. It doesn’t matter how well someone can dance, if they are dancing with their eyes closed they will eventually run into a wall. If the “conservatives” are good at anything, it’s making a science of that rationalization, but the democrats aren’t terribly far behind. Ultimately though, the choice to be aware or blind in this regard seems to be a personal one, and as we can see, it’s a choice that people are willing to approach, thier liabilities locked and loaded. Amazing indeed.
Mr. Beasley and JSpencer don’t seem to be getting the big picture. No one wants to jump into the last known reserves of organic fuels without an alternative down the road. We all want to fully develop wind, solar, hydrogen and whatever else might be developed as a clean source of energy as soon as possible, but we can’t let our economy totally go south by cutting off the recovery of these resources and/or mandating immediate pollution standards that drive the cost of a gallon of fuel up to what European’s pay. Get serious about finding a way to switch us over to alternative fuels like we did putting a man on the moon. Slowly develop the infrastructure to pump NG into fuel tanks, for instance, while developing altenatives.
There is a way to settle this argument, to easily see where the obstruction is, to see who is wrong, who is profiting from energy profligacy.
There is a course of action that will result in more available energy than drill baby, drill. At a cost orders of magnitude lower than nuclear power plants. That will produce many more jobs than loosing environmental regulations. Using technologies that are already available and already proven. A course of action that will reduce our carbon emissions at a much lower cost than solar power or any other alternative fuels.
And yet any time it is mentioned one half of the political spectrum lines up to oppose it. This includes one of the major parties as well as a sizable portion of the regular participants of this forum. Wouldn’t you have to agree that these people represent a sizable part of the problem we’re facing concerning energy and carbon emissions?
This wonderful technology that is the low hanging fruit of the energy solution is conservation. The simple, easy to implement technology that draws so much opposition every time it is proposed, from the people who oppose tightening building energy codes or CAFE standards for automobiles. To the people who support our freedom to buy incandescent light bulbs instead of those evil twisty CLF bulbs. You know who you are. Please come forward in the context of this thread and explain once again the reasons you oppose energy conservation.
Thank-you merkin. All four of my grandparents understood (and practiced) day to day practical conservation more than almost anyone I know today. The old adage, “waste not want not” was something they and most of their peers believed in. Funny how the easiest and most practical approaches are so ignored today.
JJ, if the “big picture” is escaping anyone I think it’s you. None of this is new information. We should have been addressing these issues long, long ago, instead people imagine that kicking the can down the road decade after decade is a substitute for a solution. Then they act surprised when they realize it isn’t working.
Merkin…airlines aren’t making any money because of fuel costs. Shippers are paying fuel surcharges for everyday items that are hauled to us by large diesel eating rigs. We pay more for ethanol tainted fuels that take more hydrocarbons to produce than they save and produce less miles per gallon. How are we going to get where you want to go, by using the methods you propose, without a total economic collapse? I’m in the food business. I have lost massive amounts of business the last eight years or so because of increased costs related to subsidized ethanol mandates and the skyrocketing price of corn that has been a direct result of these mandates. You have the big picture in mind here? If so, tell me how you squeeze off domestic drilling, increase EPA standards, and keep fuel, transporation, food, electricity, heating and cooling costs from sinking us. If you can’t answer, please see if JSpencer can help you.
JSpencer says that we haven’t been listening..have been kicking the can down the road, so we are now going to be taught a lesson. “I told you you were fat; I told you to quit eating; you didn’t listen; now I’m not going to let you eat any more; I don’t have anything healthy as an alternative since we didn’t plant a garden, so I guess you’re going to die.”
No it’s more like:
“I told you you were fat; I told you to quit eating that unhealthy junk food; you didn’t listen; now you’re running out of food and have no idea how to grow a tomato despite the fact that I showed you how to do it, besides which you aren’t physically capable of doing it anyhow cause you’re too obese and unfit to perform any manual labor. You don’t have anything healthy as an alternative since you didn’t plant a garden and you trashed the little one I planted for you to get started, so I guess you’re going to die. Tough cookies, just don’t think of coming into my yard and steal my fruits and veggies.”
QF…you OK?
How do the changes you made fit my “you can’t drill; we don’t currently have any alternatives” analogy?
Does this work better for you? “I have bad news and worse news…which do you want to hear first? We can’t drill for oil that we have underneath us; we still have to buy from those people in the Middle East who hate us; and the price is going up rapidly. Now here’s the worse news….we don’t have any alternatives currently available and the price for electricity, and auto fuels, and heating fuels, and food, and literally all our consumer goods are going to go through the roof.”
We’re all still waiting for economical and practical, that is, serious, alternatives to our current energy sources that include fossil fuels.
(silence from the peanut gallery)
You can keep waiting, there isn’t any.
The ex-burbs are dead, the outer suburbs are going to get killed, and metro-areas that don’t have a functional mass-transit system are dead.
We are running out of cheap oil, deal with it.
And there is NO CURRENT REPLACEMENT.
Electric cars might be able to replace some of our motor vehicle parc if we can improve our battery technology and bring it’s cost down but currently there is no way to replace the 200 odd million motor vehicles that are on America’s road with electric ones.
Electricity isn’t a problem, we have plenty of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro power and that failing plenty of Nuclear power available. If we do some decent urban planning, build our mass transit systems and upgrade our railroads there is no reason why the US can’t maintain a high standard of living for it’s population.
But all of that reeks of big government, so we can rely on the republicans, the conservatards and the teabaggers to fight it tooth and nail until they are stuck in their burbs with no gas, no job and no prospects, cause going along with the program would be to admit that the Dirty F**ken Hippies are and were right.
QF. I concur. We can rationalize all the way to the grave if we aren’t willing to step up to the plate at some point.
Sentry hits nail on head: QF and JSpencer can’t see the nail.
QF, your wind and solar ideas sound great if we had a means of storing the created energy…and how long does it take to license and build nuc plants? You also need to check further on your geothermal and hydro potential. Minimal, as best. Futhermore, your “if we build this and expand that” scenario sounds great. How you going to pay of it?
All this can be worked on and incorporated into a stout alternative energy program, but you can’t just let fossil fuels underneath us, that would bridge the gap from current energy infrastructure to another, sit there.
Actively going after it would create jobs, improve the economy and pay for what you want to see done…what we all want to eventually see.
One other thing…you don’t ever seem to want to specifically address natural gas in this discussion. This is the fuel that is going to be the the key to getting us from point A to point B. We have massive reserves that are now being actively recovered all over the U.S. If we don’t get pumping stations built and vehicles that will run on it, it will be exported and all the benefits, in the form of profits, will just go into the pockets of the producers.
JJ
Here are the numbers according to Uncle Sam:
Oil reserves in the United States
IEA – US Oil Consunption
Using some basic math :
21,000,000,000/(19,148,000 * 365)=3.005 years.
JJ
More numbers according to Uncle Sam:
EIA – U.S. Crude Oil, Natural Gas, and Natural Gas Liquids Reserves
IEA FAQ – How much natural gas is consumed (used) in the U.S. (total and by end use)?
So according to the IEA we have approximately 255 Tcf of reserves and we consume 23 Tcf a year, so doing some very basic math:
255 / 23 = 11 years
THERE IS NO SUBSTANTIAL QUANTITY OF OIL IN THE US NOR IS THERE ANY SUBSTANTIAL QUANTITY OF NG IN THE US.
Thank you for the skewed figures. Here’s a different point of view.
http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/oil/
First of all, lots of new sources have been discovered since 2009, and you could expect this to continue as exploration increases and new fields are discovered and new techniques implemented.
Pull your head out….even if the situation is as you say, and we could get only 20 or 30 years out of combined oil and natural gas reserves, we need to be actively going after it, and during this time bridge the transition to developed alternatives.
That’s commonly known as the fantasy view…
No, there hasn’t been any substantial discoveries since 2009.
OK…let’s take another course here. Will you agree that what you call “known reserves” of oil and gas will provide our needs for the next 20 years, without new fields being discovered?
What do you propose we do? Leave it in the ground or actively go get it and use it to bridge the gap from fossil fuels to viable alternatives… with the key word being viable…as in affordable.
We have 3 to 5 years worth of Domestic Oil and 10 to 15 years worth of Natural Gas. And That’s that.
We’re going to do what we have been doing for the last forty years, we’re going to import Oil from where ever we can get it at the cheapest price possible, we’ll use to bully governments that refuse to sell us cheap oil, we’ll overthrow the ones that just plain refuse to sell us their oil. We’ll just keep making enemies and wonder why they hate our freedoms.
And we’re going to do that until the whole economic structure collapses.
BTW Last time I checked a third of our trade deficit was OIL.
The above is what is going to happen, this is what I would propose:
Tax gas so that it’s price reflects it’s value. ($10 to $12 a gallon) Use that money to rebuild the inner core of US cities, to rebuild inner suburbs, to fix our mass transit systems, to rebuild our passenger train system, to upgrade and extend our freight train system, to work on battery powered vehicles (with an emphasis on the postal service, school buses, and other vehicles that run short repeated routs), do lots of urban planning to deal with the fact that cities are going to have to geographically contract.
Painful, expensive and requires lots of government, it’ll never happen.