Great Article on oil!

[Peter_Puget]

Oil

[klenke]

This was brought to my attention through an email from my uncle not long ago. I must say the idea is intriguing for humanity's future, and the science seems plausible (at least in so much as the article depicts it), but I am still skeptical. Only time will truly tell.

[minx]

solid article.

 

i think the important thing in an economic/political aspect is to continue the progress towards alternative fuels

 

from an environmental perspective, we need to be doing it asap

 

http://www.afdc.nrel.gov/

[j_b]

I must say the idea is intriguing for humanity's future, and the science seems plausible (at least in so much as the article depicts it), but I am still skeptical. Only time will truly tell.

 

the entire argument of the paper is that we can't be out of cheap oil because prices have not risen yet. considering the various factors that influence prices (from economic to political) one can safely say that's not science. science would assess global reserves and rates of new discovery.

 

"there is mounting evidence that the discovery rate for major oil fields with reserves of over 500mn boe has fallen dramatically over recent years. IHS Energy, on a map of recent discoveries it supplies to its clients, records 28 discoveries of over 500mn boe in the three years 2000,2001 and 2002. However,16 of the discoveries were in 2000,eight in 2001 and just three in 2002."

 

http://www.odac-info.org/bulletin/documents/MEGAPROJECTSREPORT.pdf

[glacier]

Anything into oil

 

Discover mag article

[Peter_Puget]

Here is some price data and pres terms.

 

Kinda boring but since I collected the data I am posting.

 

PP

[assmonkey]

PP, whenever you post those charts, I can never read them. The print is too small or something.

 

Nice first essay link.

 

And Glacier link "anything into oil" is mind-bending. I heard the Buffet's (or the Forbe's?) invested high dollar into that emerging technology.

 

wt! wt!

 

- MR. a s s m * n k e y

[Peter_Puget]

Save it and then open it in MS Paint

[j_b]

here is a nice article on oil supplies that isn't pseudo-science: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/Campbell_02-3.pdf

 

"The implications of the decline of the world’s premier energy source are so pervasive that in political terms it is easier “not to know”. This is certainly the position of the International Energy Agency in Paris, on which many governments rely. It in turn has been able to hide behind a new study by the eminently respectable United States Geological Survey, which in a new report of 2000 has claimed near limitless resources. The oil companies come in with bland public relations imagery, knowing too full well that any mention of the dreaded word Depletion would smell like a dwindling asset to the investment community. The critical issue is not so much when oil will eventually run out, but rather when production will reach a peak and begin to decline, which will represent a major watershed for the world’s economy."

[Peter_Puget]

here is a nice article on oil supplies that isn't pseudo-science: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/Campbell_02-3.pdf

 

 

 

Link

[j_b]

another economist who believes that resources are limitless and technology will save us from depletion of easily recoverable oil. a lot of wishful thinking .... the earth is for all intent and purpose a closed system (until we start drilling mars i guess, which i don't see in the near future), which necessarily implies that the economy has natural limits.

 

"Shell had previously said it had overstated the extent of its oil and gas reserves - a figure used by analysts and investors to value the company - by 20%. "

Edited May 13, 2004 by j_b

[Loose_Brie]

PP,

 

I usually totally disagree w/ you. But on this I think you are right. Oil combines, economics, politics and science like no other.

 

Have we found most of the large reserves that are politically and economically viable at $40/barrel? Probably. Is that a relavant statement? Not really. What happens when prices of $80/barrel are sustained for 5 year? Will we drilling in ANWR? Probably. Will the wells of Texas be profitable again? Will there be in coup in Venezuala? Maybe. Who knows.

 

Supply and demand on decade long time scales is proably the best predictor of science, enigineering and politics here.

 

This a good article. But it doesn't say very much. Its not prescriptive. Its a typical I'm smarter than you article, because it makes all sides of the debate look wrong.

[decrepit]

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/blanchard/

[j_b]

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031704_two_planets.html

 

"Major oil discoveries have declined every year so that 2003 saw no new field over 500 million barrels, and in 2001 and 2002 the top ten non-state oil companies spent more on exploration than they discovered in value, a new and alarming record. It is well over twenty years since more oil was found than consumed in a year. From the outset of 2004, large reserve write-downs, starting with Shell, and including El Paso and BP, have shaken the confidence of the financial community, set in motion an official SEC enquiry, and may yet be just the tip of the iceberg."

 

[..]

 

The trouble is that the Saudi Aramco presentations of Mahmoud Abdul-Baqi, Vice President of Exploration, and Nansen Saleri, Manager of Reservoir Management, seemed to be describing not just another country, but another planet when compared with what Matt Simmons, President of Simmons and Co (the world's largest private energy investment banker) had to say.

 

[..]

 

The two different reports presented by Simmons and Aramco are so utterly divergent that they are polar opposites, so that there seems to be no room for a middle ground. Either the Saudis are in the right direction or Matt Simmons is. Simmons was one of the first in the world to begin to comment loudly on global oil peak, after he discovered that the North Sea giant fields of Forties, Brent, and Ekofisk had peaked and already declined to midgets without anyone really noticing. Simmons and his staff have carried out some of the most meticulously detailed studies of US oil depletion, and he has been proved right concerning his prediction of North American natural gas peak. “Non-renewable things do some day peak, and there is some chance that that might be in the past tense. Scoffing at the notion is today, in my opinion, frankly naïve.”

[hopalong]

dieoff

[Dru]

deep hot biosphere theory? oil as renewable resource created by deep crustal microbial activity?

[scrambler]

How 'bout Fischer-Tropsch synthesis?

[scrambler]

Earth's oil gauge on low? Rising demand puts pressure on proven reserves, which have not seen a significant boost in 30 years.

 

With oil prices hovering near record highs and OPEC saying it's out of their control, the question of whether the planet is nearing the end of its oil supply has again arisen.

[scott_harpell]

Wow! If taht article is right, we better get our shit together. Especially with the huge ass vehicles taht people are driving nowadays. I recently saw an article taht said we have surpased the average weight of vehicles of the 70's... and that it isn't including things like the excursion or the H2 because these are not in the same classification. I think I will stick to my Specialized.

[Peter_Puget]

[T]he issue is not whether the world is running out of oil. The debate concerns a theoretical milestone called Hubbert's peak, after which output from any given field slows and becomes more costly to produce long before the last drop is lifted. Half of Saudi Arabia's oil comes from the giant and venerable Ghawar field; much of the remainder comes from four other aging giants that may be at or near their Hubbert's peak.

 

What's true of a single field must, at some point, become true in aggregate of the world's inventory of productive oil fields. Various authorities have been sounding the SOS for the past year, their debate hosted in the pages of the Oil & Gas Journal. How much oil is left is far less significant than how quickly and cheaply it can be extracted, especially from a relative handful of large, cheap-to-produce fields that have carried industrial man for a century. Some believe that getting much above today's 80 million barrels a day would be horrendously costly if not impossible. If they're correct, two billion Chinese and Indians, right now beginning to trade their bicycles for Toyotas, would be stuck trying to achieve modernity by outbidding the rest of us for a share of the world's current rate of oil production rather than benefiting from additional output.

 

All this has some petroleum engineers predicting resource wars, famine and pestilence, preventable only by a massive effort of central planning to shift the world to a less hydrocarbon-intensive lifestyle. If so, we might as well pass around the cyanide caplets right now. Such global planning is certainly beyond the wisdom and power of politicians to manage.

 

Yet the unwillingness of doomsayers to credit price signals with eliciting changed consumption behavior, new technology, a thousand substitutions and other adaptive responses is more than a little peculiar here. Oil companies have held back from investing in deep-water searches, Canadian oil sands and Venezuelan bitumen for fear oil prices will plummet to $15. Shareholders have kept Big Oil on a short leash, tolerating only low-risk investment projects that will generate cash flow in a small number of years. Won't this change now if higher prices seem a permanent feature of the landscape?

 

Motorists might or might not be willing to swallow price hikes, but what about other industries that use petroleum as feedstock? They're price sensitive and would be expected to adapt in ways that aren't all easy to foresee from today's vantage.

 

Scare talk is a hardy perennial in the global petroleum business, a passport to fun and attention from the media. Industrial society is frequently painted as a fragile, vulnerable machine, yet all the evidence suggests the opposite: It's a machine that has grown more resilient and adaptable the more complex and interdependent the world becomes. In short, as long as the price mechanism is allowed to work, mankind seems likely to muddle through. Hallelujah, then, for higher oil prices.

 

link

[icegirl]

nice .sig PP, I love how it has evolved...

 

good article, thanks.

[j_b]

well, at least, this one acknowledges the hubbert peak for cheap conventional oil. it still is in denial about the huge costs involved in increasing recovery and processing of bitumen and heavy oils ... and the obvious implication for the world economy.

 

"Despite the higher recovery expected from this emerging process, the huge amount of energy required results in major drawbacks, such as much higher greenhouse gas emissions and much higher production costs, when compared to conventional recovery methods."

 

http://www.peakoil.net/iwood2003/abstracts/FrancoisCupcic.html

[Peter_Puget]

link

[glacier]

Oil sands

 

Canada, the next OPEC?

[Mal_Con]

A few years ago we sold MSFT and bough Imperial Oil it has done very well.