Chris Martenson: Re-Thinking Peak Oil

8 Comments on "Chris Martenson: Re-Thinking Peak Oil"

J-Gav on Fri, 1st Nov 2013 11:25 pm 



A somewhat technical discussion which requires some staying-power to get through. Is it worth it? Maybe, if you just remember what Chris says at about 24′ – he sees the whole economic shebang in grave difficulty within the next 2 or 3 years …

DMyers on Sat, 2nd Nov 2013 12:13 am 



Martenson is misunderstood by these critics. He will win the bet on the new peak(not!). The true dimensions of this “oil” boom will come into focus soon. The “even bigger than we expected” will become the “much less than we’d hoped for.”

The concurrent depletion factor is beyond some people to grasp. So is the sweet spot teaser rate.

Kenjamkov on Sat, 2nd Nov 2013 1:06 am 



in 1970 EROEI was what? 50-1
Where are we now, broke economy and maybe 10-1 and that is waaay too generous.
The oil back then went into infrastructure, now it goes into plastic pumpkins.

Arthur on Sat, 2nd Nov 2013 10:17 am 



There is hardly any significant difference between EROEI 50 or 10.

The future of fossil fuel is more uncertain then ever. Sure, DMyers, the fracking boom could be short-lived. But nobody doubts that there are the equivalent of further trillions of barrels of oil waiting to be harvested. EROEI! says the dyed-in-the-wool resource skeptic. However, it takes a single technological breakthrough to completely change the fossil energy picture. Conventional oilfields are usually abandoned when they are half empty, but with new technologies the other half could be harvested in the future after all. I am not advocating this, but it could happen.

http://tinyurl.com/nj3y28c

Ghung on Sat, 2nd Nov 2013 1:36 pm 



“There is hardly any significant difference between EROEI 50 or 10.”

Uh,, If I got $50 back for every $1 I invested in 1970, but now only get $10 back, I would say there’s a difference. It may not matter to the oil patch since they get paid upfront, but it certainly matters in terms of net benefit to the economy.

“Conventional oilfields are usually abandoned when they are half empty..”

My understanding is that there are thousands (millions?) of stripper wells still producing from ‘abandoned’ conventional wells, still producing oil at very low cost even after decades. Not so with offshore wells. Not so sure about tight oil.

“But nobody doubts that there are the equivalent of further trillions of barrels of oil waiting to be harvested…”

I doubt it, at least in the sense that they can be harvested at a price that economies can afford. Then again, maybe I’m just ‘nobody’.

Arthur on Sat, 2nd Nov 2013 5:10 pm 



“Uh,, If I got $50 back for every $1 I invested in 1970, but now only get $10 back, I would say there’s a difference.”

There is a difference, but not a very significant one. The money analogy is wrong, since it entails an essential time aspect, lacking in the EROEI story.

A better comparison is the… potato business. You can either eat a potato or use it to generate the next harvest. Assume you have 1000 potatoes and that you want to have 1000 potatoes every year. If you have a potato EROEI of 50, you only need to reserve 20 potatoes for the next harvest of 1000; in case of a potato EROEI of 10, you need to reserve 100 potatoes for the next harvest of 1000.

In case of EROEI 50, you can eat 980 potatoes, in case of EROEI 10, you can eat 900 potatoes. A difference of ca. 10%, not the world.

EROEI is an essentially logarithmic measure. Laymen tend to think that EROEI of 50 is 5 times as good as EROEI of 10. It is not.

“I doubt it, at least in the sense that they can be harvested at a price that economies can afford.”

Institutions like the US geological Survey come up with these figures. There are trillions and trillions of carbon fuel waiting to be harvested. These same institutions do indeed state that most of it cannot be extracted economically… YET.

The point is that EROEI for diverse energy sources is not a fixed entity, but can start life as a little diaper sh*tter, to end up as a king size XL Napoleon. The keyword is technological development. All it takes is some Norwegian smarty to come up with a new extraction method, like nano-particles, to completely change the energy landscape.

DMyers on Sun, 3rd Nov 2013 2:16 am 



Arthur,

The potato analogy is not so satisfying to all of us. Such a cheap commodity, .5 a pound in my locality, distorts the comparison with a valuable commodity like oil. Let’s measure energy as an equivalent to one barrel of oil. In the scenario it is one barrel of oil to produce 10 in one case and one to produce 50 in the other.

As this involves oil, the numbers are much higher than the 1000 proposed. Let’s set this in terms of millions, as the world consumes 85 million barrels/day or more. One barrel of oil yields 10 barrels of oil or one yields fifty. In the 10 barrel case, it would take 100,000 barrels to make a million. In the 50:1 EROEI case, the million would require 20,000 barrels of oil. The difference is 80,000 barrels on each of many millions.
I believe that is significant.

Let’s say the USA burns 18 million barrels a day. To make that in 10:1 country would take 1,800,000 barrels. In 50:1 country, it would take 360,000.
The difference is no small potatoes, as the saying goes.

Arthur, I watched your link, and I’m only semi-impressed. It is a grand idea, but I think more time and experience are required before blowing the party horns on this.

Arthur on Sun, 3rd Nov 2013 8:59 am 



D, no offense, but you merely repeat my argument. The essence of both your and my example is that EROEI difference 10-50 translates into 10% effective difference in net energy.

Or to illustrate it in a graph:

http://deepresource.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/net_energy_cliff.gif

With EROEI 10 we have not fallen from the net energy cliff.

“It is a grand idea, but I think more time and experience are required before blowing the party horns on this.”

That is a sensible and thoughtful attitude, that I am more than happy to join. But I would like to stress that 12 months ago we were all making jokes about the shale business.

The longer I stay on this forum, the more I am forced to join the illustrious ranks of the likes of Socrates and Einstein, namely to realize that I know almost nothing when it comes to the future of energy and fossil fuel in particular. There are simply too many wild cards.