Peak Oil is You
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Page added on November 13, 2015
What does a year’s worth of crude oil look like?
Right from the beginning the oil story has always been about big numbers. But what do those numbers mean?
Imagine a city building that is 1 kilometre square – about half the size of Sydney’s CBD. Now picture it towering 4.5 kilometres into the sky, up amongst the clouds. That is the volume of oil that the world consumed in 2004.
Now imagine a new building being added beside it every single year, except each new building is 10 storeys higher than the one before.
By the time 2014 arrived, the new building was more than 700 metres higher – representing a massive 5.24 cubic kilometres of oil extracted and consumed – in one year alone.
That’s how big the numbers get.
Still having trouble picturing it? You can “see” the building in this clip from Richard Smith’s 2007 ABC documentary Crude – the incredible journey of oil.
Oil is a fossil fuel, formed by unusual geological circumstance over hundreds of millions of years from the remains of ancient phytoplankton.
The resource is most definitely limited, and some estimates suggest that in the past century the world has managed to consume half of all the oil there ever was.
Well before we run out of the stuff, we will reach what is called “peak oil” – the point at which oil production reaches a maximum before its inevitable decline.
The most optimistic market and industry voices still see the peak of oil production as far off in the future, if at all.
They point to growth coming from new technologies, unconventional deposits such as the tar sands in Canada, as well as new discoveries, but everyone accepts that the oil we’ve already used was the easiest and cheapest to extract.
New deposits are far more difficult to find and harness.
“With all its resources, its money and its incredible kit, the year that the oil industry discovered the most oil in one year that it ever will, was way back in 1965, and it’s been kind of downhill ever since”
Jeremy Leggitt – former oil geologist and now author – Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis
Both OPEC and the International Energy Agency are projecting that the demand for oil will continue to increase and that the low prices the world is currently experiencing cannot be sustained beyond the short term.
6 Comments on "What does a year’s worth of crude oil look like?"
Dredd on Fri, 13th Nov 2015 6:04 pm
“What does a year’s worth of crude oil look like?”
The inside of Oil-Qaeda’s brain, or an ice stream turned into SLR (Weekend Rebel Science Excursion – 53)?
rockman on Fri, 13th Nov 2015 6:20 pm
it would be much more impressive to offer the actual volume of the reservoir needed to find that amount of new recoverable oil. Their model doesn’t come close to capturing the reality. It would make their number look puny…like pissing in a bathtub to make it overflow. I’ll work on my model later.
Go Speed Racer on Sat, 14th Nov 2015 7:55 am
they forgot to include the cubic mile of coal, and the mile long tank of natural gas. We use up those things too along with the big tower of annual oil.
rockman on Sat, 14th Nov 2015 12:27 pm
OK…bear with me. 5.4 cubic kilometers is equal to about 180 billion cubic feet. But oil doesn’t exists in giant underground lakes…it exists in the pore space of rocks. For simplicity I’ll use optimistic assumptions. The average rock is made up of 25% pore space. So the volume of rock needed to hold that years work of production is 720 billion cubic feet. But we can’t recover 100% of that oil even with decades of secondary recovery efforts. So an average recovery of 50% is very good. So now we need 1.44 TRILLION cubic feet of reservoir rock.
The next step requires some confidence in Rockman’s ability to approximate the a average thickness of the generic reservoir I’ve been describing. So without any justification I’ll say the average is 80′. Yes there are a few 200’+ thick but many times more that are less then 30′.
So skipping over a lot of very rough guess: it would take finding a field (based on all those unprovable assumptions) that covers 65,000 SQUARE MILES. Which might sound like a lot but compare to my equally WAG of the areal extent of the fields currently producing that volume assuming a 30% water cut: over 200,000 sq miles.
None of the numbers really mean anything. It’s just a silly effort to build some mental image.
Boat on Sat, 14th Nov 2015 1:20 pm
Rock,
Isn’t this why going into old fields shows promise. They had straws poking holes. With horizontal fracking they can go in at multiple levels and depths that those straws would have missed. What oil price would you guess for that to become economic.
rockman on Sat, 14th Nov 2015 4:40 pm
Boat – The vast majority of the old (and big) fields produced mostly from rather porous conventional reservoirs. So frac’ng has no application in them. But hz drilling could add a very small additional recover. But it’s neither simple or cheap. Believe it or not (and I wouldn’t fault you for calling me a liar) the Rockman and his little company that almost no one (including most of the oil patch)has heard of was the first to drill a commercial hz oil well in an old (69 years old)conventional reservoir in the Texas coastal trend. This particular field trend has produced 4.5 billion bbls. Several years ago Energy XXI began a similar program in the offshore GOM. Made some impressive wells: 2000 to 3000 bopd. But spent $billions of borrowed capex and as a result of the oil prices drop are about to file for bankruptcy protection.
But focusing on all EOR methods: there hasn’t been any fields in Texas or La. that hasn’t had the appropriate EOR recovery applied to it. In many cases for 30+ years. A significant amount of Texas oil production has come (and continues to come from) from wells in fields undergoing EOR. The entire “lots of oil left to be recovered by EOR” potential has been grossly over estimated. EOR did have the potential to produce billions of bbls of additional oil…and have been producing those billions of bbls for over half a century.
For instance 26 years ago the state decided to even kick in half the taxes the collected from oil production to boost EOR projects:
The EOR Incentive (Introduced 1989): Oil produced from an approved new enhanced oil recovery project or expansion of an existing project is eligible for a special EOR tax rate of 2.3 percent of the production’s market value (one-half of the standard rate) for 10 years. For the expansion of an existing project the reduced rate is applied to the incremental increase in production after response certification.
The source rocks that fed those tens of billions of bbls from conventional fields are still out there in Texas and elsewhere. And like the Bakken and Eagle Ford Shale which have been known to be productive for more then 60 years. All it takes is high oil prices to make them significant viable targets.