[dorlomin]

The 6% decline rate was offset by new oil coming online to be somewhere near 2-3%.

That, though, will be enough to ensure hydrocarbon depletion is the big story of the next 10 years.

[Pops]

Depletion is 24 7, and decline in flow rate after some point is inevitable for every well. There is a well being capped somewhere every day because it is unproductive, every hour I suppose. So of course new wells must come online to make up for those that wear out.

But, over the last 10 years, C+C has remained essentially flat. The rest of the story is that all of those 10 years hundreds and thousands of new wells were completed and brought online but hundreds and thousands of other, older wells were constantly depleting and flow rates in many others declining and in others finally grinding to a dusty halt.

Even with every bit of technology and hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment, flow from all those new wells could not replace the flow from declining wells and increase the total more than a few tenths of a percent per year, even with the rewards being the highest average real prices ever in the history of oil.

The fact that can't be avoided is all the wells that can be drilled are being drilled and yet supply remains stagnant - except for a few, soon to be depleted LTO sweet spots in the US.

Not sure how else you would describe such a situation other than the peak of oil production.

There are a couple million barrels shut in here and there that might come online at any time depending on whose god comes out on top. And of course there are billions of barrels of oil in proved reserves we have yet to tap, after all, the second half of the curve has to come from somewhere. But right now, everything we can do we are doing and it is only amounting to keeping production even. It doesn't seem like a logical leap to think the next thing to happen is that the new wells will not be able to keep up with the decline of the old, that the large tide of decline overwhelms the flow from new wells.

Ron Patterson I think calculated earlier this year that it's taking 60% of new well production simply to make up for old well depletion in N Dakota - and "old" in the Bakken means last month or at best last year because that is how fast the new wells start declining. The EIA says the US will peak in a couple of years and plateau for a couple more and decline by 2020 - I take that as the most optimistic forecast.

Europe is declining rapidly, Russia saved us from PO in the Oughties but now is obviously peaking - barring a fracking miracle of their own, and all the other tight, deep, frozen and x-heavy sorta-oil are going to amount to a fraction of today's flow at their height.


In 2014 I'd worry about peak oil because it sure looks to be just around the corner
.

[Subjectivist]

Seems like there are at least of a few of us thinking that peak decline is startng this year. Is that paranoia or are we just better at prediction?

[dissident]

It is hard to evaluate the situation because we do not have a detailed list of new production and old production around the globe. There are snapshots of parts of it and the rest has to be deduced via handwaving. Given the available information, there is not enough conventional new production to explain the current plateau and allow for some happy motoring decades into the future. It looks like it is non-conventional that is propping up the current production and this non-conventional just does not have the scale to replace the conventional decline. So we will fall off the plateau in the next several years. I think it is a bit ironic that the interest in peak oil peaked when it is just about to become clear.

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dissident', 'I')t is hard to evaluate the situation because we do not have a detailed list of new production and old production around the globe. There are snapshots of parts of it and the rest has to be deduced via handwaving. Given the available information, there is not enough conventional new production to explain the current plateau and allow for some happy motoring decades into the future. It looks like it is non-conventional that is propping up the current production and this non-conventional just does not have the scale to replace the conventional decline. So we will fall off the plateau in the next several years. I think it is a bit ironic that the interest in peak oil peaked when it is just about to become clear.

[dolanbaker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Subjectivist', 'S')eems like there are at least of a few of us thinking that peak decline is startng this year. Is that paranoia or are we just better at prediction?

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rollin', 'I')n a land where you can get your eyes, heart, hips, knees, cancers and many other things fixed I think we need to worry about the state of the medical industry.

[Ibon]

Although prediction is difficult it seems we have some long term posters here, myself included,whose peak oil barometers are showing signs of falling pressure and storms brewing.

I remain tentative in seeing if my hypothesis is correct that when undeniable consequences start to bite we will see a rallying around the issue as a culture, in spite of the impossibility to maintain the status quo as we know it.

Moving out of denial collectively will open a lot of doors for alternative values to emerge. As mentioned in the Horizon Scanning thread pay attention to changing values in the millenial and following generations. In spite of the digital imbilical cords they have and naivete and youthful hubris the young are the ones to be watching.

[AirlinePilot]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'T')he thing that worries me now and really always has, is the continual drift into irrelevance that our lives are taking. It seems to me that more and more people I talk to know relatively little about the world or how it works and merely exist from one vacation or spending spree to the next. My neighbor dropped by yesterday (to ask me if the laptop he had the specs for would serve him to browse the internet) and when I showed him my ongoing pickup project (with engine now totally disassembled and spread around the shop) he said "I'd not know where to start." No big deal, except, he worked for years selling Pennzoil, is a big NASCAR fan and has a couple of classic cars and collects "automobile" stuff. The guy can't change his own oil..