[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A') front-page story in The New York Times focused on a series of recent oil discoveries. But, as the story, “Oil industry sets a brisk pace of new discoveries,” published Sept. 24 acknowledges, none match the giant oil-field discoveries of the past. And despite these recent finds, world oil production has achieved a peak, or plateau, and eventually a steady decline will bring dire implications for the world economy and modern society.

Peak oil is not some fuzzy academic concern based on anecdotal information, but a geological reality. This is true for the United States (where production peaked in 1970 and has declined in most years since, despite enormous investments and technical improvements), and for most of the world's major oil-producing nations (including Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Norway, Mexico, Venezuela, and many dozens of smaller producers).

More important, the world as a whole reached a “plateau” from 2005 through July 2008, despite enormous price increases, which has been followed by a decline in production of about 5 percent in only one year. These are data from conservative American and European agencies that are in agreement.

While many would argue that sufficient financial incentives would increase production in these countries, they passed their peak production during a period of unprecedented price increases and, for most of them, stable political conditions.

Over the past year the price of oil has remained relatively low as many economies have collapsed at about the same rate as many oil fields, reducing demand. The world has not found major new resources since the 1960s, while continuing to squeeze more oil from old fields. Hundreds of major oil fields are declining severely (East Texas, Yates, Prudhoe, Brent, Forties, Ekofisk, Samotlor, Yibal and such). Many are collapsing, most notably Mexico's Cantarell Field, the world's second largest producer, which peaked in 2004 at 2.2 million barrels a day, then dropped to less than one-third of that in five years.

There is no way that the relatively few new fields recently discovered can compensate for the decline and collapse of so many older large fields, let alone allow growth of global oil production. Also, the geological realities are complicated by political events and a scarcity of investment capital to underwrite oil production.

Advances in oil production are stymied

The greatly increasing dollar and the energy needed to produce oil from ever deeper offshore ocean fields and other hostile environments trump technological oil-production advances.

In 1999, the global oil and gas industry, excluding nationalized companies, produced about one-tenth of a barrel of oil (including gas expressed as oil) per 2005 dollar spent in exploration, development and production. By 2006 that number had declined by about half. In 2005, despite all of the technological advances that allow oil companies to drill in arctic conditions or below thousands of feet of water, 60 percent of the world's oil production originated in fewer than 500 “giant” fields (about 1 percent of all oil fields worldwide); almost all of these fields were discovered 50 or more years ago.

The energy cost of getting oil and gas has significantly increased. In the 1930s, the United States recovered 100 or more barrels of oil for every barrel invested in seeking and producing it - Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI). This dropped to 20-30 to one in the 1970s and 10-18 to one by 2000.

Global patterns of decline are similar, and if present trends continue it will take a barrel of oil to find and produce a barrel of oil in, perhaps, as little as two to three decades. At some point, oil will not be a significant net energy source no matter the price and no matter what ill-informed economists say. We will miss it dearly as few alternatives have the favorable EROEI as petroleum did, and perhaps does still, and none except coal are conceivably of the same magnitude and quality in the foreseeable future.

It is time to prepare for a world without cheap and plentiful oil.

Robert Fromer lives in Windsor and is an environmental consultant. He wrote this article with data provided by Dr. Charles Hall, professor, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, New York.
http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=d2266a56-fc7b-429c-a175-cafd83b9ee76

[cipi604]

5 stars , simple to understand, a logic/rational article, not like NYT crap.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cipi604', '5') stars , simple to understand, a logic/rational article, not like NYT crap.

[hardtootell-2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('cipi604', '5') stars , simple to understand, a logic/rational article, not like NYT crap.

[shortonsense]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'A') good refutation of that "oil is everywhere" article in the New York Times. The oilfinders of the world never seem to want to address the EROEI issue.

[SILENTTODD]

Get yourself a bicycle now while they are still cheap!! Also at least a dozen tires and tubes for each bicycle your own!!! I do!

[eXpat]

Is maybe too early to say, but i think that soon we will remember with fondness the good old times of the bumpy plateau...

from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5808#more

[shortonsense]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eXpat', 'I')s maybe too early to say, but i think that soon we will remember with fondness the good old times of the bumpy plateau...

from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5808#more

[Revi]

Peak oil is the moment when the Titanic hit the iceberg. Most people won't notice anything for a while. If you happened to be looking over the edge you might have seen it, but most people are still blissfully unaware.

Too late to save the ship now.

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eXpat', 'I')s maybe too early to say, but i think that soon we will remember with fondness the good old times of the bumpy plateau...

from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5808#more

[shortonsense]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', 'P')eak oil is the moment when the Titanic hit the iceberg. Most people won't notice anything for a while. If you happened to be looking over the edge you might have seen it, but most people are still blissfully unaware.

[shortonsense]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', ' ')Trying to predict the future using just geology or just economics or just technology or just human nature or just the Energy Fairy pulling a plum out of herrear is where all the prophets (both Doom and Deliverance) get into trouble.

[shortonsense]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('shortonsense', ' ')MadDog has already verified for us its consideration in relation to the modern oil and gas business.

[mos6507]

A quick history of peak oil doomerism in the last 5 years...

I first got into peak oil around 2005 when The Oil Drum was already calling peak and expecting Mad Max to immediately follow. It probably wasn't the first time the general consensus from peaker circles was that we had peaked, but it's probably the time when they made the most noise about it, and seemed the most sure of themselves.

But instead of the graphs turning immediately downward the way the oil drum predicted, it became clear that we were on a plateau, and not a completely flat one either.

So the first big assumption about peak oil was blown. That was, that we'd have a nicely visualized peak and then immediately start tracking downward. It didn't happen.

Next we had the oil runup from 2005-2008. Surely the plateau combined with Chindia growth patterns would be more than enough to cause TEOTWAWKI. But then we had the credit crisis which, almost overnight, chopped out a big chunk of global oil demand.

Suddenly not only did the price crash, but we began to see oil producers intentionally reduce supply and investment. This was not supposed to happen.

So the second pillar of modern peak oil theory, that the combination of population growth and 3rd world industrialization insured an unbroken thirst for more and more oil. This should have conspired to push oil prices ever upward to $200-300 and beyond.

And yet what we have is this kind of residual analysis that simply tries to visualize peak oil based on the production charts alone.

Now, semantically, maybe it's peak oil. But I care about supply and demand disconnects. I don't care about the raw chart. I don't care if oil production slows to a quart a day if the world is not harmed in any way by such a drop. So what we can look at the chart before 2008 and make certain assumptions, but from the fall of last year onward, we have to make different assumptions.

Those assumptions are that oil as it is now, hovering somewhere between $60-70, has returned to a relatively comfortable spot as far as the continuance of BAU. Sure, it's BAU with a global recession, but it's a far cry from Mad Max dystopias and malthusian die-offs.

This does in no way mean that peak oil doom is a myth. It just means that our ability to "call" the 8-ball in the corner pocket is piss poor. Matt Simmons is the poster-child for this, someone who was the whistle-blowing hero during the oil runup, now rendered a laughing stock by being too sure of himself with his calls.

Someone like Richard Heinberg has also made bad calls, but his language is much more qualified with "maybes" and such. So he's gotten through this largely unscathed. Nevertheless, he, as well as neophytes like Rubin, coat-tail riders like Orlov, and others have latched onto the credit crisis as a means to give peak oil some relevance during this lull. Yes, this is in the form of "PEAK OIL CAUSED THE CREDIT CRISIS". That meme has largely not been swallowed by the masses, and for good reason.

So as peak oil recedes from the limelight, in comes Fatih Birol as the white knight proclaiming not that 2030 is the peak date, which is disturbing enough, but more like 2020!

But just as that bombshell is going off, Lynch et. al. come in for the killing blow. And Fatih kind of half-back-pedals on his statement as well for whatever reason.

So now we're at a point in time when The Oil Drum is even thinking about calling it quits. Sure, part of the reason for that is the feeling internally that peak is in the past and that it's too late just to awareness raise, but the other part is that the financial situation (and global warming) is overshadowing any concerns people may have about peak oil and is likely to remain that way for some time.


We can talk all we want theoretically about carrying capacity and things like that, but what we as individuals confront first is the job market and the economy. Someone who can't pay his bills doesn't give a crap about peak oil OR global warming. He wants the quickest path to getting cash flow going again so he can put food on the table.

Just to see how this is cutting close to home...

When I went to the Boston Peak Oil site I contacted one of the members here to see if he/she wanted to get involved in a local Transition initiative. That member told me he/she was unemployed and too busy looking for new work.

If peakers are too consumed with navigating through the credit crisis then how can we expect anyone else to be interested?

Not that everybody's unemployed. Certainly in my town I sense mostly complacency, but what little anxiety there is here, is probably economically driven, and by factors that in my estimation are not very well linked to global oil production charts in a way that gives me an "in" to appeal to them.

So what I see here is really a half decade in which very little tangible was accomplished by the peak oil movement. Even billionaires like T. Boone Pickens have had to retreat.

What little mitigation is going on, like all the money going into electric cars, is being driven primarily by concerns about global warming. And these programs all probably would have been canceled last year if not for federal support, since the public has largely switched from shock to trance by the drop in oil prices.


Pretty much the only silver lining in all this is the forward momentum of the transition town movement, something I have guarded optimism about.

But after last year I have really turned the corner with my peak oil guru worship. I don't necessarily take any Oil Drum analysis, Energy Bulletin blog, etc... as gospel.

I would advise everyone to temper their tendency to rally around some kind of group-think narrative about how and when this is going to play out.

Unlike shortonsense or JD, I am not predicting a happy ending. It's still doom. It's not going to be pretty, but the details are going to be hard to predict. But for now, I'll stick with the IEA's 2020 timeframe, and backdate it to 2015 at the earliest. If the production chart keeps tanking AND oil prices go on a sustained upward run unbroken by another speculative bubble bursting, then I'll call peak oil (at least MY definition of peak oil) but we're not there yet. Despite Cantarell etc... we're not quite there yet.

[AirlinePilot]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('shortonsense', 'A')lthough I'll be the first to admit that the first peak oil production I remember in 1980 I was pretty nervous too! After you've been through a few, they just don't have the same scare effect they used to.

[hardtootell-2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '
')
Next we had the oil runup from 2005-2008. Surely the plateau combined with Chindia growth patterns would be more than enough to cause TEOTWAWKI. But then we had the credit crisis which, almost overnight, chopped out a big chunk of global oil demand.

Suddenly not only did the price crash, but we began to see oil producers intentionally reduce supply and investment. This was not supposed to happen.

So the second pillar of modern peak oil theory, that the combination of population growth and 3rd world industrialization insured an unbroken thirst for more and more oil. This should have conspired to push oil prices ever upward to $200-300 and beyond.

But after last year I have really turned the corner with my peak oil guru worship. I
I would advise everyone to temper their tendency to rally around some kind of group-think narrative about how and when this is going to play out.

[AirlinePilot]

Good post mos.

I tend to agree with some of what your saying and I 'get" how it sure seems that its taking quite a while for things to get ugly. I'd submit we are all in the 'boiling frog" pot right now. We are living it. Its not dire or serious yet but that's because a lot of us understand that it will take time for the downward spiral to accelerate. I don't hold out a lot of hope at this point since I believe personally that we are past the point of mitigation. I do believe that its going to be bad, but in a Long Emergency way, rather than some swift Mad Max scenario.

Remember also that as we move forward the past becomes clearer. Yes a lot of doomer calls have been made and proven wrong. But we are getting a better handle on things with time and more focus from more people who are concerned about the problems. I sense we are at or very near the peak and it will take a few years before the true effects are felt. Until then the latest crisis is a more important and pressing issue so Po takes a back seat. I don't think we'll have to wait very long for another bout of energy related problems to come along and remind us what a huge issue passing the Peak of World Oil production will be.

[thuja]

Mos welcome to my world- the world of the Peak Oil "moderate"-

God knows I had to sit through the drivel of 2008 when people were predicting an imminent discontinuity, the end of the world, run to the hills, Annie grab your gun doomstead doomerism. Bah I say Bah...

There is plenty of doom to talk about when discussing oil production depletion. Plenty. But why resort to hyperbole and false panics?

How about a rational examiniation of the likely effects of energy constraints? I know you don't believe that the recent plateau in oil had anything to do with the recent Great Recession...but you certainly must believe that oil constraints (and water, arable land, etc) are likely to have serious and lasting damaging impacts on the global economy.

And that will translate into increased unemployment, increased impoverishment as well as increasing hunger, discord, conflict and resource wars.

We are likely to see...

A cascading series of recessions (Depressions) as oil production declines. With each recession there will be demand destruction...but the heights of production will not be met again and so we will never truly come out of the previous recession.

We will not be able to make up for the energy loss with efficiency and alternative energy.

That last line is the basic premise of Peak Oil adherents. For some it means...and therefore we will all die. I don't believe that. It means an increasingly lessened standard of living and decrease in the average age of mortality.

Moderates rule! Forget the Insta-die-off Peakist Dooomstead-a-topians. But even they speak more truth that the silly Rosy Glass Star Trek CornyFuturo Short ON Sense morons.