[ROCKMAN]

"The remaining oil in North America is basically worthless. Drilling of that stuff is not preventing collapse." And yet today the US refineries are paying about $140 BILLION PER YEAR for that worthless oil. I suppose we each have our own definition of "worthless". LOL

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', '&')quot;The remaining oil in North America is basically worthless. Drilling of that stuff is not preventing collapse." And yet today the US refineries are paying about $140 BILLION PER YEAR for that worthless oil. I suppose we each have our own definition of "worthless". LOL

[ROCKMAN]

Adam - But IMHO it's good to have some comic relief around. Otherwise such a serious subject would be more difficult to absorb.

[dissident]

The EIA graph is utter rubbish. It invokes a mythical, basically unlimited undiscovered category to produce such retarded projections. There is no hint of a basis for expecting such vast replacement of depleting conventional reservoirs. Discoveries of conventional oil have been crashing since the 1960s. An organization that invokes magical thinking on conventional has zero credibility on non-conventional oil. Again, there is no indication that non-conventional oil reserves are vast. The surge in production since 2008 does not constitute any evidence vast non-conventional reserves.

The EROEI debate is nonsense as well. At the present time non-conventional is still cheap to extract. In the near future it will be too expensive to extract 1 barrel of oil by burning 20 barrels and over. Those 20 barrels are not in situ like in the case of the failed attempt to convert kerogen into oil in shale deposits (and the notion of burning vast quantities of oil into CO2 just to extract a small fraction which will also be burned is suicidal given climate change). Energy will have to be diverted to extract the equivalent of 5% or less of it. That's like going to your bank, taking your money and then gambling away 100% of it to get 5% of what you had. People have been arguing that the oil price will never reach high levels because the global economy cannot handle it. That in itself kills off any chance of extraction of very low EROEI oil. The cost of energy to extract it will be higher than any return. This includes deploying nuclear power plants to extract deep tar sands deposits. It is nonsensical to expend cheap energy to extract expensive energy in much smaller quantities. Energy is energy. EROEI is a good indicator telling you if you start leaving the rationality reservation.

[ROCKMAN]

d - "That in itself kills off any chance of extraction of very low EROEI oil." The very point I've been trying to beat into some folks. I sign the invoices for the energy my company uses to drill and i know how much we produce. SomeweSomewehere below an EROEI of 5 or 6 wells become uneconomic to drill. But that was when oil was around $90/bbl. At today's prices only projected with significant!y higher EROEI are worth drilling YES: EROEI for the average oil prospect is currently higher today then it was 3 years ago.

That will be impossible for some to accept.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dissident', 'T')he EIA graph is utter rubbish. It invokes a mythical, basically unlimited undiscovered category to produce such retarded projections.

[ennui2]

As we get farther and farther downfield, it's important to remember that the peak-oil movement originally worshiped under the altar of this simple and elegant symbol.



From inception, peak-oil has attempted to simplify a complex system, and using the conventional peak of the US as the validation test-run for this symbol, priming the gates for curve-fitting world production against the symbol, and wishcasting various dooms on the back-slide of the curve.

This oversimplification turned out to be inadequate at predicting the oil supply/demand dynamic that we've just experienced over the last 10 or so years since TOD claimed peak.

So now peak oilers have had to scramble and come up with a far more complex model in which to explain the movement of the markets. And predicting the economy is several orders of magnitude more complex than Hubbert's Curve. If it were that easy, there would be a lot more millionaire stock traders and short-sellers.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', '
')So now peak oilers have had to scramble and come up with a far more complex model in which to explain the movement of the markets.

[StarvingLion]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;...and that ENERGY comes from all sorts of places."

[tita]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AdamB', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', '
')So now peak oilers have had to scramble and come up with a far more complex model in which to explain the movement of the markets.

[ROCKMAN]

tita - Close but still not completely correct. Hubbert wasn't concerned about the economics of the remaining US reserves...just the volume left to produce. And his "single sine curve" proved to be amazingly correct. How could that be? Easy: it was based upon the projection of future production from the KNOWN US OIL TRENDS. Folks really need to read his paper and stop depending on all the bullsh*t others are saying about his work. He SPECIFICALLY says his model doesn't include future new trends that could be developed. In fact he actually points to the shales and offshore plays as future potential. He also SPECIFICALLY says that his bell shaped curve will not be anywhere close to symmetrical: the tail will stretch out much longer then the build up.

Folks are constantly misrepresenting Hubbert in an effort to support various positions they've taken. And some of those positions are valid. But they hurt their credibility by building such strawmen arguments based on Hubbert's work. Projections that are still correct today FOR THOSE TRENDS HE BASED HIS MODEL UPON. And not to take anything away from him but those trends were rather mature when he developed his model. BTW a modern day Hubbert could do the same with our current shale plays: obviously they offer a new sine wave of US oil production. And as long as prices stay low they present a curve very similar to what Hubbert developed for the trends he used: a rapid build up followed by a much slower decline. IOW another asymmetric bell shaped curve. Granted we've just started on the backside of the curve but it isn't that difficult to see it developing, is it?

BTW his projection for global oil production suffers greatly from the simple fact that the great Middle East oil trends had not been identified yet and thus were not part of the population his statistics were based upon.

[ennui2]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('tita', '
')Maybe we will see a sine wave profile on top of a plateau for some years, but this won't change the global shape which is Hubbert's curve. And the plateau was expected to happen before a real decline.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('StarvingLion', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;...and that ENERGY comes from all sorts of places."

[Zarquon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'B')TW a modern day Hubbert could do the same with our current shale plays: obviously they offer a new sine wave of US oil production. And as long as prices stay low they present a curve very similar to what Hubbert developed for the trends he used: a rapid build up followed by a much slower decline.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zarquon', '[')

And maybe it's only my still confused amateur understanding, but as someone here put it a while ago, there's prices and there's geology that shape the dynamic. Prices are basically unpredictable, but they affect the short-term dynamics, the wells drilled within the next one or two years. Over a longer time span you'll see the 'sine-wave', as markets move up and down. But finally, if you look at the total lifespan of a field or trend, over fifteen or twenty years, then the sine-wave of stop-and-go development becomes simply an average. And all that's left then is geology. That's where ole King Hubby comes in.

[ennui2]

Yes. The short-term chart-watching and all the overblown nail-biting over them is what holds people back from gaining a full understanding. Expand the time-horizon out longer and average things more and you'll see things start to resemble some of the abstract models. I'm just tired of fast-crash near-term doomers creating a loyalty test where you have to interpret every chart dip as a sign of the "big one" otherwise you get tarred and feathered as a paid corny sock-puppet. There is no one single "official" doomer viewpoint despite attempts on the part of Gail and a few other stalwarts to create one.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zarquon', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ROCKMAN', 'B')TW a modern day Hubbert could do the same with our current shale plays: obviously they offer a new sine wave of US oil production. And as long as prices stay low they present a curve very similar to what Hubbert developed for the trends he used: a rapid build up followed by a much slower decline.

[ennui2]

Adam, when all is said and done there IS still a geological limit. It's just that there are phase-changes in what people drill for and how aggressively, which are based on market forces and how much stuff is left (i.e. going for the low-hanging-fruit first). The problem with doomers is that they simply take a snapshot of things as it is now and assume that these phase-changes will never happen. Drilling tapers off always means the oil's running out with no alternative explanation is ever considered. High cost of drilling means the cost to drill must always be high. X amount of oil used to drill means X amount of oil must ALWAYS be used to drill. Various above-ground disruptions will keep disrupting things or get worse, never better. Just this monochromatic pessimistic analysis. The reality is that, as I keep saying, BAU finds a way to hang on longer than doomers think it will. It will not hang on forever, just longer than doomers want.

[AdamB]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', 'A')dam, when all is said and done there IS still a geological limit.

[vtsnowedin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AdamB', '
')Hanging on into tomorrow isn't good enough doom. It must happen now!! And when one trigger for their favorite doom scenario doesn't pan out, there are always others. Climate change being one of the current majority favorites I believe.