[Ayoob_Reloaded]

I'm working on an update to the PO.com faq, and want to make the sections open for the members for comments. I'll do one section every week and try to finish the section by the end of that week. I've sketched an outline for a number of branches and I'm sure it'll grow and change over time. Or maybe it'll shrink, who knows.

That said, here's the first section.

What is Peak Oil?

Peak oil is a concept which was developed and published (note: I have a copy of the paper on my HD, I’d like to link it to a spot on the PO server so the curious can read it for themselves) in 1949 by M. King Hubbert, a petroleum engineer at Shell. Hubbert looked at the behavior of individual oil wells. What he noticed was that an oil well essentially has three stages of production.

At the first stage of a well’s life, the oil is easy to produce. The pressure in the reservoir simply pushes the oil out. At this stage production growth is easily achieved. The best quality oil is usually extracted in this phase of development.

As more oil is produced the pressure in the reservoir starts fading. As most of the easy oil has been extracted, the oil becomes more difficult to extract. At this stage great amounts of technology have to be introduced to maintain reservoir pressure and flow. The production curve levels off. In this phase of development, extraction shifts gradually from the best oil to the mid-grade oil.

At a certain point, no amount of technology can stop the production from declining and the production starts to decrease until extraction is not economically feasible anymore. When that happens the well is closed. In this phase, the oil extracted gradually shifts from the mid-grade oil to the lowest grades of oil. This kind of oil is more difficult to refine into a usable end product.

Plotted against time this yields a bell shaped curve, the so-called Hubbert curve. Hubbert’s main discovery was that the curve was symmetrical and that the peak in production usually fell at the halfway point with the technology available at that time. That means that the production peaks at the point where it has produced half the oil that it is ever going to produce.

Hubbert then went further by assuming that the production of a country should display a similar behavior, since the production of a country basically is the summation of a number of wells. In he applied this concept to the production of the USA and derived a peak in 1970. Although his theory was met with a lot of skepticism it has proven to be extremely accurate. US production peaked in 1970 and has been in decline ever since.

This theory can also be applied to the world as a whole. According to the peak oil theory, the peak will occur when roughly half the world’s recoverable reserves have been recovered. One way to visualize world oil peak is to imagine that all of the world’s largest oil fields are currently in production, and are pumping oil, and that they have been doing so for many years. Many of these fields have been in production since the 1970’s.

Since that time, we have found fewer new fields to pump, and the new finds are smaller than the old finds. Imagine one field so large that it supplies 5% of the entire world’s oil supply on a daily basis, and that to replace it, one would need to find twenty or thirty fields of today’s “largeâ€

[ohanian]

URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

[nero]

Here are my comments,

I would suggest that you not put so much emphasis on Hubbert. While he is an important figure in the history of Peak Oil thought, this isn't a cult and we wouldn't want it to appear as one.

Neither a single well nor a single oil field follows a bell curve. The smallest region that might be reasonably expected to follow a bell curve is on the scale of a sedimentary basin. I haven't read Hubbert's original papers but I expect he was extrapolating from his experience in the US with different conceptual 'plays'. Lately the idea that peak will occur when 50% of the oil resource is used up has been demphasized, partly because of competing estimates of the original resource available and particularly because real life is more complicated than that and it has rarely been found to have useful predictive value; Hubbert's original prediction being the one great exception.

Somewhere in a definition of peak oil you should use the word "depletion"

[smiley]

Ayoob. thanks for the input. When I started with the FAQ I got a lot of promises for input. You're the first who actually delivered something.

Some comments

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n this phase of development, extraction shifts gradually from the best oil to the mid-grade oil.

In this phase, the oil extracted gradually shifts from the mid-grade oil to the lowest grades of oil. This kind of oil is more difficult to refine into a usable end product.

[Ayoob_Reloaded]

Smiley,

Are you going to be the FAQ guy? Aaron was asking for volunteers to maintain the FAQ as recently as this past week. If you want to do it I have some stuff to send your way, as well as some ideas for our FAQ to make it a resource that is different from that which is offered on Wikipedia, LATOC, ASPO, and Wolfatthedoor.