by WebHubbleTelescope » Sat 19 Feb 2011, 01:17:39
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('OilFinder2', 'S')o as I said, if you insist on comparing your model to EIA numbers, you're doomed to be wrong. The only way you can be right is if you decide to include these unconventional deposits in your discovery model.
You still haven't read the book, or you have and are attempting some jiu-jitsu to blow some trivial aspects out of proportion. If you understand the main point I have tried to drive home, we need to consider dispersion and disorder as a fact of nature. The oil sands are a huge dispersive factor, perhaps large in volume but fractionally small in extractable rate. This in fact is a separate dispersed lobe and thus we can mathematically separate that effect out, or to first-order just ignore it. It is really a separate category to consider (which unfortunately you have serious problems with) .
Yet when we place it in that context, it actually strengthens the argument. So take away a percent of the worldwide production as miscategorized unconventional crude, one has even less of the conventional crude to account for. I don't make a big deal about this because I tend to the conservative anyways (no use piling on to gain a percentage difference).
Let me put it another way. Conventional crude extraction is around 4% proportional draw-down per year from reserves. If say that the tar sands contain 3 trillion barrels and the production is over 1 million barrels a day, then the proportional draw-down is around 0.01% per year. That is a factor of 400x difference in draw-down percentage. In engineering mathematics parlance, we have an example of a stiff equation here, due to widely dispersed rates. The slow rate uptake won't make a whit of difference in changing the overall profile. It essentially gets absorbed as a baseline offset.
Or we can take the 3 trillion barrel oil sands reserve and divide it by 400 and get an "equivalent discovery barrels" quantity of around 10 billion barrels that remains as a constant background with respect to conventional crude. We can draw-down at a 4% rate from this amount for a long time as it is rate-limited for the foreseeable future. If peak oil is actually about the flow rate, then this is a perfectly acceptable approximation. I figure this is quite obvious because I spend quite a bit of time in the book describing dispersed growth rates.
So I could make all these minor adjustments and the curves will still look pretty much the way I described them out to 2050.
It is so nice to have good models like dispersive discovery and the oil shock model to allow us to logically reason about oil production. You will just have to thank me in a few years.