I didn't post this one up top, because it's subscription-only, but maybe someone who has a subscription can give us details...

Aramco Adds More Projects to Upstream Push

State giant Saudi Aramco has started planning long-term expansions at three oil fields -- Shaybah, Berri and Safaniyah -- adding to its current slate of huge projects, according to details of internal plans obtained by International Oil Daily.

So in two to three years time Saudi will be claiming around 7 million barrels a day of spare capacity in the midst of falling global production and rising demand!

Note the two caveats: Beyond that it's a bit unclear & 'though the exact number is uncertain'

Rad: Interesting headline- then in the article, KSA claims a minimum capacity by the end of 2009 of 12 mbpd, while claiming a current capacity of 11.6. I guess this headline is better than "KSA says production capacity will not decline before the end of 2009 as new investments are planned".

I think it is a double bluff. They have admitted to an unattended 8% decline on existing fields
which supposedly has been held to 2% decline via advanced recovery/increased rigs.

The double bluff is making people think that they wouldn't dare lie in reporting such outrageously high future production rates.

in my opinion.

Marco.

For what it's worth

As I posted yesterday, I have been out of town for a week now and must drive across town to borrow my brother in law's computer to post. So if this note on Saudi Arabia was posted Sunday when it was fresh then I do apologize for the re-post. But in Sunday's Parade Magazine, there was a list of "The World's 10 Worst Dictators." Here is #5:

King Abdullah Saudi Arabia. Age 83. In power since 1995. Last year's rank; 7.
Because King Abdullah and the Saudi royal family control the world's largest reserves of oil, the U.S. government has not acted to oppose the repressive and intolerant actions of their regime. In Saudi Arabia, it is still possible to be executed for witchcraft and flogged for being alone with an unrelated person of the opposite sex. It is illegal for a Saudi citizen to practice a religion other than Islam. According to a 2006 report by the Center for Religious Freedom, Saudi school textbooks to be birulently anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. Last year, the U.S. State Department judged Saudi Araia one of the top eight offenders of religious freedom.

As I said, I apologize if this has already been posted. But I would just wish to point out there are multiple reasons that Saudi Arabia would wish the world to believe that they are sitting on the world's largest reserves of oil when in fact that is a complete myth. Well, it's a myth unless about 70 billion barrels are the world's largest reserves.

Got to go now. Hope to check in again in a day or two.

Ron Patterson

KSA's previously announced plans were to increase production capacity to 12 mbpd in 2009 and 15 mbpd in 2012. What I gather from this latest statement is that they are on target to meet the first goal, but that they are losing confidence in their ability to reach the 2nd goal. Instead of increasing production capacity by 3 mbpd during 2009-2012, they are revising that expectation downward to 0-2 mbpd in that timeframe.

Their stated post 2012 plans are not to increase production. They have said that they will plateau from 2012 onward. That's the part of their prediction that it most questionable. It's quite reasonable (not to mention alarming) that they will peak in the 2009-2012 timeframe, but do they really expect to avoid production declines for decades afterward?

Now that they are on record as bringing in their peak timeframe from 2012 to 2009, we may expect some explicit statement on post peak decline rates. So far they have been avoiding public statements about it.

Hi Bob,

Skipping the diefoff debate and recognizing that everything I have to say is a guess, here goes:

1. Energy, staying ahead or equal to the curve - it isn't going to happen for a number of reasons. First, there are too many vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Second, there won't be the necessary funding without cutting other special interests, i.e., defense spending, crop subsidies, etc. Third, any change would require a concomitant change by the populace which hasn't shown much interest in changing :-). Lastly, it would require the overthrow of the growth paradigm.

2. Secession/Balkanizataion - the question is whether the US tends toward some form of "dictatorship" as it appears to be doing today. Given the unlikelyhood that the Feds will be at all proactive about the future, it seems possible to me that there will be a Balkanization centering upon regional interests. This is happening to a small extent today where groups of states are suing the Feds over various laws/Fed actions. It is possible that the US will return to its roots as a republic.

Conversely, again assuming there isn't absolute Federal control to stop it, the US could turn into a number of smaller countries a la Ecotopia. There are clear advantages and disadvantages were this to occur. But there are far too many to broach the subject on TOD.

Were the Feds serious about the future, a logical thing to do would be to establish model communities trying different approaches to acheiving a stable-state society. These would include not only energy but also governance and economics.

One thing that might help people look at living differently would be to view Colonial House and that appeared on PBS some time ago. Besides seeing how important interpersonal are, they also allow one to see what existing technologies are of real importance.

Todd; a Realist

Bob,

Have you thought about all these "ranchettes" that have been split off the old farms and ranches over the past couple of decades? I'm sure Phoenix/Flagstaff is a veritable corridor of mini-ranchettes. They are owned by retired urbanites and have a couple of horses and maybe raise a little hay.

Will these continue to exist in the age of ethanol and $20-a-bale hay?

Will they just become little fuel farmettes of the future, or could they play some role in a biosolar habitat community?

It's possible that they'll eventually be bought up and combined into huge fuel plantations.

Bob, I love the vision of bioregional "biosolar habitats" and all.

My guess is that Hanson is right about the way in which the political elites of various nations and regions will use whatever resources they have to manipulate people into various Resource Wars. Already we see CERA playing the role of propagandists for more resource war as they demonize national oil companies and represent their client multinational oil corporations as "God's chosen."

So many resources will be poured into war, and so many people will be killed, hurt, dislocated, and impoverished that there won't be any bright and sunny bioregions for anyone to inhabit.

We have yet to see the effect of multiple nuclear bombs being denotated around the world in a brief period of time, but it looks like we will get that chance soon, does it not?

We have yet to see what mass slaughter and imprisonment of various civilians in the USA will bring about, but we are also quite likely to see such events take place as people become more desperate and the Imperial Government becomes more violent in an attempt to keep order sufficient to keep the factories making military weapons and munitions going.

I think that you will find plenty of people who will refuse to see reality and will choose the Faux News propaganda "Resource War: Operation Endless Terror v.2.1" until you pry their cold dead hands from their TV remote.

Some of the things you talk about could happen after about 10 or 20 years of intense violence, ecological upheaval, and widespread famine and pestilence.

You know, the whole "Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse Bring Long Emergency" scenario. After 5 out 6 people are dead and the human population has been reduced to less than a billion or so, then we get to do the biosolar habitat thing.

Sorry to be so Peak-Oily-Anna-ish. I know I make it sound like a cakewalk. I don't really mean to be so optimistic. Some people think we optimists are delusional, but we know better, don't we?

We do not control outcomes, only our own contributions to the future.

Ultimately, I think most cities should rid themselves of all cars and all personal mobility within the city should be provide by food, bicycles, electric bicycles, rail, and street cars.

However, a beneficial alternative or interim approach might be for cities to provide directly or through subsidy a fleet of small electric vehicles that could be rented on a short term basis within the city. This would make living or visiting the city a more pleasant experience, increase the use of transportation alternatives, cut down on energy consumption, and provide a kick start to the mass production of electric vehicles, thus reducing their costs.

on the google article.
the pannels are only there to power their office worker pc's and not their data-center ones.

In what way are natural gas storage levels rated at? I guess my question is the 14.7% number based on actualy Bcf or on days of supply?? If it is based on simple Bcf that number doesn't really mean anything if demand has increased correct? If it is based on days supply it would be accurate to quote that number as meaningful.

Badger,

I am inclined to agree with you. The CNBC talking heads were all talking about Lower NG prices this morning. Very short term perhaps, but by summer it might look different when lower production takes a bite out of storage builds. If we have a cold winter next year, it might look really ugly.

If I lived in a cold climate dependent on either NG or heating oil, I would start thinking about a backup heating method, at least a wood stove.

Incorrect.

Construction of the first and second cellulosic facilities are already underway.

Ground-breaking of the first BTL ethanol plant is slated to start soon in GA.

Around the world, private investors are putting money into stoves and furnaces that burn bio-mass for heat, hot water and electricity, a technology with an EROI of at least 10 - 1.

Except in Brazil, liquid fuels from bio-mass require taxpayer subsidy. Will the need for subsidy subside? I doubt it and think certainly not when natural gas goes into terminal decline.

A lot of people on this list are quick to diss Smith's 'invisible hand', often after misrepresenting the concept. For myself, I think the market mechanism is a social invention of great utility. People are right to point out that an 'invisible hand' is often claimed to be at work, when the facts point straight to market manipulation for the purposes of unearned personal gain.

Ethanol in Iowa or, as Iogen is insisting, in Idaho is truly an example of a very 'visible hand' at work in the economy. Collectivist goals, such as national security are invoked in defense of this offense to free market economics. Ironically, individual greed, laziness and social alienation lie behind the collectivist mantra of national security. Freedom is reduced to a full tank of gas, a private bubble, however fleeting, and a few freedom froms, such as freedom from exercise or freedom from sharing.

I wonder if those of you so quick to dismiss the 'invisible hand' are happy with the work of the 'visible hand'?

I wonder how many staffers the DOE could hire with the money going into the 20,000 troop escalation in Iraq?

Reserves do not equal production.

You can't bring your car to the gas station and ask to fill it up with reserves.

xom lists total boe, or barrels of oil equivelant. What is happening is that they are replacing declining mostly oil reserves with new mostly gas reserves, particularly in qatar and, i think, uae too. So, as is well known, as oil goes down ng is coming up... but, the replacement is much harder to transport and.or use for motor fuels, the major use for liquid fuels.

I belive those were not new oil fields but existing ones

From drilling on Wall Street.

Canadian natural gas data is available here:
http://www2.nrcan.gc.ca/es/erb/prb/english/View.asp?x=449

This site has monthly updates. In January, Canadian natural gas in storage was 416 Bcf. U.S. storage as of last week was 2088 Bcf by comparison.

I think a key fact in the natural gas picture is the wells drilled vs. production figures. In 1998, Canada drilled 4991 natural gas wells and produced 16.1 Bcf/day. In 2005 they drilled 15,931 wells and produced 17.1 Bcf/day (down from perhaps a 2001-2002 peak of 17.4 Bcf/day). So basically they are having to drill more than three times as many wells just to maintain a nearly flat production level. The U.S. situation with drilling and production is similar. How long can this go on?

CERA are clawing, scraping together any shreds of black coloured things they could burn to show the world that there isn't problem. It is actually rather comical.

Remember chemical Ali, Saddam's war adviser; "We are beating the infidel American and pushing them back" whilst enough NATO ordnance to blow up the planet Krypton was falling round about his head.

It's sort of that magnitude of denial CERA are now entering. They may be perfectly correct when they say there are 3.7T barrels but who wants it with such horribly low EROEI. Meanwhile the sheeple are getting story after story about this that and the next find without being told about the logistical problems associated. It is this planted misinformation that we have now entered a tactical war of words with. People are starting to take notice of energy depletion and the powers at be have started to realise that the people have started to take notice.

Marco.

Well, we wanted TOD to get popular enough to get the word out, but of course being popular attracts nuts like this. Be careful what you wish for I guess.

Hello Everyone,

Speak of a synergy between Creationism, Biblical Literalism, Global Warming and Environmentalism:

Evangelicals Protect The Planet, The Planet God Created

The Evangelical “What Would Jesus Drive?” green campaign of a few years ago has now paved the way for a new movement. An unprecedented group of Evangelical and scientific leaders just last month sent an urgent call to action to President Bush on behalf of “Creation Care,” urging him to protect the environment and “defend life on earth.” They are calling for a "fundamental change in values, lifestyles, and public policies" needed to address global warming and other environmental problems "before it is too late.” ...

Climate change isn’t the only turf Evangelicals have been walking on lately. Marcus R. Ross submitted a doctoral dissertation to the University of Rhode Island in December on the existence of mosasaurs, but was vocal about his status as a ''young earth creationist'' who, aside from his academic work, believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.
http://www.motherjones.com/blue_marble_blog/archives/2007/02/3568_evange...

Wouldn't it be wonderful if America's millions of conservative Christians woke up to the reality of pollution, environmental degradation, and the destruction of Nature (which is a blasphemous destruction of God's own creation)?

If millions of conservative Christians woke up from this oil-induced delusion and looked outside their windows and noticed that corporations have transformed the living Earth to a desolate, lifeless, polluted, asphalt-covered wasteland ... millions of people might begin to stand up to the oil corporations demanding that they stop.

But I am only dreaming with these thoughts. These Christians don't seem to mind so much that American bombs & bullets are murdering Iraqi children, how then are they going to care about something so abstract as Nature and something so large as the entire Earth?

These Christians expect God to reward them with mansions and eternal life in heaven so they probably do not particularly care about corporations abusing, polluting and destroying the Earth. Too bad that Christians failed Christianity's ideals beginning pretty much at the moment in which these were first expressed.

I look at my own religion and mourn its long history of atrocities. If Christianity wakes up now it has woken up about two thousand years too late.

May God have mercy upon us all.

David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1

Yes, WHY is it so slow? (Not to quibble, as I appreciate that this is an all volunteer operation which copes with a dizzying amount of data.) I am grateful to all who make TOD possible, but it takes so long to post a response that my reply appears way down thread and while waiting for it to post, I lose all track of the conversation.

and a whole section for d mathews (my god he takes up space) to where I count the lines across and follow them down (and past) to find relevency.

If one is looking for 'faster thread loads' the use of a back end Database, distributed front end page generation, and a distributed front end web proxie would accomplish your speed boost.

Just adding a squid proxy cache might help. (depending on page code)

But now you are busy spending someone elses money so you can have a faster experience.

Limited resources, their allocation and 'making due' are recurring themes here on TOD. I don't consider the service slow, I am just happy to see such a place existing and the good info (along with the not so good)

One day we may have to go back to a store and forward style system (like UUCP for email, INN/C news for forums) The quick, worldwide network we have right now will be local due to energy constraints.

Hello Everyone,

In quoting the above article I somehow missed the most important statement:

As global warming continues to wreak havoc with the weather, snowmakers impose a nostalgic order — albeit one that does nothing to help the situation, since snowmaking runs on electricity (and water, of course, one and a half to six gallons a minute, depending on the size of the machine). Charles Santry, president of Snow Economics, said his Backyard Blizzard Sport machine, which has a 1.5 horsepower engine, can use up to 1,650 watts. A clothes dryer guzzles more power, but snowmaking is certainly not going to win any green awards.

In response to the impacts of pollution human problem-solving technologies generate more pollution. Wasting electricity and water in order to generate snow to replace that which Nature formerly provided for free is an act of insanity. We humans have made such a mess of the Earth that we are only beginning to witness the consequences. Future generations will face Nature's harshness without the technological crutches, I imagine at these people will suffer terribly.

On the subject of negative human impacts on the environment, there is also an article in this month's Smithsonian about Kenya's exploding human population (doubling since 1980) destroying the formerly pristine Kenyan forests, lakes and wildlife:

One afternoon last May, a bearded 36-year-old black man named Robert Njoya set out with friends to hunt for bush meat on a private ranch called Soysambu, in the heart of Kenya's Great Rift Valley. They brought along a pack of dogs for running animals into wire snares, and they carried an iron bar for clubbing their catch, and pangas, or machetes, for butchering the meat.

That same day, a 38-year-old white man named Tom Cholmondeley, whose family has owned and managed Soysambu for almost a century, was touring the 48,000-acre property with a friend. He carried a 30-06 rifle loaded with soft point bullets, as a precaution against buffalo.

Late that afternoon, in a dense stand of acacia trees and lelechwe bushes, the two parties crossed paths. Cholmondeley knelt and fired a series of shots. Two dogs died on the spot. One bullet also hit Njoya, who was carrying a partly butchered impala. Soon after, at a hospital up the road, Njoya was dead, of massive bleeding.

It was the second time Cholmondeley had shot and killed a black man on the ranch in little more than a year.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2007/february/kenya.php

The rest of the article is not online so you will have to go to the bookstore or library to read the rest.

Very depressing stuff. It describes increasing human violence against humans, animals, forests and Nature in Kenya. Homo sapiens are terrible in any environment. Homo sapiens have a habit of eradicating any ecosystem that they happen to plague.

Homo sapiens make very poor gods. Fortunately Homo sapiens are not immortal gods.

David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1

Thuip yoind toimnd gonignotisl; in in in yum fo soime; weeeeee hoo ibb, (ib yong).
Ag hij ryut des tig nur nur eeeeeeeee.

Marco.

Irony alert. I believe those guns require a lot of energy and cause a lot of co2 emissions. I also happen to know that they are very loud. Surprised the neighbors haven't shut him. down. Reminds me of Bush's administrations position that one of the answers to global warming is more air conditioning. And remember a couple of decades back when the answer to the vanishing ozone layer was sunglasses on dogs.

Two points: (1) The EIA is almost certainly going to show a year over year decline in crude + condensate and (2) We are clearly seeing a decline in net oil exports.

For example, the one year increase in Total Liquids consumption by just Saudi Arabia and Russia (from 2004 to 2005, EIA) was in excess of 500,000 bpd. And it looks like we are seeing a comparable increase for 2006. So, even though Russia is still showing a (slow) increase in production, their year over year net oil exports have already started falling. And of course, Saudi Arabia, on a monthly basis, is showing an annual decline rate of 8% per year in crude + condensate production.

Hello Everyone,

I would label this post "sleeping with the enemy" except, in this case, the United States' administration is already owned by the oil industry:

Justice Official Bought Vacation Home With Oil Lobbyist

By Susan Schmidt and James V. Grimaldi

A senior Justice Department official who recently resigned her post bought a nearly $1 million vacation home with a lobbyist for ConocoPhillips months before approving consent decrees that would give the oil company more time to pay millions of dollars in fines and meet pollution-cleanup rules at some of its refineries.

Sue Ellen Wooldridge, former assistant attorney general in charge of environment and natural resources, bought a $980,000 home on Kiawah Island, S.C., last March with ConocoPhillips lobbyist Don R. Duncan. A third owner of the house is J. Steven Griles, a former deputy interior secretary, who has been informed he is a target in the federal investigation of Jack Abramoff's lobbying activities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/14/AR200702...

ConocoPhillips? ConocoPhillips? For some reason I have a feeling that this is an oil corporation which also has very explicit ties to The Oil Drum. That's just an intuitive thought on my part. Just a little wild speculation.

In November 2006, ConocoPhillips reached proposed consent decrees with the federal government and four states that would modify an agreement the company had reached with the Environmental Protection Agency in 2005 to settle charges it was violating the Clean Air Act. The proposed changes, which must be approved by a federal judge overseeing the case, would give the company more time to install equipment and processes that would cost an estimated $525 million to cut emissions at some refineries.

Wooldridge, as head of the Justice Department's environmental division, signed the agreements on behalf of the federal government.

An oil corporation violating the Clean Air Act? How is that possible?

At least these oil corporations aren't messing up the global climate, as Heading Out has so amply demonstrated. they might smog up the local air but the global climate is far too complicated to suffer any ill impacts from pollutants.

Wooldridge, who was deputy chief of staff to the interior secretary and later became solicitor at Interior, provided ethics advice to Griles and advised then-Secretary Gale A. Norton on how she should handle the inspector general's allegations. She did not tell the inspector general of her personal relationship with Griles, according to sources familiar with the investigation. About August 2002, according to the inspector general's report, Wooldridge replaced Griles's special assistant as his ethics screener, a role in which she helped him determine when he should recuse himself from matters that posed a conflict of interest. After Griles's departure from Interior, Wooldridge disclosed to investigators in the Abramoff probe that she and Griles began dating in February 2003, sources familiar with the probe said.

Just another prime example of corporations and the government working together to look out for the public's best interests. I love the oil corporations. ConocoPhillips is wonderful.

Thanks for all the cheap gasoline. Thanks for the warm winter, too!

David Mathews
http://www.geocities.com/dmathew1

While I would tend to agree with your post, just wait until we are flooded with CTL, if you think oil is horrible. We don't need to go to Africa if we want to witness the horrific. Just fly over West Virginia some time.

It may be a tug of war between falling, or slowing, demand and falling production; however, the most recent EIA numbers show higher year over year consumption, and China/India are huge factors.

In any case, I thought the following headlines from Sprott Asset Management were interesting. Some of these have been posted, but notice the trend: new production projects delayed; accelerated declines in production and increasing demand.

FEB 15 Kashagan First Production Delayed Again (Energy Intelligence)
Excerpt: First oil production from the huge Kashagan oil and gas field offshore Kazakhstan is likely to come on stream in 2011-12, at least two years later than the revised start-up date of end-2008 and more than six years after the original target of 2005

FEB 15 IEA: Lower Oil Output, Capacity Problems in Venezuela (Energia.gr)
Excerpt: Venezuelan oil production dropped 5.5% last year to an average of 2.56 million barrels a day, the largest drop of any Latin American oil producer, according to estimates released this week by the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

FEB 13 Russia's crude oil exports down 2.4% on year in 2006 (Tass)
Excerpt: Russia's crude oil exports decreased 2.4% on the year to 227.539 million tonnes in 2006, the Federal Customs Service said Tuesday.

FEB 13 UK oil production to decline faster than expected (Islamic Republic News Agency)
Excerpt: Britain's oil and gas production in the North Sea is expected to decline even faster than expected, according to a survey of offshore operators... UKOOA said that last year's production of oil and gas was down 9 per cent to 2.9m barrels of oil equivalent in oil and gas a day, the lowest level since 1992 and down from a peak of 4.5m boe per day in 1999.

FEB 13 IEA ups oil product demand forecast on Chinese demand (Market Watch)
Excerpt: The International Energy Agency said Tuesday in its monthly market report it has revised up its forecasts for 2006 and 2007 global oil product demand by 111,000 barrels a day to 84.5 million barrels a day in 2006 and by 273,000 b/d to 86 million b/d in 2007.

I have in mind a solar powered organism, which would use photsynthesis and some water to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and convert it to wood. Do I get the money?

It would of course take more energy to get the carbon back into the state it was in before being combusted (i.e. coal or oil), so the goal is to get it into some intermediate energy chemical state, or physical location, where it causes less harm.

Direct capture is expensive for fixed coal-burning e-generators and completely ridiculous for automobiles (side note: coal isn't pure C, so you wouldn't get pure anything by burning it with pure O2). Transport to a repository for either case is daunting, if nothing else than the fact that you have a lot more mass to deal with than when you started. Then, you need to compress and pump it underground, under the seabed, or maybe combine it with some minerals that you have to mine and transport from elsewhere. Silly me--I'm just not optimistic about this ever being practical.

Another approach is to capture it and then convert on site into something else using sunlight. Some of the algae-derived biodiesel ventures are going down that road, capturing CO2 from power plants and feeding it into closed solar bioreactors. The problem is that the biodiesel will eventually get burned, so the only way this sequesters anything is if you leave something else in the ground somewhere to compensate. I don't see that happening without a mindset change.

I have some ideas, but I think I'll go after the $25M prize and leave all this behind. Maybe later.

Yes, getting it from the atmosphere directly would be a mighty impressive feat and could actually enable us to not just mitigatge global warming but reverse it by reducing the total co2 in the atmosphere. Sounds like $25 million offer is rather paltry given the thermodynamics involved. Might even be a low risk offer if Branson offered a billion. But that would sure get those little grey cells moving and might even result in some interesting discoveries even if they didn't direclty solve the problem.

Of course we have spent a great deal more than $25 million if exercise that may be equally pointless, like the so far fruitless pursuit of hydrogen as what Bush calls "the fuel of the future". Yeh, the future. Always a good thing to point to, especially if your ass is going to be out of office in two years.

The GW denialists are right. Climate models have problems. Unfortunately they underpredict the disaster that is going to hit humanity this century. While all the focus of the scientific debate has been on magical offsetting albedo from clouds the real problem, namely the mickey mouse ice schemes, has been ignored. The Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are not giant ice-cubes that take centuries to melt. They are dynamic systems that respond on much, much shorter timescales. Water is able to move through and under these ice-sheets taking the heat where it was not supposed to go.