A most interesting chart in the GAO report is on page 13. It shows estimates of the timing of peak oil, according to 21 studies reviewed by GAO.

Ten of the 21 studies say that peak oil will be reached before 2020, and no later. Four additional studies say that peak oil may be reached before 2020, or sometime later. Seven of the 21 studies say peak oil will be reached after 2020.

I could be wrong about study (n), it's hard to tell if the date for that one is supposed to be 2020 or 2025.

Seven of the 21 studies say peak oil could be now.

Coincidence? Oil spiked at 12:00, was this when the report was released?

Highlights of the report now at Energy Bulletin (in HTML):

energybulletin.net/27919.html

Bart
Energy Bulletin

This whole thing reminds me of the way that I do arithmetic now that I'm in my dotage: I add up a column of numbers three times and then take the average.

And here's the NASDAQ story:

US Auditor: Energy Dept Should Develop Plan For Peak Oil Era

The U.S. Department of Energy and other federal agencies need to develop a strategy to mitigate the effects of a peak in oil production, which studies show could occur by 2040, a federal oversight body said Thursday.

While there was a great deal of uncertainty over the timing of peak oil because members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries don't open up their crude reserves for audit, the U.S. would be one of the hardest hit by a such a peak due to the nation's dependency on oil for transportation, according to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office.

The study was requested by members of the House Committee on Science and Technology.

The theory of peak oil, which was first put forward by American geologist M. King Hubbert, holds that oil production peaks when half of the world's reserves are depleted. Once dismissed as a fringe theory, peak oil has gained popularity in recent years as oil prices surged.

Interesting report. A lot of the discussion revolves around reserve number estimates. Very few discussion about actual flow rates which is the bottom line of peak oil. The list of countries that have passed their production peak is getting longer and longer.

Nary a mention of this report on either MSNBC or CNN web pages...

I can't say that I'm the least bit surprised.

I did get to vote whether Donald Trump would look better with or without hair though...

There is an interesting little flap mentioned on page 40 between the GAO and the DOE on environmental issues. The GAO stuck to its guns.

The report is now up at the official GAO site:

http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/pastweek.html

You can download an abstract and highlights, as well as the full report.

Congratulations to Congressman Bartlet

His untiring efforts are now rewarded. Peak Oil is now or soon will be in the consciousness of the American public through the multiple press releases (and the spike in oil price on the same day). Hopefully that same awareness will drift up here to Canada and into government.

Pickens on CNBC:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/17853676/site/14081545/

Ministére de l’Economie Des Finances et de l’Industrie estimates peak oil will occur between 2010 and 2120. They probably released a hundred page report that essentially said "we have no idea what we are talking about"

I've only skimmed the report and read the comments here, but so far I'm disappointed, to say the least.

They quote the DOE as saying PHEV's will be here in 2014? Someone tell GM to push the Volt back four years.

All that emphasis on reserves, not flow. Tsk tsk.

They use Richard Duncan, the Olduvai Gorge guy, as a source? Holy cow.

I was hoping this report would turn out to be the wake up call for at least some in the mainstream. Instead it missed the mark by a mile.

I still predict that peak oil will have its mainstream coming out party in 2007, much as global warming did in 2006. Instead of Al Gore and AIT being the catalyst, this time it will be yet another price spike caused by tensions or a war with Iran and/or a hurricane and/or Saudi Arabia not being able to answer the call when the world rings them up for some more of that "voluntarily" withheld oil.

The WSJ's energy blog has picked up the report:

Prepare for Peak Oil, GAO Warns

Thanks Calorie, you beat me to it re: WSJ.

Also, as I just updated in the post: Congressman Bartlett will be leading a Special Orders tonight between 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm Eastern to discuss the release today of the GAO report about peak oil. It will be on CSPAN at some point.

GAO on Oil Shale —

The Green River Basin is believed to have the potential to produce 3 million to 5 million barrels per day for hundreds of years.

Given the current state of the technology and associated challenges, however, it is possible that 10 years from now, the oil shale resource could be producing 0.5 million to 1.0 million barrels per day.

Oil shale is not presently in the research and development stage. [??? - DC]

Shell Oil has the most advanced concept [in situ heating, with freeze walls] for oil shale, and it does not anticipate making a decision regarding whether to attempt commercialization until 2010.

Well! It's like baking a cake. Sink the heating elements into the ground and set to about 700 degrees fahrenheit. Wait 4 years. Pump oil. Tranport to refinery. Crack. Take gasoline to gas station. Pump gasoline into car. Go to Wal-Mart. Easy!

Bake & Suck

Hello TODers,

I was hoping the report would go into specific scenarios for mitigation that Congress could use for legislation.

Speculation follows:

1. Peakoil Outreach to fully inform the huddled masses. IMO, this would do much to reduce violence and increase cooperation at all levels. People would understand that Overshoot and insufficient resources is the problem-- the tendency would be less scapegoating and anarchic yells of 'Bring me his head!'

2. Funding of Asimov's Foundation for metered detritovore decline and biosolar growth. Full habitat/watershed ecosystem assessments and redrawing of functional infrastructure spiderwebs to reflect natural limitations; example: Colorado Watershed, Columbia River Watershed, Mississippi Watershed, and so on, instead of the non-useful 50 state boundaries. The application of predictive collapse and directed decline helps the move towards greater sustainability and reduces timeframe waste and mis-applied investments.

3. Encouragement of Legal Secession to jumpstart grassroot-to-toplevel reform. Cascadia, New Vermont Republic, etc, as opposite biosolar attractants to Hirsch's Fifteen Favored detritovore states. Full cessation of SuperNafta efforts--drive towards relocalized permaculture and school curriculums towards animal husbandry, soil education, composting and full recycling, etc.

4. Jumpstart towards 60-75% of labor force doing manual labor as proactive offset to declining FFs. Legislation mandating a specific % of natgas must be stockpiled as fertilizers to assist in paradigm shift, reduce burning in wasteful ways [ex: electricity for tanning salons], and to help encourage building of Eco-Tech shelters. Laws that would allow every ten neighbors to pool money to make one house the 'survival house' for all at crunchtime. This way the elderly and very young could retreat to this offgrid PV shelter when heat or cold is lethal; this one house would be the neighborhood source of hot water, cooking equipment, communications.

5. National call for 150 million bicycles and wheelbarrows, supporting tire, wheel, and ball-bearing factories, essential hand-tools. Full feasibility studies of surface spiderweb riding to augment mass-transit when underground infrastucture pipelines need replacement. Leverage human strength limitations by steel-wheel-on-rails for as many as possible. Recall that first railroads were inside coal & guano mines and human-pulled.

6. Bush should get the party started by calling for Victory Gardens again, then plowing the White House lawn into vegetable plots like back in the olden days.

7. Of course, a moratorium on growth and population increase goes without saying, emphasis is towards Japanese Edo Period and Jeffersonian living.

8. All of this must be done faster than the rate of scarcity to minimize violence. Nature will do its part; we can't stop that, but we can control ourselves to optimize Detritus Powerdown and Biosolar Powerup.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

Ah, this is what I was waiting for!

Associated Press has just picked up the story. It will now be published in multiple newspapers and news sites. It's already appeared at:
MSN
Houston Chronicle
Forbes
Business Week

Report: Gov't needs plan for oil peak
by Alan Zibel (AP)

The U.S. government is in need of a strategy to minimize potentially dire economic consequences after worldwide oil production peaks and begins to decline, the investigative arm of Congress said Thursday.

Though experts disagree about when daily oil output will reach its maximum level -- or whether they have done so already -- the Government Accountability Office said in a report that most studies have found oil production will reach a peak sometime between now and 2040.

The report warns that, as the world's largest oil consumer, the U.S. is vulnerable to significant economic troubles, brought about by rising prices, if a peak arrives and no technology exists to replace petroleum-based transportation fuels. [More at original postings]

All I can say is go to YouTube and search for "Lawns to Gardens". It will take Pop-culture programming to keep people from freaking out when they can't afford to live anymore.

The time of debate is over, and now it's time for Americans to find the spirit that makes this country great.... entrepreneurs get off your asses and home owners convert your grasses!

I would like to comment or make some observations on sections within this Congressional report as follows:

There is for some a belief that Western Governments must be aware of Peak Oil -must be preparing for it and might have something 'up their sleeve' in readiness: a techno cure or 'Manhattan Project' perhaps -the following report sentences dismiss this myth:

1. "Key alternative technologies currently supply the equivalent of only about 1 percent of U.S. consumption of petroleum products, and DOE projects that even under optimistic scenarios, by 2015 these technologies could displace only the equivalent of 4 percent of projected U.S. annual consumption. Under these circumstances, an imminent peak and sharp decline in oil production could have severe consequences, including a worldwide recession. "

and

2. "… there is no formal strategy for coordinating and prioritizing federal efforts dealing with peak oil issues, either within DOE or between DOE and other key agencies."

and (perhaps most boldly as a section header -page 35 as if to make the point really clear!)

3. "Federal Agencies Do Not Have a Coordinated Strategy to Address Peak Oil Issues"
(May bring back memories of recent Hurricane Katrina woes that occurred on a much smaller scale)

From the document I find the following statements worrying -succinctly what we in the West are effectively doing is writing what in the UK is diplomatically called a "self-cert mortgage" and in the US a 'liar' type mortgage on a global scale for our future (consider the recent sub-prime US mortgage debacle with the difference that 'civilization as we know it' is throwing the dice -not just some trailer-park bricks-and-mortar wannabe):

1. "Estimates of how much oil remains in the ground are highly uncertain because much of these data are self-reported and unverified by independent auditors"

and

2. "…companies wholly owned by various OPEC countries where the majority of reserves are located, are not subject to these filing requirements and their related liability standards. Some experts believe OPEC estimates of proven reserves to be inflated. "

Figure 10 on page 26 basically states that we are putting all our eggs into one OPEC basket. Thus a future failure to supply from OPEC would cripple us -sounds like a recipe for history repeating itself 1970s style. Do we really have such short memories? The growth in OPEC supply past 2010 in the figure looks like wishful thinking to me.

Fig 11: Looks less like a detailed analysis of chaotic real-world supply-demand parameters and more like some school-boy set of projections based on dragging an MS Excel x%/year growth tab to the desired future date… Based on current human growth rates each human will have just 1 square meter of available Earth based land each within 768 years, I know it to be true because my spreadsheet tells me so…Enough said…

This is perhaps the statement that gives the greatest comfort to any optimist:

"Specifically, using future annual increases in world oil consumption, ranging from 0 percent, to represent no increase, to 3 percent, to represent a large increase, and out of the various scenarios examined, EIA estimated a window of up to 75 years for when the peak may occur."

-Yippee! 75 years to play! But: Sorry? What was the 3% growth window timeline again I missed that one; I only got the optimistic 0% growth one and I'm still dancing but in a 0% growth subdued kind of way. Anyway, I can now relax. I have a 0% predicted growth rate in children so other people's offspring can 'shovel the sh*t' so to speak…

The rest of the report is biased towards transport which is the first sector to get hit bad due to the fact that 98% of US consumption is Petroleum/"Gas" based (boy that must cause confusion somewhere). SUVs are toast, Corn-Ethanol is a mirage, blah, blah.

Summary: If I where to give the report a mark -school teacher style- it would be 7/10 with some sarcastic teacher style comment like "must try harder" -that is must try harder to learn our tue predicament and convince congress that more needs to be done NOW to avoid hardship tomorrow whether it be in 5 years or 25. I sincerely hope to be proved wrong in the decades ahead with a well planned and thought out mitigation strategy by 'those in power'. As a UK citizen I would welcome an open and frank response in the form of a UK based report to the House Of Commons that dealt specifically with the issue of Global Peak Oil.

Nick Outram [ www.Megatrends2020.com ].

As noted earlier CNBC has been fast and loose with the Peak Oil term in the last week or so especially Maria Bartiromo . I wonder if they got a little pre-notice on this report being released? My guess is less Yergin and more Simmons in the future on CNBC. This report has raised the windowshade of legitamacy for the MSM in th U.S. on Peak Oil. I anticipate and look forward to an even more engaged discussion on the mitigation thereof.
Down grade the report all you want I agree it ain't all that most peakers want but it is the most legitmate vindication to date of Peak Oil by the government. A step in the right direction lets see how it plays in the media and if anyone is listening. Will be interested to see what the WSJ has to say tomorrow. I wonder if the price for CERA just went down along with a lot of their underpants that now need to be changed.

Let's remember that even though there may be 75 years of oil remaining, the cold hard reality of peak oil is starting now. We can't expect to keep driving to Wal-Mart and watching American Idol for the next 74 years and then it suddenly all comes crashing down. It will be a gradual decline into social chaos.

I think Matt's seceratary will be busy booking him into interviews with the networks next week.

flow rates replacing climate change, that is an attention getter.

OCB

"BACK TO THE FUTURE" THE GAO REPORT OF...2007, 1973? HARD TO TELL

The first of the two big shoes has now fallen. The long awaited GAO Report is now in the hands of the press and the public. I sit with my very own copy, now downloaded to my hard drive, trying to glean some useful information. First impressions? Mixed.

---The GAO Report is interesting, but in no way a breakthrough piece of work. The first thing I instinctively kept thinking was that this report could have been written in 1973, such is the lack of discussion of modern developments since those chaotic wild times. In fact, if one reads the GAO report, and is not aware of the developments since those days, we would believe that we have seen nothing but halcyon days since the 1970’s, and the world, in particular the technical world, is essentially unchanged.

This is most telling under the heading “Andvanced Vehicle Technologies”. One must assume that either (a) the report is intentionally very limited in scope, to the point of being a quick overview (as one would expect from a magazine article) or (b) the writers of the report are simply unaware of developments since the 1970’s.

Should one have expected discussion of, for example, the absolutely astounding radical developments in battery development? There is perhaps two or three sentences mentioning, with no details, lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries. At least four of the six major catagories of batteries now showing promise for electric and plug hybrid cars did not even exist in the 1970’s. What about advances in electric motors and controllers. Computers now controlling the drivetrain of a Toyata Camry Hybrid could have only been matched in power and sophistication by NASA in the 1970’s, and found on spacecraft.

Hydrogen, as always, is seen as only useful in a fuel cell. Therre is not even passing mention of hydrogen as a combustible fuel, and the fascinating developments by Honda of Japan and BMW of Europe in using hydrogen in combustion engines, and extracting it from water using sunlight. The report does not even attempt to disparage such ideas, seeming to be anaware they even exist.

Hydraulic and Pneumatic hybrid drivetrains are nowhere mentioned, although research is moving rapidly in these areas, with firms such as Ford, Eaton Corp. and government agenciy EPA taking part.

The report is written as though technology was somehow frozen in 1973 or so. Almost every idea mentioned in the report as “advanced” was already in developmental stage in those days.

The most amusing references are to hydrogen fuel cells: “Because hydrogen fuel cells are still in an early stage of development (!!!!), the ultimate cost of hycrogen fuel cells is uncertain...”, and, “hydrogen fuel cell vehicle technologies are still in research, development, and demonstration.” ASTOUNDING. The first self propelled mobile vehicles using hydrogen fuel cells was an Allis Chalmers tractor and a golf cart built in the early 1960’s.
This is surely the most long running “early stage of development” period in technical history.

---The “Back To The Future” feeling is even more pronounced in the area of alternative liquid fuels. To the delight to the detractors of ethanol, once more, it is declared essentially marginal at best, at least for a long time. But, likewise, so is Bio-Diesel, and pretty much on the same grounds. The cost will only go up as the pressure on the raw material to make it becomes greater, and faces full competition from the imput materials use as food stuff.
This leaves ethanol about where it was in the mid 1970’s, still lacking the infrastructure to make it work, still lacking heat content when compared to gasoline, and still absolutely dependent on cheap and abundent natural gas to provide the fertilizer and distilling.

There seems to be hope pinned on the prospects of Cellulosic ethanol, so at least we get one new concept born since the Jimmy Carter days, but hopes don’t seem high at least for awhile.

There is of course no mention whatsoever of bio-butanol, and it’s superiority as a finished fuel. Again, either the writers were unaware of it’s existance, or felt that it was not even worth the trouble of dismissing.

Likewise, research on production of algae as a potential fuel, bio technology contributions, nano technology developments in batteries and thin film solar which could be used to produce electricity for plug hybrid systems or produce hydrogen, methane recapture....in fact, any type of “integrated approach” to electrification of transportation, recapture of waste or “confluence” design such as vehicles using plug hybrid in combination with advanced fuels (such as methane or bio-butanol in extremely efficient amounts) seems far beyond the scope of the writers of this report.

In several places, such as the discussion of natural gas vehicles, the issue of a natural gas peak and crisis seems to be out of the question (again, just as it was in the 1970’s, when it was assumed we had at least a century or more of “cheap and abundent gas”), and unless one assumes renewable developments in solar/wind to produce hydrogen, one must assume projections about hydrogen fuel cells are referring to hydrogen from natural gas.

----The possibility of radical changes in taxation/policy are avoided completely. Changing tax incentives to encourage rail/barge transport? Not discussed. Changing policy on offshore drilling on the OCS (Outer Continental Shelf), not discussed. How the DOE long term projections of fuel as cheap as we have it about now in all catagories makes any sense? Not asked.
--------------

So, what is the verdict? Is this a useful report? Well, it does bring the word “peak” into the mainstream. We must recall what a sensation the Hirsch Report was only a couple of years ago, and it was done “by contract” for a relatively minor section of the Department of Energy. The constructors of the Hirsch Report were actually perhaps a bit more technically astute than those people who created the GAO Report, but the GAO has credentials in a way that few government organizations do. So now, one should be able to discuss at least “the prospect of peaking and declining oil" without being dismissed out of hand. That is at least some gain. The issue is now out of the closet. But as for “mitigation”, the report seems to be telling us that all those things we talked about in the 1970’s? Well, they still don’t work....and as the old joke goes, Franco the dictator of Spain is still dead.

We can only now wait for the other shoe to fall. The (cliche’ alert) “long awaited” NPC (National Petroleum Council) report is due out in June, reporting on the status of world oil and gas supply. Who knows, it may shock the policy makers, the press and public by revealing that U.S. oil production has been in decline for three decades.

Let us hope we are not in for a “battle of the mundane” report, giving us breaking news that is now thirty five years old. Has anyone seen the pictures of the “Electric Chevette”? That’s right, a brand new 1978 all electric Chevette sedan....General Motors says these are the cars we will all see in every city in perhaps 4 or 5 years. The streets will be full of these efficient green machines by 1985 or so...

Thank you for your attention
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom

RE: biomass to liquids

The report covers the bases, however, there are 2 specific areas of contention that I have.

Appendix IV p.61 - potential production

"Some experts project biomass GTL to have the potential to produce up to approximately 1.4 million barrels-of-oil-equivalent per day by 2030."

BTL retains the potential to produce much greater volumes of LTFs than any of the liquid fuel options presented. A four-fold increase of existing U.S. ethanol production in 13 years via this production path, however, is perhaps a lofty goal sans a national peak mitigation strategy.

Appendix IV p.61 - readiness

"Biomass GTL is currently in research and development, nearing the demonstration stage. Experts project that biomass GTL production could be demonstrated at the pilot scale by 2012."

Untrue. BTL pilot plants have been running for years while ground has recently been broken in Georgia for what will become the world's first commerical facility - 10MMgy (x4) of ethanol from gasified wood waste.