If American (and friends) actions in Iraq have resulted in more oil permanently staying underground than would otherwise be the case, then certainly a positive move on climate change. Let's hope we can find a less destructive way of keeping the bulk of American, Russian, Chinese and Australian coal underground.

"The peak oil problem is more to do with flow rates than the ultimately recoverable reserve (URR). The CO2 problem is more to do with URR than flow rates."

Another way to look at it is probabilistically. We're flying over the Pacific in the plane with a broken fuel gauge. There's a 95% chance there is enough fuel to land safely on island Aspo, a 50% chance we have enough fuel to land on the more distant island of Cera without having to shove passengers off the plane into the sea, and only a 5% chance of landing on island Engdahl with a full complement of passengers. To which island should the pilot head?

There is this tendency to think the mean expectation should always guide our decisions even when the lower likelihood outcomes do not have equal ramifications. To see why this is flawed reasoning just try the following experiment: Toss a coin four times. Let's say the number of heads is roughly proportional to how much oil is in the ground. The expected number of heads is 2 right? However the chance of having less than 2 heads (lower risk of rapid climate change but early peak oil) is 5/16. The chance of having more than 2 heads (late peak oil but higher risk of climate change) is also 5/16. The chance of the Goldilocks outcome (avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change and early peak oil) is 6/16. That is, getting exactly 2 heads when tossing a coin 4 times (6/16ths) is lower than not getting exactly 2 heads (10/16th).

Euan,

and where to hell did all that old CO2 saturated, warm water go to?

Why don't you pose that question to Dr. Gavin Schmidt over at RealClimate.org

He just put up a post titled Ocean heat content revisions
Filed under:

* Oceans
* Climate modelling
* Climate Science

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content...

PDO variance is due to ENSO,NPI and reemergence mechanism over pacific ocean,NPI is a short term unpredictable oscillation,ENSO can be predicted up to some months thus no one knows if PDO has switched to prolonged cool mode, simply a strong la nina event has now favoured PDO-.
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/people/gilbert.p.compo/Newmanetal2003.pdf
http://shadow.eas.gatech.edu/%7Ekcobb/seminar/schneider&cornuelle05.pdf

"Several recent studies have used statistical analyses to reconstruct the annually averaged PDO and determine the processes that underlie its dynamics. Newman et al. (2003b) found that for annual average anomalies (July-June) the PDO is well modeled as the sum of atmospheric forcing represented by white noise, forcing due to ENSO, and memory of SST anomalies in the previous year. The latter results in part from the “reemergence mechanism”, where ocean
temperature anomalies created in winter are sequestered below the mixed layer in summer and then re-entrained into the mixed layer in the following fall and winter (Alexander and Deser 1995, Alexander et al. 1999, Deser et al. 2003). Schneider and Cornuelle (2005) found that the
annually averaged PDO could be reconstructed based on a first-order autoregressive model and forcing associated with variability in the Aleutian Low (essentially internal atmospheric noise), ENSO and wind-driven Rossby waves in the North Pacific Ocean. On interannual time scales,
ENSO and the Aleutian Low were about equally important at determining the PDO while on decadal timescales, all three processes, including ocean dynamics, were of equal importance."

Thus PDO cannot be responsible for global temperature increase observed since 1975, it's an ENSO consequence and ENSO affect global temperature but mostly over shorter time scales.
Global temperature are still rising, obviously there are short term fluctuation due to ENSO, 1997-1998 spike has been favored by strong elnino and anomaly was much above 1975-2007 linear trend, then 1999-2000 la nina cooled the world below 1975-2007 linear trend. A prevalence of elnino again favored temperature above linear trend between 2002 and 2005 and now again we are below linear trend due to strong la nina condition, this doesn't means that underlying trend has stopped!
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/trend2.jpg

So I am surprised by the claim that "the CO2" problem is more to do with URR than flow rates. If we burned all the remaining oil tomorrow - would that not cause a greater problem than burning it slowly over a thousand years?

My thinking behind that comment was thus: Elevated CO2 concentrations are bad and the time scale over which they are bad is greater than the plus or minus a couple of decades or a half giga tonne either way that the flow rate degree of freedom covers. If we can agree that pretty much all oil that will ever be extracted will have been extracted within the next 50 years then that's a good enough resolution for climate change. What matters is how much in the 50 years, not how the flow rate is distributed within the next half century.

From: Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?

This chart in Hansen's recent paper shows how the forcing today (black curve) will eventually produce 2 degrees further warming. The red horizontal lines are my annotation. Historically the forcing and temperature have been closely correlated, the current deviation is caused by the (relativity) slow response.

This warming comes from slower processes that haven't equilibrated yet, 0.6C from ocean thermal inertia and 1.4C from surface albedo change associated with ice cover and vegetation. The bulk of the temperature change associated with a change in forcing takes many decades to hundreds of years with the full response even a thousand years.

It's a great paper, flick to page 4 for slow feedbacks and page 5 for the chart and discussion on time scales. To quote:

Time scales. How long does it take to reach equilibrium temperature? Response is slowed by ocean thermal inertia and the time needed for ice sheets to disintegrate.

Ocean-caused delay is estimated in fig. S7 using a coupled atmosphere-ocean model. Onethird of the response occurs in the first few years, in part because of rapid response over land, one-half in ~25 years, three-quarters in 250 years, and nearly full response in a millennium. The ocean-caused delay is a strong (quadratic) function of climate sensitivity and it depends on the rate of mixing of surface water and deep water (29), as discussed in the Supplementary material.

...

Warming “in the pipeline”. The expanded time scale for the industrial era (Fig. 2) reveals a growing gap between actual global temperature (purple curve) and equilibrium (long-term) temperature response based on the net estimated forcing (black curve). Ocean and ice sheet response times together account for this gap, which is now 2.0°C.

The forcing in Fig. 2 (black curve, Fe scale), when used to drive a global climate model (5), yields global temperature change that agrees closely (fig. 3 in 5) with observations (purple curve, Fig. 2). That climate model, which includes only fast feedbacks, has additional warming of ~0.6°C in the pipeline today because of ocean thermal inertia (5, 8).

The remaining gap between equilibrium temperature for current atmospheric composition and actual global temperature is ~1.4°C. This further 1.4°C warming to come is due to the slow surface albedo feedback, specifically ice sheet disintegration and vegetation change.

One may ask whether the climate system, as the Earth warms from its present ‘interglacial’ state, still has the capacity to supply slow feedbacks that double the fast-feedback sensitivity. This issue can be addressed by considering longer time scales including periods with no ice.

Euan,

Now I'm aware that during the 20th century, scientists like Lovelock grew concerned about the creation of a warm surface layer of water that had become saturated in CO2, had become acidised, and was preventing both the solution and biological pumps from working. But now, out of the blue we suddenly have all this cool water appearing, especially in the NW Pacific. Are you able to update us on how the CO2 concentrations in this "new" cool surface water differs form the old - and where to hell did all that old CO2 saturated, warm water go to?

First, there is some evidence that the southern ocean at least is saturated or saturating with CO2 (link) and there is some evidence that the pH of the oceans is dropping (link). Third, your graph shows temperature anomaly, not absolute temperature. So I assume you meant to ask where all this cooling is coming from, on water that is not necessarily cool water to begin with? (You can begin cooling boiling water, but no one would claim it is cool until it gets below wrist temperature or so I'd say.) As far as I know, SST is determined by an interplay between the atmosphere and the ocean currents but the specific origins of the PDO are not known (link). We can assume thermodynamics still holds however and that the lost heat is either going up into the atmosphere as water vapor (good news for us in drought stricken SE U.S. because that water vapor comes down as rain here) or the warmer water is getting buried and displaced by cooler water from upwelling.

*edit* Oops, I'm a little off, the wet weather in the middle U.S. right now could be from the PDO turn over. Incidentally, the reason the SE U.S. is in a drought right now is that the PDO and the atlantic multidecadal oscillation are beating in phase coupled to a El Nino/La Nina event.

If we burned all the remaining oil tomorrow - would that not cause a greater problem than burning it slowly over a thousand years?

Euan could you be starting from a false premise here? Possibly one might say " If we burned all the oil quickly and thereby precipitated a fast economic collapse would this cause less of a *problem*, than burning it conservatively, under as slow an economic retraction as possible".

*problem* -- This word needs a bit of definition, I think. (as in, "Hey whazza problem guys? No gas for my SUV, or is the earth gonna blow up or something?":)

And now that the PDO has switched to its cool mode we have experienced steady lowering of the global average surface temperature since 1998.

We have been experience a steady rising of the global average surface temperature since 1999.

We have been experience a steady rising of the global average surface temperature since 1997.

How can temperatures be rising since 1997, falling since 1998, and rising since 1999? By cherry picking the endpoints of your trendlines.

Euan,

I've heard that 'cooling since 1998' line several times. I did a bit of googling and found these two graphs.

One from the US EPA: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recenttc_triad.html, and one from Science Daily. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080116114150.htm. I can't make a cooling trend out of either one, and 10 years is long enough for one to show if it was there.

My personal local experience is that we used to routinely reach -35C. The last time we reached -30 was in 2000. I grant that last winter we got to -26 after only hitting -24 in 2007.

Chris - as you are probably already aware the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) set in warm mode was responsible for a significant amount of the increase in global average surface temperature experienced in the period 1980 to 1998. And now that the PDO has switched to its cool mode we have experienced steady lowering of the global average surface temperature since 1998.

Euan,

You seem a little mixed up on temperature trends here: We have not experienced a steady lowering of the global average surface temperature since 1998. The temperature trend is up in the 5 year mean. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

Chris

I didn't realise "typical reservoirs are ten to twenty feet deep". This seems suprisingly shallow (I've always had visions of hundreds of metres deep!). Is this also true of fields such as Saudi Arabia? Also, do they find reservoirs *beneath* other reservoirs, or are finds a *one-layer* deal?

If significant finds are shallow and exist on a single level (and I understand only around 60% of any reservoir can be extracted before economics kick in and around 95% of the planet has been "assessed"), surely "proven" figures must be fairly accurate?

"Twice as many" seems a little optimistic.

Regards, Matt B

MS update: Literally dozens of stories in the papers over the weekend on oil and petrol, but not once did I sight the words "Peak Oil" (stories are still all about blaming speculators and the like). Perhaps we need to find a trendy name for PO?

Assuming he is correct and there is plenty of extra oil then why have we been sitting on a production plateau since 2004?
He can only be refering to, as of yet, unknown fields which will take years to develop properly even after they are found.

Its OK to blame a lack of investment by oil companies but they probably understand better than anyone they would be throwing money into an empty hole by doing so.

Kharecha and Hansen see coal production trebling from, current levels. We show the three different coal resources published last year, where Laherrere's is the highest. Laherrere is a geologist, former exploration manager with Total. The curves are combining peak oil, gas and coal.

Giddaye Carolus,

Do you believe extraction, in the end, will be in a (more or less) "bell" shape. Or perhaps a slow, declining plateau with a cliff at the end; or something else?

Some here say we have a mere few years before things get a little dodgy. Others, like Pike, say decades. My problem is, though I'm leaning more toward Todster conclusions (primarily due to ongoing upward price trends), I'm still not sure what to believe.

Years or decades. Bell or sustained plateau. What do you think?

Regards, Matt B

Variant 3. Pike is wrong - check the existing data to see.

If Pike is wrong, we will see it in the historical data.

Peak Oil theory simply says production will peak at some stage and go into decline - it is NOT the 'end of oil' but the 'end of cheap oil'. As we approach peak, production growth will slow and prices will rise steeply.

We will only know when peak has occured by looking in the rear-view mirror since the production is dependent on many things besides geology - maximising profits for the producer is the main consideration, not how much a potential customer needs to buy to continue growing their consumption/lifestyle.

What does the historical data say? ....

Prices have been rising for nine years or so now, currently up around 1200% over that period - not rising for just the four years that the Governor of the Bank of England says - he just can't help being optimistic and 'economical with the truth' - no wonder the public doesn't 'get' peak oil!!

Production has benn flat for around 4 years now and net exports have been falling for two years!

BobCousins,

Thanks for that link. Pike is perfectly right in drawing attention to the follies of pseudo-environmentalism and its core fallacy that many a mickle makes a muckle ('every little bit helps').
See also the excellent site garyp recommended the other day:

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air:

http://www.withouthotair.com/

(Unfortunately I'm on a Linux machine and can't get the video to play so I'm going on stuff I've read elsewhere.)

I'm not a geologist or professional statistician but I use probability and statistics extensively in my computer work. The key point that various statistics on sums independent observations are not the sums of the individual statistics is valid. However the big question for me about this stuff is: to what extent do the P90 numbers behave like idealised P90 numbers? In engineering with some complicated situation it's common to take some pulled-out-of-the-air model and construct using it and some measurements a number that you call and use as statistic X, but you've always got to keep in mind how your number embodies hidden assumptions that mean it doesn't really behave the way it should. In particular, most of the mathematics of statistics assumes there aren't systematic methodological differences between data collected at various points in time, whereas I'd imagine the modeling assumptions that went into computing a P90 thirty years ago are very different from those computing a P90 ten years ago.

So I'd expect there to be bigger uncertainties from the creation processes of the P90 value's than due to his mathematical point.

From a UK point of view, I am not sure what the evidence of GW will be. Perhaps London getting flooded? I image we will build a higher barrier.

I think by the time any wider effects occur, e.g. unable to crop because of soaring temps, or drought, it will be too late for CO2 reduction. Any money will be spent on mitigation, eg desalination plants.

The majority of the comments are about the two and how they relate to each other. This is exactly the debate we need. The two problems are inextricably linked in both cause and mitigation. The website is about "energy and our future" and as such this discussion is on topic.

Yeah, I come here for my daily infusion of PO 900m3r pr0n and instead get wafted by c02 and hit by clumps of carbon.

Pluck Underdog,

Thanks for the link ('Guest Commentary: Richard Miller').

BTW, I think much confusion arises from the meaning of the word 'ultimately' as used in 'ultimately recoverable resources'. It is used more in the sense of 'ultimately at this writing', since the figure changes (to date always upwards) every year. I suppose if one factored in the increase in estimated URR from year to year one could get a kind of figure for 'ultimately ultimately recoverable resources'.

Presumably the annual increase in URR will have the shape of some kind of sigmoid curve (i.e. will eventually drop to zero), so the question is: where are we on that curve at present? Only when we know that can we determine the real, final, ultimate UURR. :-)

Of course.

Dr. Pike's comments are gaining a great deal of traction and so I decided to write a rebuttal. I have sent it to New Scientist and The Toronto Star we shall see if they publish it.

I would be very interested in hearing about any obvious defects in my reasoning from a group as sharp as this one.

Thanks.

J.F. Berg

What's coming down the Pike?

New Scientist: "Have we underestimated total oil reserves?" : http://tinyurl.com/5256t5

The Independent: "Oil shortage a myth says industry insider": http://tinyurl.com/5p6xez

The Star: "Oil, oil everywhere? Well just maybe." http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/447057

Ah the famed wisdom of the "oil industry insider". Such a coyly engaging designation. What this insider is also very coy about is naming a single instance where his alleged theory has been proven. There is on other hand a litany of counterexamples that debunk Mr. Pike's assertions. But first let us give Mr. Pike his due he is correct about one thing. Because of SEC regulations dating back to the inception of oil stocks on capital markets the West's major oil companies were forced to be quite conservative in estimating the size of their finds. The essence of these rules was that these oil companies could only report the first of the "Three P's": P<1> Proven, P<2> Probable, P<3> Possible.

What Mr. Pike does not mention is however even more important to the reserve picture. The oil companies bound by these rules today account for only 10% to 15% of the world's reserves. The second thing he fails to mention, something any industry insider should know, is that advances in geology over the last century of the oil business has greatly expanded the size of the P<1> category. (I.e. The percentage it represents of the Ultimately Recoverable Resource.) The result of this being that reserve growth subsequent to original finds is orders of magnitude smaller today than it used to be.

The remaining 85% of the world's finite oil supply is held by nationalized oil enterprises not bound by the rules to which Mr. Pike refers. The Russians for example have always reported the P<1> and P<2> estimates for their finds. Middle Eastern oil reserves on the other hand are shrouded by secrecy. (Two-thirds of the world's remaining oil.) Reserves which have magically remained at the exact same number for the last two decades irrespective of production or finds.

The reason for this magic is easily explained. In the mid-eighties OPEC changed its production quota rules to a percentage of stated reserves. Over the next few years, unsurprisingly, country after country claimed greater reserves as this allowed them to sell more oil. That this was a purely political phenomenon, and a brazen one at that, is further substantiated by the lack of reporting by these same countries of major new finds. The Saudis held off the longest from playing this game but finally use their power and influence to bring an end to these political shenanigans in the process almost doubling their stated reserves to 260 billion barrels. (No doubt threatening to go much higher if this practice of reserve creep did not stop.) These figures remained static until recently when the Kuwaitis were forced to revise their estimates of their reserves downwards when their greatest field Burgan, the world's second greatest, began to fail.

Yet another very telling point contradicting Mr. Pike's blithe musings is the meaning and significance of RLI. The Reserve Life Index of an oil company is certainly not something that one would want to "over-hype". Shell oil's stock for example was hammered as a result of five downward restatements since 2004, and top people loss the job of a lifetime. With that said it is also the single most important factor for an extractive company's stock price. (And why Shell was hiding its true position)

Now while it is certainly easy for any of us to see the temptation for those within such companies to fudge the numbers in an upward direction, what incentive would there be to hide genuine good news? The incentives all run the other way. I.e. If company executives could legitimately substantiate a significantly higher RLI they, and their company's stock, would be handsomely rewarded. Not to mention that such information signals are supposed to be the greatest strengths of open markets. To imagine that oil executives are knowingly depressing their company's price, not to mention their personal remuneration, demands a very heavy burden of proof. A burden that Mr. Pike comes nowhere near meeting.

One final point. Flow rates and not reserves are what determine the price of oil and what determine whether or not supply and demand can be reasonably balanced. The very simple truth is that what matters is not how much fossil fuel there is but at what rate we can access them. The quintessential example of this is the 2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent "reserve" in the oil shale of North America. Putting aside the very important energy returned on energy invested aspect to this story, the fact of the matter is that the test cases of oil from shale show that the flow rates from this process are measured in the hundreds to thousands of barrels a day range. Given the tens of millions of barrels of oil per day consumption of N.A. it is obvious that despite the estimated size of this reserve its impact on prices will be negligible.

The Alberta tarsands represent a similar issue with its 172 billion barrel reserve likely to be revised upwards considerably. The flow rates from this resource will nonetheless never match the Saudi oil extraction rates of today. In fact the best estimates so far indicate that this reserve's flow rate will never rise to even half of what the Saudis managed in their heyday. And if the water and natural gas issues are not resolved by technology they will in fact never meet the 3 million barrel a day level that so many now seem to take as a given.

J.F. Berg
www.postcarbontoronto.org

Indeed, Hightrecker, and I trust you are reading Taleb's sequel, The Black Swan, in which he champions empiricism over theory. Carolus Obscurus would concur when he says (up thread) "I have no problems with theory because, well, I don’t have any theory."

Perhaps we should concentrate on observed production rates, observed field decline rates, observed new field development work, observed atmospheric CO2 levels, and, to end with an illustrated link, observed Arctic ice extent.

We can see what we are doing and we should be able to see that it is not good. We should plan for the expected and add resilience to insure against the unexpected.

Does Dr Pikes argument not fall slightly flat on the fact that the vast bulk of the worlds reserves are not held by companies listed on the stock exchanges of the west but by national oil companies of various sorts who's declarations are somewhat political?

And his analysis seems to leave out the 'energy return on investment' of the remaining oil, that it will require more energy to extract, and once energy inflation gets sunk into a society, the financial costs of extracting the energy will also go up.

Iceberg, your rebuttal looks sound to me, though too long to get in as a letter in New Pseudentist etc. I expect the reason others havent responded is cos you didnt say anything irritating enough or theyre all asleep or something.
I suggest you edit the previous copy down to a blank (or "see below") before anyone replies to it (as you can't edit this one now that I've posted this). Cheers

As suggested in the ODAC newsletter, Pike's observation may explain the mystery of "reserves growth". This is where oil fields continue to produce more than original estimated. The initial P90 figure proves to be underestimate, so is continually revised upwards. Similarly, P50 figures tend to be revised downwards.

You also need to account for the fact that most oil reserves now are not SEC reporting-compliant, and the reserves estimates are a stab in the dark anyway.

So even if Pike is correct, his observation would be interesting but pretty irrelevant. The worst thing is that he apparently ignores EROEI.

Defining "peak oil" in terms of realistic flow rate comes very close to the optimal definition, one I always use.
The definition needs to be extended

I think you're getting unnecessarily muddled here. We already have a reasonably adequate definition, namely the alltime peak of output of conventional oil (with slight variations of definition of the latter). Adding in unconventionals such as shale etc doesn't make a great difference because of their limited output and their lower eroei.

However, I wonder whether there could be a possible improvement on Hubbard and Co.

Instead of a chart of oil production measured in barrels, it would be much more informative to have a chart of oil production measured in energy gain (i.e., joules). Hah! Sorry folks, I now need to explain another of my innovations. People constantly get confused by the EROEI concept, imagining negative values. That's because it would be much more natural to use a concept we could call Energy Gain on Energy Invested - EGOEI. That would obviously get into negative values if you tried to use seriously silly techniques.

Now a century ago when we were drilling light sweet easy oil, the EGOEI used to be really high. But increasingly the EGOEI is going down as we resort to deep water, warzones, heavy, sour, and finally sands, shale, ctl and (with often negative EGOEI) bio.

Hence the peak graph of oil production measured in EG (i.e. joules) rather than barrels, would be much more down at the right end.

What's more, the peak oil EG would likely have all the more step decline coming in the next few years as increasing resort is had to tougher options with decreasing EGOEI.

Now the one problem with my proposed new chart is that it depends on some wizard experts generating estimates of the EGOEI of the various grades and sources of oil etc. But at least once one has got those estimates out of the way one will have a clearer picture of what the true energy production situation is.

(With subcere apologies for my vast EGOEIsm.)