I submitted a written question to Mr. Wells, "What impact (and when) will North Ghawar watering out have ?"

He responded that they were already getting high water cuts and shutting in some wells, it is not a sudden oil > water (I knew this, besides Ghawar is too large to water out uniformly).

And then, in a quiet voice, he said that North Ghawar should "mostly" water out within the next two years or so.

He did not address the impact of this development.

Alan

GREAT post HO, as always.

A problem of "Scale" and perspective to set priorities.

We’re still (thinking) at the nation level, or even, some might say, still thinking globally,...Because the numbers are real, the decline in global production is coming, and ... soon... priorities switch from nation, to community, to family, to self.

I bet many of us here started focusing on the "family" part quite a while ago (and if you're like me, have been dragging them kicking and screaming into the Real 21st century).

"Peak Oil is more important than Climate Change, but also that there is an arrogance in the IPCC community ".

The IPCC and climate change has been a most horrible distraction at this TimezUp.

Thank the godz for people like Mr. Udall, Matt Simmons and Ken Deffeyes - leaders with a spine who are Awake and Sober.

I am looking forward to the DVD set. I just can't justify the expense of flying to the West Coast for a meeting about peak oil. Unfortunately I miss the one-on-one conversations with people that way.

One thing that strikes me is that this is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Not that much changes on a week to week basis, and in a sense the basic story hasn't changed in years - it is only the details that change.

INTELLECTUALS AWAKE,

Never mind what the Establishment and the masses say or think. It is time to change our lifestyle and plan our future. I think the intellectual Jews left Germany long before Hitler came for them.

We know what is coming down the tubes, and should plan our lives accordingly. Sure "they' may be wrong by 10-20, or even 30 years, but we of intellect must position now.

If the population of the planet keeps increasing, even God cannot save us from the inevitable. He may help a bit with mass pestilences, plagues and floods, but only those getting onto Noah's-Intellectual-Ark will be left to pick up the pieces. The lesser intuitive masses as always, will be the cannon fodder.

(Personal irrelevance, I have survived four social implosions by being ahead of the game. The lesser intellectual Patriots, are still biting the bullet in these societies)

Peak oil is a fact. Peak Credit seems to be a fact. Peak derivatives and peak leverage seem to be a fact. From here it is all downhill.

With the fact that one barrel of oil represents about 11 years of human work and represents about $200,000 modern dollars (TOD post), we had better get a touch of reality very soon.

For anyone of intellect to even think of continuing along the path which got us here, is an insanity.

0-60mph in 5 seconds, cars are an insanity.
100mph cars are an insanity,
Long range cars are an insanity. I live in a country where villages are about 10km apart (a horse/ox days range)

Mega houses and air-conditioning are an insanity. (I live where a room 10x10 can sleep 5+ people).

Suburbs and commuting 20+ kilometers to work are an insanity. If one cannot walk to work by 7am the job is not sustainable.

Asia, in its backwardness, will soon be ahead of the leaders.

Graham

Thanks for the summary and comments!

The IPCC ppl quoted fall into the typical R/P trap. The whole concept should be outlawed and the people who use it to think about oil should be shot. Really. It's just moronic.

If they can't think in volumetric flow terms, their reasoning is even less valid than the worst of climate change denying rabid idiots.

Somebody needs to explain this to them in terms that they can analogously understand in terms of AGW.

Here's a very crude start. Somebody can fix it:

Look. Carbon production per se is not a problem, right? Biomass ties it up, oceans soak it, it recycles in the earth processes.

The problem is exceeding the volumetric flow (volume/time) of CO2 generation compared to the recycling capability of the earth systems.

If you pump too much of it, it builds up in the atmosphere and causes too much radiative forcing, hence global warming.

The exact same thing happens with crude oil, but in reverse.

You need to consume more volumetric units per unit of time than you can actually produce. Never mind the stock or 'reserves' now - think only about the productive flow maximum available.

This production flow cannot grow forever. This is regardless of the amount of reserves. Hence, peak production flow is inevitable. No sane geologist on earth will deny this. I doubt you want to argue this.

So, if need is constantly higher than production flow, then a shortage of oil builds up (cf. build up of CO2 in atmosphere).

An increasing gap between need and production flows, causing a price inflationary forcing in the price of oil, hence catastrophic rise in price of oil

There's even the likelihood of anthropomorphic catastrophic oil production shortage (due to wars, geopolitical loops, resource nationalism, EROEI trap, etc).

See just like AGW! It wasn't so difficult to understand after all.

This is one of the reasons I've cut down on reading and posting in the otherwise excellent TOD.

I've clearly past the 20/80 threshold in reading related understanding myself - and talking to most people (cf. IPCC ppl in question) is like talking to a wall: rigid structures are immune to conceptual change.

Heading Out, it isn't clear to me from your essay what you are implying with your data about engineering interest. Is your lament about an educated populace that there aren't enough mathematically literate people out there to understand what a Quad is or the scale of the problem, or that there aren't enough engineers to implement solutions you believe are wise? I suspect there is some truth is both statements, but your own reference to data at a particular school doesn't seem sufficient to make a case about the educational abilities of an entire populace.

One point that I think is worth mentioning, and applies to ASPO as a whole as well as to TOD participants, is that given our general state of mathematical and (IMHO more importantly) rhetorical and logical illiteracy in the US, it becomes more and more urgent that people take on the project of educating the general populace about peak oil and its implications. And by general public, I mean the truly general public. Many TOD pieces are written at a level far too advanced for most Americans to read or understand, and contain technical language that many people are not familiar with. They are often lengthy and require extensive background knowledge - now this is extremely valuable, of course, and for someone with the technical background, or even a self-taught amateur with a taste for deep waters (like me) gets a lot out of it. But no matter how many times people hit the digg or whatever buttons, much of the work peak oil thinkers are doing is simply hugely inaccessible to people.

Add to that the boys club culture that pervades ASPO and TOD (which I actually find rather endearing, despite my mocking it periodically), and the tendency to talk about sheeple and how moronic the masses are, and you have a large number of very brilliant, talented, dedicated and quite wonderful peak oil spokespeople who are also inaccessible to many of the people who most need to really grasp PO and the issues it raises - in some cases, they seem to be contemptuous of accessibility issues. It isn't clear to me that's what your reference above to engineering interest implied, and I apologize if I'm misconstruing you, but I think it is important to understand that, for example, scale can be explained to people without even an algebra-level education, if it is done with great care and creatively. My six year old son, for example, can discuss scale for both energy and astronomy in quite detail, despite the fact that he's still learning his times tables. That is, the problem is both the literacy level of the population as a whole and the ability of the knowledgeable to present information well. IMHO, some of the problem lies on both ends of that equation.

There are some notable people doing this - Matt Savinar's site offers an accessible (if high defcon, although these days it isn't seeming so unreasonable) version of this. Kurt Cobb writes newspaper narrative level versions that are excellent. TOD's own clearest mind, Gail Tverberg writes accessible primer material. I flatter myself that by speaking and writing to women and families more directly than anyone here has, I've been marginally helpful, even if my readers do not always speak in Quads ;-). My claim is not, of course, that the oil drum should do more generalist material, but that more people are needed to do the work of speaking accessibly about peak oil, and that they might be recruited through both TOD and ASPO. If there were interest and personal commitment, TOD might also provide more primers than it does at present (the ones it has are quite good, although pitched even a bit high for the average American who has poor critical analysis skills).

I think ASPO has, to a degree, some responsibility in the failure of a wide audience to fully apprehend its mission. Lack of engineering or mathematical literacy may be part of the problem, but elitism, lack of engagement with issues that immediately affect ordinary people (including the ways that Peak Oil is already being expressed in daily life, which apparently aren't nearly as fascinating as the next generation of technocars), and a lack of interest in doing the dull ground work of explaining energy density to people who are not engineers, and have not studied math for many years is also central, as are the weak writing skills of many engineers and technical experts (TOD and ASPO also have some fine and very clear writers as well).

I admire many of the people who presented at ASPO this year enormously, and look forward to reading the publication of their later works and the summaries. I think ASPO and TOD together may have one of the great concentrations of brilliant minds. But brilliance of thought often requires some training, care and clarification to be transformed into brilliant presentation of thought, skilled teaching and accessible material.

Sharon Astyk

This hyperbole becomes tiresome in what should be a scientific debate. None of the ASPO luminaries, when crunching numbers, has yet to come to the conclusion that population is a part of the problem and hence stopping its growth is a part of the solution. Therefore, we have not only enough oil for the current population, but enough for the coming millions upon millions. The numbers, as analyzed by the scientists, back me up.

Glancing back through Richardson Gill’s The Great Maya Drought I found the section where he talks of the impact of famine, and how priorities switch from nation, to community, to family, to self. We’re still at the nation level, or even, some might say, still thinking globally, but one wonders how long that will last.

I do not understand how you see a priority being placed on national interests in our current cultural environment. The emphasis is at best on family and often only on self. Our economic and political system strongly encourages this narrow focus of interest. Status and security are gained at the individual level by earning wages manufacturing and selling as much stuff as we possible can in the short term. The more HDTVs and Blackberries that people buy the better our 401K funds perform. Everyone knows that if personal financial disaster hits, apart from their immediate family, they will largely be on their own.

Our economic system is set up so that high consumption of resources is regarded as a sign of productive 'health'. The minute growth even starts to slow down for a month or two every newspaper in the country publishes a story about the 'anemic' growth of the most recent quarter. This deep contradiction, in which depletion of wealth is equated to increase of wealth, has been present in capitalism from the beginning. In Wealth of Nations Adam Smith wrote about 'frugal' people who dedicate a substantial part of their yearly income to increasing their capital so that they will become wealthier in the future. Thus 'frugality' is equated with speeding up the consumption of resources as rapidly as possible.

Of course building infrastructure is a good thing if that infrastructure helps to build up a system of economic production with long term stability. Unfortunately our current economic system is incapable of encouraging the creation of such infrastructure. Any action which would slow down, halt, or (horror of horrors!) shrink composite production in the present cannot be even remotely considered. The only sensible response to the crisis we are facing involves shrinking wasteful forms of economic production and dedicating the saved resources to creating sustainable infrastructure. Of course such an action will involve people losing their jobs. We need to support these people while they are being retrained and give them confidence that they will be supported in their old age. We need to create a cultural and political environment in which any person who is willing to put their shoulder to wheel and help create the new infrastructure that we need is guaranteed shelter, food, and medical care independent of whether or not some private investment bank is willing to extend credit to the manufacturers of electronic toys. Voluntary simplicity and mutual support are the path to adaptation of human productive systems to a finite world.

This community based solution to the problems we are facing cannot be considered because the dominant cultural orthodoxy forbids its consideration. Even here on TOD anyone who suggests such an approach is largely dismissed as a left wing lunatic. If you are hoping to find a purely technocratic solution which will continue to allow the capital market/every nuclear family for itself orientation of our current economic system to dominate society into the distant future, then your pessimism about finding solutions is well justified.

I should point out that my conclusions that capital markets need to be eliminated (which, by the way, is a different thing than saying that markets in general need to be eliminated) and that emphasis should be placed on community security rather than on family security is not based on my reading of socialist or Marxist writers, of which I have very little knowledge. These conclusions are based on a completely independent effort to think about how economic production can best be organized in a resource limited world. I began this effort firmly committed to the idea that any solution that did not preserve capital markets was blue sky idiocy, and I was reluctantly driven step by step to the conclusion that all of the so-called 'practical' solutions which preserved our current economic norms had absolutely no chance of being successful in the long run.

What happened to the comments on pod cars and local vs desert solar?

"The handy Dashboard on my Mac tells me that a Megawatt is 56,869 Btus/min. A Quad is 1,000,000,000,000,000 Btu."

But that tells us little about scale, because the Megawatt includes a time component, but the Quad does not. It's like comparing horsepower (which includes time) to torque(twisting forc) which does not. There are many of these types of comparisons used to prove that absolutely NOTHING is scalable, and of course, the public believes it because as has been said above, they are not able to digest the math, they just see strings of zeros proving beyond any doubt that they are doomed.

RC

Triple Crisis:
Peak Oil, Climate Change, Overshoot

http://www.oilempire.us/triple-crisis.html

Peak Oil and Climate Change resemble the parable of the blind men touching an elephant. Each observer is correctly describing what a part of the elephant is, but none have a holistic understanding. Peak Oil and Climate Change are two facets of the problem of overshoot, and neither can be mitigated in isolation from the other.