One of the big stories that speak to improvements in Saudi Arabia has to do with drilling technology and completion technology. I'm surprised it hasn't been talked about much here but from about 2004 onwards the advances which included maximum reservoir contact wells, SMART completions, attention to quick water shutoff, gas reinjection etc. really have made the difference in terms of ultimate recovery likely to be seen from Abqaia as well as parts of Ghawar (i.e. Haradh III). I try to stay up with the advances and results which seem to get regularily reported in SPE publications. The Saudis claim that this is why they have been able to keep water cut fairly constant. The MRC wells drove contact area from a few hundred metres in a given well up to 5 km of contact which makes a big difference in rates and hence water production. That was all coupled with 4D seismic which allows Aramco to image the advancing water front and identify problematic areas of high permeability. Without doubt Aramco is at the forefront of field management, out of necessity obviously. And they don't seem poised to suddenly stop as now they are talking about ERC wells or extreme reservoir contact wells.

Well first and foremost as far as I can tell there is certainly a theoretical long tail to oil production. For some of the factors you describe and more. Stripper wells if you have enough can produce significant quantities of oil slowly washing rocks. Overall we do have plenty of technologies capable of extracting a good bit of the remaining oil.

However in general the production rate is much lower then it is today and plays a role in why its a long tail as the depletion rate is itself low. New fields play a role but exactly how big is tough to decide. Discovery is obviously well in the past this does not mean of course we won't find some big fields but depending on the numbers you want to use we extract the equivalent of a single Ghawar every few years. I don't see future discoveries as being important for supporting a high production rate in general they will simply help lift the annual production rate as the come online. So technically we face a long gently downward sloping undulating plateau. Its exact nature really depends on investment.

What matters is where exactly this long potential tail exists vs current production levels. Do we simply come of of peak and enter this long tail of post peak extraction or is there a discontinuity possible as the nature of our oil reserves becomes dominated by tertiary extraction methods ?

One big problem is the tail itself is large if you try and take its area its difficult to determine and we don't really know how to partition our remaining reserves how much will really be extracted in this tail region. Assuming 1 trillion barrels for this region is as good a guess as any. However approaches that include it tend to swamp the critical period of a fairly small amount of oil extracted immediately post peak with information that should be relegated to the tail.

Now between our peak production rate and the rate we will produce the long tail at lies a potential problematic area.

I'll not go into details but any review of tertiary extraction suggests that the production rates will be much lower than they are today. As usual I simply guess what they might be and guessing a number of different ways indicates that long term post peak oil production would probably be around 15-30 mbd maybe as high is 40mbd initially.

So the bulk of whatever oil we have left would be extracted within that range for decades probably longer than we have been producing so far assuming of course we continue to produce oil as fast as we can.

So how do you connect this long tail back to the peak ?

Well this obviously depends on what I call the amount of fast oil we have left and how fast we are depleting it. The long tail can be safely disregarded if the assumption is correct that its production rate is significantly less than todays. If its produced at all it will be in a radically different socio-economic environment from what exists today.
It would not be a stretch to say its production is up to a simply different civilization from what we have now as the economy and oils place in the economy at those production levels is just to different from the way things work now.

Its not "our" oil.

Regardless one can focus on this fast oil and ponder if its going to be a smooth slow decades roll over or a fast drop. Obviously I tilt the game a bit because I call it fast oil its oil we not only produce at a high production rate but also a rapid depletion rate.

Depending on how you measure it about half of the worlds oil production falls in this category its small new fields depleted in less than ten years various off shore fields advanced extraction of older fields of all types typically with horizontal wells. The hallmark of this fast oil is depletion rates hovering around 10% so basically about every ten years or so all the wells in this category have been in production for less than ten years. And I use wells not fields because its really all about wells. Also re-completions and other major rework of existing wells should be counted as a "new" well.

If this pool of fast oil is small i.e a few 100 GB my best guess was about 300GB then when its gone its gone. Drilling more does no good and production begins to plummet as large numbers of fields become candidates for expensive low production rate advanced extraction methods.

Its pure guesswork I like to at least believe its educated guessing and I've done a good job of hitting the numbers. The important factor is of course the real depletion rates.
This is itself related directly to per well productivity. And as far as I can tell if the concept is correct then the transition from peak production to the tail is abrupt i.e its a shark fin as our last set of high depletion rate wells pull the last bit of easy to deplete oil out of the ground. High prices will of course encourage aggressive drilling near the end but this simply sharpens the eventual fall.

With this model although you can really know the exact depletion rate once oil production seems to hit a wall or plateau depending on your assumptions of the real depletion rate oil production falls dramatically shortly thereafter. I'm comfortable assuming that we are depleting the fast oil or more correctly where depleting it at about a 10% depletion rate when we hit the wall. So we had about ten years or less before production began to fall off a cliff. Obviously its not a right angle cliff so at some point during the last few years of depletion of fast oil production decline rates would accelerate rapidly and the cliff has a bit of a curved lip if you will but the radius is measured in years at most.

Now of course this is guesswork on top of guesswork so YMMV :)

But it does not really matter if you think its true and you think we turned the curve then its not really relevant how well you "predicted" the turn.

Given that I assert without a shred of proof outside of sulfur that we are now on the downside trend i.e we have turned the curve I did not do a bad job if you read my old postings.

And of course if this is true then no real reason to have raging arguments on the oil drum as within six months or so the situation rapidly becomes critical aka TSHTF.

About the only real reason I continue to post is given the nature of the event waiting to claim to be correct afterwards may are may not be possible :(

Its akin to correctly predicting the onset of thermonuclear war when you live somewhere thats a first strike candidate. You may or may not be able to crow about how you nailed it.

With all that said as best I can tell all that happens at first is the massive amounts of debt we have in our current economy system is forced out. The waste is immense housing is still insanely overpriced esp given and end to the baby boomer growth period. Commerical real estate is way overbuilt we throw way way to much stuff away etc etc.

There is a tremendous amount of fat in the world economy and rapidly falling oil production will at first in my opinion simply be painful and invasive liposuction. Literally ripping the fat out. Painful and disfiguring but not deadly.

The deadly blow probably has nothing to do with oil as far as I can tell but falling sulfur production which is a by product of our oil industry resulting in the crippling of our overall industrial capacity along with the effects of sky high oil prices. As sulfur production falls you get a large secondary problem as virtually everything we make or do is impacted. Not only do we no longer need to make all the junk we do today we literally can't because of the lack of sulfur and petrochemical feedstocks. This of course runs right smack into the fact that society waited way to long to get off of oil regardless of the decline rate and I'm predicting a worst case scenario.

Best guess is we could effectively lose 50% of our industrial capacity if not more and this is not even considering social issues.

In any case if correct at that point our current civilization is simply no longer viable and a new civilization must be created. My best guess is probably 2014-2015 for the real collapse. We have a lot of fat in our economy and it will take time to rip it out. Its just once thats over I think we will find we have effectively nothing left to keep even this new leaner economic system going. We would have at that point effectively half the resources we have at our disposal right now if that. Imagine our entire world running off of the resource usage of the US alone to get a sort of ballpark estimate including social upheaval. The shear number of people in the world finally swamps the entire system.

Certainly a new civilization is possible but not until after the population level falls well below what we need it to be to create a new civilization with the remaining resources. Even a new robust renewable society is a growth proposition at first as the infrastructure is rebuilt along saner lines. It simply not going to be able to support anything close to its final population capacity for some time and if its viable population control will be a intrinsic feature of the society. If I had to guess I'd assume this society would by choice keep population well below what even a sustainable society would permit. Since they have to control population I can't see them even trying to allow it to grow to reach even renewable restrictions. I could well be wrong but I suspect if I am then that simply means several cycles before we finally limit human population to leave a light footprint on the earth.

I'd guess the only real consolation about being alive now is that on average after all this is over it really can't get any worse barring a exogenous event like a meteor strike this is probably the worst of times to be alive. But on the other hand our future will be made over the coming years and not just a future for civilization but a future for humanity itself once we really grow up humanity will be fundamentally changed by the events that are starting to unfold so in a sense its the best of times. No other group will probably live through such a momentous change. We will be forced to use our intelligence to fundamentally change ourselves how we do it is the interesting part despite the obvious horror of the process.

We shall see personally I hope we have a nice slow transition and I'm completely full of crap given enough time I think we could make the changes we need to make. Certainly we will not do it untiled pressured but a constant strong pressure is sufficient we don't need to be smashed. Small wonder that we actually do everything we can to convince ourselves that it will be a strong pressure of some sort not a smashing. We are barely ready to face the fact we need to change much less that it might be a smashing change.
But thats probably from the underlying group psychosis we have which is a symptom of the mental disease we need to cure not fact. I find it amusing how few people will even consider the credible threat of a fast change as possible it tends to be rejected out of hand without even the slightest attempt to consider the possibility.

Back to the meteor I suspect if astronomers informed our population that a huge meteor was on collision course with the planet and we could do nothing the stop it the majority and probably close to at least 70% of the worlds population would discount the fact right to the point they are vaporized. As a group for some reason we are simply incapable of really dealing with true problems. Not that I have anything more than guess work supporting my case regardless it seems people can't deal with it at a basic level. I'd argue the guesswork is good enough to at least start finding the facts to prove or disprove the situation. Simmons of course realized very early that without data transparency we would never ever figure out whats fact fiction or good sleuthing.
I don't care if people think I'm crying wolf and full of crap it does not matter the consequences if I'm right are simply too dire to ignore. We need to know the truth right now we are frittering away a rare autumn summer of relatively cheap oil and functional industrial base trying to keep suburban housing prices from falling and the bankers collecting their bonuses.