UK Telegraph Reports, "Oil Reserves 'Exaggerated by One Third'"--An Analysis
Posted by Gail the Actuary on March 25, 2010 - 10:37am
Earlier this week, the UK Telegraph reported:
Oil reserves 'exaggerated by one third'
The world's oil reserves have been exaggerated by up to a third, according to Sir David King, the Government's former chief scientist, who has warned of shortages and price spikes within years.
The article goes on to say,
Sir David said he was "very concerned" that Western governments were not taking the concept of "peak oil" – where demand outstrips production – seriously enough, while China is throwing all its efforts into grabbing as many energy resources as possible.
Ovrstated Reserves
According to the article:
The scientist and researchers from Oxford University argue that official figures are inflated because member countries of the oil cartel, OPEC, over-reported reserves in the 1980s when competing for global market share.
Their new research argues that estimates of conventional reserves should be downgraded from 1,150bn to 1,350bn barrels to between 850bn and 900bn barrels and claims that demand may outstrip supply as early as 2014. The researchers claim it is an open secret that OPEC is likely to have inflated its reserves, but that the International Energy Agency (IEA), BP, the Energy Information Administration and World Oil do not take this into account in their statistics.
The growth in OPEC reserves, without any corresponding discoveries, is an issue The Oil Drum has talked about various times. I know I talked about the issue about two years ago, in an article called The Disconnect Between Oil Reserves and Production. This was a graph I showed at that time, of published oil reserves.
The FSU corresponds to the Former Soviet Union. The OPEC 11 is the 11 countries that were members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries at that time. (Membership changes over the years a bit.) As one can see, the vast majority of the reserves are those of OPEC--but these are not audited. The reserves the Telegraph article is talking about are "conventional reserves"--that is, reserves of liquid petroleum, not very heavy reserves that need to be melted, so would leave out the "Oil Sands" reserves in Figure 1.
Based on the 2008 analysis, Figure 2 shows the distribution of oil production is quite different from that of the reserves. There is virtually no production from the oil sands, compared to their huge reserves. OPEC-11 also has much less production in comparison to its reported reserves.
Figure 3 shows that when one calculates the ratio of oil production to oil reserves, one gets very different ratios for the four groups shown above. The oil sands, because they have to be melted, can only be produced very, very slowly. OPEC also seems to have low production compared to reported (unaudited) reserves.
When one looks at the history of OPEC reserves shown in Figure 4, one can see they were raised very substantially in the 1980s, without any corresponding reported new fields being found, apparently because countries were at that time vying for production quotas, and higher reserves might have allowed greater production quotas. The reserves have not been reduced in recent years, even though oil has been extracted from these fields, tending to add further to questions about these reserves.
Some might ask whether higher oil prices could lead to higher reserves. If we are talking only about conventional (that is liquid) oil, located in the Middle East--not under some deep sea somewhere--it seems unlikely that higher price would have much impact on reserves. Pumping these reserves wouldn't seem all that expensive, so a higher price of oil shouldn't have too much impact on the amount of reserves.
Academic Paper Supporting Telegraph Article
The UK Telegraph article is related to a peer reviewed article soon to be published in the journal Energy Policy. The article is titled The status of conventional world oil reserves—Hype or cause for concern? by Nick A. Owen, Oliver R. Inderwildi, David A. King.
The abstract of this article reads:
The status of world oil reserves is a contentious issue, polarised between advocates of peak oil who believe production will soon decline, and major oil companies that say there is enough oil to last for decades.
In reality, much of the disagreement can be resolved through clear definition of the grade, type, and reporting framework used to estimate oil reserve volumes. While there is certainly vast amounts of fossil fuel resources left in the ground, the volume of oil that can be commercially exploited at prices the global economy has become accustomed to is limited and will soon decline. The result is that oil may soon shift from a demand-led market to a supply constrained market.
The capacity to meet the services provided by future liquid fuel demand is contingent upon the rapid and immediate diversification of the liquid fuel mix, the transition to alternative energy carriers where appropriate, and demand side measures such as behavioural change and adaptation. The successful transition to a poly-fuel economy will also be judged on the adequate mitigation of environmental and social costs.
The Key conclusions section of the paper reads:
This paper supports the contention held by many independent institutions that conventional oil production may soon go into decline (Alekkett, 2007; Campbell and Laherrere, 1998; IEA, 2008; Laherrere, 2009a; Robelius, 2007; Sperling and Gordon, 2007; USGAO, 2007) and it is likely that the ‘era of plentiful, low cost petroleum is coming to an end’ (Hirsch, 2005). Significant supply challenges in the near future are compounded against a backdrop of rising demand and strengthening environmental policy. Key conclusions include:
• The age of cheap liquid fuels is over. A condition of meeting additional demand is to develop unconventional resources, which translates to an increase in the price of petroleum products.
• Oil reserve data that is available in the public domain is often contradictory in nature and should be interpreted with caution.
• World oil reserve estimates are best described by 2P reporting. This means public reserve figures should be revised down-wards from 1150–1350 Gb to 850–900 Gb.
• Supply and demand is likely to diverge between 2010 and 2015, unless demand falls in parallel with supply constrained induced recession.
• Reserves that provide liquid fuels today will only have the capacity to service just over half of BAU demand by 2023.
• The capacity to meet liquid fuel demand is contingent upon the rapid and immediate diversification of the liquid fuel mix, the transition to alternative energy carriers where appropriate, and demand side measures such as behavioural change and adaptation.
• The negative effect of oil price on the macro-economy is significant, and should be used to build the business case to invest in alternative energy carriers. Many alternative fuel carriers also present the double dividend of improving energy security (i.e. utilize local resources) and reducing emissions (i.e. electricity, hydrogen).
UK Telegraph Reports, "Oil Reserves 'Exaggerated by One Third'"--An Analysis
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UK Telegraph Reports, "Oil Reserves 'Exaggerated by One Third'"--An Analysis
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I recall a graph about a week ago showing the relative usage of coal vs oil. Coal has risen to about 70 million BOE / day from about 40 while oil production has been approximately flat. The Industrial Revolution started on coal and will resume on coal by the look of it.
Given the production cost and energy density of coal it will take a tremendous display of social discipline to restrain our falling back on the 'black elephant in the room'.
I question the assumption that the tarsands will always be slow to produce. Why? No shortage of labor once the supply of conventional drops; none now for that matter. Where's the technical constraint? It's just mining and smelting after all.
Tar sands have a couple of Achilles Heels as I understand it.
1) Production is heavily dependent upon low prices for natural gas.
2) The synthetic oil needs to be up-blended with higher quality crude oil feedstock.
So, tar sands production is dependent upon energy and energy product inputs.
I would contest that contention, in that it is simply based on "typically to now" logic and should be preceded by that statement. To point 1), it is already demonstrated that syngas can be produced from the petcoke removed in the upgrading process, and the syngas can provide both the heat needed for in-situ extraction and the hydrogen for upgrading. As for point 2) it is essentially wrong. Blending and shipping instead of locally upgrading is simply a short-term strategy to exploit the remaining life in some existing refineries in the north US. Loydminster upgrader among others already demonstrate the nearby upgrading to light sweet. The choice is merely a matter of labour resources, time and finances to build local upgrading, which will not likely be a significant problem in the lifespan of the resource (which BTW should be considered MUCH larger than the 173 billion shown).
Lengould,
In the business world we talk about scalable production. Tar sands do not strike me as scalable. You have to mine it, process it, and ship it.
Current production is very low given the huge resources being thrown at tar sands.
It is an inherently expensive and time consuming process.
I would love to know the capital investment required to scale up production to the level where it would make a real difference: 5 to 10 million barrels a day (the amount needed to keep world oil production from tanking over the next several years).
And tar sand producers will have find a way of reducing their CO2 emissions.
It is not a golden bullet.
SAGD
"In 2008, CERI was projecting a potential for oil sands production of over 5 million barrels per day (mmbpd) by 2015, and over 6 mmbpd by 2030. It was our opinion that the likely development path of the oil sands would be far lower than the CERI Unconstrained Projection (2008). The CERI Reference Case Projection (2008) indicated 3.4 mmbpd of bitumen production by 2015, increasing to 5 mmbpd by 2030."
"The CERI 2009 Economic Slowdown Projection indicates that C$218 billion will be invested in the oil sands for new production. This is C$97 billion less (the “loss”) than previously projected under the CERI Reference Case Projection (2008) and a shocking C$241 billion less than the CERI Unconstrained Projection (2008)."
http://www.ceri.ca/Publications/documents/CERIOilSandsBriefingFebruary20...
You know, that is an interesting question. Let's do a ballpark analysis - we need 5 to 10 million bpd of incremental production, recent oil sand production has come in around $100,000 to $200,000 per incremental barrel of production, so that gives a capital investment amount of $500 billion (low end) to $2 trillion (high end).
It seems like a lot of money, but not when you consider that the current US national debt is on the order of $12 trillion. However, to address the Peak Oil problem, the US would have had to have spent the money on oil sands development rather than whatever it did spend it on. What did it spend it on?
CO2 sequestration into deep formations. Not cheap but if you really want to do it, toss a few hundred billion more dollars into the pot. Much cheaper than sending a man to Mars, more comparable to sending a man back to the Moon.
Rocky,
You make my case ...
Canadian tar sand producers cannot tax like the US government and don't issue the world's reserve currency.
So they have to make it work on the basis of profits and well functioning capital markets.
To raise $500 billion to $2 trillion will be difficult.
In any case, tar sands will not delay the peak of world oil production because too many of the world's giant oil fields are in decline.
I don't think you really understand the situation.
1. I agree that oil sands will be slow to upgrade, because of the time and capital costs required to build new capacity. I don't think funds will really be available for building, unless the price of oil stays over $80 barrel.
2. Natural gas is not necessarily needed for the process. It is one way, but not the only one. It is possible to burn part of the oil sands material itself.
3. If you make synthetic oil from oil sands oil, it is a fairly lightweight oil that is quite liquid. You are confusing synthetic oil with bitumen, which is putty-like. The product initially produced is bitumen; some oil companies choose to upgrade the bitumen, essentially by doing some of the steps normally considered part of refining process right on site. The upgraded product is "synthetic oil".
4. If bitumen is diluted (to go through a pipeline), it is often the synthetic oil made by another oil sands producer that is used as the diluent.
5. Another approach that is being considered for shipping bitumen (besides diluting it and shipping it by pipeline) is rail car. This is especially being considered for export to Asian countries, since there is not pipeline capacity to the West coast. If rail is used, there is no need to dilute the bitumen with anything. The rail cars can be heated to facilitate removal of the bitumen.
What about water? I understand that this process requires substantial water resources... Is that only for preparation for transport by pipeline? Or is a lot of water required for both?
I would say that oil sands production depends first, last, and always on the price of oil. All the other issues are technical and are resolvable:
1) You need a source of process heat. Currently, this is usually natural gas, but that is just because natural gas is cheap. If natural gas was not cheap, they would use some other fuel, and there are a number of different fuels available in the oil sands area (coal, bitumen, uranium, etc.)
2) Transporting the bitumen to the refinery is difficult because bitumen does not flow readily. There are two choices, 1) dilute it with solvents or light oil, or 2) heat it. Both work and both are used. You could also build a refinery on-site and refine the oil sands to gasoline and other products directly, but nobody wants to build a new refinery when there are too many refineries in the world already.
3) Water is something of a red herring because there are huge amounts of water in the oil sands area. Currently about 2% of the available water resources are used. All potential oil sands operations would raise it to no more than 5%. Compare this to many North American rivers which are 100% utilized (e.g. the Colorado).
As regards water draws on the Athabasca River basin, focusing on the oil sands exclusively is a red herring as well; total use for oil and gas extraction was somewhere around 80% last time I checked.
State of the Environment - Water Indicators As can be seen these draws are far from the total volume of the river's flow, but they are increasing, and the source glaciers for the Athabasca are shrinking with time, leading to lower peak summer flows; at Fort McMurray these declined by 29% between 1970 and 2005. Running out of Steam? (PDF)
Did you miss the "Allocations too small to be shown at this scale" footnote on the top graph?
Total flow is about 22 billion cubic metres, total allocations are about 0.9 billion cubic metres.
Sure, oil and gas accounts for 80% of what is allocated, but there's no other use for this water. 96% of it is just flowing to the Arctic Ocean untouched by human beings.
And as for uneven flows - the Athabasca is the longest river in North American with no storage dams on it. But there's no law against building storage dams - with 96% of it unused there's just no need.
And the Athabasca Glacier is not going away anytime soon. I went and walked on it, and it's doing okay so far. (Warning: Do not try this yourself without a professional guide).
I pointed that out in my post.
Under what classification do you file the sentient bipeds living along its course, then?
Snout has retreated almost a mile since the 19th. Flows have decreased over the 20th century as I stated, and were stronger from 16th-19th centuries: Climatic and hydrologic variability during the past millennium in the eastern Rocky Mountains and northern Great Plains of western Canada.
Few and far between. If you take a comparable-sized river in the southern half of the continent, e.g. the Colorado, you find that cities with millions of people are dependent on its water, as are tens of thousands of farms and ranches. On the Athabasca, north of Fort McMurray, there are only a few thousand people scattered in small settlements across a vast area, and they have numerous other sources of water to draw on. The Athabasca is not the only river up there, nor is it the biggest. There is also no particular demand for irrigation that far north.
Well, yes, during the Little Ice Age most of the glaciers advanced (in the Alps they bulldozed a number of villages out of existence). In the Rockies, they stopped advancing about 1900, and are now retreating again. We're back to conditions that prevailed in the Medieval Warm Period around AD 1100–1250. However, we've been through this before (at least the natives were).
Glaciers are dynamic features of the landscape. Under normal conditions they are usually either advancing or retreating. They seldom stay the same for long periods of time.
As everyone now knows, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) dropped the ball on predicting the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers, and personally, I have serious doubts about what they said about the glaciers in the Rockies as well. It's not completely and utterly stupid, like the Himalayan predictions, but I think it's still pretty flaky.
Note that I've spent a significant amount of time hanging around a lot of different glaciers, so I can be pretty opinionated about them.
Actually, IPCC working group 1, whose business includes glaciers, did fine on the Himalayas. It was working group 2 (social scientists, etc.) which assesses the impact of climate change, that misreported the speed of Himalayan glacier disappearance.
To say "IPCC dropped the ball" on this issue is an overstatement.
A children's treasury of deglaciation news
Graphs of doom:
Mean Cumulative Mass Balance of Glaciers, 1980-2008
All Published Himalaya Glacier Mass Balance Measurements, 1960s - 2000s
That's good to hear.
Here's what Parks Canada says about it:
Yes, it is an impressive moonscape that it leaves. Note that they do not say it leaves a large, raging river. If you actually go there, and it is amazing scenery, you will be very underwhelmed by the dirty little stream that is the start of the Athabasca river. Even when it runs into the nearby town of Jasper, it is still only a large creek. By the time it gets to Fort Mc is is a very large river.
So how much of the flow is contributed by the Columbia Glacier, or the other glaciers in it's headwater? probably 5%, and less in winter when the glaciers freeze up, but the river at Fort Mac, and even jasper, is still flowing nicely.
If you want to see real diversions from a river, go and take a look at the Colorado River Aqueduct that supplies LA.
Receding glaciers indicate that they are melting faster than they accumulate. This can be from warmer weather, or less precipitation, or both. But the retreating of the glaciers does not mean there is no precipitation, or no rivers. There are many rivers in the world (most?) that don't start from a glacier.
If you want to see real water wastage, take a look at a field of corn being grown for ethanol. One acre of corn uses 650,000 gal of water in a season, to produce about 400 gallons of ethanol, or 162 gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol. And much of the water is coming from the Ogalalla aquifer, a non renewable resource (unlike the athabasca).
Last year, the US produced 11bn gallons of ethanol, so it used 1.8 TRILLION gallons of water to do so. In barrel terms, this is equal to 115 million barrels of water a day to produce 0.7 million bpd of ethanol.
In the process, some 27 million acres of land was used, and 5million tons of nitrogen fertiliser (made from natural gas). I should add that 100% of this land is deforested, and will never be rehabilitated, and the runoff/infiltration contaminates groundwater and surface streams throughout.
So ethanol uses more land, 40x more water and produces less than half the product, and uses a feedstock that can otherwise be eaten. Which one is the bigger environmental culprit?
Just for completeness, perhaps we should also suggest that the few native people who survived the genocides and from whom the cornfields were stolen would appreciate their being returned to them in original condition.
Just for the record, they never were able to grow corn up there. Global warming is going to have to cut loose in a major way to put Northern Alberta into the corn belt.
The native peoples in Northern Alberta were largely ignored (except for the furs they traded to the Hudson Bay company for guns and blankets) until they signed Treaty 8 in 1899. They each got paid for their interest in the land. They got land, financial support, and hunting supplies in return. They still retain hunting and fishing rights on the land they ceded.
And they are still don't need hunting or fishing licenses and are exempt from taxes because, of course, Indians never needed licenses or paid taxes. Hunt and fish anywhere you want without a license, don't pay any taxes. It's a lifestyle that appeals to many.
They also got mineral rights on their reservations, which the white men up there did not. I know of some tribes in Northern Alberta where the average member is a millionaire because of that little provision in the treaty.
Eh Rocky. I was referring to the native peoples of the corn country of the midwest US, eg. ethanol country. You know, like the Sioux, Lakota, Northen Cheyenne, Arapaho, Osage, Kaw, Ponca and Omaha who lived there until the US military pushed them off to Canada or killed them.
Sorry, I missed the change in topic. In Canada the native peoples were protected by what they called the "Medicine Line", the magical dotted line at the 49th parallel where the US Cavalry would suddenly stop chasing them.
My point in response to the previous poster saying the Athabasca Glacier is "doing OK." In reality it is shrinking. A lot.
It's fine to argue that there is a lot of water in Northern Alberta. I agree. But the stability of the Athabasca glacier shouldn't be cited as support of that argument.
That's the main problem I have with the doom & gloomers who claim that the rivers will run dry if the glaciers disappear. The glaciers contribute a tiny fraction of the water in the rivers (e.g. 5%). If the glaciers go away, it will continue to rain, so why would the river stop flowing? All things being equal, one would expect the flow to be about 95% of what it currently is.
Also, and this is going to really annoy the doom & gloomers, based on archeological evidence one would expect Northern Alberta to become warmer and wetter if the temperature increases. All that happens is the northern forests turn into grazing land and the Prairies move up into the Northwest Territories. It has happened before, it could happen again.
OK.
Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States
Climate Change Canada river flow - Google Search
True, rivers are wasting away globally, with or without deglaciation: World's largest rivers shrinking.
Enjoy a tour of freshwater depletion around the world.
I agree with Rocky Mountain Guy about water--it really is not much of an issue.
I think some people took the worst company with respect to water usage, at the worst time of the year (when rivers were lowest) and hypothesized that if the industry ramped up with this as a business model, then there might be a water problem when rivers are low.
The catch is that this isn't what happened. Companies that mine oil sands (rather than use Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage or other newer techniques) use a lot more water than other companies, but even the mining companies recycle their water, and have gotten better with it over time. The growth has been in low water use techniques, and further growth is expected to be more in this area.
So water use really isn't an issue.
When isn't water an issue? Tar Sands production is certainly an environmental impact that is quite devastating. Consider this general information:
http://oilsandstruth.org/
The site notes that many environmental groups have been, themselves, impacted by corporate money and are no longer playing a watchdog role, just as has happened with the corporate media. The level of corruption forces us to not only consider our sources, but to wonder whether previously reliable sources have become corrupted.
[What is the EROEI for tar sands, for example? I've seen everything from 1.5 to 6. At this site (above) which is focused on the environmental damage, they toss out a range from 1.5 to 3. (http://oilsandstruth.org/topics/energy).
Elsewhere, I've had debates here on TOD with those who have provided sources arguing from 4 to 7.
See, for example,
http://www.homerdixon.com/articles/20061129-nytimes-endofingenuity.html ]
ON WATER:
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/1480
Water
For each barrel of oil produced from the tar sands, between two and 4.5 barrels of water is needed. The water is used in the process of extracting bitumen from the naturally occurring the tar sand. The bitumen is later "upgraded" into synthetic crude oil.
In 2007, the government of Alberta approved the withdrawal of 119.5 billion gallons of water for tar sands extraction, of which an estimated 82 per cent came from the Athabasca River. Of that, extraction companies were only required to return 10 billion gallons to the river.
Most of the water used ends up in giant, toxic tailing ponds. As of 2006, tailing ponds covered 50-square kilometers of former boreal forest. By 2010, according to the Oil Sands Tailings Research Facility, the industry will have generated 8 billion tons of waste sand and 1 billion cubic metres of waste water--enough to fill 400,000 olympic-sized swimming pools. Today, the largest human-made dam by volume of materials is the Syncrude tailing pond, a few kilometres from the Athabasca river.
The waste sand and water contain naphtha and paraffin, which are used in the extraction process, and oil leftovers like benzene, naphthenic acid and polyaromatic hydrocarbon, among others. Chemicals found in the tailing ponds are known to cause liver problems and brain hemorrhaging in mammals, and deformities and death in birds.
downstream...lupus, multiple sclerosis and other diseases in recent years...
--snip--
You discredit your position with half-truths and sloppy reference. (eg. I expect that most of that "water .. needed" is recycled from the outlet holding ponds. How much of it is actually fresh intake?)
Look you guys. I'm as fanatic as the next Canadian that Canada must not damage its georgeous environment, but I'm quite satisfied that the oil sands extraction projects are being adequately managed in that regard by the Alberta government. If you have a specific recommendation regarding a means to mitigate a proven permanent damage to the environment, or any proven damage to people living in the area, then put that up to the Alberta Dept. of the Environment. If that fails, then go to the Canadian Dept. of the Environment. But have a legitimate case, not just some scaremongering hyped up by protectionist US oil interests.
What part of 'toxic' isn't clear? We are talkin' about the largest waste water pond in the world, are we not? Anyone up for a swim? Water is not a problem!
Focus on this:
"Most of the water used ends up in giant, toxic tailing ponds. As of 2006, tailing ponds covered 50-square kilometers of former boreal forest. By 2010, according to the Oil Sands Tailings Research Facility, the industry will have generated 8 billion tons of waste sand and 1 billion cubic metres of waste water--enough to fill 400,000 olympic-sized swimming pools. Today, the largest human-made dam by volume of materials is the Syncrude tailing pond, a few kilometres from the Athabasca river."
Again, a bunch of selected verses without logic or documentation. What exactly is a "ton(s) of waste sand"? Is that the overburden removed from the minesites? The material remaining after the oil is removed which is returned to the minesite and re-covered with the removed overburden? In what way exactly is it "waste"?
The "toxic" part. The settling ponds are actually less toxic than the original oil sands.
You have to realize that in the oil sands, we have the world's biggest oil spill. An area the size of Florida where the ground is absolutely saturated with oil.
Think of it as cleaning up an enormous oil spill. We take the contaminated sand, extract the oil, and put the clean sand back. We dispose of the contaminating oil by burning it in our cars.
There are a few annoying details to handle in the cleanup process, such as the fine sand particles don't settle out of the cleaning water very fast, but that is solvable over a few decades, and at the end of it we reclaim the settling ponds, plant grass, and put the clean water back in the river.
I'm just trying to put this in perspective.
I would also note that the Athabasca river has from the beginning of its history flowed through this oil-spill-contaminated land and carried the toxins it's collected from its banks downstream. The first written records of travelers in the area contain notations of the tar coming out of the riverbanks naturally. The native americans living in the area had developed many uses for it, such as waterproofing their vessels etc.
The comparison to cleaning up an oil spill is most apt. The original situation is comparable to having the entire oil resource of a hundred Prudoe Bays or 200 East Texas' spilled onto the sandy beaches of California. The oil-sands production companies are simply cleaning it up, using exactly the same methods as would be used in that circumstance.
This sounds ridiculous. In the whole process of extracting oil from tarsands chemicals are used that do this:
Not true ? I read about fish in the rivers with cancers, but ok, that are only animals and less important than the biggest predator of all: human beings.
The current oil production from tarsands is allready damaging enough, to let the tar where it is it will do the least harm. Everyone who doubts this should read the book 'Our stolen future' about the negative effects of thousands of chemicals in general.
The only chemical used in the separation process, other than hot water, is caustic soda. Caustic soda is also used for cleaning drains, making soap, and preparing some foods such as German pretzels and Scandanavian lutefisk.
The chemicals found in the tailings ponds are the same chemicals found in the oil sands, just in lower concentrations. Keep in mind that ordinary everyday crude oil contains a lot of nasty chemicals, and oil sands have more of the chemicals on the nasty end of the scale than ordinary oil.
This nonsense is highly misleading and extemely annoying because it implies that they are creating some kind of new toxic product. In fact, they are starting with a natural product which is somewhat toxic, and turning it into a synthetic product which is somewhat less toxic.
Maybe, but if they let the tar where it is, the toxic chemicals come in much less quantities in the rivers and the air. Anyway in much lower concentrations, and that is what counts.
And I wrote maybe, because I found this:
Solvents are not the same as NaOH (soda). And searching after solvents gives:
So probably a good quantity of halogenated solvents end up in the rivers. And yes, they can cause cancer and other diseases.
The above was based on the reports published by one doctor in Fort Chipewyan. He is in a certain amount of trouble with the medical authorities because he won't give the names of the supposed cancer victims to the authorities so they can verify his claims. It's illegal in Alberta for a doctor to refuse to release epidemiological evidence to the authorities. The authorities conducted their own investigation, and found cancer rates to be normal for a community that size. It's apparent they think he's talking through his hat.
The use of solvents to enhance recovery is an experimental in-situ method which is not yet in commercial use. By "solvents", they mean lighter straight-chain hydrocarbons such as ethane, propane and butane, which are commonly found in natural gas and used in cooking, among other things.
That is a completely different patented method which is not used in the Canadian oil sands. It is designed for the American oil sands in Utah (among other states), which are much more difficult to extract the oil from. They basically have to use dry-cleaning fluid to extract the oil - much like what your local dry cleaner does (you might ask him what he does with his used solvents). It will never be used in Canada because the hot water + caustic soda separation method works perfectly well on the Canadian oil sands.
What I don't like about quotations like the above is that it is apparent that the writers have no idea what is actually being done. They are simply fishing through all the literature looking for something that can be portrayed as bad to the uninformed, so most of what they catch is red herrings.
It seems so. Fishes with cancers maybe also red herrings. Seafish turning into riverfish.
Well, let them go on to expand to 4 mbd in 2020 ? 8 mbd in 2030 ?
Lengould,
You need to go over this 'protectionist US oil interests' self-defensiveness. It's rubbish and is particularly alarming given you know nothing about the backgrounds of the commentators on this board.
And no believes that the Alberta government is run by a philosopher-king.
The truth is that exploiting this region is an environmental disaster and will not affect the date of peak oil.
We may need to use tar sands during the transition, but let's not close our eyes simply because this resource allows the Albertians to enjoy a higher standard of living.
And by the way, it is an Alberta issue. The Canadian central government has very little control over how Alberta disposes of its energy resources.
You have discredited your own position by talk about 'protectionist US oil interests'.
And global warming is real and man-made and tar sands will accelerate global warming.
I do accept the science of global warming as published by the IPCC. What I challenge is the contention that oil sands petroleum products are significantly more threatening in that regard than any other source of petroleum. I've seen the comparative "total CO2 emissions to point of US refinery entry" for a fairly broad cross-section of types of crude input, and oil sands as a source is just slightly above the middle of the pack, heavies from ME and Venezuela, and (if I recall correctly) extraction-equipment-intensive deep-water sources being worse. And I have previously posted this information here and had it go relatively unchallenged, so I'll stick by it until you post reference to YOUR source of comparison data. Which should be simple for you given the level of commitment you present. So lets see something credible!
Define significantly.
A small car using petrol derived from tar sands probably generates similar CO2 per mile to a the same sized car running on electricity derived from coal.
Extracting and processing tar sands emits significantly more CO2 per barrel of oil produced, relative to most conventional oil sources. However, it still represents a small percentage of the CO2 that will be released when that barrel of oil is burnt. Depending on the exact methods employed, of course.
Tar sands have a bad press because they are more visibly polluting and directly damaging to the environment at the point of extraction. I suspect they are not popular at TOD because they smack of desperation in the face of inevitable peak in an attempt to sustain BAU when society and the US would be better served by investing in adaptation strategies.
Ok Ralph. Let me know the day you've converted all your auto and truck and offroad machinery to battery electric, and we will resume the discussion. Meanwhile, compare oils to oils.
Or is it because they offer a potential monkeywrench to the various doomer scenaria?
"Several independent studies by researchers in both Canada and the United States have established a basis for comparing the GHG footprint of various sources of oil based on their life-cycle emissions. This measurement considers total emissions produced from the time the oil comes out of the ground to its final consumption by the end user.
While oil sands-derived crude is more carbon-intensive than the average barrel currently consumed in the United States, the gap is much smaller than Mr. Gore and other critics claim. Studies by RAND, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Alberta Energy Research Institute , and Cambridge Energy Research Associates all confirm that the emissions of an average barrel of oil sands crude exceeds the U.S. average by between 5-20 per cent, depending on the project. This puts crude derived from oil sands in the same range as other crude oils imported into the North American market .....
Oil sands producers, in close cooperation with academic and government partners, are developing innovative production technologies such as Toe to Heel Air Injection (THAI), or cold-solvent extraction. Each of these technologies holds the potential to reduce emissions by lowering energy input requirements."
http://www.oilsandsdevelopers.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/osdgmar_news...
(If you don't like that source, then present your preferred reliable source)
You know, I looked over the site carefully, and can only come to one conclusion:
These people don't have the slightest clue what they are talking about. They don't have the faintest idea of what is fact and what is fiction.
Just a personal opinion, but one based on large amounts of experience in Northern Alberta.
Want some real gibberish? Go to the Oil Sands Tailing Research Facility and read their documents...
Nothing cited, no authoritative sources. Of course, we can imagine where their funding comes from, right? http://www.ostrf.com/funding
Even US PEIS docs state: "...mining and processing of tar sands involve a variety of environmental impacts, such as global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, disturbance of mined land; impacts on wildlife and air and water quality... http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/tarsands/index.cfm
From http://www.water-matters.org/pub/watered-down
The above link will take you to "Watered Down" which "highlights some of the most compelling testimony from the recent federal hearings by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. From its testimony, Watered Down derives the recommendation that the Government of Canada should live up to its legislative responsibility and substantially increase its role in protecting human health and the environment through the oversight and regulation of the oil sands industry's impact on fresh water resources and aquatic ecosystems."
I'm tired of being insulted by others on this site who are incredibly hostile to the environment in search of energy. What's it all about folks? Don't give a f*ck about the planet? So sorry! It's not my fault if your favorite polluting industry has ugly side effects.
As I said above, if EROEI is as low as wind, or lower, perhaps you shouldn't be passing off tar sands as fun for the whole family?
A comprehensive review of regulatory documents conducted by the Pembina Institute and Water Matters [external link] found that only two of nine oil sands operations reported they would comply with a new provincial law designed to limit increases in tailings, the toxic liquid waste produced by oil sands mining operations.
Find the report here: http://www.oilsandswatch.org/
I'm utterly convinced many oil sand supporters on this site have some vested interests in this foul business.
Again, check your sources and I'll check mine. You don't get a free pass for being arrogant.
Are you familiar with Canadian political system operation? Those federal hearings are little more than political campaigning for whomever can wrestle control of the hearing chairmanship. This whole Watered Down appears to be a repetition word-for-word of the position of the smallest of five opposition parties in Canada. Who are in politics simply to make speeches preaching to the converted, no hope of ever forming a government or even much of being invited into a coalition. One thing EVERYONE who knows Canadian politics knows, the federal government has ZERO hope of arbitrarily imposing anything on Alberta in the energy sphere and environmental regulation where the provinces have superior jurisdiction. That just won't fly again after the National Energy Policy dustup during the Arab oil embargoes of last cenutry.
??? I love the environment, do everything I can to maintain it within reason and consider myself fairly knowledgeable, having grown up in a situation which enabled / required me to learn a lot about it. Perhaps if you developed your back-country walking capabilities to a point where you could make more than 100 yards through a boreal forest without collapsing out of breath to consult your GPS, swellphone, mother earth manuals and dietary advisor, you would learn the real scale of things and relative relevances.
Stiv, oil IS a foul business. Wherever you get it from, it is dirty (and oily). take a look at the Kern River oilfield near Bakersfield, it looks like something right out of Mad Max. That oil, by the way, is almost as heavy as oilsands, and now requires in situ heating to get it to flow. To date, this has been done by generating steam from burning coal!
The oilsands are no more environmentally disruptive than the the Wyoming coal mines, and far less so than modern agriculture and cities. The US nuclear tests have rendered much more land permanently unuseable than the oilsands ever will. If you want to see contaminated water, take a look at the LA River after a rain event.
The only real disturbance in the oilsands is the temporary removal of the forest cover, and this was not any great forest to begin with. Underneath it you have oily ground. When the mining is finished, you have less oily ground and new forest cover. The newer operations, which are all in situ, have minimal surface impact.
To replace current oilsands production, with biofuels (ethanol or biodiesel) would require 60 million acres of prime agricultural land, equally as much natural gas, and enough water to dry up the Colorado river. Yes, there is a (managed) impact from the oilsands, but look at the alternatives and they are no better and often worse.
I'd love to see the world get off oil altogether, (I am a renewables guy myself), but until then, oilsands represent a reasonable source of supply. Not cheap, but no more environmental impact than the alternatives, does not require exploratory drilling in nat parks/mountains/offshore, and is in a democratic, politically stable country.
That is why they are and will continue to be developed - the alternatives available are no better and often worse.
Paul, I have seen all of this stuff (Kern River heavy oil, Wyoming coal mines, the LA River, and the oil sands), and everything you said is true.
Sure, the oil sands are not great from an environmental perspective, but none of this other stuff is any better. It's all nasty and industrial looking, and you wouldn't do any of it if there were better alternatives.
At this point in time, there are no better alternatives. The people who argue otherwise haven't looked at the alternatives closely enough.
That's just the PR site for a university research facility: ("Give us your grant money, and we will find out all sorts of new and innovative things for you".) The real data is hidden behind a password protected user wall. If you want to get the actual research papers, you will probably have to contact them directly, and most likely pay money for them.
It's primarily funded by the major oil sands companies, but the impetus for that spending is Alberta government environmental regulations. Tailings are a major problem for these companies, and they're funding a lot of research to improve their methods of handling them.
And that differs from other fossil fuel production (such as coal mining) how? I've seen some absolutely enormous coal mines in the United States, and they don't really look all that enviromentally friendly.
I understand Canadians being defensive about the tar sands but they suffer from some serious draw backs:
1. They cannot scale, not in the time or volume necessary to mitigate PO
2. Their production is environmentally very damaging. It is no use arguing about responsible management etc. Ripping up the forests, elevated pollutants in the Athabasca River and the tailing ponds are just the worst examples
3. CO2 emissions are very significant
4. EROEI is too low, what ever the value as long as it is less than around 8 (the edge of the EROEI cliff)
So the question is clear. Is it worth it? Not just from a narrow Canadian view point, but from a global view point? I am not so sure. It probably doesn't matter anyway. They will continue to be developed whatever anyone says.
last night on Discovery channel I watched another thrilling episode of "Swamp Loggers", where cameramen follow these crews with huge mechanized logging equipment specially built to operate over extremely swampy lands in the northeastern states, harvesting primarily hardwoods and some pulpwood. I can tell you from simple observation of that film that the areas covered by this one crew, clearcutting 20 truckloads / day (40 tons / load) from swamps where the best stands yielded only 3 cords / acre (about 4 tons). That's 10 acres / day harvested, another 10 acres trashed by the machines and trucks. 2,000 acres per year of prime wetlands for just that one crew. Say it takes 25 such crews to keep one mill operating, and there might be 10 mills. 500,000 acres per year? 800 square miles? 100 years for re-growth of the hardwood forests?
The area, after harvesting, looks just as bad (much worse IMHO) as the restored oil sands mines.
I also noted that when the forestry agent came to lead the foreman to the next harvesting area, he first had to help the foreman unload his truckload of pails of hydraulic oil, presumeable lost daily by the logging machines. Not a word spoken.
But I'll bet all you guys crying for only "clean" petroleum (define that again for me?) to use in you Prius have hardwood floors throughout your McMansions, and hardwood facings on your kitchen cabinets. It looks so "natural", eh?
Claiming that clear cutting in the northeast (US?) should be more of a concern than environmental damage caused by tar sand production is comparing apples to oranges.
First your arguement has several inaccuracies. I know people tht have forest land in the US midwest and have seen their neighbor's land logged. Its not anything like the damage to forest at 56 N latitude in Alberta.
1. You quote swampland in the North East. Where would that be? I have been all over the North East and seen bogs, but not any real swamp land forests because hardwoods do not grow in swamp land (oak, ash, hickory, maple, etc.) Best trees to grow on wet type swamp land are willows and cottonwoods.
2. Forests at 44 N latitude in the US regrow in about 50 to 75 years, even with hardwoods. Forests in Alberta at 56 N latitude would require 100 plus years to regrow due to colder climate and much shorter growing season.
3. Log trucks hauling 40 tons? That is not true if they ever run on public roads where weight limits are 40 tons gross ( a few state allow 52.5 tons gross with 8 axle rigs on certain highways).
4. Why are 10 acres of prime wetlands "trashed by machines". Guess you haven't heard of logging roads that are maintained by the US and state forest services. This claim is mostly BS.
Lengould I think you need to get out in the woods some day in US or State forest land and see that logging is not causing the same environmental havoc on land as tar sands production. I have been in dozons of states forests and seen tree harvesting production in person. Seeing such in a TV program is mostly drama and not reality.
If you think the discovery channel scriptwriters who I am quoting were lying about the location, then ask them to clarify. They offered nothing further, but it appeared likely to be somewhere just south of Quebec.
In my youth before university I worked full time as a logging machine operator, both northern Ontario and northern BC. I also grew up on a farm in N. Ontario north of Minnesota where I could walk south from our back yard and encounter nothing but boreal forest for 100 miles, still in Canada of course. I've spent a LOT of time walking and studying it, fishing trips, hunting, guiding prospectors etc. The nearby town, Dryden, supported itself with a huge sulphate pulp mill and sawmill operation, and logging was everywhere around. I do know relative growth rates of boreal softwoods and northern temperate hardwoods, we studied forestry in highschool, did tree planting both as school projects and on dad's farm. Stick with my estimates, or use yours, makes no difference. BTW, you haven't had adrenaline until you're assigned to run a Timberjack 404 (a logging tractor so big you can walk standing under its blade when lifted) up and down the side of a BC mountain in winter on night shift. It's more "interesting" than skydiving, and I know, I've had licenses for both. I've also operated Cat D7 and D6 crawlers as skidders, and Timberjack 330's, Treefarmer C4's and C1 skidders, and a variety of wheel loaders. I've owned my own John Deere 1010 crawler loader w/backhoe. And I've been assigned to work with a crew to extract a Cat D9 roadbuilder, which is the weight of an Abrams tank with a blade the size of a 2-car garage door, from a swamp area where it got itself stuck. Takes a skid tractor just to pull the winch cable off it, and when winching itself it can haul a pair of Cat D7's sideways uprooting trees and everything else. I know exactly the effects of preparing soft ground to have logging haul trucks operated on it. (and BTw, logging companies typically didn't purchase culverts for creek fords, they simply filled the fords in with waste timber and let the water run between the logs. Makes an awful mess but its nothing like getting a large hydraulic slasher on crawler tracks stuck in a swamp.. Thankfully the practice has been stopped here, but they had a grapple loader moving around a lot of suspiciopusly muddy crooked trunks with no explanation for why... Perhaps these crews were buying proper culverts, but it sure looked like an undisciplined operation, small and private. From what I saw this crew doing, they were nowhere near as tightly regulated as logging operations in Canada. They were leaving 2 or 3 foot stump cuttoffs lying all around their landings, never collected and no evidence of a truck which could have hauled them. Probably hollow sections, which sawmills hate. In Canada, every part of the trunk or branches of every tree over 2 1/2" diameter must be removed from the forest by truck and taken to the mill. Inspections were tight, to the point where the company in BC, where we worked piecework, was paying us the same price (30 cents per tree, 1970) for bringing out the broken bits as for bringing out 80 foot trees with two foot stumps. They had to operate a special "chunk truck" with solid bed and sides just to haul them out to the sawmill where I think they were simply run through the chip-n-saw or dumped into the chipper and trucked on out to a pulp mill, but that was the government rules strictly enforced.
A typical load in BC used logging trucks with 13' wide bunks, 10 foot stakes and a 50 foot reach. In Ontario they use 50' trailers with 8.5 foot bunks and 10' stakes. The trucks in the discovery show were hauling 8.5 foot bunks, 10' stakes and two settings of 16' or 20' logs. I'll let you calculate the tonnage at 1.25 tons per 8' x 4' x 4' cord softwood, 1.5 tons for hardwood, I'm not interested enough.
And no I was not overly impressed with the operation. Strictly amateur with too much money in equipment for the production and neither enough regulations or brains.
I know what I'm talking about and you don't.
No, you don't know what you are talking about. You continue to confuse self interest with reality.
1. Tar sands will not scale sufficiently to make a big difference.
2. Tar sands are an environmental disaster.
3. Tar sands will contribute to global warming.
I am losing my patience with your 'I am a self-righteous Canadian and you are dumb outsider'.
Are you serious???? Gotta say, you got nerve anyway. What's next, "Put on your sweatervest, my man, its fisticuffs!!!"
I merely require that anyone pontificating on a topic on which I am knowledgable provide acurate information, I don't care what country you're from. You don't.
And there's a difference between using softwood lumber studs, joists and rafters to build the frame of a house, and using hardwood planks to decorate your floors. Its the same difference as between using deerskin for moccasins or the walls of a teepee, and mink fur for a decorative stole.
Actually, it's more of an apples versus apples comparison.
The "Swamp" they're logging in the northeast US is the same thing as we would call "Muskeg" in Canada, except that in Canada we have much, much more of the stuff. It's not really swamp, its a form of organic soil that you get under cold, wet forest conditions when organic material does not decay fast enough. You can't drive on it except with special equipment.
The trees are different species, however. Northern Alberta tends to black spruce and jackpine, with few hardwoods other than aspen and birch. No really valuable hardwoods such as you find in the NE US. It's too bad, really, but good hardwoods can't survive the extremely cold winters.
You have to realize that the oil sands areas are all designated as commercial forest, and lumber companies have leases on most of the land. The forests will be logged. Then they will grow back and be logged again. It will be just like "Swamp Loggers", but with more rules.
If an oil sands mine moves in, they will just log it earlier, and replant it again after the mine is gone. There will be a gap in the middle when the mine is operating.
3. CO2 emissions are very significant
Exactly, Oil sands takes about 1 barrel of oil equivalent to produce 3 vs say 1 barrel to produce 20 with conventional oil. So every barrel of oil sands oil burned is actually 1.33 vs. every barrel of conventional oil being 1.05
From http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/09/20/TarSands/
And then there are the boreal forests - besides all the ecosystem destruction, carbon sinks are lost - from the same link
All this and water pollution for a few more years of BAU. We are truly an insane version of the human species.
In Canada there are 3,100,000 square kilometres of boreal forests. Perhaps 1/5000th of it overlies active oilsands mining projects (or should we use above's 1/1000th intermittently over the entire production life, eg 100 yrs.) whereas the forestry sector annually harvests approximately ½ of 1% (1/200th every year) of the region, primarily used to provide lumber and paper to the US. At one harvest per 80 years, that means 2/5th is used for timber harvesting. You should far sooner stop the use of studs and joists for housing, or toilet paper, if you had a clue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boreal_forest_of_Canada
That's the thing about these Americans and also Europeans, for some reason they think that Northern Canada is some kind of pristine wilderness that should never be touched. No! It's mostly commercial forest which has been earmarked to provide lumber for McMansions that they can live in and fuel for SUV's so they can drive to work. Lumber operations, oil mines, diamond mines, uranium mines, whatever provides work for Canadians.
If they want pristine wilderness, we have that too, in fact we have some of the world's largest national parks. Of course they can't get their except by canoe or bush plane, so they'll never see them, but if they did I'm sure they would like it. Unless something there killed them, but that's a different issue (I wish the tourists would stop getting themselves killed).
There you go again playing the nationalist card. Are you not ashamed of making such sloppy arguments?
And by the way, the Europeans are far energy efficient and emit far less CO2 than do the Canadians.
Let me also add an observation about natural resources. No country has every achieved a solid economic future through oil and gas production.
Even Saudia Arabia has a much lower standard of living than OECD countries and the Dutch disease referred to the fact that Netherland gas production hurt the non-gas sectors of the Dutch economy.
The reigning economics powers such as Japan, China, and Germany are not rich in natural resoures. Human capital is the key.
Finally, what has Alberta done with this oil money? Has it built a fast train system? Good public transport? A large public investment fund?
It's a good bet that Alberta is just squandering its wealth and will suffer a slump once the gas and oil is gone.
Typical short-sighted Anglo-Saxon mentality.
I'll grant that Europeans may be somewhat more energy efficient than Canadians, but also point out that Europeans don't provide the world anywhere near as much per-capita energy-intensive products as Canadians either. From the wheat in your pasta to the nickel in your stainless steel kitchens, etc. etc. etc. it mostly comes from Canada and requires large amounts of energy to provide. That holier-than-thou largely based on the "good fortune" of having had to import everything since day one, is getting a bit tired.
Canada is a supplier of raw materials, not finished goods. With the US as the principal importer.
And I didn't know that Germany had the good fortune to 'import everything since day one'.
:)
Canada is also a major supplier of manufactured goods to the US and other countries. In particular, Canadian automobile factories have a disproportionately large share of the North American market. However, the US is short of energy, and Canada has a large surplus, so Canada is the largest supplier of energy, particularly oil, to the US.
Well, simply invading other countries and seizing all their natural resources, as they attempted to do during WWI and WWII, didn't work.
No... Why should Americans be the only ones allowed to make sloppy nationalist arguments?
Yes, but Canada provides huge amounts of energy for other countries (notably the US), and the energy industry itself is very, very energy-intensive. Also, Canada is bigger than either the United States or Europe, and it takes a lot of energy just to get around the country.
How about Norway? As a result of their oil and gas revenues, they will have nearly $800 billion in the Pension Fund by 2014, and that is for a country of 4.7 million people. It's not too shabby compared to almost any other country you care to mention.
Well, it has built a first-class school system, and has first-class highways and a pretty good health system. And I think I have mentioned elsewhere the Calgary LRT system, which has a higher ridership than any light rail system in the US, including Boston. We're still lobbying for a high-speed rail link between Calgary and Edmonton, though.
See: The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund for details. Do you think these ideas don't occur to other people?
Hey! Who are you calling an Anglo-Saxon?!!! I only masquerade as one, and it's a thin disguise.
Roderick wrote "No country has every achieved a solid economic future through oil and gas production."
Actually, I'll challenge you on that. The US produced virtually all of it's own oil and gas until the mid 50's, and I would say that economically, it did pretty well in the first half of this century. Oil imports only reached 1mbpd in 1960, and didn't get above 2 mbpd until 1972, and have risen steadily since then. In fact, I'd say the gradual decline in US wealth has coincided with the gradual increase in oil imports.
And as for your comment about the reigning economic powers, the US, despite its decline, is still the reigning power, and has more natural resources than any other country on earth. This is what has made the difference between being a power and being THE power.
I think RMG has answered your points on Alberta fairly well, and having lived in Calgary myself, I would have to agree with him. Compare the standard of living, poverty rates, schools, transit, housing, health and health care, education etc of Alberta with Texas, and tell me which one of these oil producers has done a better job of looking after it's people, not just the people with oil money. Alberta has invested well in it's human capital, I'll bet the engineer to lawyer ratio (productive to non productive people) is better than any state in the US.
Re: "All this and water pollution for a few more years of BAU. We are truly an insane version of the human species."
Indeed. Why pursue something so destructive when we could run electric vehicles with some sort of renewable energy source? Too expensive? What is the true cost of global warming? What a ridiculous waste of money the US has blown on its Middle East conquest. Imagine a trillion dollars spent on solar, wind, weatherization, improving the grid, bullet trains... But no. Stupidity and arrogance rule, not just on this forum, but in the highest places of business and government.
The fact that some larger area is being destroyed by deforestation does not make an effective argument for a use of tar sands that has been documented as being worse than leaving it alone. The argument that extracting oil from the sand is "cleaning it" is the most ludicrous notion I've read about the matter--anywhere!
Those who've argued that extraction and 'replanting' trees to make up for the deforestation and toxic tailing ponds are bizarrely naive about the environmental consequences of this misguided attempt to maintain BAU. When the tar sands are spent, and the environment more degraded, global warming exacerbated, then what? More bright ideas Dr. Frankentarsand?
Unsupportable nihilistic nonsense. Logging those swamps is also worse than leaving them alone, just ask the beavers. When I notice you yelling as loudly for stopping that logging, I'll re-evaluate your motives.
C'mon Saildog,
The drawbacks of the oilsands are no worse than for any othernew oil projects being contemplated;
1. They can be scaled up as fast as the capital can be applied. If an "Alaskan Highway" type effort was wanted, it could be done, to get them from 1.4 to 5 mbpd. Currently, the oil companies are nuetral on them, at current prices. If oil is back above $100, and stays there, they will scale up. It is not much more capital intensive than deepwater GOM
2. Their production creates environmental impacts only in the area of the most naturally polluted soil on earth. Lots more forest area gets ripped up every day elsewhere in US and Canada, for less value product than oilsands. LA is a much greater environmental impact than the oilsands (and uses almost as much oil as they produce!)
3. CO2 emissions, when you take into account that from the final product, are all of 20% greater than conventional oil, and much less than the coal to oil being done in S. Africa and China, or the gas to oil being done in Malaysia.
4. The EROEI is not much different than any other NEW oil prospects. Look at what's involved with deepwater rigs. Or, look at any biofuels, none of them get close to oilsands. Much of the energy input is natural gas (and much of that is produced from within the oilsands themselves), so, it is in effect, leveraging NG into oil. NG is not currently a transport fuel, (and unfortunately is not likely to be come one), so this is a good use for it.
As for is it worth it? The only way to answer that question is are companies doing it? After all the costs involved, obviously it is. Even if there is a carbon tax (which I support) it will likely still be worth it. As long as there is a $6.4bn/day business in oil, we can expect these "unconventional" porjects to be developed, because there isn't much conventional stuff left, or not in safe countries, anyway.
From a Canadian perspective it's really great, because without oil sands, Canada would be a net oil importer by now, whereas with oil sands, Canada is the largest exporter of oil to the United States. The Canadian economy is doing really well compared to the countries which are past their oil peaks:
Headline in the Toronto Globe and Mail this morning:
...and we have the natural resources to support that extra activity.
From a global perspective, the negative comments are an example of the Perfect Solution Fallacy . The rebuttal to the perfect solution fallacy is that "an imperfect solution is better than no solution at all". There is no perfect solution to Peak Oil.
That's nice and let them preserve their nature. I saw the surroundings of Vancouver on t.v. during the wintergames and it is beautiful, comparable to the Alpes.
Are Govts starting to wake up?
You can add another country to watch:
Brazil
Furious drilling and development of new fields and not much to show for it.
C&C prod Jan05 1498mm bl/da
Dec05 1684
Dec06 1787
Dec07 1806
Dec08 1842
Oct09 1990
NET Increase of 492mm bl/da.
Gross additions(2005 to 2009):1400 to 1990mm bl/da.
I have given a range to account for ramp-up and underperformance.
The SOBBERING TRUTH is a base decline of 16-25% per year!
Marlim(offshore discovery in 1987)and it's satellites account for aprox 45% of total prod.
Tupi can't come fast enough!
Cheers!
Except that you are out by a factor of 1000. You mean thousand barrels per day not million!
Should have used k.
mm(milimeters) too small!
Actually that could be an excellent way for the EIA/IEA to report increased oil production. Just imagine how many barrels of oil a day we would be producing if we scaled them down to 1mm high :-)
Personally I'm beginning to wonder if the EIA is using "seasonally adjusted" barrels in recent reports as making sense out of them makes my head hurt.
Actually your gross additions are too low; Brazil brought on 2990 kb/d between 2006 and 2009, yet their production of C+C only increased 337.23
kb/d; liquids 433.66 kb/d. By 2008 20% of their liquids production is "Other," i.e. ethanol, with a tiny smidge of oil shale in there as well. In theory all of this fresh production should have brought down these drastically high decline rates some.
That's the key phrase. From here on out, its not so much a matter of excess of supply as it is of capability to pay. Economies which to now have depended on very cheap resource inputs are about to encounter resource supply restrictions due to the expanding ability of far more people to pay the price for them. Efficiency of economies relative imported resource inputs, and access to local resources will rule from here on.
..Economies which to now have depended on very cheap resource inputs are about to encounter resource supply restrictions due to the expanding ability of far more people to pay the price for them...
True, but it's a circular trap. If raw material costs go up, Chindia will pass this on in exports, then we get poorer , buy less Chindia tat, etc etc..
They'll simply develop their own consumers. I doubt the Chinese people would consider you are doing them a huge favour by consuming their product if in future you can't pay for it.
Figure 3 above shows the production to reserves ratio. I find it easier to understand if you switch that around and express it as reserves to production. Of course the oil sands would have a much higher reserves to production, about 250 or somewhere in that neighborhood. But conventional oil, around the world, should have pretty close to the same reserves to production ratio.
Of course newer fields will have a much higher reserves to production ratio and as they age that ratio will drop. And offshore will have a different ration than onshore. But looking at the whole world it all should average out or at least be relatively close.
It isn't. OPEC has a reserves to production ratio of about 87. The six Middle East OPEC nations of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi and the UAE have a combined reserve to production ratio of about 100. The entire non-OPEC world has a combined reserves to production ratio of conventional oil of about 20.
Now I know many will say that reserves have nothing to do with production. However some of these same people will put great store in the Hubbard Linearization method. This method is absolutely dependent upon there being a direct connection between reserves and production.
I know the connection is not absolute. That is there is no direct formula that will take production and from that calculate exactly what the reserves are. (Though the HL method tries to do exactly that by looking at cumulative production.) But for six nations to have a reserves to production ratio of 100 and the rest of the non-OPEC world to have a reserves to production ratio of 20 is beyond all reason.
Note: A R/P ratio of 87 would mean that about 1.15 percent of reserves are produce dach year, pretty close to what Figure 3 shows. And a R/P ratio of 20 would mean that 5 percent of reserves are produced dach year. That is pretty close to what Figure 3 shows if you combine FSU with the rest of non-OPEC. The six OPEC countries I mentioned, if they are to be believed, are producing about 1 percent of their reserves each year. But than makes no difference because that is "magic oil", with each barrel extracted being replaced with new barrel in the ground. Their proven reserves never decrease.
Ron P.
Regardless of the way you show the fraction, the issue is the one you point out--it is really bizarre that any group of countries could produce so little from their reserves each year, unless perhaps they were counting some amounts as reserves that are very viscous, and thus more like oil sands reserves (that have to be melted, and because of this can be produces only very slowly) or perhaps they were fibbing about the real reserve amount.
I didn't want to give the idea that reserves would last "n" years, so didn't make the calculation the direction you suggested.
Actually the magically flat reserves figures are by no means unique to OPEC; China stayed at 24 bbo from 1990-2002, producing 14.9 bbo in the meantime, if I have my math right. These flat figures aren't exclusive to oil, either, and is simply indicative of lack of pressure on these nations to provide realistic updates. You would expect better for OPEC but apparently OECD governments are happy with what they get.
Why pay Sir Dave the $19.95?
The USGS World Assessment 2000 gives 1107 Gb of conventional oil F50--proven and probable-- outside the USA.
In 2007 there was an update that saw 171 Gb of reserve growth plus 69 Gb off new discoveries. Let's assume world conventional oil production was 75 mbpd over 7 years that's a subtraction of 191 Gb. That means that in 2007 world mean reserves was 1156 Gb.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1021/pdf/OF07-1021_508.pdf
http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-060/sum1.html
I think the USGS puts out their World Assessments every 10 years; why not just wait for the next one.
I do believe that world oil supplies have peaked and production will be come more difficult but falling off a cliff?
Pah-leese!
Where's the beef?
Memmel would point to this. His red line is reported oil production. His blue line is how much oil he calculates was actually burned to balance atmospheric CO2.
http://mike-emmel.blogspot.com/2010/02/checking-exhaust-pipe-for-peak-oi...
Then there are the mysterious slides Matt Simmons produced last year
I explained to memmel why observed CO2 doesn't track emitted. If the paper I linked to in that explanation (in the Petroleum Demand article) doesn't suffice try it out at realclimate or openmind, you'll get something very detailed and nuanced I'm sure.
"Highly regarded confidential supply model"? Sounds like the kind of Engrish you see on shoddy installation instructions. BP sez 2005-2008 sums are:
2005 2006 2007 2008 Decreasing production -3,763 -2,420 -3,228 -3,602 Increasing production 5,946 3,412 2,667 4,215 Sum 2,182 992 -561 614Matt's presentations.
Good God!!!!!......Once again they have the almighty chart and graphs out!!!!
Just repeat after me:
300BB under Iraq.......
300BB under Iraq.......
300BB under Iraq.......
OK Doomers!!!! Keep scarfing down those cheese doodles and colas!!!!!
Aviator,
Very sloppy. The world is losing 4 million barrels of daily oil production each year. Iraq is hoping to produce 8 million to 12 million barrels in 2018.
So the world is going to lose 36 million barrels and Iraq hopes (intent) to make up less than 1/4 of the loss ...
Yes, you have a compelling argument ...
Gad, I love it!!!!!
You don't challenge me on the central premise of 300BB of oil beneath Iraq.....Thank you for graciously conceding the point...
Then, you note the Iraq production will only be 8 to 12MBD....
How do you KNOW????.....Maybe it will be 20MBD or 30MBD or 40MBD!!!!
Next up....will the world REALLY lose 36MBD of production capacity in
ONLY NINE YEARS???????!!!!!????....Dear God, even the apparently addled
Matt Simmons doesn't make that claim!!!!
Are you saying there will never, ever be another oilfield found or produced EXCEPT in Iraq??????
On the other hand, the good old U S of A STILL had the world's largest military....Bet that alone assures us of a continuing supply of 20MBD...
Gee, I guess that means someone else takes it in the shorts....
Toooooooooo Baaaaaaaddddd
Soooooooooooo Saaaaaaaaaad
Or 2.34 mb/day?
Anyway, everyone knows the 300 billion barrels are under the Falklands not Iraq. We'll let you have some if you tear up the Declaration of Independence. Just you wait - it will be the British Empire Strikes Back. Of course we might have to re-elect Margaret Thatcher and nuke Argentina a few times until they get the message.
Hey, I can seriously hallucinate as well as you can!!!!
But we can be cured. Join the church of Memmel and see the dark^h^h^h^h light.
Here's IEA member countries tracked imports from Saudi Arabia by grade plus totals over the last decade. Data from IEA (Edited to update with preliminary 2009 data)
Light exports to IEA members peaked in 2002 at 2.84 mb/d
Total exports to IEA members peaked in 2003 at 4.65 mb/d
BP's figures are simply a reporting exercise. They report figures. They don't verify them.
The truth is oil and gas figures are very mushy.
Falling off a cliff does not have to happen for the world to have a severe problem. Regular TOD readers have known about goofy OPEC reserve numbers since I started following Peak Oil about 5 years ago when I went by the handle "practical". No way are OPEC oil wells different from those in the rest of the world.
The statistical ratios of production to reserves should fall into a normal distribution. For there to be orders of magnitude in the range discussed above shows that somebody is lying. The distribution is not normal. The question then is why?
Since OPEC is a cartel which is prima facie evidence of collusion, it does not take rocket science to figure out who is not telling the truth.
In a free market it is the marginal unit that sets the price for the whole shebang. This is true of all markets but more so when the item has a finite supply. Rapid run ups in price can occur as the the last marginal unit is sought by one more bidder than seller. The stock market is notorious for this behavior.
This is what happened in the 2008 oil market and it can happen again. It is obvious that with ever increasing human population and, more importantly, fast rising world vehicle numbers that something has to give. With conventional petroleum production stagnant to falling in the infamous plateau the plot is set.
At some point there will be one more bidder than seller for the marginal barrel and the price will rise. Perhaps it is already happening. Gradually and usually not so gradually other bidders will figure out the situation just as in 2008.
Then the oil market will be upward bound until the economy can't handle it again. Those countries with weak economies due to wars, debt, high labor costs, environmental regulations and other mismanagement will be out bid by countries like China or India.
That marginal barrel is worth more to them because they are not constrained so much by the factors I just mentioned.
That is the beef of the situation.
Because oil reserves are not 'normally' distributed, they are concentrated in a small number of places.
Why isn't more corn grown in Alaska than Iowa or the Sahara desert?
http://certmapper.cr.usgs.gov/rooms/we/index.jsp
An old estimate of the USGS--geologists (1993) gave the following;
Area Reserve Mean undiscovered Used up
North America 51Gb 44Gb 199Gb
South America 49Gb 56Gb 44 Gb
Europe 41Gb 21 22
Asia/Aus 71 71 44
FSU 129 151 109
Africa 76 51 56
Middle East 597 141 186
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1998/of98-468/meast_oil.htm
Yes there have been unexpected finds off Brazil and Africa since 1993 but in the list above
59% of the reserves were in the Middle East followed by 13% for the FSU.
Perhaps it would be a good thing if Middle East oil production fell off a cliff.
Good for oil industry bankers who stand to profit from a huge infusion of investment dollars.
Good for ethanol farmers who'd like to hurry the switch to E85.
But is it probable given expert assessment of the USGS? No.
Also there's the fact that non-OPEC ROW oil production has been flat for 5 years while OPOEC has been rising.
You tell the sad tale of the End of Oil fairly well, but is it likely to be true?
I think you just totally missed the point. He's not talking about geographical distribution at all. Quite how you get a normal distribution in terms of location I don't know.
Yes, Majorian completely missed the point X was trying to make. But I am not surprised. X wrote:
Now no one could make a point clearer than that. But Majorian still got it wrong. He/she somehow thought X was talking about the distribution of reserves and not the distribution of reserves to production ratio, although X could have not been clearer.
Ron P.
What does this even mean?
The ratio of production to reserves(P/R) would be P/(URR- cummulative production) which equals K, the theoretical logistic growth rate x cummulative production/ URR. This P/R rate would decline depending on the inferred K rate, which varies by oil field, and the URR which is only inferred over a period of time.
The same goes for the decline rate which varies depending on the URR; decline rate = K x (1-2*cummulative/URR).
Let's he's refering to the ratio P/R of fields at peak.
The decline rate for fields at peak = 0% decline.
For example let's assume that a field has a inferred logistic growth rate of 6.5%, if the field is running at a decline rate of 4% by HL theory then the field has only 20% of the URR in reserves;
-4%/6.5% = (1 - 2*Q/URR), Q=.807*URR.
Since the decline rate is always changing I don't see how statistics applies here.
Ghawar in the Nov 2008 report was having a 0.3% decline with peak occuring in 1980. That suggests that the URR of Ghawar is colossal.
IOW, it seems that X is confusing the logistic curve which describes production versus reserves with a statistical normal distribution for sets of data. Has someone actually attempted to 'normalize' P/R or decline rates?
Blame WebHubbleTelescope for this kind of foolishness, not me.
Majorian what in heavens name are you talking about.
No, that is not what production to reserves ration is at all. The term is far more often used in the inverse, reserves to production ratio, or R/P ratio. But either way it means exactly the same thing. One way it is expressed in years, the inverse is expressed as a percent of reserves produced each year. It has absolutely nothing to do with cummulative production or K. You are just making things up. All you had to do was Google the term and you would have gotten hundreds of hits that explained it. Reserves to production ratio is one of the most commonly used terms in the oil industry. And the fact that you do not have a clue as what it means... means...
Wikipedia: Reserves-to-production ratio
You wrote:
No X was not confusing anything. H stated exactly the same thing I said in my first post today at 12:21 PM. I wrote:
The Middle Eastern nations I named have a combined R/P ratio of 100 while all of non-OPEC has a R/P ratio of 20, or orders of magnitude greater for the OPEC nations. X correctly says: " For there to be orders of magnitude in the range discussed above shows that somebody is lying. "
If that is not enough to explain who is confused, you or X, then go here:
Global Oil Reserves-to-Production Ratios, 2004
Notice that the map shows that the only nations with R/P ratios from 43 to 100 and over 100 are Middle Eastern OPEC nations, OPEC nations of Libya and Nigeria and Venezuela, another OPEC nation. Middle Eastern non-OPEC nations of Oman, Yemen and Syria have R/P ratios of around 20, exactly the same as the rest of the non-OPEC world. The same can be said of other non-OPEC North African nations, they all have normal R/P ratios. But the OPEC nation of Angola also has a "normal" R/P ratio also. Why? Angola only joined OPEC two years ago. It would have been a dead giveaway if they had suddenly raised their "proven" reserves upon joining OPEC.
Are you still confused?
Ron P.
Your link points to a map?
But this isn't about geography?
So what is the normal distribution of R/P on your map.
Ronny-boy,
you want to start a fight.
I came here for an argument.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM
Are you being wilfully dense? The R/P ratio has NOTHING to do with the maps! That there is a link discussing this factor which utilises a guide to where such oil deposits are has absolutely no relevance to the issues X and Darwinian are referring to. It's like looking at a map of a ratio for rich to poor people around the world and you're nitpicking the effect of where people live, rather than the actual conditions relevant to the value being measured.
He he, he is just being wilfully dense of corse. No one could really be that dense. But he got hammered in the debate and exposed to the list what he really knows about oil reserves so he came back with some stupid Monty Python video to try to cover up for his lack of knowledge about the subject being discussed.
Well on second thought perhaps he is not just being wilfully dense.
Ron P.
This started with Ronnie giving his unsupported opinion that OPEC was running out of oil reserves.
My point was that the total reserves of the PG and OPEC bigger than ROW and that looking at the EIA production data from 1986 onward OPEC production was rising faster than than ROW production and used this as evidence that ROW should peak before OPEC. This agrees with Hubbert's curve for oil fields.
Now X comes along with the bright idea that the production to reserve ratio(inverse of Ronnie's R/P in the earthwatch map)
of OPEC is out of the 'normal distribution'. First I mention that oil resources are not evenly distributed so the idea that OPEC oil reserve to production ratios
need to be the same as ROW is apples and oranges. There is no reason that Russia or the USA which are pumping oil like mad with relatively small reserves are more 'average' than OPEC--it's just their policy to do so.
I try to explain that complaining that PG counties which according to Colin Campbell and others are not yet peaking aren't declining at the same rate as well past peak ROW countries makes zero sense. The decline rate of countries well past peak is much higher than at peak according to HL theory.
Even now Admiral,
I am certain you cannot comprehend what I am trying to convey to you(probably because you don't want to understand).
As to the Monty Python episode,
Michael Palin who wanted an argument didn't want mere abuse from Graham Chapman which is what I'm getting from you and Ronnie.
The map is good not because it points to geography but because it points to politics and transparency. Is it incidental that the extremely high R/P ratios are found in countries that are not exactly democratic and transparent.
Gustu
then r/p is resources/production. i thought this discussion was about opec RESERVES being overstated.
It is RESERVES to production ratio. And those RESERVES are overstated. Did you not read the Wiki definition or R/P ratio above Elwood? That is exactly what we are talking about. Their R/P ratio is vastly overstated.
Ron P.
you seem to use reserves and resources interchangeably.
The Wiki definition explained that the term "Reserves to Production Ratio" can be used on any type of resources. That is it can be coal, oil or gas. It is usually only applied to fossil fuels. In any case it always means some form of non-renewable resource. From the Wiki definition:
In this thread oil is the resource we are discussing. Check out Figure 3 above. Here Gail is talking about Production to Reserves Ratio and the resource she is talking about is oil.
But resources can mean reserves but one must make clear what type of resources he is talking about. In this thread there was never any doubt that the resource being discussed was oil.
Ron P.
oil resources do not equal oil reserves.
resource is a term in general use in the oil and gas industry refering to an area that may or may not contain economically recoverable oil or gas, that have not been proven(p90), that doesn't rise to the level of probable(p50) and doesn't rise to the level of possible(p10).
based on the term - resources - in general use in the oil and gas industry, opec's resources are probably as grossly understated as us shale gas resources are overstated.
you seem to be using oil resources interchangeably with oil reserves.
USGS is irrelevant. I have talked to the USGS. Their definition is technical feasibility. Not economic or commercial viability or commercially scalable.
The SEC does not allow US oil companies to use technical feasilibity. Reason? Oil reserves that can't be extracted profitability are irrelevant to valueing a company.
Similarly, no reason to believe the USGS estimates are relevant for world oil production. World oil production is a market, profit driven exercise.
X,
I agree with your analysis. However, normal distribution is just a statistical assumption of convenience. Many phenomenon have fat tails and are better described by the Cauchy distribution.
Majorian you seem to think the USGS publications are holy writ. The USGS simply quotes the exact same figures that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and every other OPEC nation feeds them. The USGS has never done a survey in those countries. Why do you continue to quote them as if their data carries any more weight than the data the OPEC nations publish since that is the source of their data?
Ron P.
Fine, Ron.
I did mention Colin Campbell's estimate(378 Gb) but you scoffed at him too and pulled 270 Gb out of the air for the PG.
I don't buy your theory that the USGS just uses whatever data OPEC shoves at them.
Where is the smoking gun for your conspiracy theory?
L. F. Buz Ivanhoe discussed this matter in the first issue of the Hubbert Center Newsletter.
http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/Ivanhoe_96-1.pdf
http://hubbert.mines.edu
Conspiracy theory? What makes it a conspiracy. There is absolutely no conspiracy anywhere when it comes to proven oil reserves.
The EIA and the USGS gets information from the BP Stastical Review, World Oil and Oil & Gas Journal. And they publish the fact that these publications are the source of their information. And these folks get their information from the foreign oil companies such as ARAMCO, when they can. Of The make no bones about it because the numbers they report are the exact same figures reported by these countries.
As I pointed out earlier, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly has pointed out that these numbers are inflated. They put Kuwait oil reserves at 48 GB, half of that proven and the other half probable. Kuwait Oil Company, the USGS, Oil & Gas Jouranl, World Oil and the BP Stastical Review all report that Kuwait has from 104 to 99.425 GB of reserves.
EIA: World Proved1 Reserves of Oil and Natural Gas, Most Recent Estimates
Ron P.
Majoran,
The USGS does not have access to OPEC countries. How are they going to do analysis?
Also what is the USGS defininition of reserves? I only see technical feasibility. I would doubt the USGS has the expertise to determine whether whether resources are commercially recoverable ...
I have looked at USGS documents. They don't talk about proven reserves or probable reserves. Certainly not in the document where they ungraded Venezuela oil reserves.
Proven oil reserves is an SEC concept.
The USGS looks at oil and gas as physical resources and ask only if they can technically recoverable. It does not answer the question of whether the resoures are commercially recoverable.
There is no economics in the USGS analysis.
"Holy Moly Batman, I wonder what else is new."
"Very true Robin, It was common knowledge in the 1980's but apparantly it got lost. Why would anyone believe Campbell or Laherrere? The references to 2007 are to make the author feel better. Their actual publications were much much earlier."
"Ya never know Batman, one day they just might read 'Twilight in the Desert' like it was just written yesterday."
Pretty much my take..not exactly news to anyone round here
But seemingly it is becoming official canon.. will we see counter statements from with in the system?
I doubt it...probably more meaningless stuff with the word "challenges" thrown in
My pain Med has my head screwed up today. I thought I was understanding what was being said that OPEC was misrepresenting the amount of crude they had but then I read something about Batman and Robin. Did Batman or Robin write Twilight in the Dessert? Man I got to lay down, my head is spinning.
hotrod
Really, we can use all the imaginary numbers we want (or even get into N space if it gets your rocks off), but this is some of the greatest fiction ever written, even surpassing Greek Ferry Schedules of the 1960's.
Will the UK be the first country to officially acknowledge peak oil?
This article suggests that possibility.
Leaders at Closed-Door UK Meeting on “Inevitable” Peak Oil Crisis Weigh Possible Solutions to Energy Scarcity
http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/leaders-at-closed-door-uk-meeting-on-“inevitable”-peak-oil-crisis-weigh-possible-solutions-to-energy-scarcity325/
Posted by Zoe Macintosh on March 25, 2010 at 1:20 pm
"The group agreed that the exact date of a global peak in oil production was irrelevant compared to its inevitability and associated risks, but the working estimate during the meeting was 3-4 years from now, as the world recovers from its present recession."
Obviously different people perceive peak oil in different ways. To say they predict peak oil to occur in 3-4 years from now, is to reject the idea of a peak plateau that began in 05 to the present, suggesting they anticipate supply to exceed that plateau to a new peak. I wonder how much they anticipate the flow to climb?
Then again, I suppose the tale of the tape will be whether or not oil production can increase to a new level. Wow, that would be quite a feat, but possible I suppose with all the promise of oil in Iraq and the constant drilling to install more super straws in the largest old fields that supply 90% of world oil.
Hi Gail,
A key issue is whether or not demand can be satisfied by some alternate means. If this is true, then supply and demand might not diverge for some time.
It seems pretty clear (I guess) that wind and solar and the associated infrastructure (transmission lines to electric vehicles) will not scale up in time to completely offset the decline in oil.
It also seems pretty clear that more exotic technologies (algae, next gen nuke, etc) can't scale up in time.
Coal, deep sea oil, tar sands, ethanol, etc all seem to have significant challenges to be cost effective. Even Iraq oil has some major hurtles to overcome. But, the one area that confuses me is US NG. I asked Rockman about this a while back (and I really trust his comments) and he basically said it all depends upon price.
Could the proclaimed abundance of NG really be a factor in significantly delaying the impact of PO here in the US? I know that using NG for transportation is not a walk-in-the-park, but the technology is proven and people like Pickens are willing to put lots of $ behind the effort.
So, how likely is it that a slightly scaled down BAU could continue for a couple more decades in the US because of NG?
I get the impression that the US is not considering NG vehicles for the following reasons:
1. It is not as energy dense as oil. This gives the vehicles less range (if single fuel) or less storage room (if duel fuel) and also less
power unless the engine is configured specifically for NG.
2. Although retrofitting existing cars is common in Europe it is rare in the US, because the oil lobby has effectively regulated it out of existence.
3. Building enough infrastructure to get the technology off the ground will be expensive and require large government subsidy.
4. It is not high tech so it is not sexy.
5. It is not particularly green so it is not sexy.
6. It does not require large amounts of R and D so the the auto industry cannot get huge government grants to 'develop' the technology.
It works. But that counts for very little.
Ralph, While it is obvious that the US govt is not pushing NG vehicles, I disagree with your reasons stated;
1." It is not as energy dense as oil." Neither is ethanol, and battery-electric is worse by 10x, yet this is being pushed. An NG vehicle can more power, more storage space, longer range and faster refuelling than any EV built or planned, yet the government IS pushing EV's so this can't be the issue
2. I'm not sure if the oil lobby is to blame here, but given the way Exxon etc are moving into natural gas, which they produce here, instead of buying oil from Saudi etc, I wouldn't be surprised to see the oil majors change tune on this. Consider also that with CNG/LNG, you can fill up at a gas station, in a few minutes. With electric, you can't fill up at a gas station at all, so then the oil companies get nothing.
3. NOt that much infrastructure is required. Equipment is off the shelf (yes, it costs, but so do ordinary tank installations too). The natural gas grid covers 90% of the population, and there is the potential for many places to easily do a CNG outlet that could not do a gasoline outlet, due to rules about underground tanks etc. Any shopping mall could do one.
4. Agreed on this
5. It is just as green as an electric, given that 70% of electricity is coal or gas. Methane can be produced as a biofuel, and this is already being done. So you could run you CNG car on landfill gas and cow manure. But still, can't compete with the image of solar panels and electrics. But when you realise an electric + solar panels is $100k, it can't compete with any real vehicles.
6. Wrong . The fact that it can use existing engines, tooling etc which the car companies have, and is paid off, is a huge plus. Contrary to popular belief, the car industry is in the business of building and selling cars, R&D is a necessary evil. The small block Chevy v-8 was developed in ther 50's and is still in use today (the basic block, the rest has changed), that makes for profitable business. The car industry would rather stay with what they know. Gov grants don't come close to matching the real costs of R&D.
One other point in favour of NG is that it can all be produced domestically - that is energy security in a nutshell.
I think #4 is the real kicker. It is not sexy for consumers or politicians. BUt your last statement, that it works, is correct, and that is why some corporate fleets, and city buses are going to it. The fuel cost is less than half of gasoline or diesel, and if you have vehicles that drive everyday, that adds up fast. Watch for the railroads to start seriously looking at this too.
There are already 7 million CNG vehicles on the roads around the world - we won't even have that many hybrids on the road by the end of this decade, let alone electrics.
I don't think that the supposed abundance of natural gas can delay the impact of peak oil for several reasons:
1. The big impact of peak oil is on the financial system, because of its need to grow, and loss of ability to do so. NG will not be sufficient to restart the growth phenomenon, so leaves us where we were on the financial meltdown.
2. Even if NG could be ramped up, it would be a slow and expensive process (considering drilling, pipelines, new / refurbished vehicles). The cost would make it very difficult to do, and limit its benefit. Its short timeframe it lasts, once it is up, would limit it further.
3. New NG is likely to be expensive. This means many people's electricity bills will be going up, limiting what they have to spend on other things, and making recession worse.
Gail,
There is no intrinsic connection between oil prices and leverage. Review the 1974 oil crisis.
The last recession was triggered by bad debt, not oil prices. And by the way, it's over. Despite your assertions to the contrary.
Most postwar recessions followed the same pattern. Accelerating inflation. Fed raises interest rates. Recession.
The fact that oil prices were rising at a time of accelerating inflation is not surprising - when it rains, umbrellas appear.
But that doesn't mean oil prices caused the recession.
I just finished reading this thread, and it makes me so sad. I was a lurker here for weeks before I finally decided to register. It is quite obvious to me that everybody here is very intelligent, and well informed too. Everybody is in agreement about the important stuff- it's running out, how much is left is being exagerrated, there are too many people, the ramp-down is going to be ugly, etc. Why are you ripping into each other about source validity and statistical minutiae? It sounds like a Congressional hearing when you read it, everybody trying to tear the other down. :(
We're human.
and now you know everything you need to understand why politics fails on these subjects.
Because we have Big Egos and message boards promote the Dark Side ...
However, there are some legitimate and important points of disagreement. It drives me crazy when people cite official data sources that are known to be inaccurate or irrelevant. For example, we have the US Geological Survey crowd who earnestly believe the USGS is producing estimates of technically feasible and commercially recoverable oil reserves.
However, USGS estimates are based solely on technical feasibility.
The difference between technical feasibility and commercial recoverability is the difference between saying when we can send a man to the Moon and saying it is profitable to send a man to the Moon.
:)
Yup Roddy.......ya finally got something right...y'all are ego maniacs and DOOMERS!!!!!!!!!!!
Repeat after me:
300BB under Iraq
300BB under Iraq
300BB under Iraq
plus a humorous DOOMER thinks:
300BB under the Falklands
300BB under the Falklands
300BB under the Falklands
Yep....scarf down them cheeze doodles....We're bringing back the HUMMER!!!!
Why would there be 300BB under the Falklands? Now you're just trolling.
This is an issue. I was feeling some of that way myself, but then saw how well some folks responded to the goofy claims of others.
There are a number of organizations that are spreading their version of "truth" that are pretty well spun to the group's liking. Some of our readers have fallen for this stuff, especially if the groups paint themselves as do-good organizations. It is hard to find a simple way to deal with this. People like to believe what they have been told by "nice" folks.
Not quite true. There are a number of cornucopians here, and others who bring (mostly unsupported) concepts about how the US cannot possibly ramp down for political reasons, the Earth can support 10 billion people with no problem, or that car pooling will save us. And then we have guest villains like "cells" for a little added excitement.
Though your point is true for the majority of posters, the nature of the forum does not lend itself to preaching to the choir.
There are two reasons for this that I can think of off the top of my head.
The first is that for the majority we are talking of (or for me, at least) the timing of the effects is critical. We think it's coming...but when? Next Tuesday, or ten years after I die? Where, geographically, will the effects be felt first? What form will the effects of peak oil take, and in what order? I think we all want better data to help us prepare ourselves, or allow us to lobby for or support timely changes in policy. We bring our ideas here to be tested. I'm actually a little disappointed when nobody takes the time to slag me (only a little, mind you.)
The second is that the devil is in the details, and climate change and peak-oil deniers are looking for chinks in the armour- areas of uncertainty or disagreement to use as an entry point to discredit the whole idea, or delay it's discussion. It's not enough to just "have a feeling" about it. We need a consensus, or at least an agreement on terms of reference. In the months I've been reading here, I think I have seen some movement towards this, but without graphs, well, I'm just speculating...perhaps if we look at the Poster Grumpiness Index...or were to chart the Smart Alec Comment Reserves ...
I have been arguing for some time that, for Peak Oil to be taken seriously at the government level, some respected, credible body has to call the bluff of the various reporting agencies. "The scientist and researchers from Oxford University" are about as respected and credible as you can get so, hopefully this is just an opening shot in what will become a salvo.
If and it's a big if, the UK government were to side with the challengers and say "We do not believe the evidence supports the reserve figures being put forward and as a result are going to set our own timetable for Peak Oil", that would be a real breakthrough.
As a side note. When I try to explain the concept of Peak Oil to some people in my neck of the woods a common retort is ,"America has lots of oil, they're just hoarding it, preferring to use other peoples oil first." At that point I either roll my eyes and give up or try to point out that, based on the ratio of oil production to oil reserves, that is absolutely not the case. A quick google search brought up this article posted by Gail on March 6, 2008 by Matt Mushalik from which Gail got all the graphs for this post. The following is a graph that was not used.
Which could be interpreted to suggest that the US has been producing as hard as it can but, the amount of production resulting from this effort has been declining steadily. At least it should be quite obvious that if anybody is guilty of hoarding, that would be OPEC, if you believe their reserve numbers.
Alan from the islands
OPEC has a disproportionate number of the world's largest onshore oil fields. Research by the Upsalla University group suggests that these giant fields also decline more slowly.
I think that implies their reserve/production ratio should be larger.
The giant oil fields like Ghawar have been in production a half century.
Comments welcomed.
Islandboy,
It would be great if scientists actually were well-respected and taken seriously, but the "climate-gate" flap has reduced the already iffy respectability of scientists (in the U.S., anyway). Getting people to really get up and do something about peak oil will probably require the intervention of Hollywood celebrities.
Ah, but, these researchers are from Oxford University, a university that in Commonwealth countries enjoys the reputation and prestige that MIT or Harvard enjoys in the US. Anyone can correct me if I'm wrong but, people tend not to question the academic qualifications of Oxford graduates, like MIT or Harvard, you just don't get to go there if you're not in the top x percentile of applicants. In many countries, among the intelligentsia, it is a badge of honor to have graduated from Oxford. Are you saying that if researchers from MIT or Harvard put out research like this, it would not be taken seriously?
Alan from the islands
While I personally have plenty of respect for scientific research done at the research universities, plenty of people around here don't really understand that some research is better than other research.
I teach freshman composition part-time at a local university. Part of my job is helping students understand just that--that not all research is equally valid. It is a job at which I am not 100% successful, and part of the problem is attitudes of parents and the local culture ("Fox News" oriented) about science and scientists that the students bring to class.
The quality of research conducted at a given university or institution just is not on the radar screen for many of these students and, based on comments I hear in class, their parents.
Even getting students to understand that the "Wall Street Journal" is not a scholarly source is a struggle (they say, "but it has 'journal' in the title!").
The fact that our most recent past president graduated from Harvard has also not helped Harvard's reputation among people who do rank universities using criteria other than the success of their sports teams.
I forgot about Dubya and Harvard, otherwise I would have left them out, honestly;-) So, I'll just stick with MIT. The point I am making is that, there may be more than a few people in positions of power and/or influence in countries around the world that might be more inclined to pay attention to this study because of it's source. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore graduated from THE other British university, Cambridge and would be one candidate if he were still in office. As it stands his son, also a graduate of Cambridge (Mathematics and Computer Science), is the current Prime Minister of Singapore.
Alan from the islands
I think I do understand your point (I could be mistaken---it happens!). I just think that having a few people in power pay attention to, and understand, the problem isn't going to be enough. Those people are unlikely to be able to make any headway on addressing the problem until the public recognizes that the problem exists.
Here in the Southeastern U.S., the public isn't especially impressed with science and scientists right now, regardless of where and how the research is conducted, so the problem is going to have to be brought to the public's attention by some other person/people. In the U.S., the most successful group, in terms of raising awareness of issues, seems to be celebrities--- from television, film, and sports. (Again, I could be mistaken.)
Once the problem is more widely recognized and enough citizens start making a fuss (because they've paid attention to some celebrity who has been convinced and started spreading awareness of Peak Oil), then the people crafting legislation, rules, and guidelines will have a chance to do something worthwhile to address the problem. It just seems terribly unlikely to me that the few people in positions of influence who might pay attention to any work coming out of Cambridge/MIT/etc. will be able to make anything happen before then, regardless of how "convinced" those people are.
I guess I am just expressing one non-US perspective. AFAIAC there is a fixation with celebrity (celebrity worship) in the US in particular that borders on insanity. On a trip to Europe last year I don't remember as much of an intense interest in the affairs of celebrities as I get from the US media. Celebrities should worship their fans and not the other way round. It's going to be interesting to see what happens to some of these mega stars when essentials (food, clothing, shelter) and energy start to consume most of peoples income.
Alan from the islands
My take on the UK population view is that they tend to regard Oxford & Cambridge people as "very clever" but that's orthogonal to the issue of if they consider scientists in general to be "honest". If they are in the group who consider scientists as a type to be "underhand people" then they consider Oxford university scientists to be "particularly slippery underhand people". (I ought to declare an interest: to judge from when I was there, I'd agree that Oxford researchers tend to be clever but that this has no correlation with morals. Where I'd disagree is that competing experiments (NOT peer review) should to weed out fraudulent theories. (Peer review is designed to weed out inconclusive and poorly formulated experiments; in experimental sciences clever deliberate fraud isn't expected to be detected by a peer reviewer). Of course, that's the problem with climate science: it's very difficult to do independent experiments with which to validate things.)
I have no understanding of your comment. I am not interested in whether Oxford and Cambridge researches are viewed as 'moral'. I am interested in their research.
Global warming forecasts are built on chemistry and physics.
Global warming is not difficult to understand. CO2 and other gases absorb infrared radiation and hence prevent it from radiating back to space. What is so difficult? No chemist or physicist is going to dispute that assertion. That CO2 is a greenhouse gas is well known.
Global CO2 levels have doubled since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the earth temperature has risen.
We also know that the earth has experienced tropical temperatures as far North as the Pole and those high temperatures occurred when CO2 were approximately five times current levels.
The science is not hard or disputable. The average human being doesn't have the intellectual capacity to connect the dots. The proof is this ridiculous notion that a cold winter in the Northern hemisphere some how casts doubt on the global warming trend.
Global warming is a forecast of global temperature, not local.
And statistics doesn't care much for single observations (a hard winter in the UK).
The psychology literature on cognitive dissonance clearly shows that human judgment has inherent biases.
In 1914 crowds gathered London chanting "We want War! We want War!".
The war was expected to last a couple weeks ...
I was responding to islandboy's point that suggested that being in the xth percentile meant the scientists should be listened to by pointing out that it's not just cleverness that matters.
I don't know whether you've been a professional scientist or not; if so I may be telling you things you already know. Science is intensely competitive, and I've seen cases involving other people that have been bordering on "stealing of ideas/credit". Just because you're clever doesn't mean you won't do anything to get ahead The only reason that there's not more actual fabrication of results, such as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_Woo-Suk
is that it's almost certain to be found out by other experimenters. This is why I believe scientists, not how clever they are.
I'd also suggest that you're exaggerating how obvious it is that CO2 will induce significant global warming. I happen to believe that's true, because that's what the experts predict, but I genuinely don't have the detailed theoretical and experimental background to determine that this is the dominant effect. I did have a look at some of the papers about the data pre-processing to compensate for "experimental" defects, because that's a general area I have some experience in. This is things like "before 1986 these ocean sensors were calibrated by a different procedure, so you have to shift old data in such-and-such a way", technical issues about interpeting ice cores, etc, and my primary reaction was "I'm bloomin' glad I don't work in that field". Making these kind of changes is valid if it genuinely reflects your knowledge, but it would be so easy to pick assumptions in order to get a positive result on the data, particularly given the relatively few "experimental samples" (core samples, etc) that are taken compared to the sheer number of variables in the earth's climatic conditions over the course of a couple of millennia. (For example, I'd be interested to know what physical evidence and theories were used to establish the co-incidence of tropical temperatures in the arctic and 5xCO2. I would think they'd be convincing, but I'd also think that they're going to be much, much more subtle, indirect and theory bound than the confimation of Newton's law's of motion that happen in school physics classes.) Indeed, the climate gate emails that worry me are teh ones that are ambiguous about whether they're "working harder" on legitimate data preprocessing is in order to squeeze out statistical significance, or whether actual directions of preprocessing are being chosen because they'll lead to significance.
To reiterate, I do think there's a significant chance AGW is happening, but I think that that's because scientific experts say that, not because I could actually critically read a climate research paper. And my reason for believing the experts is not that they're clever Oxford people with perfect morals, but because if they were to use their cleverness to fabricate results they'd be skewered by competitors. That's the reaons the general public should believe their results. (The fact the general public doesn't probably does have connections with inherent biaes, as you say.)
Who said anything about climate science? In this case AFAICT we are talking about petroleum geology and statistics. In the article that Gail referrs to for this post, the following statement is made:
Without seeing the actual paper, the research by these very clever people seems to be saying "somebody is either lying about their reserves or being very careful with their production of said reserves". This is more of an accusation of incompetence/ineptitude at best or dishonesty at worst. How does that call into question the honesty or morals of the accuser?
Alan from the islands
Alan, with all respect, but are you not following the critical news about oil on TOD ?
Very careful ? Why then a Saudi Aramco official said that KSA is 'losing' 500.000-1 million bopd every year from their mature fields ? That won't happen when their R/P ration is that high.
Why they are planning a CO2-EOR project in Ghawar, why they start exploring deep under the Red Sea if they just could open up the tap some more this and the next decades ? Why they want $70-80 oilprices now and are not satisfied with $22-28 anymore like from 2002-2004 ?
I was bringing in awh's point about "the climate-gate flap" that you responded to with your point about "Oxford's intake being in the top x percentile". (In the below, please assume I'm replying to points made in the WHOLE of this subthread rather than just the post I'm replying to.)
The big point that I was making is that just because someone is clever does not mean that what they say is accurate (ie, "true") and hence that they should be trusted. One of the virtues of the scientific system, that I explicitly wouldn't expect to apply to "elite university" people in politics and similar areas, is that it should strongly discourage papers touting fraudulent results because discovery almost certainly end a scientific career. I have no knowledge of the background of this paper, and I would hope that it is reliable regardless of the morals of the paper writers (I don't see that calling them "accusers" sheds any light on the issue) because in academia the penalty for skewing results and analysis is so high. In contrast, as is frequently lamented around here, oil company spokesmen, "independent" experts like Daniel Yergin, politicians, journalists, etc, can ride out having made "self-serving proclamations" and make more proclamations.
Basically, I was just irked by islandboy's suggestion that one should take account of "elite university" people just because they're clever. The reason one should be able to trust scientific experts at universities is because in that career there's a stiff penalty for saying things that are motivated by anything other than fitting the facts.