Drumbeat: February 14, 2011
Posted by Leanan on February 14, 2011 - 10:19am
Administration to Push for Small ‘Modular’ Reactors
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s 2012 budget proposal will include a request for money to help develop small “modular” reactors that would be owned by a utility and would supply electricity to a government lab, people involved in the effort say.The department is hoping for $500 million over five years, half of the estimated cost to complete two designs and secure the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s approval. The reactors would be built almost entirely in a factory and trucked to a site like modular homes.
Probe of Texas Outages Focuses on Preparation
NEW YORK—The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator that serves 85% of the power demand in the state, said Monday that widespread outages seen across the state on Feb. 2 were caused by unusually cold weather that froze equipment at power plants."It is something we have never experienced before," Ercot Chief Executive Trip Doggett said about the number of plants that tripped offline at once. There were "dramatically more" plants shut at one time than ever seen on the grid and rolling outages helped prevent a statewide blackout that could have lasted at least 50 hours.
Gazprom cuts gas prices for some European clients
MOSCOW (Reuters) Gazprom, Russia's top energy firm, said on Monday it agreed to cut gas prices in its long-term contracts for some European clients in 2010 on the back of sagging demand and low spot prices.It also said it agreed to include a spot price element into its long-term contracts with some European companies, while raising take-or-pay obligations on some who received concessions.
Chile: energy measures shouldn't hit copper mines
(Reuters) - Planned energy-saving measures to reduce electricity voltages and save hydroelectric reservoir waters should not affect copper mines in south-central Chile, Mining and Energy Minister Laurence Golborne said on Monday.
The Philippines: Govt reserves power barges for Mindanao
THE Department of Energy (DOE) wants government’s remaining power barges to be privatized only if they are to be used in Mindanao.Energy Secretary Jose Rene Almendras said this would allow the region, which relies on hydroelectric power plants for half of its requirements, to secure its electricity in anticipation of low water levels in the summer months.
Enbridge proceeding with Bakken expansion
Enbridge Inc. ENB-T is going ahead with a $560-million expansion of its Bakken pipelines, adding 145,000 barrels per day of new capacity from one of North America’s fastest-growing oil producing regions, the company said Monday.Enbridge will expand its North Dakota and Saskatchewan pipeline systems in order to handle rising oil output from the Bakken field, which spans the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, and the U.S. states of Montana and North Dakota.
One of the most worrying issues that I’ve been introduced to since I started this position at IFandP is that of peak oil and resource depletion. Much of the discussion seems to revolve around the precise date at which we might hit peak oil. However, as many have pointed out what matters more is the point at which the total net energy we obtain from fossil fuels starts to decline. The situation is compounded by the issue of climate change, which will also act to accelerate the amount of free energy available to society, given the increased need to mitigate its effects and sequester carbon. This rings particularly true once you consider the complete storage of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels would require an infrastructure of comparable size to that of the current oil and gas industry.
Peak oil believers put their faith in leaky arguments
Around 2004, others were also casting doubts on Saudi oil capacity. The most high-profile was the late Matthew Simmons, a US investment banker, who argued in his book Twilight in the Desert that the Saudis were facing serious technical problems in their fields.The then Bank of Montreal analyst Don Coxe opined that "the kingdom's decline rate will be among the world's fastest as this decade wanes". Paul Roberts, a resources journalist, focused on alleged problems at the Saudis' largest field, Ghawar, in his book The End of Oil.
The writings of the three men were littered with elementary technical errors and misunderstandings of the industry that a professional could easily have corrected. Nor did they present much evidence, beyond cherry-picked anecdotes of ordinary problems that are faced and solved every day in oilfields around the world.
Lawyer: Chevron Fined $8B for Ecuador Pollution
(CBS/AP) QUITO, Ecuador - An Ecuadorean judge ruled Monday that Chevron Corp. was responsible for oil contamination in a wide swath of Ecuador's northern jungle and fined it at least $8 billion, the plaintiffs' lead attorney told The Associated Press.Chevron said it would appeal and called the ruling "illegitimate and unenforceable" in a news release.
Pacific Herring Are Back in the Bay in Big Numbers, Three Years After a Major Oil Spill
The herring that have recently flooded into San Francisco Bay in dense schools have surprised fishermen and ecologists, who doubted that the generation of the silvery fish that was spawned during a devastating oil spill three years ago would survive.
Anger rising as Gulf spill claims process drags
NEW ORLEANS — President Barack Obama vowed during a White House speech last June that the $20 billion he helped coax out of BP for an oil spill compensation fund would take care of victims "as quickly, as fairly and as transparently as possible."Eight months later, that's not how things look to many people along the Gulf Coast.
Obama's DOE Budget Request Promotes Clean Tech, Slashes Fossil Energy
The White House continued efforts today to beef up investment in nuclear and renewable energy technologies in its $29.5 billion fiscal 2012 spending request for the Department of Energy.The clean-tech increases would come at the expense of fossil energy spending, including the perennial request to eliminate billions in tax incentives for the oil and gas industry.
Gingrich’s Energy Policies Rile Conservative Critics
In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of conservative activists, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, called last week for a radical shift in national energy and environmental policy, including the total dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency, the relaxation of coal mining regulations and quick approval for offshore drilling projects in the Arctic.The reaction from some conservative commentators was swift and harsh. “Intellectually incoherent,” said Myron Ebell, the director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “Asinine,” a blogger for the American Spectator opined.
E.U. Climate Chief Has Work Cut Out for Her
BRUSSELS — Connie Hedegaard embodies the way the European Commission would like to be perceived in the 21st century.Ms. Hedegaard, 50, leads the commission’s efforts on climate change, an issue with global resonance, and she is a confident and telegenic communicator, helping dislodge the commission’s image as a haven for graying politicians who settle fights over fish quotas.
China Works To Stave Off Wheat Crisis
HONG KONG — It is weather with global breadbasket implications.Even as senior Chinese officials exhort local officials to do everything possible to cope with a severe drought in the country’s wheat belt, the government is trying to reassure the public that food prices will not rise.
China’s drought-control headquarters posted a statement on its Web site on Sunday that described conditions as “grim” across a wide area of the wheat belt in Northern China and called for emergency irrigation efforts.
Kurt Cobb: secrets and treachery of the arrival of peak oil
Kurt Cobb is a Kalamazoo-based author and columnist who focuses on energy and the environment, and he's the author of a brand new novel called Prelude. It's about the secrets and treachery surrounding the arrival of peak oil."Peak oil is the point at which the worldwide production reaches its highest level that it will ever reach and thereafter it begins an irreversible decline," Cobb says. "It's a reality in the United States where peak oil occurred in 1970."
The price of oil is once again daily in the news. The Western Europe benchmark Brent crude has hovered near $100 / barrel for much of the last month, and the IEA is again warning of the burden of oil consumption. Is this a harbinger of things to come, or a mere statistical blip in a market that is "well supplied"? How will events play out in oil markets in the coming year or two?Certainly, oil prices have surged on the back on strong demand, of which some is structural, and some transient. The northern hemisphere has seen a strikingly cold winter, leading to increased heating oil usage. And the global economy is recovering from a deep recession, with demand bouncing off the recessionary trough. These are, to an extent, passing events. But in many respects, increased prices fundamentally reflect an oil demand that is increasing faster than supply.
China Is Paying Up in Push to Join The Shale-Gas Boom
Chinese companies are paying a heavy price to participate in North America's natural-gas boom in a bet on gaining vital new technology and access to a bountiful new source of energy.Technological advances have opened up massive new gas fields in North America, creating opportunity for Asia's energy-hungry countries. The technology taps gas trapped in rock, called shale gas. Energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Ltd. estimates that potential U.S. shale-gas resources total 650 trillion cubic feet. By comparison, proved U.S. gas reserves at the end of 2009 totaled 244.7 trillion cubic feet, according to the BP Statistical Review.
Police fire tear gas at Iranian opposition protesters
TEHRAN — Iranian security forces fired tear gas in central Tehran on Monday to disperse opposition supporters marching in a banned rally inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, a witness said."There are thousands of people marching ... not chanting slogans ... Security forces fired tear gas to disperse them near Imam Hossein square," said the witness.
Will Egypt re-energize Iran's 'Green Movement'?
Both sides in Iran are claiming the cause of the Egypt protests as their own: The opposition “Green Movement” heralds the protesters' push for democracy, while the Iranian government says their demonstrations follow in the footsteps of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed shah and put the Shiite Muslim clergy in power.
Kurt Cobb: The week of the game changer in oil, or was it?
This past week was supposedly the week of the game changer in the world of oil. Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables from Saudi Arabia called into question the ability of the globe's largest oil exporter to raise production to satisfy a world increasingly thirsty for petroleum. In the United States a technique called hydraulic fracturing--which has seemingly unlocked vast natural gas resources--will now be applied to oil trapped in shale deposits. Are these two developments really the so-called game changers they are claimed to be?
Aramco ‘unlikely’ to have fudged oil reserves by 40%
John Sfakianakis, chief analyst at Saudi Banque Fransi in Riyadh, said Saudi Aramco was unlikely to have risked exaggeration.“I don’t think they want to risk being proven otherwise,” he said.
He said that Aramco provided its own money for most of its investment in search and exploration, and that as such, hedging numbers would be detrimental to its own interests.
WikiLeaks, media distort oil estimates
As good as they are, I hope WikiLeaks cables will not become our reference for everything that goes around the world — including the evolution of the oil market.
Lilongwe City rejects fuel march
The Lilongwe City Council (LCC) has refused the Human Rights Consultative Committee (HRCC) permission to stage a protest march this Monday against persistent fuel shortages in Malawi.
Austin considers $50 a year, unlimited electric car charging service
Austin City Council members this week will consider charging Austin electric car drivers $50 a year to boot up their batteries from any Austin Energy plug-in.
Phoenix Solar to build PV park for Saudi oil company
Phoenix Solar has been commissioned to build a 3.5 megawatt (MW) PV park for the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco). When complete, it will reportedly be Saudi Arabia's largest PV installation.
All forms of government in recent times find themselves in the same predicament: the mismanagement of contraction. Too many people and too many enterprises are competing for a contracting resource base. In many poor countries it expresses itself plainly as expensive food, or no food at all for some. The expensive food part of the story is already being felt in the wealthier countries, too, but the contraction expresses itself more in terms of money - many people do not have enough, or else much less than they were used to having, and at the same time the money that does circulate seems increasingly worthless. So we have the great debate over whether the contraction is deflationary or inflationary.
There will soon be seven billion people on the planet. By 2045 global population is projected to reach nine billion. Can the planet take the strain?
Clashes in Bahrain before planned protest rally
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Bahrain's security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse anti-government protesters Monday in advance of plans to stage major rallies and bring the Arab reform wave to the Gulf for the first time.The sporadic unrest since late Sunday underscores the sharply rising tensions in the tiny island kingdom — a strategic Western ally and home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet.
Egypt Army Suspends Constitution, Meets Protester Demand
Egypt’s ruling army council said it aims to hand power to a democratically elected government within six months, after almost three weeks of popular unrest ended 30 years of autocratic rule by President Hosni Mubarak.The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces yesterday dissolved parliament, suspended the constitution and said it would rule until general elections take place. The council also formed a committee to introduce constitutional changes, according to a statement read on state television yesterday.
Two decades ago, Egypt consumed about half the oil it produced and exported the rest, about 450,000 barrels a day. Since then, however, its production has declined as its domestic energy consumption has increased, and today Egypt is a net importer of oil, based on data from the International Energy Agency.That concerns those who believe in "peak oil," the theory that global crude production has hit its apex and is entering a state of persistent decline.
"Egypt is just a perfect case history of export math," said Jeffrey Brown, an independent petroleum geologist in Fort Worth who writes frequently on peak oil issues.
Brent Oil Rises on Ongoing Mideast Tension, China Crude Imports
Oil extended gains in London and erased earlier losses in New York as protesters planned demonstrations in Middle Eastern oil-producing nations and after a report showed that China imported more crude.Brent crude advanced as much as 0.9 percent as China, the world’s biggest energy consumer, increased net crude-oil imports to the highest in four months in January as demand for diesel to operate irrigation equipment in drought-stricken regions rose. Protestors plan a demonstration today in Iran, OPEC’s second- largest member, while Algerian opposition parties prepared a protest on Feb. 19 following a weekend clash with police.
FACTBOX - OPEC, CEO comment on high oil prices
(Reuters) - Brent crude oil LCOc1 jumped above the $100 a barrel mark on Jan. 31 for the first time since 2008, adding to pressure on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to pump more oil.Even U.S. crude CLc1, which is trading more than $15 below Brent, is slightly above the $70-$80 price range, which top oil exporter Saudi Arabia has said is the ideal for producers in need of returns on their investment and not so high as to damage the fragile economies of consumer countries.
OPEC has resisted calls to change formally its output policy and has said the market has plenty of oil.
Hedge Funds ‘Bearish With a Capital B’ in Gas
Hedge funds raised bearish bets on natural gas to the highest level since December 2008 as the fuel plunged on speculation that seasonal inventories will reach near-record levels at the end of March.
Why Is Gas Cheaper In Middle U.S.? Thank Canada
Gasoline prices have been on the rise for months now. As the economy improves, demand has gone up. But aside from that, something unusual is happening with gasoline prices in the U.S. this winter: Prices are rising faster on the East and West Coasts than they are in the middle of the country.
Russian Growth May Increase to 6% Next Quarter as Oil Climbs, RenCap Says
Russia’s economy may expand next quarter at the quickest pace since 2008 as companies boost investment and higher oil prices help the government ramp up spending before national elections, Renaissance Capital said.
Venezuela loses $1.5 bln a year in gasoline subsidy
(Reuters) - Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA loses around $1.5 billion a year through domestic subsidies that make the South American OPEC member's gasoline the cheapest in the world, the energy minister said on Sunday.At a cost of $0.03-0.04 per liter ($0.11-0.15 per gallon), most Venezuelans can fill their tank for under a dollar. And since deadly protests in Caracas in 1989, successive governments have been wary of changing the subsidy policy and hiking prices.
Gazprom to get $24 bln from local price liberalization in 2013
Liberalization of domestic industrial gas prices will bring an additional $24 billion income to Russian gas giant Gazprom in 2011-2013, the firm said on Monday.Gazprom expects the income to be higher than the volume of mineral extraction tax which rose to 237 rubles per 1,000 cubic meters this year from 147 rubles levied in 2006. From 2012, the rate will increase to 251 rubles and to 265 rubles from 2013.
Liquefied natural gas output from Indonesia's Bontang plant is expected to fall by 6% this year due to lower supply of natural gas from a Total field, the plant's operator PT Badak NGL said today.
Dutch oil and chemicals storage company Vopak will build a liquefied petroleum gas terminal in Indonesia together with Chandra Asri Petrochemical for an investment of $150 million, the Indonesian player said.
Syria, Iraq discuss cooperation in oil, gas
Syrian Oil and Gas Minister Sufian Allaw and his Iraqi counterpart Abdul Kareem Luaibi held talks here Sunday on cooperation projects in oil and gas, Syrian official SANA news agency reported.The talks focused on reopening the old Iraqi oil pipeline and enhancing cooperation between the two ministries to facilitate the purpose.
Iraq to Sign Akkas Deal, Review Kurdish Oil Contracts
Iraq, seeking to rebuild its energy industry after years of conflict and scarce investment, will soon sign a delayed deal for the Akkas natural-gas field and review production-sharing contracts signed separately by the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, the country’s oil minister said.
Ecuador accepts US court decision favoring Chevron
Ecuadorean officials say they will temporarily block a potential multibillion-dollar judgment against Chevron Corp. for alleged environmental damages.The Attorney General's Office says in a statement that Ecuador will obey the order from a U.S. federal judge in New York even though officials "do not agree" with it.
Nigeria: Govt Rejects Oil Firms' U.S.$30 Million Gift
Lagos — The $30 million (N4.6 billion) promised by the oil and gas companies in Nigeria towards the training of some ex-militants in the Niger Delta has been rejected by the Federal Fovernment as it considers it too little in the effort to make the region free of restiveness. Some of the oil companies include: Agip, Shell, Chevron etc.
Navy urged act as Somali pirates hold 700 sailors hostage
The head of shipping at Royal Dutch Shell has called on the Royal Navy to launch military action against new "pirate motherships" off Somalia that have captured two $200m oil tankers this month.
Three books on the gulf oil spill
Just six months after BP stopped the oil that had been flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, a gusher of books about the spill has begun to wash ashore. The first wave includes three very different approaches to the disaster that riveted the nation most of last summer.
Wikileaks goes peak oil wild in Saudi Arabia … or did it?
Given the impending reality of peak oil production in both the world overall and Saudi Arabia, the rulers know that the oil wealth is not to be squandered and that leaving some oil in the ground is as good of a strategy as any.
Emirates Post issues stamp on OPEC’s Anniversary
The stamp was issued in recognition of OPEC’s significant impact on its members and the world community during the past 50 years. The organisation has served as a bridge between producers and consumers, creating a forum for discussion on issues like fuel supplies in the long run as well as technology, trade and environment conservation.
Investment and jobs boosted by North Sea boom
THE rude health of the North Sea oil industry was revealed by news from corporate financier Simmons & Company that its Aberdeen office has conducted $11 billion (£6.9bn) of deals.This was emphasised by an announcement by oil services company Production Services Network that it is hiring 100 more people.
Russia's Rosneft discovers two E. Siberian oilfields
(Reuters) - Russia's largest state-owned oil company, Rosneft discovered two new oil and gas deposits in Eastern Siberia, the producer said Monday on its web site.
Why you don’t want gas to get cheaper
Americans would like to pay less at the pump. But what would that take? How about another economic crash -- or perhaps you'd prefer an ecological one. However the next century shakes out, one thing's for sure: the ever-growing gap between world oil supplies and demand is making itself felt, and the longer it takes us to break our addiction, the more painful the coming decades will be.
Coal-to-liquids as a case study of how excessive optimism is our enemy
Confidence provides strengths for a society, but only when coupled with clear vision. Unfortunately modern America too-often sees the future only in terms of doomsters’ pessimism and advocates’ optimism. Here we have a case study of the latter.
Brazilian ethanol is the best hope for replacing oil, says BP's Bob Dudley
Ethanol derived from Brazilian sugar-cane offers the best hope of replacing oil as the world's main source of fuel when it runs out, according to Bob Dudley, BP's chief executive.He said Brazilian ethanol is the "best type of renewable energy" and offers the possibility of an "ultrapotent fuel that could revolutionise the market".
BP is channelling its research into renewable fuels accordingly, with 40pc of its $1bn (£625m) annual spend in this area targeted at Brazilian ethanol, Mr Dudley told the weekly Brazilian news magazine Veja.
"There will obviously a time when the oil runs out and with this prospect on the horizon, we will use more renewable energy sources," he said.
India May Save Money Replacing Diesel With Wind, Hydro, World Bank Says
India, which spent 1.7 billion rupees a day ($37 million) subsidizing fuels in 2010, could replace power produced from diesel with renewable sources at one-third the cost of generation, the World Bank said.The country’s entire wind, biomass and small hydropower potential of 68,000 megawatts could be produced at 6 rupees a kilowatt-hour compared with the 18 rupees a kilowatt-hour cost of diesel generation, according to a World Bank report.
Suzlon Energy Plans $392 Million Australian Wind Farm in New South Wales
Suzlon Energy Ltd., the world’s third-biggest maker of wind turbines, plans to build a wind farm in Australia’s New South Wales state estimated to cost about A$390 million ($392 million), government filings show.
Chrysler Considering Natural-Gas Engines for Ram Brand
Chrysler Group LLC, the U.S. automaker operated by Fiat SpA, is exploring the possibility of adding compressed natural-gas powered engines to its Ram truck brand, a top executive said.
Drivers express interest in hybrids, but many don't buy
About six out of 10 consumers say they would look at a gas-electric hybrid when the time comes to replace their current vehicle, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll has found.Some 35% would "strongly consider" a hybrid; an additional 23% would "consider" it.
But while the results seem to indicate that hybrid gas savers are taking off, the results are at odds with what consumers actually are buying: only 4.3% of vehicles sold last year were hybrids, the Environmental Protection Agency reports.
Dominion proposes rate breaks for hybrids
RICHMOND -- Dominion Virginia Power proposed a pilot program Monday to offer time-of-day pricing options to encourage off-peak charging of electric vehicles.If approved by the State Corporation Commission, the program would offer reduced rates for overnight charging and higher rates during peak times to Virginia drivers.
China Profits From Solar Policy as Europe Backpedals
China, the world’s biggest electricity consumer, is figuring out how to capture a larger share of the solar-energy market without losing money.The government will spend at least a year studying Europe’s system of paying above-market prices for solar power before deciding if there’s a better way to spur clean-energy plants across China, said Wu Dacheng, an adviser to national power regulators. The delay has stalled projects planned on Chinese soil by developers such as First Solar Inc. of the U.S.
Examine this picture closely. It is the scariest picture you will see in a long time. It is from the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2010. The IEA is the energy policy research agency of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which represents the interests of the major developed market economies. Apparently.So what’s so scary about this picture? The growing light blue wedge representing “Crude oil: fields yet to be found” is real cause for concern. Eliminate that growing wedge, and we do not have much more than five years before overall supply starts to decline.
Carolyn Baker - Paradox: Linchpin Of The Long Emergency
When people ask me, “Will the Long Emergency happen quickly or slowly?” I answer, “Yes.” When they ask, “Will it be like rolling down a bumpy hill or falling off a cliff?” my answer is “Yes.” My response usually draws laughter or a knowing smile, and then I proceed to explain what I mean as I intend to do in this article. Answering “yes” to such questions underscores the paradox that is at the core of both the questions—and the answers, and without which it will be absolutely, unequivocally impossible to navigate the Long Emergency.
For India’s Farmers, a Bare-Bones Drip System
So, in effect many farmers are too poor to make the investment that could pull them out of their poverty.But there is a way out, argues Peter Frykman, the chief executive of Driptech, a start-up firm based in Mountain View, Calif.
His company sells simple drip irrigation systems in India for as little as 6,500 rupees ($144) for half an acre. Unlike the Jain system, the Driptech product does not have specialized pipes or an emitter that releases a measured quantity of water.
The Conversation: 'Carbon Nation'
Is it possible to separate politics from the divisive issue of global warming?That's the ambitious goal of filmmaker Peter Byck, a self-described liberal who says that support for green policies shouldn't depend on whether you believe in climate change.
In his new film, "Carbon Nation," Byck spells out a common ground -- that smarter green strategy can save money and give the world cleaner air and water, in addition to addressing global warming. The film will be shown at screenings throughout the country and released in May on DVD.
EU could meet carbon targets more cheaply with gas than renewables, say gas firms
Europe could save €900bn (£762bn) and still hit its 2050 carbon reduction targets if it built fewer wind farms and more gas plants, a coalition of gas producers including Gazprom, Centrica and Qatar Petroleum has told the European commission.The industry is lobbying against the possibility of the commission setting new renewable energy targets and phasing out the use of gas. Next month, it will publish a draft "road map" energy strategy to 2050.
Australia: Climate cash goes up in smoke
MORE than $5.5 billion has been spent by federal governments during the past decade on climate change programs that are delivering only small reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.An analysis of government schemes designed to cut emissions by direct spending or regulatory intervention reveals they have cost an average $168 for each tonne of carbon dioxide abated.
Academics solve problem of sealing carbon dioxide leaks
ACADEMICS from Heriot-Watt University's Institute of Petroleum Engineering have developed technology which identifies and seals leaks that could occur in carbon dioxide storage sites.The development is designed for companies looking to develop geological carbon dioxide storage sites.
Climate Change: Why Ugandans are worried?
Ugandans are now in their hottest season with an average 30˚C of daily temperature. However, most of them are not sure whether the coldest months will come soon since everything regarding the environment has changed. Besides, unusually, night temperature has been increasing from time to time and water shortage is real in several areas.
West Africa: Food Crisis Imminent in West Africa, Warns Oxfam
As the Sahel region of West Africa is just coming out of what seems like a biting food crisis, Oxfam America points out that unfair product prices, climate change and outmoded agricultural practices conspire to foretell even more cases of hunger.
Food shortages caused by global warming may be cause of world-wide unrest
While the causal intertwining of climate change, food security and political upheaval may not be new to human civilization, recent world events have thrust the topic back to the center of public consciousness with a vengeance.Rising global food prices - which some believe are caused in part by a rash of severe weather - are at least partly credited with tipping the scales of popular ire that ultimately toppled autocratic regimes in both Tunisia and Egypt in the past several weeks.
As the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index hit an historic peak in January, protests against swollen prices seemed to erupt in concert across disparate corners of the developing world, echoing the food riots of 2008.
Huff and Puff and Blow Your House Down
Global warming is most likely responsible, at least in part, for the rising frequency and severity of extreme weather events — like floods, storms and droughts — since warmer surface temperatures tend to produce more violent weather patterns, scientists say. And the damage these events have caused is a sign that the safety factors that engineers, architects and planners have previously built into structures are becoming inadequate for the changing climate.Dikes, buildings and bridges are often built to withstand a “hundred-year storm” — an event so epic that there is a 1 percent chance it will happen in a given year. But what happens when 100-year storms are seen every 10 years, and 10-year storms become regular events? How many structures will reach their limits?
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Can anyone tell me what oil discovery was for 2010?
Turnbull - if you mean how much new global oil reserves were discovered in 2010 the very short answer is NO. Not every company (country) offers an estimate or even announces every new discovery. And the ones who do offer estimates have to be viewed very critically IMHO. Even when I make an oil discovery my estimate of that volume, even with all the data available to me, might not be terribly accurate. But even if we did have a solid gold number for the new reserve volume it still wouldn't be very meaningful IMHO. A 500 million bbl oil discovery in the Texas (that could reach max production in 18 months) would have a very different impact than a 500 million bbl discovery in Deep Water Brazil that won't reach max production for 7 to 9 years. Likewise a 500 million bbl heavy oil discover onshore reaching a max delivery in 18 months but at a rate that's only 25% of the rate of the previously mentioned Texas discovery will also have a significantly different impact.
I apologize if I'm adding meaning to your question you didn't intend. IMHO how much oil is discovered during any time period isn't very important. What is critical is how any new discovery will affect the oil rates we have access to around the globe. Many bilions of bbls of oil have been disocvered in Deep Water Brazil. This will add a great deal of production to global out put. But not next year and not in five years. But eventually, yes. It's the timing of the production that's important IMHO...not the volume sitting under 7,000' of water.
Thanks Rock
I haven't seen a copy of this chart updated in the last 2 years. So was just wanting the data to update one I'm keeping updated.
I know it's not a really a good measure, but whipping out this works good whenever someone makes the inane comment "there's plenty of oil if only(fill in the blank)".
turnbull - Charting is great...especially if I don't have to do the work. I'm sure there's a lot of BS in some of the numbers but from a "big picture" perspective that may not obscure the trend line. It is a very interesting chart especially how the production rate response seems to become very dramatic as new discoveries come on line. What's really striking is the projected increase from 2010 forward. You have to go back to 1950-1965 to see a similar rate of increase. This was the time period when a large percentage of big fields (especially in the U.S.) were discovered. Interesting that they are predicting another very major discovery boom in our future. Oh, wait, they aren't: they aren't predicting a discovery boom...or even a little pop...at all. Just an increase in oil production rates like we saw during the boom times we saw 50 years ago.
Hmmm....something doesn't seem right.
No, no, everything is fine look again...
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll225/Fmagyar/FairydustProjection.jpg
If you google "the growing gap" this same basic chart appears in a variety of places, and with a wide range in the discoveries value after 2008.
I have 10 gb for 2009, nearly double what 2008 was. Any clue to what 2010 was? Anybody?
No idea T but there could be a valid basis for some (but not all) of that bump. Beside physical limtations oil recovery is also a function of price assumptions: increasing future oil prices does allow some legitimate increase in recovery. But I doubt that accounts for much of the jump.
Every January the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists) has a roundup of the previous year's big finds: Brazil Discoveries Set 2010 Pace - AAPG EXPLORER January 2011. 2010 was fairly outstanding, various trolls got into a froth about the curve being supposedly permanently bent out of shape by all these finds. But note what the AAPG has to say:
Two things stand out here: first the predominance of offshore, with its higher costs at all stages leading to more rapid production leading to subsequent rapid decline, plus longer lead times to initial oil, plus slower rate of extraction, and so forth.
Then the fact that this is boe, i.e., barrels of oil equivalent, i.e., not entirely oil per se. How much is oil is another matter.
The AAPG also notes:
So 2010's finds are by and large just a new region being opened up, expanding the scope of Brazil's operations. Brazil's existing offshore has very steep decline rates too, in 2007 they brought on a huge volume of new oil, ca. 800 kb/d IIRC, which showed as a very modest increase of ca. 200 kb/d, again IIRC. It was a very neat demonstration of decline rates in action; and these new finds are that much more technically challenging and expensive to exploit, and eventually will decline that much more faster.
The AAPG concludes:
With all of the above caveats in mind formulate your conclusion accordingly. Reclassifying the quality of the discoveries on the Growing Gap chart would be instructive - how much is offshore? How much is in giant fields? BTW Nate Hagens related on how onshore production peaked about 30 years ago. We are indeed running on fumes, or neglecting to change the oil in our engine, or whatever other metaphor illuminates this situation for you.
Excellent details KLR...you're man (or woman if so be). It's also good to remember as pointed out earlier: oil in the ground, regardless of how many billions of bbls there are, doesn't do much for the economy. It's when and how fast they produce it that's really important. I'm sure the Brazians have an estimate of that schedule. I don't know if they've made it publicly available with credible backup support. Now that would be a very interesting projection. Like our DW GOM it should come on in big gulps: hundreds of thousands of bbls/day at a time. But it could be quit a few years between each gulp. The world is to get a first hand lesson on just how long it takes to design, drill and impliment such projects. I think the world will be somewhat disappointed. Just my WAG.
I'm a Man, as it happens.
There's also peakoil.com member "Oilfinder2" and his "Catalog of Recent Oil Discoveries," which he thinks renders the whole Hubbert/Deffeyes/Campbell/Laherrère pessimism laughable, and its adherents irrational cranks. Forget what he thought he'd dug up but seem to recall that in past years he was trumpeting his totals as approaching what the AAPG claims for last year, hence of dubious utility, given their caveat about 2010 topping anything in the 6 years previous; AAPG trumps bloggers. Of course we bloggers can document what they show for public edification. Compare their totals to OF2's Catalog to test his modus.
Even 26 bbo(e) doesn't change the game. That big spike for 2000 is Kashagan, which remains vaporware. A decade of sustained major volumes would be more like it.
Big spikes are predictable. Reservoir sizes are a fat tail distribution and because of that effect, big oil fields tend to stand out. If we average out the spikes, we are around an average of 8 GB discoveries per year dropping down to less than 2 GB by 2050. That would suggest that we have discovered (including any future backdating) a bit above 90% of the oil so far.
So the 28 GB spike from last year is not unheard of. Here is a sample Monte Carlo run.
Note that the spikes are even bigger that 28 GB for this run.
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2009/12/monte-carlo-of-dispersive-disco...
This is all distilled in the on-line e-book The Oil ConunDrum
Nice, very succinct. I was about to ask where Kashagan was in there, but on that scale it's likely just one of the more prominent bumps. One could deny the veracity of Monte Carlo in the first place, of course, certainly there are ways of abusing statistical models of that sort; but all the first order evidence points in one direction as well, to me anyway.
Demand is a quite elaborate topic, though. I've been rereading Spencer Weart's Discovery of Global Warming, an excellent book. It's chock full of accounts of dead end or cul de sac theories, which seemed quite solid to their authors. Eventually with enough data piled up and methodology worked out, plus robust computing power, the case to be made came around, but it took almost a century. Energy demand has more facets than most realize, too.
I agree with dead ends and red herrings. What I tried to do, which I think was unique, was to fill up the TOC book with analogous explanations to a number of only tangentially related topics. The connecting theme in the topics was that of disorder and very similar math. It was one of those cases of preponderance of cascading evidence that after a while became overwhelming. Others may not see the same threads of connectivity but I think that is what science is all about.
Nice job with the book too, it's handy to peruse your whole output at once like that.
Although we're obviously counting "discoveries" different, both AAPG and myself have come up with a large spike in the same year (2010) - which tells me my methodology isn't that far off. I'm probably including things they would count as reserve growth and/or possibly discoveries that will show up in later years.
My total for 2010 was 45-59 billion barrels of recoverable discoveries, plus 91-92 billion barrels of oil-in-place amounts.
I notice their list doesn't include an addition to West Qurna which was announced in October as having 43 billion barrels, whereas previously it was listed as a 21 billion bbl field. If you take the average of my recoverable range (52 billion barrels) and subtract the 22 billion bbl addition to West Qurna I included, you get 30 billion bbl, which is darn close to the AAPG's figure of 28 billion bbl.
So don't mock my list, you've just demonstrated that it's pretty darn good, taking into account different methodologies!
One other thing I just noticed - the AAPG list does not include any unconventional discoveries. I've got at least a few in my list. By not including unconventional sources (Bakkens, tar sands, etc) in the discovery charts, that's going to leave a lot of people scratching their heads in a few decades why cumulative production is outstripping cumulative discoveries.
You are definitely working way too hard. I can get the same results by applying a Dispersive Discovery Model. All the discoveries are statistically expected. You will get spikes and then some of the discoveries will go into a backdated reserve growth. However, in the end, it really won't make much difference because the peak will still occur in the past.
I am working from a 2800 billion barrel global URR, BTW.
You probably didn't mean to say this but it is statistically true. Some people will never understand the concept of statistical fluctuations.
Not sure you understood what I meant. I was saying that, because a lot of (mostly unconventional) discoveries are not counted/captured as "discoveries" in the usual charts and graphs, and yet they contain real oil that is - or will - be produced, at some point in the future people will be adding up the cumulative discoveries and find that there has been X amount of oil discovered. They will then look at the cumulative production chart and mysteriously find that X + Y amount of oil has been produced. Whether this amounts to just a statistical fluctuation, or whether something somewhere just went really wrong, depends on how big Y ends up being (which would tell us how wrong X really was). I'm no statistician, but seems to me if Y is some significantly big number compared to X, then it is not a mere statistical variation but, instead, something went really wrong in calculating what "X" was supposed to be. And my point is that it's starting to look as if people aren't really capturing a true measure of "X". In my own work I'm seeing companies announce discoveries (or, should I say, "discoveries") that aren't showing up in the usual charts and lists. But I have no doubt this oil is real (would be happy to give examples).
I don't think you understand. In a chart upstream, I showed a simulation of a finite set of discoveries that tracks the actual size distribution of reservoirs. You end up seeing these large spikes due to the imbalance of the super-giants against the smaller size background.
This is as real as it gets, and it does happen because the data from 50 or more years ago is pretty solid by now, and the fluctuations occurred back then and they have continued to show up. The data from that long ago also includes the reserve growth components through backdating and that is what I used to generate a smoothed dispersive discovery cumulative. This turned into a 2800 GB URR. What do you think your URR will produce?
What is great is that I have this all written up in The Oil ConunDrum, and anyone can read it and make up their own mind on how the statistics manifests itself in real terms. No one has come close to doing anything like this kind of analysis, and it really does demonstrate the misguided approach of those that track fluctuations as if they were indicative of future growth.
The trouble is that the Canadian oil sands were discovered centuries ago. The first Europeans to see the Athabasca River basically stepped in them and got oil all over their feet, and the Indians knew about them long before that time. So, you can date their discovery to the 1700s, long before the first conventional oil wells were drilled.
The actual production is considerably more difficult than conventional oil, and is more like a manufacturing operation than conventional oil drilling. This completely screws up production forecasts if you treat them like conventional oil, particularly since the world has more oil sands than conventional oil.
Ahh, I misinterpreted that he was actually including the oil sands, thanks.
He might as well include peat moss if that is the abundance concept.
Funny that I already explained the concept of a moving baseline elsewhere in this comment thread.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7498#comment-767382
In that comment I explain how the most slimy management types that I encounter are the ones willing to use the shifting baseline argument to make the data work in their favor. They really deserve ridicule and scorn. One of the most memorable examples I recall seeing was a manager that decided to add empty lines (!) to a source code estimate to make it look like the software people were maintaining productivity. People in the know realize how ridiculous this is but others get the wool pulled over their eyes.
Mr. Abundance.Cooncept provides a great example of the kind of slimy bait-and-switch that we have to be aware of. First and foremost, the arguments have to come from a certain level of agreed upon logic and a fixed reference frame.
WHT, you're so oblivious to my point that you're oblivious that you're oblivious. So let me put it as succinctly as possible:
What if oil gets produced which was never counted as "discovered?"
And what if there is a lot of this?
Your casual dismissal of the oil sands is a perfect example (talk about slimy!). RockyMtnGuy sort-of got the point when he notes that it's hard to put a "discovery" date on it.
What if, like the oil sands, some oil does not occur in a "reservoir?" The peak oil bean counters tallying up the discovered reservoir sizes and putting bars on years representing that tally are going to miss a helluvalot of oil if they're only including oil discovered in identifiable "reservoirs" with identifiable "discovery dates." Not all oil occurs in an identifiable reservoir, and not all oil can be said to have been "discovered" in a certain year. Where would you put the bar for the oil sands? In the 1700's? The 1930's? Or maybe add smaller bars in recent years as companies add tar sands to their P1 reserves? Because of the size of the oil sands, depending on which of those 3 options you choose, it's going to make a big difference in the distribution of your curve - assuming of course you include the oil sands at all. If you choose to dismiss them altogether because they don't pass your smell test as "oil," then you're going to start wondering what the heck is happening a few decades from now when production figures are far outstripping what you thought was an accurate historical "discovery" tally.
You're so enamored with your fancy mathematical model you don't even know what questions to ask to feed into the model.
By your pretzel logic, all "oil" accounting should be based on whale oil. And when crude oil started supplanting whale oil in the 1860's, everyone was surprised when production of "whale oil" started outstripping the number of whales harvested. Seriously, that is the kind of silly argument you are making.
Often all that mathematics involves is sound logic. Work through the argument logically and it will become obvious. Moreover, every other applied use of mathematics starts out as a word problem; if you can't get the premise right, maybe you shouldn't be working the problem.
Really? Then by your bizarre "logic" we shouldn't count any discoveries of 8-10 degree oil because that happens to be the same grade as the stuff from the oil sands. It wouldn't matter if these discoveries were gushing out of the wells in California 100 years ago, or somewhere in west Texas from wells in the 50's, it shouldn't be counted ... just because of your arbitrary boundary. What kind of idiocy is that.
It's obvious you don't want to include the oil sands because it would make your nice-and-neat model a completely complicated mess.
And BTW, since it obviously didn't occur to you (another one of those questions you didn't think of asking yourself because you're too ensconced in your mathematical formulas), whale oil is not a fossil fuel and does not come out of the ground. Neither is ethanol, palm oil, or any other red herring you might think of. Oil sands are a liquid fossil fuel and they come out of the ground - just like light, sweet crude. Nice try, but that was the biggest failure of logic in this whole discussion.
You apparently can't stand logical arguments.
Types of coal from the top of my head:
Anthracite
Bitumuninous
Lignite
Peat Moss
People have kept track of the various grades because it is important from both an energy density argument and a EROEI/pollution perspective.
Oil sands is bitumen and falls into a different category, which one can count separately just like various grades of coal are counted separately.
I can't figure out your logical disconnect; is it a problem with some political stance you may hold?
Let's take it from a politically neutral angle. I could do a similar categorization of lakes around the world. Do I count salt-water lakes along with fresh-water lakes?
Heck, I can use the exact same math that I use for sizing of oil reservoirs to predict freshwater lake distributions across the globe. You can read about this in The Oil ConunDrum or here: http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/10/lake-size-distributions.html. I might be able to try this on salt water lakes as well but the biggest salt-water lake, the ocean, obviously screws up the statistics as it is not a random occurrence but a holding basin of the lowest elevation. The rest of the salt-water lakes and seas may hold some statistical pattern but the numbers aren't there to make it worthwhile to do. Freshwater lakes and conventional crude oil reservoirs follow good statistics because the counting numbers are in the 10's to 100's of thousands and the math arguments fit precisely to physical growth models.
I have no agenda apart from having the talent and skills to work with scientific models. OTOH, your agenda of "proving" abundance allows you to likely claim that Uranium is unlimited because it is dispersed in the ocean at some level of concentration and that we should act surprised whens someone says Uranium reserves never seem to deplete.
Perhaps you will eventually catch on. I also don't include biofuels because they are different and require extra EROEI overhead. I was able to use the whale oil analogy to extract that admission out of you.
You apparently still do not know how to ask the right questions.
No one - or almost no one - is harvesting peat moss as a fuel source. On the other hand, people *are* harvesting oil sands as a fuel source. Your attempt to analogize oils sands with peat moss failed miserably because clearly peat moss has little utility as an energy source (which is why no one is using it as thus), while the same can hardly be said of oil sands.
Of course you didn't think of that, just the same way it didn't occur to you how bad the oil whale analogy was. You just don't know how to ask the right questions.
Yes, of course you can. So what? But why are you doing that? To acertain the amount of freshwater in the world? OK, fine. But again you just did not think far enough: You're so busy thinking about the size distribution of freshwater lakes in the world, it did not occur to you that fresh water can also be found in underground aquifers; and that new lakes of any size can be made with reservoirs; and that freshwater can be extracted from salt water. Etc. This makes the potential amount of freshwater in the world an order of magnitude (*many* orders of magnitude?) larger than if one counted freswater lakes alone.
You clearly aren't reading well. I did not say you should include biofuels, and I myself would not include biofuels, because - I repeat - they are not fossil fuels. Oil sands *are* fossil fuels.
You clearly have talent and sills to work with scientific models. You also clearly do *not* have the talent and skills to reason what should go into those models.
Lignite -> Peat Moss is a continuum of grades, deal with it.
A model of underwater aquifers would likely follow the same distribution as oil reservoirs and lakes.
Some people have this inability to discern shades of gray. Obviously areas of tar sands exist and they can be counted. Most exploration funding does not have an objective of finding new areas of tar sands, instead the money goes into prospecting for promising areas of crude. That is what the dispersive discovery algorithm models. Right now it is useful to extrapolate future crude oil finds, and I have no doubt it will stand the test of time.
If somebody wants to model low-grade coal, low-grade tar sands, low-grade uranium, they can go ahead and try to extropolate future reserves. They are clearly independent of the model of crude oil, no matter how the grades get redefined by someone who doesn't want to face reality.
Why would one be so interested in modeling the size distribution of oil fields (or lakes, or aquifers, or whatever) anyway? There are small numbers of large items, and large numbers of small items. Most everything in nature is that way. What you spent a lot of time and effort modeling tells me no more than what I could figure out from common sense.
The one who doesn't want to face reality is the one modeling *just* oil in porous, pressurized sandstone and carbonate reservoirs, when that is almost certainly just a fraction of the world's total oil endowment. If one wants to know how much oil will be available for future generations, ignoring the other 80% of the world's oil makes about as much sense as figuring out how much water there is in the world by only modeling freshwater lakes.
When the peak arrives much later than your model projects, and when the world has consumed far more oil than your model says should be there, don't be surprised.
OK then smarty-pants, tell me one place in the voluminous literature of earth sciences that anyone has even worked out this math? You are discussing this topic with perhaps the only person who has decided that it was obvious enough to write down and document in a formal setting.
That's the way these arguments get resolved. We wear you down with logic and then you state it was obvious anyways. Don't worry, I am used to it. In my normal job I do visualizations and simulations for people that have trouble accepting some real-world behavior. Invariably when they finish with their project and come to some agreement, they no longer have any use for the simulations and usually tell their colleagues the behavior was obvious to begin with, and they really didn't need the help. Yeaaaah, sure.
80%?
How about Uranium?
Uranium disperses a huge amount:
Very high-grade ore (Canada) - 20% U 200,000 ppm U
High-grade ore - 2% U, 20,000 ppm U
Low-grade ore - 0.1% U, 1,000 ppm U
Very low-grade ore - 0.01% U 100 ppm U
Granite 4-5 ppm U
Sedimentary rock 2 ppm U
Earth's continental crust (av) 2.8 ppm U
Seawater 0.003 ppm U
Known recoverable reserves > 5,000,000 tonnes
How much does the earth's continental crust weigh? What is 0.00028% of that weight? It essentially puts your meager 80% to shame, that's for sure.
My math is all about dispersion, both characterizing it and making it understandable enough for other people to find useful in setting forth some kind of policy decisions. Can you put 2+2 together now?
What math? That, in nature, small things tend to occur in large amounts and large things tend to occur in small amounts? I don't know offhand of any specific papers, but it's so obvious I'd be willing to bet scientists have observed and written about it for hundreds of years. It's easy to visualize:
Q: What are the approximate world populations of:
1 bacteria
2 house flies
3 sparrows
4 leopards
A: Don't know the specific numbers, but isn't it obvious that 1 > 2 > 3 > 4? Yes, it's obvious.
Same thing would be true of oil fields. So what? There's no surprise there, you haven't told us anything we couldn't have figured out ourselves.
One other difference between what you're doing and the lakes analogy is that with oil discoveries you interject the element of time. Unlike lakes, oil fields aren't obvious to the eye, and take long amounts of time to discover. And even once you discover them, it often takes a long amount of time to figure out how big they are. Now, no one doubts that in the past, present and future, there will be a large number of small oil fields discovered, and a small number of large oil fields discovered. So what? That's a given. What you assume - and what I disagree with - is that the bulk of oil discovery has occurred in the past, when in fact you don't know that (and before you say anything, this has nothing to do with individual field sizes or their distribution, just gross volumetric totals). What if, for example, over the next 4 decades or so, they discover a trillion barrels of oil off the eastern coast of South America? And what if another 500 billion barrels is discovered in Bakken-like shales around the world over the same time period? I don't know if that will happen - but it *could* happen. And if it does it'll make your dispersive discovery chart with the declining discovery rates over the next 4 decades look a bit silly. You've spent a lot of time making some fancy mathematical model (which doesn't even include the majority of the world's oil) which attempts to forecast future oil production based on past discoveries, but the discoveries you include in your model don't even include the majority of the world's "discovered" oil.
In fact, I just browsed through your write-up from a few years ago on this topic and noticed the mentions of natural gas. That sure gave me a laugh! Natural gas is the perfect example of my whole point: When you wrote that (and Hubbert before you), you had no idea that - literally - hundreds of trilions of cubic feet of natural gas would be discovered in shale formations over just the next 2-3 years. In fact, this little blipvert is now pretty funny:
Just two years after you wrote that it jumped up to 1836 TCF and is almost certainly going to go up again the next time the Potential Gas Committee meets. In fact, this petroleum geologist here thinks the number could be as big as 32 quadrillion cubic feet - and that's just in the US (!!!!!!)
This is why I'm telling you you're a fool for excluding unconventional sources. They are far bigger than conventional sources, and they are already being put to the same energy uses that conventional sources are. If someone wanted to make a policy decision about future natural gas uses based on discovery rates, but decided arbitrarily not to include unconventional gas because they didn't like it or some other reason, they will make an idiotic policy decision because they've deliberately misinformed themselves about how much natural gas is available for future use.
The same thing applies to oil. The amount of oil in the tar sands alone (including both Canada and Venezuela) already exceeds your 2.8 trillion barrel figure. I guarantee you there will be hundreds of billions of barrels in the source rocks of the world (Bakken and other shales, there WILL be lots of those). What percentage of that will be recovered, nobody knows.
I don't know if these unconventional sources are 80% or whatever - I picked that number off the top of my head for illustration. But it is clear that there are larger quantities of unconventional resources than there are conventional one. This natural gas distribution pyramid is a good example.
If you're excluding these kinds of resources from your model, your model is useless.
Here's a challenge to you: Run your dispersive discovery model, but this time apply it to natural gas. Exclude all those shale and other unconventional sources. Maybe wait for a few more years of US production, and then come back to me and tell me how useless your model was.
So much for your methodical skills. The difference here is that you pick things out of thin air and claim that supports your "argument". Yet if someone goes through the effort of applying rules of probability it essentially gets mocked as silly.
BTW, you haven't really read the book. I have the natural gas pyramid referenced in the book and I talk about the issues of new sources of natural gas.
Again, you haven't read the book. I included an alternate discovery model which used the Shell Oil discovery data (labeled as "barrels of oil equivalent") and performed an analysis on that as well. That one had a URR of 3500 billion barrels, which was another 700 billion barrels higher than the 2800 conservative figure.
The problem is that, even though Shell comes up with a curve much like my (in your words) "dispersive discovery chart with the declining discovery rates over the next 4 decades look a bit silly", they did not tell anyone how they derived it! That is typical of the oil industry and oil academia mindset. No one wants to explain in some straightforward mathematical terms how this is derived! (note the "stochastic simulation" in the inset, that's some unexplained math) Yet you continue to mock dispersive discovery like it is either some bizarre alien concept that is "a bit silly" or in a prior paragraph rant about counting numbers between 1 and 4 like we are all perplexed pre-schoolers. You can't have it both ways and criticize the model as being both ridiculous and obvious at the same time.
The original post was here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2712
I refined it here to take into account the distinction between the various grades of "boe" oil:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3287
See for yourself how much the peak shifts.
The greatest success of my techniques is that we are able to watch the slide of conventional crude oil with the highest resolution possible. We watch this stuff with an eagle eye as a counter to your hand-wavy pronouncements of a rosy cornucopian future. I wish it the outlook was better but we take advantage of the methodical scientific and mathematical techniques at our disposal and see what that gives us from a totally objective view.
The depth of comprehension is becoming more and more vast and it is not looking good on your side.
Let me join in this discussion, though I'm not an expert. Just read about it a lot the last few years. Abundance, The last decades the major oil companies looked for oil in all kind of places where, geologically, you can expect oil. Why do they wait for the Arctic to melt, why do they want to drill north of Russia and other (climate) difficult places when there is a chance to find so much oil in easier places ? They have used advanced seismic methods to find giant oilfields, so why to expect 1 trillion barrels east of South America ? That's about the amount of oil in place in whole the Middle East. For what reason oilcompanies now consider a discovery of 30-40 Gb a tremendous amount of oil ?
Abundance, an oil production model based upon conventional oil counts because that's the oil this economy depends on. If you make a flow rate model for fresh water that is used for industries and agriculture you take water from the rivers, lakes and water tables, not from seawater. It's important to figure out in what timescale oil flowrates go down from 75 mbd to let's say 40 mbd. The timescale wherein oilexports go almost to zero. A world depending on flow rates from unconventional oil is a completely different world, a world probably with a much lower population. That makes WHT's work extremely important. Of course you can use common sense to think it out, but it is better to have it backed up by mathematics. With the knowledge of the oil exploration history common sense also tells that it is very unlikely that they will discover 1 trillion barrels of oil in one region. Maybe dispersed over the world in the next decades, but that won't prevent the coming economic mess.
Unconventional gas, like unconventional oil is much more expensive to develop. Unlike tarsand oil, flowrates are high, but decline starts after a short time and is high. For unconventional gas to extensively develop you need an economy that can sustain high gasprices, otherwise it are just reserves in the ground.
Han, I actually have a quote from this other cornucopian from TOD and PeakOil.com named ReserveGrowthRulz, who thought global warming had the beneficial side effect of leading to new exploration chances! Not only was that an absurd statement but like you said, they probably have eliminated this area for consideration through advanced seismic techniques.
I don't see comments anymore from him on TOD for quite some time. His thinking must be like his writing: chaotic. At least I a lot of times couldn't follow him.
One of the (optimistic ?) estimates is that the Arctic contains 80 Gb of oil. Hardly worth waiting for melting to speed up and fighting for regarding the very difficult climate conditions, though they do. For example Russia put already flags to mark their territory.
BTW . . .
And . . .
You obviously didn't realize it, but in the 2nd quote you admitted that, contrary to the first quote, you *do* have a political agenda.
More contaminants due to lower grade of coal -> more airborne particulates equals pollution -> removal of particulates requires extra energy -> extra energy reduces EROEI.
Some people obviously would rather live in a Victorian-era London with that historically record level of pollution.
Wingers usually have trouble with shades of gray. To them it is all black and white and can no longer reason.
Oh the irony!
Or, should I say, "Oh the hypocrisy!"
Just a couple days ago he tells me:
Now he tells me:
So you do have an agenda - it's not an academic debate about how much oil exists in the world, and how much of it we've discovered in the past, and how much we'll discover in the future ... regardless of value judgments about whether finding more or less oil is good or bad (which would be the proper, detached, un-biased scientific mindset). Noooo ... of course not (typical peaker!). It's really all about not wanting to discover lots more oil, or using lower grades of oil, because you don't want humans to find a lot more oil and use lower grades of oil, because you don't like its effects.
Like all pseudo-scientific peakers, you cloak yourself in an aura of objectivity and pretend you're simply doing "science," but in reality you're about as objective as the average creationist.
You know what I am talking about. Exogeneous variables have a huge impact and you can't dismiss this just by associating particulates with a political motivation.
Pointing out the fact that unmitigated release of dirty carbon, etc. into the air will detrimentally impact standard of living is essentially stating the historical record. China is grappling with this problem right now.
Obviously touched another one of your nerves.
But that has nothing to do with the topic. I might even agree with you that spewing excess carbon and other particulates into the air is a bad thing which should be avoided, but what does that have to do with the rate of oil discoveries? Absolutely nothing. As soon as one digresses from the topic "the rate of oil discoveries" into "oil is bad because it pollutes the air," that immediately sends up warning flags that the person telling us the rate of oil discoveries will continue to go downhill probably has some ulterior motive for telling us this. You clearly have an ulterior motive, and despite your pretense of being some objective scientist, your ulterior motive is affecting your "scientific" conclusions (or, more specifically, affecting the inputs and assumptions of your model).
I've debated peak oilers too much and for too long to be duped into believing they don't have an agenda. Their agenda varies somewhat, and it's stronger in some than in others, but in almost every case, it's nonetheless there.
You are full of it. The topic veered into discussion of categories of oil that differ. I was explaining why they differ and why the discovery search is directed to high qualities or grades of oil. The search for oil with low EROEI or oil with huge amounts of contamination is not the driving factor to seeking new deposits.
You can see my real agenda in The Oil ConunDrum. I have a chapter devoted to cornucopian arguments and if you read it, you will learn how to argue against cornucopians like yourself. So my agenda is to defeat the stupidity that exists in the land of cornucopia. But then one should eventually realize the fight against stupidity exactly aligns with the objective of doing good science. So I kill two birds with one stone.
You really don't understand your own absolute ignorance. Say that you were tasked with counting oil discoveries from day one in 1858 and you were hypothetically immortal so could do that job forever. So you go ahead and do your bean counting exercise for the next 150 years, and you get the data free of charge from every country. So here you are today and you claim that you will need more time to make any conclusive statements. There are still "numbers of discoveries" so you don't say a blinking thing. Since you are in charge of watching the numbers and refuse to commit pending more information, everyone assumes business as usual and things continue on as before, accelerating along with technology. But then some other fellow comes along that is curious about the effects of finite resources. He develops a model and shows how the model reflects reality. Using the principle of maximum entropy and some logic he is able to derive a Logistics sigmoid curve to describe a peaked discovery curve. He explains why the numbers fluctuate from year-to-year due to the sizing and rareness of reservoirs. He shows how the production lags the discovery profile by a number of years and what can cause deviations from perfect symmetry. OTOH, you keep toiling away while putting your fingers in your ears, claiming that the other fellow has an agenda!
In your case, ignorance is a virtue because it does not allow any kind of introspection. So you blithely ignore your own limited vision, and rail about the other guy claiming he doesn't know how to count.
This would make for a nice Dr. Seuss story if you replaced all the important scientific principles with nonsense rhymes (see the Seuss story of The Bee Watchers for instance).
It would be nice to see a cumulative version of this discovery/production chart. Has anybody produced one?
It would be nice to see a cumulative version of this discovery/production chart. Has anybody produced one?
To answer my own question: WHT did produce a comulative discover curve here http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2712
It would be nice to see a cum. production curve with it.
It would still be very nice to see. That standard graph (in an above post) should now include a spike in it showing a big discovery year (or two?) for all the Brazil discoveries. Maybe even enough to meet current production for a year? The Brazil discoveries will take a while to get going but they are significant.
From a discovery perspective they are. I don't think they'll have access to all the capital they will need to get at it, though. I suspect that a large amount of that oil will stay underground forever or in the very least the production will spread over five decades or longer instead of the timeframe they are looking at now.
Once the credit bubble we are in pops, we will no longer be able to assume that if the resource is there we will just go get it if the price is high enough. People will become very skittish about long term investments.
Iran Protests: http://www.irannewsnow.com/2011/02/live-blog-iran-25bahman-feb14-2011/
Despite the fear it looks like some have made it onto the streets after all. I imagine the protests in Bahrain and Iran will look to complement each other?
Can't see things taking off as much as they did in Egypt/Tunisia, but never say never..
Iran has no Western backers to moderate their brutal response. After stealing the election a year ago the government has tolerated no dissent. Their legal system is at best a lottery and has resulted in show trials and executions of protesters. The regime is much more powerful, and they still have significant oil exports.
I do not know enough about other countries. Egypt had relatively free if unofficial opposition groups in a loose secular coalition with tech savvy controllers. They reacted quickly to rapidly to changing events and caught the regime off guard. I doubt that other countries regimes would make the same mistakes. Mubarak was a figurehead and easy focus for Egypt.
Bahrain is an absolute monarchy and deeply spit on tribal lines. Any revolution is likely to be religious and bloody in nature.
I've been to Bahrain a few times; perhaps the most important sandbar on the planet about now. At less than 300 sq mi / 750 sq km, if things there get dicey, there are few places to hide. I expect that, due to its importance (major oil infrastucture, military, financial), US involvement will be more pronounced than it was in Egypt if TSHTF there. Reform movements in the Persian/Arabian Gulf could have a more immediate effect on Western economies than what is happening in Egypt, demanding a more immediate, physical response. While I've been excited about the recent, mostly peaceful events in Egypt, developments in Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, etc. beget a more nervous sense of reality. Exciting times indeed.
In Bahrain the protesters are native Shiites. The regime is Sunni, and according to reports, the protesters are accusing their forces of not being native to Bahrain.
I'd guess that the regime will import however many Sunni mercenaries are required to put down the demonstrators.
Why import Sunni mercenaries when they have infidel mercenaries, doesn't the Americans have a large Navel base there. I very much doubt that they will allow Bahrain to go under, it would show too the rest of the Gulf state rulers that America was not to be trusted. If Bahrain goes down you will see the rest of the Gulf states putting as much distance between it and America as quickly as possible Qatar just across the water has a ridiculously large American air base out in the desert just south of Doha which is the command centre for all of the American forces in the Middle east. Check it out on Google maps, the loss of this would certainly put a crimp in Americas style if they were forced to abandon that. There are a whole set of Dominoes here ready to fall. This is just too frightening for words.
There are large, restive Shiite populations, even majorities, in the areas along the southwest coast of the Persian Gulf. But, as you point out, there are large interests in keeping the status quo there. At least, I think, so long as the oil lasts.
Yemen is a more likely place for the next regime to fall. It has a long and troubled history, since North Yemen became a state following WW I, while South Yemen was a British colony. South Yemen eventually became independent and socialist. Later there was the unification of North and South Yemen, followed by civil war in the early '90s. North Yemen also has a Shiite minority in the northern part of that country, which they have periodically opressed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Yemen
(Note interesting bit about the British wanting Aden as a base to stop piracy of Suez shipping bound for India.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_unification
Seems the tempo has piked up a bit in Yemen
from the BBC: Street battles hit Yemeni capital in latest protest
and Iran
from CNN Heavy security surrounds demonstrators in Iran; clashes reported
Same here. I'm somewhat anxiously waiting to see how this pans out.
I suspect that this has previously been posted, but Jeff Rubin has a 2/9/11 blog post on food prices as a key contributor to unrest in Egypt:
http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com/2011/02/09/food-what’s-really-behind-the-unrest-in-egypt/
Chinese shoppers struggle with spiraling prices
Jordan revokes restrictions on public gatherings
Iran, Egypt Caught in the Churning of a Mideast Democracy Wave
Looks like the genie might be out of the bottle in more ways than one. Unfortunately this new found sense of pseudo freedom doesn't really free anyone from the as yet generally unrecognized realities of population overshoot and resource depletion.
Malthus seems to be telling us "I told you so", from his grave. Too bad there is no victory to be won over the strict laws of nature. Unfortunately even toppling all the Mubaraks in the world will not make much difference if every ignorant human, be they rich or poor, continues to believe that the current paradigm is even remotely viable.
Developments in the immediate future in the Middle East might indeed finally bring about a series of cascading and far reaching global events that might truly begin to unravel what we have come to take for granted as the normal state of affairs.
If that should come to pass I predict that the US' position as sole global superpower will be even more quickly undermined. If nothing else, enjoy the show folks, we have bought ourselves front row seats.
"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Janis Joplin
The speech about global reality, of course, should have been given decades ago, when, sadly, the world believed that all things were possible even in the face of rising population and projected resource depletion. It is too probably too late, now, for the speech, so Egypt, like the U.S. and the rest of the world will continue to rely on abstractions as a substitute for sustenance.
Having said that, Egypt is a society that lives under an extreme maldistribution of income with a tremendous amount of resources going to the military. During this revolution, it appears that most people felt the military was part of the key to their salavation and freedom. In the future, it is hard to believe that the military will allow any fundamental change as it benefits from the gross lack of equity.
ts - I hope you and I are wrong but that has been my sense also. Maybe the military is behind the people. But as far as I can guess the military has controlled the country through a figure head. I can't think of one dictator who held power without the support of the military. And as you point out the military has been "well fed" for the last 30 years. Given how Egypt's economy is on a down swing from an already low position it's difficult to imagine the military giving up their piece of the pie. As I understand Egypt s now governened by another ex-military leader who supposedly has his own resume of murder/torture. And this is the man who is going to lead the military to a new dawn of less money for the military as Egypt's resources continue to shrink? If I were the top dog in Egypt today I would be putting all kinds of friendly proposals on the table for folks to delight over. What actually will be changed in another matter.
""Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Janis Joplin
Uh, that would be renaissance man Kris Kristofferson.
Yeah, but it sounded better when Janis sang it.
Yeh, but she sang it and I think made it famous.
Bahrain protesters take control of main square
Looks like some heavy-handed unprovoked responses by the riot police happening over there at the moment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0JU1MHLzRI
Iranian lawmakers condemn protests; call for execution of leaders
Anti- and pro-government protesters clash again in Yemen
It's that time again. Watch as the U.S. Census Bureau World Population Clock ticks over to 6.9 billion in a few hours from this posting, and raise a glass to mandated exponential growth.
Oil industry girds for tax-break clash:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/7424222.html
You brought it on yourself, Big Oil. Did you not know that President Obama supports ethanol? Don’t you know the Iowa caucuses are coming up in a year? Didn’t you see Gingrich groveling about ethanol the other day in Iowa?
Wake up! Iowa is the Texas of ethanol. And the corn belt states are at least equal to the oil patch politically.
Big Oil has had so much political support and the money to buy it for so long, it appears it can not grasp that there is competition that can now play the same game.
So be careful with all those cheap shots at ethanol subsidies. You just might just shoot yourself in the foot.
If oil wants to take down ethanol, then oil is coming along for the ride. Oil has more to lose than ethanol, but seems not to know it.
In other words, corn based ethanol producers have to resort to political blackmail because there is no economic case to be made for corn based ethanol?
With skyrocketing food prices globally, I would think that it is going to get harder and harder to offer subsidies to farmers to take land away from food crops to use for corn based ethanol production. I wonder how many politicians are going to want to be associated with programs that reduce global food production?
"I wonder how many politicians are going to want to be associated with programs that reduce global food production?"
I expect Newt understands that folks in the US are more concerned with the cost of fuel in Urbana than the cost of food in Tangiers, at least for now. I'm sure his spin will reflect this until the food riots start here in the US. IMO, we'll likely see the fuel riots first.
IMO, we'll likely see the fuel riots first.
Retail theft of gas and food happen already. Long before 'fuel riots' will be an uptick in property crime tied to energy - crossconnects, fuel tanks drained, et la.
(Still have not noodled out the best additive to gas that'll destroy the people's motors who siphon or puncture the bottom of the tank to get fuel)
"With skyrocketing food prices globally, I would think that it is going to get harder and harder to offer subsidies to farmers to take land away from food crops to use for corn based ethanol production."
But if the poor can't afford to pay the cost of production for the food, and the corn growers can sell the corn to make fuel at a profit to SUV owners, then that is what the market will make happen.
I make no claims as to the moral validity of that process. Fuel and fertilizer costs are up, and the farmers have to make a profit too. If the government wants to buy the corn, then ship it overseas for free to buy goodwill, then that works too. Except that the government is broke.
And if you dump all the subsidies for any reason, then Monsanto, Cargill, and ADM will have even more control over your food supply.
I don't see a good way out.
You probably wouldn't consider it to be a "good way", but the replacement of capitalism is what seems to be required.
What I think is required :^) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_(novel)
No worries, I'm sure we can find some way to fuel our SUVs with these things...
http://www.phawker.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/hunger_1.jpg
Oh, never mind, for all practical purposes that's exactly what we are already doing now and most of our politicians don't seem to have any problem with it at all. They already support corporate welfare which by default results in ecological degradation and population overshoot. Granted that one in the picture might be a bit too lean but with some good barbecue sauce I'm sure it could be made palatable, maybe just a little corn to fatten it up, eh?
Edit: But if my post doesn't depress you just a little bit then read this:
http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/1719/the-che...
http://www.kgw.com/news/local/Produce-prices-skyrocket-overnight-1159854...
Produce prices skyrocket with freeze in Mexico, Southwest
The thermal energy driving the atmospheric circulation is increasing, in particular the formation and intensity of baroclinic eddies, so the jet stream meander is getting more intense. In the winters to come, expect more effective heat waves near the poles (20 C above normal for weeks on end this winter) and abnormal freezes down to the edge of the tropics.
Unfortunately the deniers and fence sitters will think this is evidence of global cooling since they have no education in atmospheric physics. Less baroclinic eddy activity means a more axially symmetric circulation (colder at the poles and warmer at middle to low latitudes). Experiencing weather is not enough to understand how it works.
Food is not the only thing that's going up
Clothing Prices to Rise 10% Starting in Spring
That's hard to believe. My wife just went berzerk at J.C.Penny's (a discount retailer in the US) buying clothes at 90+% off. I got a nice $75 jacket for $5, a bunch of T-Shirts for $2/ea, a bunch of work shirts for $5/ea. There'a always a crazy sale in America as the big-box stores do their clearance cycle. Target, for example, will clearance out a product based on a color change - got to keep the Chinese goods flowing.
China just bought a dissolving pulp mill on northern Van Isle that produces pulp for rayon...a silk substitute. That is as significant as their acquisition of energy and crop lands.
Paul
The local Safeway has had a sign up for a month;"Due to inclement weather the supply of lettuce has been seriously reduced. We are working with our suppliers to correct the problem. Sorry for the inconvenience."
No tomato on your fast food burger in my town.
The current prioduce price jumps will be correctly attributed mostly to weather.
But the rising costs of inputs to the farmer is going to continue to drive up wholesale prices.
Meat will be getting right on up there in the next year or so.
Price of meat:
We're having trouble selling beef halves at 3.89 per pound of hanging
weight....it seems like consumers can't do the math and see that this
price is substantially less than equal amounts at the grocery store---or
more likely they cannot make themselves commit to a year's supply of
beef all at once.
Jeanne,
I am OK with your comment.;) You have actually nailed one of the very most important reasons small scale farm to consumer direct marketing doesn't work very well anymore.
Modern consumers are simply unwilling to go to the trouble of planning ahead and investing a few hours and dollars to cut their grocery bills.Furthermore not too many of the folks who really need to do so possess the skills, kitchen facilities, and money up front to buy in bulk anymore.
We used to sell a major part of our apples and peaches direct to homemakers who would get together and buy a pickup or station wagon load for their pantry;other buyers would buy a pickup truck load to sell to homemakers a couple of bushels at a time back in their nieghborhood.
We sold to the same people year after year for fifty years-we actually inherited the childern of our own grandparents 'customers as our own customers in some cases.
Such sales are rare now-and selling four or five pounds of this and a couple of pounds of that at retail is terribly inefficient, in terms of time and inventory management. VERY few small farmers can grow enough, and in enough variety, to keep a roadside market properly stocked-meaning well enough to attract the surburbanite with cash looking for TOP quality fresh stuff and not too concerned about the price. Unless you have a good high traffic location, it's a losing proposition , unless the choice is earning a very few dollars versus earning nothing.
Hopefully as times get worse-and they are going to get worse-you will be able to find bulk order customers who are still able to spend a thousand bucks plus at a pop, have freezers, and are willing to invest a day or two in working up your meat, unless you are selling wrapped and frozen-which seems most likely.
There will be such customers-people with management skills who aren't making as much money as they used to, and looking to economize.
Always throw in something-a Coca Cola, a cup of complimentary coffee, anything you can that is appropriate;one you have done business twice with such a customer, you just about own them if you handle it right. My poor old deceased Momma used to be able to recall all the details of her customers family lives, and always gave away a few cut flowers or a bulb or two, or a bunch of grapes, or a couple of fresh cucumbers or tomatos, etc, with every sale.Whatever was in season and excess supply, basically. Some of her customers, who lived many miles away and never saw her otherwise except on buying trips, used to come and bring HER flowers every year after she became bedridden.
The sincere personal touch is everything in bulk sales farm to customer. Marketing, as practiced by suit wearing business types, is not going to fetch it;volumes will never be high enough to advertize much for instance.
Done right from your end, the customer's trip to your place will be more of a pleasure trip rather than a chore.
Just put up some big yellow arches over your driveway and throw in a free two liter bottle of cheap carbonated sugar water to sweeten the deal >;^)
OFM's comment probably pretty much nails it. Oh, and expecting consumers to actually be able to do the math is really pushing it...
The Brent-WTI spread right now is $17.37. This is madness. How long can this continue?
If it were the other way around everyone in the US would be screaming "Speculators, Speculators, Speculators!" But what are they crying now? Is anyone claiming that speculators are keeping the price lower in the US?
Anyway I have no idea what is going on. This simply cannot be only because Cushing tanks are overstocked.
Ron P.
Could it be that buyers are sitting on stocks in Cushing until the next big price spike? It may be as simple as buy low, sell high.
Considering the changes happening in the Mid East, they may not have to wait long before it becomes profitable to unstrand all of that WTI priced goo.
No, that could not possibly be the cause. Physical barrels of oil held in Cushing have little to no effect on what the traders do on the NYMEX. About three quarters of a million contracts are traded daily on the NYMEX. And each contract is for 1,000 barrels of oil. That comes to 75,000,000 barrels of oil traded daily on the NYMEX or over 20,000 times the oil held in Cushing storage tanks. Sitting on physical oil instead of trying to sell it means nothing to traders.
The traders that trade on the NYMEX and the ICE as well are all trying to guess which way the physical price, or spot price of oil will move. That is it in a nutshell.
Anyway, speculators don't have any oil in Cushing or anywhere else. Producers have oil there that they have not sold and refineries have oil there that they have not collected yet. A few hedgers have oil there also but speculators do not deal in physical barrels of oil. They only trade paper barrels.
Ron P.
I've said this before, Ron, and I'm stickin' to my guns.
Oil is piling up in Cushing, at least in part, because demand is lower then expected, because the recovery is weaker than is being let on.
We're selling something like <12 million vehicles per year (a -25% delta from '07) and we've got a structural unemployment/underemployment rate of >15%.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it:-)
My guess, and that is the best anyone can do, is that a good deal of that reduced demand is due to inclement weather conditions. We will have a true test of demand as springtime driving season approaches and soon.
I'm sending an email out this morning to our operator inquiring about trucking our oil to the Gulf Coast. Note that Brent is currently exceeding early 2008 prices, while WTI has been below early 2008 prices:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=RBRTE&f=M
In any case, globally it certainly looks like a renewed bidding war for net oil exports.
I guess that should be confirmed in the inventory report at some point.
I suspect that Chndia's combined net oil imports, as a percentage of global net exports, probably rose to about 19% in 2010, versus 11% in 2005. If we extrapolate the trend, they would be consuming 100% of global net exports in 2025. While I don't think that they will literally be consuming 100% in 2025, the trend line is pretty clear, and it's a trend line that does not look good for the US.
Chinese oil imports are up 27% over last year, while North Sea oil production is down 2% from last year. If you want to know why Brent oil is so expensive, there is the reason in a nutshell.
OTOH, US and Canadian oil consumption is flat or declining, and Canadian oil production is up a bit over last year. And there's some new production coming from North Dakota. That's why WTI is relatively cheap compared to Brent. Surplus Canadian oil is holding the price down and giving consumers in the middle of the US a bit of a break from international prices.
Now of course the oil traders are thinking, "Isn't there some way we can get some of this Canadian oil to China?" and of course they could, but it might take a few years.
I am a firm believer in the prophets of doom getting the last laugh, from Malthus onward-eventually.
It is beginning to look as if the folks who have been predicting unaffordable oil's arrival "in the near future"are going to be laufhing a lot sooner than most of us would have guessed recently.
But it is going to be hollow, bitter laughter.I-told-you-so laughter.
A shame that Matt Simmons isn't here to see events.
A shame indeed.
I have had some experience with people in my extended family having medical problems affecting thier thinking when they start getting older.The signs can come on pretty fast and are sometimes followed by an early and usually unexpected death due to heart attack or stroke.
Of course we will probably never know very much about his health in his last year....His family is entitled to privacy in this matter in any case.
Yeah, it would have been nice to have him quieting watching with some satisfaction.
But I gotta say, at the end there he became way too much of an waaaay-out-there person with bad science and conspiracy theories. May he rest in peace and the world thanks him for his valuable contributions on alerting the world as to peak oil.
Indeed, on balance he will have a favourable perception by those who will look at his life. And as oldfarmermac said, when people get older and are close to strokes their minds changes and got a little crazy. Matt Simmons' final two years cannot discount the efforts he made to the Peak Oil situation, especially with getting out the message and inspiring a lot of his readers to delve further, irregardless if they agreed with him or not, most stayed.
bad science and conspiracy theories.
Such as?
I'm not going to get into it. If you want, you can dig up the things he was saying about the BP oil spill not long before his untimely death.
There were some bad ideas (lets use a nuke) but if you aren't willing to defend your statements, why make 'em?
That laugh is more the satanic laugh of the weirdos.
It is very sad to see climate change, corn ethanol and high oilprices wreaking havoc.
I don't look at it that way.
I think of it more in a game theory / comparative advantage manner.
Endless oil flow has allowed the absolute worst people - the financiers and politicians - to milk the system for all its worth, to profit in ways that are obscene and quite unnatural.
Peak oil is the only thing that can bring these folks down. Be glad! I'm telling you, peak oil is more powerful than Bernanke and the money machine, and we should all be thankful for that.
If you believe otherwise, you merely believe in comfort and safety - I care not that Wall Street gets away with murder, my belly is full. Fill me with Doritos and Prozac and TV till the day I die.
I say, good riddance.
I welcome the return of the darwinian world with open arms - we'll see how long the financiers can last.
That is so apropos. Do people remember the slogan for Doritos when Jay Leno was spokesman?
"Crunch all you want, we'll make more"
Don't have to watch it but here is a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpF6am8F3QM
I used to feel the same way, and still do to a certain extent. But on the other hand I'm really not sure that I'd truly want to return to a 'dog-eat-dog' world where these types of things can happen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Be careful what you wish for...
exactly.. what types do you (Oilman) think those folks ARE in the Dog-eat-dog world?
Wolf in Bankers clothing, man.
I agree with Johkul, if we assume that things are going only halfway to hell in a hand basket;the bankers and lawyers will get a fat hog share in any world where the conventional power structure remains standing.
But in the event of an actual collapse-resulting in anarchy-lawyers will starve while current day muggers and hard core pushers continue to eat.
If push really comes to shove, and we do see a return to a truly Darwinian world, which very well might happen, we might even see really tough guys eating lawyers-literally.
One must admit that there is a sort of poetic justice in this scenario, the lawyers having fed on the criminals, figuratively, in quite a Darwinian fashion, for a long time. ;)
Turn about, they say, is fair play.;)
I hope to be safely dead of old age before tshtf, but just in case , I'm ready to bunker down, locked and loaded.
I've always felt that the "fat" man is usually the last one to have enough strength to prey on the weaker. That is, the politicians and financiers have enough financial cushion to buy up scarce resources and negotiate some security in chaotic times. All this while the rest become too weak to really compete. Sure their time will come and certainly they'll become targets, but a well fed rottweiler will last longer than other dogs who can't feed themselves every day. When the rottweiler begins to go very hungry it's still ahead of the, by then emaciated, competition.
WT is there any unused rail capacity there?
Canadian syncrude and Bakken production plus relatively US low demand.
The reason that Brent is higher is declining North Sea production and much higher demand in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Conventional oil (most of which is in MENA) has peaked.
Unconventional oil and ethanol which everybody hates is starting to become more economical.
The law of substitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_rate_of_substitution
It costs Suncor about $45 to produce a barrel of synthetic crude oil from the oil sands. If they could sell this on the Brent market (which they can't because they physically can't get it to England), they could get $100 for it.
So, Suncor is doing really well, and England not so good. The entire population of England could move to the Canadian oil sands (which are bigger than England) and the problem would sort itself out. But that's a long-term solution.
The immediate problem is the ethanol production. The US is converting corn (about 25% of the crop) into fuel. Unfortunately, this is driving the price of grain up worldwide, and the result is food riots in MENA (Middle East and North Africa). This is probably something the US was not expecting to have to deal with.
Baloney.
American farmers grow feed corn for animals, not people.
Animals provide milk and meat--luxuries for rich people.
Rich people aren't rioting for milk and meat.
Poor people couldn't afford to buy milk and meat from the US.
Hording and food subsidies in the Third World are driving prices higher and crushing the poor.
You also don't understand that oil prices by themselves cause food prices to rise--figure the transportation not to mention oil-based packaging.
But I know you're not that dumb--you're just trying to get a rise out of me.
:-D
How are those wind-powered commuter trains doin', RMG?
How are those wind-powered commuter trains doin', RMG?
They're doing really well, thanks. The new Calgary West LRT Line is on track for completion in December, 2012. The people in the South East and North who don't have wind-powered electric trains are demanding service be extended to their part of town ASAP.
The transmission lines from the wind farms are running hot due to excessive load, but the provincial government is fast-tracking new transmission lines, dealing with objectors on the principle of "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down." Or the NIMBY that stands in the way of progress becomes road kill. Your choice of metaphor.
You realize that Canadian oil consumption is falling, and all this development will free up even more oil that we can sell to other countries at high prices. That's what its all about, at least for Canadians.
And as for food - we sell food to other countries, too. We're looking for big sales in the near future - Saudi Arabia is going out for bids on wheat. We've got millions of cattle that are looking really fat and exportable, too.
And immigration into Canada set a new record last year - 280,000 people. But we're cool with that. The more the merrier.
How's that property bubble coming along too? Catching up to the US in food and oil production is one thing, but maybe ease off on emulating their financial booboos.
Property is doing fine. The key to it is that the Canadian mortgage companies are not allowed to lend money to people who probably can't pay it back. And the bank and government finances are in pretty good shape, too.
In general, things are pretty sold.
Ok. We know you've already sold your soils to the Great Satan below you. You got anything solid left on sale? >;^)
The property bubble is doing great.
http://www.news1130.com/news/local/article/172901--vancouver-s-westside-...
That does not compute! That does not compute!
That's far too rational to come from the same species I'm surrounded by. Are you sure you're not from another planet?
The last I looked at this it was 18.23
http://www.upstreamonline.com/marketdata/markets_crude.htm
NPR ran a story this morning. Philip Verleger blamed the spread on a lack of pipeline capacity.
.. or maybe the CIA or the Bernank or Obama personally owns the next physical batch of 1000 bl inside the pipeline just outside the refinery and refuses to sell "it".
There you go, that should halt Cushing , stem prices and widespread panic is dampened for another day. /snark
The spread has really only been significant for a month or so. It takes longer than that for people to understand it is permanent and to figure out a way around it. You can be sure companies are looking at sending some oil by rail to somewhere else but that takes time and might take an investment in rail cars. I am not sure if there are other options companies are looking at. The spread could stay like this for several months until an alternative is found.
Does WTI really exist?
The consensus in Spain among the people who discuss these things (all half dozen of them!) is that WTI hardly exists at all, that it is a convenient fiction.
You can read the arguments in Oil Crash, but the name is misleading, in Spanish only I am afraid. The site is kept (per amore) by a PhD in Physics, a researcher of the CSIC. In Spain scientific researchers are public workers, with an administrative career.
http://oilcrash.net/2011/02/05/ineficiencias-crecientes-en-el-mercado-gl...
To summarize their opinions: the standard view about the spread then the curious fact that WTI is a "convenient fiction", made up from the mixing of oils from different sources because Texas doesn't produce enough oil, mixed with oil from Saudi Arabia.
Arbitrage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage In an efficient economy if the spread is more than 10% very quickly economic agents trade the products to make money from the difference, if it doesn't happen it is because there must be some kind of inefficiency in the markets.
Sulphur is growing in the American crude oil sent to refineries
http://www.theoildrum.com/files/2%20crude%20sulfur%20EIA.jpg
From this they conclude that not only WTI is fictitious, it doesn't represent the American crude market.
Because refineries certainly know what they buy, they drive down the price because of the lower benefit they get from sulphurous oil.
4th of July, 2008 the highest oil price in the market was not 147 dollars, but Tapis at 152.81
We don't see arbitrage between WTI and Brent because simply there's not enough WTI, it has disappeared from the real world -WTI production in 2008 was 300,000 barrels a day
http://www.slideshare.net/oleganisimov/eugene-weinberg-commerzbank
http://www.downstreamtoday.com/news/article.aspx?a_id=16068
On a global basis the ratio between crude delivered and commercial trade is 1:6, in the case of WTI it is an extraordinary 1:2,000.
-----
Go to http://www.oil-price.net/ and see for yourselves
They no longer have in the front page WTI and Natural Gas prices, now they have WTI and Brent side to side.
CONCLUSION: WTI only exists now in the financial markets.
s - WTI is real and a lot of it is sitting in Cushing right now. You are free to drive up there and buy as much as you want. Haul it to the EU (at your expense, of course) and sell it. WTI is a type of crude oil. The WTI index is not a type of crude oil..it is an index. Folks seem to be having trouble understanding the difference.
Ron I think what he is saying is that the quantity of "real" WTI produced is so low now that the index itself is irrelevant.
There are still large amounts of WTI being produced these days, but the fact is that there are far larger amounts of Canadian oil than Texas oil being produced, and most of this oil is exported into the middle of the US, drastically affecting the price of WTI.
So WTI is really a proxy for Canadian oil trading in the US.
As I am fond of telling people, we are only about 10 years away from the time when Canada will be producing more oil than the US - and most of that new Canadian oil will be consumed in the US (Canadian oil consumption is actually falling rather than rising). The spread between WTI and international oil prices is just an indicator of what is happening, and will become more obvious in the future.
The only thing is that, while the US is now an exclusive buyer (i.e. 99%) of this increased Canadian oil production, China has its eyes on it, too. And Canadians will have no qualms about selling it to China if China offers more money for it.
I agree and I think that is the point santaluciae was making, that WTI is just a proxy. I buy that because prices in general are simply a proxy for a combination of all sorts of factors that combine in an arguably complicated fashion.
Ron - here's a fairly recent (about 3-4 years ago) example of how a lack of transport can skew the numbers: NG was selling around the U.S. for about $6-7/mcf. Due to a lack of pipeline throughput some Rocky Mnt operators had to sell their NG for as little as $0.75/mcf...essentially an 80% spread. Makes the 15-20% spread for WTI not look so bad, eh? A simple but cruel fact of the biz: if you can't move it you can't sell it.
But now the Rocky Mnt Express is moving that NG...and the consumers in CO are very unhappy about the rise in local NG meter prices.
The Brent-WTI spread right now is $17.37. This is madness. How long can this continue?
Until 2013, which is the earliest they could complete new pipelines from Cushing to the Gulf Coast. However, the difference is now large enough that people are probably going to start moving large amounts of oil to seaports by tank car. Watch for it coming to a railroad line near you.
Anyway I have no idea what is going on. This simply cannot be only because Cushing tanks are overstocked.
There's more new oil coming down the pipelines from Canada. It hasn't hit Cushing yet, but it will, and the oil traders know that, so they're discounting prices accordingly.
Western Canadian Select, Lloyd Heavy, and Bow River Heavy are all trading in Canada at a $40 discount to Brent. Don't you think that concentrates the traders' minds wonderfully on how they could take advantage of that spread?
Rocky - "Don't you think that concentrates the traders' minds wonderfully on how they could take advantage of that spread?" Hell yeah...I was pricing 20 gal jerrycans at Home Depot this weekend. Thought I might cruise up north of the Red River and pick up some of that easy spread money.
Actually I was hoping someone like Alan could offer some insight to what might be going on with rail tank cars right now. I have no idea what excess capacity, if any, might exist. Makes me also wonder what profit there might be for an over-the-road tanker would be. If the new p/l starts in 2013 that doesn't leave a lot of time to recover any big capex (let alone profit) from some big transport expansion to take advantage of the current spread. You and I both know why there's a big spread: that's what is should cost you to move the oil to the refineries. But I wonder how close the spread is (or isn't) to that reality.
Rockman, I think the two richest men in the world (Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) have this situation pretty much covered. Buffet owns BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) and Gates owns a big piece of CN (The railroad formerly known as Canadian National before the Canadian government privatized it.)
The rest of us will have to be satisfied with crumbs, although I do own a small piece of CN, and it's Canadian competitor, CP.
At this point in time I think the supply of railroad tank cars is insufficient. Of course, given enough money, they could probably build railroad tank cars faster than you would believe. I'm just guessing, of course, but Warren and Bill do have more money than you would believe.
I have heard it would cost about $7/bbl to move WTI to the Gulf Coast by rail, and given that the spread between WTI and Louisiana oil is closer to $17, I think it might happen. Tracks are not really a problem because the railroad tracks are there. They just have to build the tank cars and move the oil.
There's a new boy in town...
Carlos Slim - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires
Kleptocrat Hosni Mubarak is the richest man in the world, thanks to the US tax payer in part.
Ha! A new, new boy in town!
Rocky - How fast they can build additional tanks cars isn't the issue IMHO. The qustion is: how long will it take to recover that capex? I have no idea but what if it takes 2 years to payout. I have to think that's somewhat optimistic. And if your projection of the new pipeline coming on in 2013 holds up then how many tank cars would you build this year knowing that in less than 2 years the demand for those cars would disappear? I know you understand net present value: and if the new tank car build out generates a money losing investment than it's not likely we'll see more cars being built.
Bring a few double-hulled barges and I'll help you load it for a decent cut. I'm pretty sure there are finished oil lines from the refinery to the port. I'm not sure there are crude lines, but I'm willing to find out!
What volumes of this low grade Canadian oil are coming down the pipe? The tar sands output hasn't jumped significantly (not according to the rosy predictions trajectory leading to about 5 million barrels per day by 2020).
I think there's around 500,000 bpd in new oil coming down the pipe toward Cushing. The Canadian pipeline companies have built 885,000 bpd in export capacity to the US in the last 12 months, and there is another 850,000 bpd under construction, but only 500,000 bpd of that is leading to Cushing.
It's true that there's not really enough new Canadian production to fill all these pipelines, but there's enough new oil to really make a difference to US oil prices. There's more new oil sands capacity under construction which will go into the pipes in future.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers estimates that Canadian oil production will hit 4 million bpd by 2022, which should fill up all this pipeline capacity. This should be distinguished from the rest of the world, where things may be getting pretty dire from a supply perspective by that time.
The key point is that Canadian production is slowly but steadily increasing, whereas other oil producers are falling off the table, one by one.
If the US only needed 2 m/b/d your argument might be sustainable. But the US uses 20 m/b/d so Canadian oil is 1/10 of the supply. If Texas has 300,000 b/d, it doesn't account for anything. Watch the inventories and Government adjustments. The last marginal barrel price will win eventually IMO. The futures and oil stock movement today are consistent with this reasoning.
Hey, both Brent and WTI are crude oil and imports from Canada are in barrels of crude oil. When you say 20 mb/d you are speaking of all liquids, a totally different thing. You should not mix apples and oranges.
In December the US produced 5,592 kb/d and imported 8,685 kb/d for a crude oil total of 14,277 thousand barrels a day. The rest was Renewables, 961 bp/d, Natural Gas Liquids, 2,037 kb/d, Refinery Process Gain, 1,066 bp/d and adjustments of 417 kb/d.
So 14.277 mb/d is the number you should be working with, not 20 mb/d.
Petroleum Overview
Ron P.
I think one should be careful with all those definitions. For example, imports (10,928 kb/d) include products as well as crude. Exports (2,244 kb/d) include mostly product, which gives the net import figure of 8,685 kb/d. If those products were not imported along with the crude, we would need to import and refine a larger quantity of crude to make up for the loss. If the natural gas plant liquids weren't available, more crude imports would be required as well. Of course, the numbers for ethanol and renewables don't fit in very well, given the lower energy content of a barrel of ethanol...
E. Swanson
The products you are talking about are crude oil products, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other distillates. Ditto for exports. And all of these combined came to a net of 8,685 kb/d. So if we did not import those products then net imports would not have come to 8,685 kb/d. Then we would have had to import enough crude to compensate. That would have brought crude imports right back up to about 8,685 kb/d.
So what's your point?
And we were talking about Brent, WTI and Canadian imports, not NGLs. What we would have had to have if we did not have enough NGLs is a totally different subject.
Bottom line when you are talking about crude futures and crude imports you should not include NGLs or renewables and especially not refinery process gain.
Ron P.
I do agree that including NGLs can be misleading. But, the EIA wants to make their accounting of source and sink balance out, which is to say, products supplied must equal crude plus imports and the others as well. Part of the problem is that the EIA mixes different types of fuel together, counting gallons, not BTUs. So, they must include ethanol along with the gasoline produced from crude or imported to match the sales of gasoline to the consumer. The same is true when biodiesel is sold mixed with diesel from crude or from imported sources. Then too, there was a serious draw down from storage in December, as shown in the EIA table to which you linked, which resulted in less crude and product being imported to provide that 20,000 kb/d total. On top of that, the data for December is an estimate, which is obvious from the precision of the total number.
Of course, one might assemble the data in a different combination. For example, one might remove the propane/propylene from the data. Or, one might do the revision based on BTU equivalent of the various sources and end products. Whether this effort would provide further enlightenment would be difficult to say...
E. Swanson
Interesting in that consumption is a mix but you can get production from EIA as a crude component
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=57&a...
Most ironic, I just received an email offering me Unused Surplus Pipe & Casing Available For Sale. I'm not in the business so I doubt if I will be buying any anytime soon. I'll be glad to forward the email to anyone who might be interested. My email is posted in my profile. BTW, just wondering if I received this email because I read and comment on The Oil Drum. Perhaps the rest of you have already received the same offer...
I haven't heard about any surplus pipe for sale, but I'm not interested. If someone offered me a used bridge, I'd probably pass on that, too.
However, I do own shares in railroads. Me and Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. In the post-peak-oil era, railroads may be the best way to move goods around. I wouldn't count on there being too many trucks on the roads.
Well then, have I got something for you! I can let you in on the deal of your life, a once in a lifetime ground floor opportunity to buy in on a bridge to nowhere that hasn't even been built yet. Betcha can't beat that, can you? It's almost as good as investing in undiscovered unknown reserves to supplement future oil production. I'd let you pay later with the vast profits you're bound to make but I just need a small suitcase full of hundred dollar bills up front so I can make it out to Nassau on the evening flight. I'll sign the papers at gate as I'm getting on the plane >;^)
To be clear I wasn't trying to sell anything to anyone I just found it curious that I had gotten such an email since I work with solar not oil.
Matt Simmons old Company is claiming to have seen this coming:
"We have effectively identified the trend in WTI price weakness, consistently highlighting expectations for Midwest refiners that consume crudes that are priced off of WTI to outperform other regions for more than six months," Simmons said in the note released on Monday.
"Our thesis is playing out, in fact more rapidly and pronounced than originally expected," the Houston-based energy investment bank said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/14/refiners-wti-idUSN142961372011...
WTI-Brent spot spread now $18.84
WTI-Tapis spot spread now $23.77
http://www.upstreamonline.com/marketdata/markets_crude.htm
Arctic climate variation under ancient greenhouse conditions
The gist is that the climate record in the Arctic Ocean for a period in which it was ice-free during the summers resembles the current record. Therefore it is unlikely that a comparably warm climate due to AGW would result in a climate that has ENSO or NAO stuck in a particular phase, rather than oscillating as it did then.
However, it may not be particularly persuasive, since the positions of the continents have changed somewhat since the Late Cretaceous (69–76 million years ago). This has modified ocean currents between the Atlantic and Pacific, as well as exchanges with the Arctic Ocean, resulting in the current climate consisting of primarily Ice Age conditions, with relatively brief warm periods.
The abstract is at Tropical ocean-atmosphere controls on inter-annual climate variability in the Cretaceous Arctic
The article points to an interesting report. I've been wondering how the data from sediment cores taken from the middle of the Arctic Ocean might turn out. However, without more study, I think it's important to again note that there was a major change in ocean circulation which occurred about 3.3 million years ago as the Isthmus of Panama formed. That shut off the equatorial circulation between the Atlantic and the Pacific, which may have resulted in the Ice Ages which followed. Looking back to the Cretaceous as an analog of the impacts of Global Warming is likely to give a false impression, as the basic circumstances back then were different. Indeed, the report presents a map of the period, showing a considerably different ocean pathway between the Atlantic and the Arctic, via the "Western Interior Seaway", which is roughly the Great Plains of the US.
It's interesting to note that the data for this paper was collected in 1983. Perhaps, there is now published data analysis available for this most recent time period. If anyone knows where that might be published, please leave a comment. I've just found some more recent reports, by Googling on the core number...
E. Swanson
The little article above on cheap drip irrigation, For India’s Farmers, a Bare-Bones Drip System, seems a bit out of place at first, but it occurs to me that, especially in the US, it represents the type of thinking we need to encourage; doing more with less.
I posted some last summer about adding drip irrigation to our new, larger garden. After familiarizing myself with all sorts of systems, I realized that I could spend a ton of money on various emitters, flow controls, filters, timers, etc. What I came up with was a bit like what is pictured in the article. My emitters are simple lengths of scrap 12.5 ga fence wire inserted into the drip tube. Reasonably effective flow control can be achieved by varying the length of wire inserted into the tube. The remaing wire gets pushed into the rootball of the plant, channeling the flow precisely and anchoring the emitter tube. This scrap wire was on the way to the dump. While perhaps somewhat crude, and requiring a bit more attention, it beats hauling water in buckets from the pond, requires less pressure, and saved $$ and resources.
Thanks for making my day! I hate the clog-prone emitters and this is going to work great on my ever-growing garden. Simpler (less complex) is better!
August
I've been using a 12V mini-submersible pump with a good length of poly tubing in my pond - power it with a deep cycle marine battery that I trickle charge with a single solar panel.
Limiting factor, of course, is the pond - which very nearly dried up last year during a summer of virtually no rain. That and the battery which isn't a permanent solution but with proper care should last a good long time.
Plan B is to hook up a rain barrel - gravity fed (plenty of head difference between my house and the garden) thru buried tubing. May be working on that this spring although my more immediate concerns are learning how to compost and prepare the beds with all the proper nutrients since this, rather than water, appears to be the problems with various crops I've tried to grow.
"That and the battery which isn't a permanent solution but with proper care should last a good long time."
Solar pumping direct to an elevated tank is what I did, avoiding the battery. I'm using a salvaged RV pump and an old Dankoff controller, pumping up a hill to a pallet tank. I plan to put a bigger tank higher on the hill this year. Our pond is at the bottom of our watershed so if it drys up ........
Catskill, compost helps to overcome all manner of soil ills. It serves as a pool of slowly-available nutrients, it helps to ameliorate soil acidity (by tying up Al and Fe), it helps slow leaching of plant nutrients, it increases soil water-holding capacity and it increases activity of soil micro- and macro-organisms (which release plant-available nutrients through their biological activity). It wouldn't hurt to have your state extension service or private lab do a soil test for you. They will ask what it is that you are growing and make recommendations for fertilizer and lime (make sure to get a pH test). However, if you do nothing else, figure your garden square footage and order enough compost (usually sold by the cubic yard) to cover to 1" depth. My 2 pennies...
Thanks for the info PO Tarzan - perhaps you can answer a question I had regarding making good batches of compost. If I were to order some finished compost as you suggest is it useful to set aside a portion of it as a "starter" for new compost - or is it best just to start completely from scratch with each new batch. I'm definitely going to take your advice and get cooperative extension to do a soil test - they offer one per year for free (or very cheap) here. Is that best to do right at the start of growing season - once things are dried out enough to start planting the earliest crops ?
Catskill, most of the "bugs" that you need to make good compost will be present in a shovelful of topsoil. You could seed it with some "saved" compost, but I wouldn't think it necessary. I see some of the garden and seed supply places sell a compost starter. I've never used them but maybe someone else can give you some first hand advice. Generally, folks submit soil samples during the winter months, expecting to have results by planting time in the spring.
Edit: I should say that it is common composting practice to add topsoil in layer-cake fashion along with grass cuttings or kitchen scraps and drier materials such as hay or straw. When you do this, you pretty well insure that your compost pile will have a good supply of micro-organisms available to break down the cuttings, scraps, straw, etc.
I'm experimenting with composting in a bucket on my balcony... the first thing I have learned is that in the tropics fruit flies bite (or is it that the mosquitoes like to snack on melon rind??). The big plan is to get enough decent compost to mix with the baked clay they call soil around in a pot and grow a squash. If the trucks with food ever stop coming me and my squash plant are in trouble ;)
In a back yard in a temperate climate composting is easy, just make sure not to suffocate it, and have a bit of patience.
PO Tarzan pretty mcuh sums up garden composting. A volume of about a cubic yard/metre is usually good enough space to generate all the heat and conditions ideal for compost, and handle the output from a house and small garden. Open to the soil, so bugs can get in. Plastic/wood sides to keep in some mositure, bit of old carpet on top. Job done. If you want to compost on a smaller scale you can buy home kits with worms etc and that will let you compost inside the house and keep the fruit flys away! Add some sand to the clay and compost, so that the soil has better drainage.
Hey Ghung, your flow control is nice. How do you tap your zillion little tubes into the larger hoses? Got a pic? I've been using the permeable hoses but they degrade after severals years.
Paul in Ontario
paulne obscuring shift 2 primus confusing dot ca
I'm still using 1/2" poly pipe to 1/4" emitter tubes, via the little tee taps:
If one shops around, tubing and basic fittings can be found cheap. It's the emitters and flow controls that cost alot (and cause the most trouble). Look for 12.5 gauge high-tensil electric fence wire (nice and stiff, fits the tube just right, stays put but not too tight ;-)
Owww...It's lovely. But, but, but who does the perfect weeding?
Hmmm.. Tees - tubing - algae - yes your wire seems very good. vg++
I see the black poly on the right, but what is the white?
Thanks a bunch,
Paul
Ha! The white stuff is a sort of polyester felt that I pulled from the dump. It came from a closed pillow factory nearby; used to line pillows and comforters. I found several large rolls. It works well as a weed barrier, though I probably should be concerned about chemicals. The worms love it!
Waste not, want not.
Speaking of waste not-old fire hoses used industrial plants and on fire trucks are replaced on a fixed schedule-they are very useful in a garden , considering they can be had for the hauling when replaced.
We punch small holes in them and use them as a trickle feed line.if they clog up, just giving them a shake clears the clog most times-if not, just punch another hole.
When empty, they are very light and flexible.
Our local fire brigade relies on equipment donated from the USA. Probably over 90% of their gear has been supplied in that way including fire engines and fire resistant uniforms. They might be grateful for those used hoses etc.
NAOM
Thank you. I was looking at other emitter systems to see if I could figure out a better emitter system.
I've tried alot of irrigation systems. Use of standard, expensive drip tubes and emitters will usually clog when using surface water. Maybe 6 weeks, maybe longer. It's a pain to keep clearing them. Even with ground water, I usually got what I presume a bacterial buildup in the tube or emitter. I went to cutting the tubes 3 or 4 inches to 24", no emitter. Same feature initially as you cite, being able to vary flow based on the friction resistance of the tube length, but they clogged much too soon also. I would bet your fence wire will clog, esp in the heat of the summer with black pipe. It's like an incubator in there. Leaving the system on 24/7 to maintain pressure was no help.
Next was just rolled 3/4 or 1 inch black poly pipe with bare drilled or punched holes. Same problem within a month for surface water at low pressure. Or some would clog, others would flood. I imagine higher pressure might work, but you'd have to monitor , too much work for gravity feed on a hillside, as some portions are too high for effective pressure and the pressure fluctuations over the hill. That was years ago, I'm back to overhead.
This has been my experience somewhat. It's one reason I don't want to pay a buck or more for an emitter that is going to clog in a few days and is hard to clear. I believe that it is algal growth that is the cause (I filter the water at the pump). The wire inserts don't clog as readily and are easy to clear. It isn't a perfect solution; just one I can live with.
I studied algae, both filamentous and diatoms, fairly extensively years ago. My problem was not algal, recall bluegreens are now bacteria. I have used both pump and gravity drives. As they say, your mileage may vary.
Read your link, it was good to read that some of the comments realized that increases in irrigation efficiency has not translated to less water used.
Interested to see what TOD members think of this analysis:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/252568-why-plug-in-vehicles-are-a-luxury...
I started to write a comment about poor comparisons and the author's attempt at a 'one size fits all' evaluation, but MarkoH beat me to it (in the story's comment section):
The article ignores early adopters of EVs who also have the ability to charge their vehicles from renewables. A 'different segment' entirely. What is the efficiency of the Camry when the pumps dry up?
Petersen holds EV efficiency to this standard:
He conveniently ignores the total embedded supply chain energy in the Camry's tank of fuel. Duh. Also, the thermal efficiency of the Camry's ICE is likely much lower than that of "an electric power plant that consumes coal, natural gas or uranium to make the juice that drives the wheels."
I might add that i have seen no data supporting the claim that it is very difficult or expensive to recycle automative type recharheable barreries-and as they become more common, the costs of both manufacturing and recycling should come down.
I am highly suspicious of blacl boxes on machinery, especially ones that are full of secrets accessible only to dealers , and available only at dealers parts counters.
But once the manufacture of batteries matures, I strongly suspect that they are not going to cost much if any more than a complete ice, and at that point there will be no need to ever scrap a car again, unless it rusts away or is crashed-electric motors and so forth simply refuse to wear out if well built.
The argument might hold if one assumes both that raw materials for such batteries will be the limiting factor in mass producing them, and that gasoline will also be available for the life of the hybrid car.
"What is the efficiency of the Camry when the pumps dry up?"
You accuse the author of erroneous comparisons then you burp out this?
The answer is zero because when the pumps dry up we will be so immersed in chaos the last thing anyone will be doing is jumping in their car to go anywhere.
And his point that ev's will at least maintain current levels of coal burning if not increasing it, is VERY valid.
I understand that you hate it when someone brings up the realities of the constraints but IMO it is more important to press the point that NOTHING is going to allow for even a hint of BAU.
Yes there will be massive innovative efforts to at least cope when the time comes but what is keeping the world from moving in that right direction is misplaced optimism not pessimism.
"You accuse the author of erroneous comparisons then you burp out this?"
'Twas not a burp :-(
"I understand that you hate it when someone brings up the realities of the constraints but IMO it is more important to press the point that NOTHING is going to allow for even a hint of BAU."
It was my hope to address the context of the article and not display my considerable talent for doomerisms (per recent requests by the staff for a kinder, gentler TOD). Silly me.
Putting nuclear and fossil carbon energy into the same category is idiotic. At least with nuclear you don't doom the world to a warming hell. As you note, burning gasoline with a 25% efficiency is worse than 40% efficient (more if combined cycle natural gas is used) electricity production from thermal power plants.
Aside from the table there was no data or detail to back anything up in that article. The whole battery use intensity figure was a complete crock of sh*te. Both the hybrid and pure electric batteries are deep cycle and their performance is determined by battery characteristics and not whether the vehicle is a hyrbid or a plug-in electric. A 40% saving on gasoline consumption in the hybrid is not stellar. You can get more by using a turbocharged diesel in a smaller frame.
Just a note of interest. I like fooling around with the EIA crude oil database found here: International Energy Statistics
The annual data for 2010 is not in yet. That is perhaps five to six weeks away. But looking at the annual data from 2005 thru 2009 I found that World Crude + Condensate was down 1,405,000 barrels per day while net exports of C+C were down 3,193,500 barrels per day.
Production for 2010 will be up about one million barrels per day over 2009 or about 400,000 bp/d below 2005. Net oil exports however will not come close. They will still be down over two million barrels per day below those of 2005.
C+C Production C+C Net Exports 2005 73,719,000 44,415,100 2009 72,314,000 41,221,600 Change -1,405,000 -3,193,500Okay, all you no peak folks, C+C production may or may not reach a new peak in 2011 but it is a lead pipe cinch that net oil exports will not. Net oil exports peaked in 2005 and you can take that to the bank. And that is the important thing. Oil available to the developed world has peaked and will never reach 2005 levels again.
End of story.
Ron P.
What about the greatest recession since the Great Depression?
http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9023770&contentId=...
Do you have an obsession with Peak Oil?
;-)
Yes I do. When you are watching the end of the world as you know it, it's just damn hard to take your eyes off it.
The decline in the early 80s, from 1979 until 1983, was, 9,417,000 barrels per day, far greater than the one we experienced after 2008. However that was a war caused decline. There was the Iranian revolution plus the Iran-Iraqi war and consequently the "Tanker Wars" that resulted.
In September of 2008 OPEC deliberately cut production but by February of 2009 every OPEC nation except Saudi, Kuwait and the UAE were producing flat out. I think that in January even these three nations were also flat out though it hardly matters. They are not recovering from any war or tanker bottleneck this time.
Every so often some wag says "But look at the early 80s, everyone thought that was the peak also." No they did not! I very well remember those days and almost no one was saying peak oil. We all knew very well what the problem was, after all it was all over the news and blasted to us on the TV every night.
I have stated categorically that 2005 was the peak of world exports. If you care to question my prediction then state your case. But pointing to the time of the problems in the 1980s Persian Gulf or calling me obsessed will not do it.
Ron P.
People who think Peak Oil causes everything have an 'idee fixe'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id%C3%A9e_fixe_(psychology)
You chose to omit a gigantic worldwide recession as a possible cause of declining oil production instead going back to 2005 but there is no sure agreement on that either.
IEA shows no Peak yet for Non-OECD and OPEC but a meandering plateau for OECD oil. OECD is about 2 mbpd down from 2005.
http://omrpublic.iea.org/balances.asp
BP says oil minus biofuels and NGL peaked in 2008 at 82 mbpd and dropped to 79 mbpd in 2009.
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/re...
Since you place the fate of the planet on a single number and single date I think you've joined the
ranks of 'mathematicians' who are predicting May 21,2011 to be the Rapture.
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-01-01/bay-area/17466332_1_east-bay-bay-a...
Whenever IEA gets mentioned, one needs to quote the EIA numbers. Those are closer to the BP numbers. The EIA crude-only is a good look at reality:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=57&a...
As to why you bring the bible into this, that is your problem. I am more a fan of The Mentaculus.
So you're comparing a wide array of deeply intelligent(and overwhelmingly atheist) analysts to a bunch of cranks that think that the Mayans hold the secret to the Rapture? I'm sorry, but that just disqualifies you for the future on this site and relegates you to the ash heap of ignorants at best.
There's always people taking it too far, look no further than climate change.
And yes, some people are too narrow in their focus on Peak Oil and forget other issues.
In my humble opinion, Peak Oil, climate change, the ever-faster re-occuring food crises is merely a symtom on the larger disease: overpopulation.
Despite the need to maintain balance and an overview on the situation, your comments reads out as desperate at best and outright stupid at worst.
The recession happened to the extent it did due to oil prices. We were going into recession irregardless, even if Peak Oil was not a factor, but the severity of it was deeply compounded by Peak Oil.
The Saudis didn't increase anything in 2008 because they couldn't.
The world has about 2.25-3.25 in spare capacity, which will evaporate in 2012 at the very latest. We might feel the squeeze in late 2011 if demand increases more than anticipated(which it always does).
And add to this declining net exports due to increased domestic consumption.
Your entire comment reads out as a man who is grasping at the straws to avoid the inevitable.
The date of Peak Oil is unimportant. We're already there and it's not a Rapture. It's a grinding event which will get incrementally worse as more and more Egypts around the world will implode and more and more starvation will slowly creep towards the richer areas of the world.
How things will eventually pan out is anybody's guess. What won't happen is BAU or anything closely resembling of BAU and PO has a huge part of that, but not the only.
Please learn to argue intelligently.
(And no, don't start to backtrack your comments now. It's too late to undo the damage).
Leiten, lighten up. It's not just Majorian who has to live with what he's said. The above does you few favors..
And what are you going to do when oil reaches 90 mbpd?
Don't worry I won't.
Now don't get me wrong, I believe we only have ~60 years of oil and gas left based on geological reserves, not on a date or the change in world production. I don't believe that more exploration will magically create more hydrocarbons and technology will not magically unlock vast reserves either--we are simply using up reserves too quickly for that.
OTH, the mathematical idea that any falling annual production proves falling reserves is a logical fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
You seem to be neglecting the little problem of net exports declining faster than top line production.
Oil importing countries have far less than 60 years of oil left. Add to that the hoarding, collapsing debt bubble and other geopolitical problems that will arise and anyone who is thinking clearly can see we are headed for a mess.
Given that, production rising to 90mb/d is a very, very short reprieve from an inevitable fate.
We are heading for disaster of course.
To be honest, I am just concern-trolling the obvious here--that there is no need to get so hung up on
the precise date or curve of the decline.
I'm not sure it is inconceivable that we couldn't maintain 90 mbpd to a couple decades, especially if unconventional oil is considered.
I think it is easier to ramp up new, alternate sources than most here believe but in the end it won't help much.
For example, 1100 Gb = 1/2 x 33 Gb/yr x 67 years
or 1100 Gb = 20 x 33 + 1/2 x 33 x 27 years. Total 47 years.
In truth, an extended plateau will result in an even nastier surprise.
As to net exports, I would say globalization has made that somewhat moot. The market will limit availability of oil and the poor will be just priced out of the market--could you imagine Iran 'revolutionaries' raising consumer gas prices 10 years ago? Look at Castro's Cuba and the end of the Iron Ricebowl.
Of course they are moot. Why should importing nations like the US, Japan, South Korea and just about every other nation save about 20 major exporters be concerned about falling oil supplies? They will just figure out something else, some other form of energy.
Sure they will!
Amazing Majorian, absolutely amazing.
Ron P.
He is not the only one.Once it dawns on you how lucky you are to be born in this age and time of civilization and that this is going to come to an end during your lifetime hits you in the gut.Understanding this is like enlightenment and makes you watch closely all the signs of the coming
end times.I am in Ron's camp.
Me too. I grew up reading Sci-Fi yarns and the myriad of futures that would be possible if only mankind could get past its need for fossil fuels (which it cannot). Alas, instead of reaching beyond the solar system, mankind won't even make it to Mars. Another moon-shot seems impossible now.
When I tell my children (7, 8 yrs) that one time there weren't cell-phones, cars, planes, internet, etc, I feel the need to explain their provenance. Maybe I need Little House on the Prairie re-runs so I can show my kids how it's going to be ...
Playing a similar devil's advocate role to this thread: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7497#comment-767100, are there any comparable figures available for total liquid production, including net exports?
Here are the total petroleum liquids data for the top 33 net oil exporters in 2005 (99%+ of global net exports, BP Data + Minor EIA Data contribution), along with Chindia data:
And here is what BP shows for annual total petroleum liquids from 2005 to 2009:
2005: 81.3 mbpd
2006: 81.6
2007: 81.4
2008: 82.0
2009: 79.9
Thanks, much appreciated. Look forward to 2010 figures!
Yes, that data is at the same link I posted above. You just need to click on "petroleum" then production or exports. But I regard C+C as the true indicator of oil production. I don't keep track of palm oil, ethanol or bottled gas.
Ron P.
Brilliant, v. useful, cheers.
Yes, I am also with Ron on this point in that one needs to always refer to C+C. That is the only real measure without a moving baseline. And it is very easy to get this from the EIA site from a drop-down menu:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=57&a...
Thanks for the link. What exactly do you mean by a moving baseline?
A moving or shifting baseline is the usual name for some measurement of an observable that is purposefully not well defined.
Example is software lines of code: Redefine what a line of code means to make productivity seem higher. I have seen this happen, and also with moving deadlines or with moving defect number.
The often unnoticeable shifting of what we take to be normal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline
It is quite clear that the redefinition of what constitutes a barrel of oil is a maneuver that every business or engineering professional recognizes as a moving or shifting baseline strategy. All the gullible people think that BAU is operable as the definitions change.
I hope that is clear enough because it seems pretty standard practice in a dog-eat-dog world.
Thanks for the clear explanation.
So I gather in this context the problem with the non-C+C liquids is twofold - not only may they contain intrinsically less energy per barrel than oil but that the energy required for their production process is not accounted for.
Although I suppose you could argue the latter point is also relevant to C+C.
I guess the currently unobtainable holy grail would be to have a graph of net EROEI per capita in barrels of oil equivalent, for both C+C and non-C+C.
Still, if we take the hypothetical situation that non-C+C liquids did continue to grow at a significant rate then there would surely come a point where those monitoring C+C would have to stop and say "Well, hang on, their contribution is no longer insignificant. Perhaps we'd better take a note of these after all.."
But, but, that can't be right! I thought the EIA had forecast production to be on order of 120 million barrels a day by 2030...
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll225/Fmagyar/Prediction.png
/snark
Ron - And perhaps the beginning of the next very sad story.
The world is heading for an oil drought, says Shell
from the article:
link:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-world-is-heading-for-an-oil...
Regards,
Nawar
Predicting of oil drought in 2050!!! Great prediction.Let him try starting 2012.
Let's run it through the "Assume the Opposite" Filter, and this is what we get:
Here's their scenarios update:
Signals & Signposts: Shell Energy Scenarios to 2050 [PDF]
Nice to see old Jeremy hangin' in there. How old is he - about 260 years old now?
I don't know if he still does it , but old Jeremy used to be a member of the Students Union committee of University college. They used to wheel him out of his cubby hole when they had a meeting and he was settled around the table. They would always enter into the minutes that good old Jeremy was in attendance but did not vote. I know one bloody thing if he was to put up for Parliament I would vote for him even in his present state he at least seems to be listening which is more than can be said for the present load of politicians
http://lostbutfound.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/08/01/jeremy_b...
A status report on Norwegian crude-oil production as of new year, field by field..
There is a Norwegian fellow running a site called Oljekrisa (the oil crisis) which scrutinies the unravellings of the Norwegian oil reality. Every early year he debugs the situation field by field ... so here goes.
Needed translations -
Header :
Million cubic meters (Sm3) of oil, 24 major producing fields, approx. 84% of Norwegian crude oil production in 2010:
Columns :
Name of Field - Production 2009 - Production 2010 - Development pct (2009_2010 difference) - oil originally in place - Rest oil as per 31/12-10
Below:
samlet => in total / added up
Takeaway point from the adjacent text :
There is 16% crude oil left in the listed fields as compared to originally in place. As noted, these listed fields constitute 84% (by volume) of the actual producing fields in Norway.
Does this mean there was a 12% decline in production overall in 2010?
Yes- concerning these 24 major producing fields, part of this survey.
Are the north sea oil fields connected somehow? It sure seems like production is dropping substantially in many places at the same time:
http://energy.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1977890?UserKey=
http://www.indexmundi.com/denmark/oil_production.html
Here is a map showing the subdivision of the North Sea. and several of the fields are spreading across into the neighbors waters.Those resources are divided by a percentage-wise agreed upon share whereas other resources are lying in a sovereign water but produced/piped from a platform across the borderline due to lack of native infrastructure nearby. Agreements are signed to ensure the dollars are going into the correct pockets.
As you point out - all the North Sea is taking a big hit now given its common production history, starting around 1970.
Does that put it at 87.8 m3 * 6.29 b/m3 / 0.84 = 657 MB/year ?
I did the Norway analysis several years ago with an update for 2007:
This is dependent on whether they have included the content of NGL + condensate which is 15 to 20% of the crude component.
See The Oil ConunDrum for complete analysis.
They had maximum production during the price dip to 20-25 dollars. I remember from the news (I lived there around that time) that they were trying to maximize production...Is it as ROCKMAN says, cash flow determines what is done?
They still accumulated 400$B for 4.5 million people, in the OilFund, though
According to EIA, in 2009 it was at 855 MB/year.
That point intersects with the red model curve above, so the decline is progressing according to the model.
Paal, great resource, takk.. Finally an excuse to brush up on my Norwegian.
velbekomme og lykke til med oppfriskningen :-)
China just announced that they increased their imports to 5.13 million barrels per day in January the 4th highest rate on record.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/UPDATE-1-China-Jan-cr...
If the Brent price is what Chinidia is willing to pay, and if WTI is all that the U.S. is willing or able to pay, it's not hard to figure where this is all going.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4030/4251480205_a60c904ea0.jpg
http://assets.speedhunters.com/Images/Paddy%20McGrath/2010/Stories/Dubai...
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs462.snc3/25379_10150158824...
http://www.driverside.com/backseatdriver/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/duba...
n - For your benefit and others the Brent, WTI et al indexes are just that: indexes. Those are not the prices anyone pays for crude oil per se. A refiner in England might pay a Nigerian producer based upon the Brent Index. But that doesn't mean they are paying that price. They might pay Brent + $4 or Brent - $7. I sell oil from a S Texas sour well based on WTI. But I don't get WTI...I get WTI - $22 because of the sulfur content. And the adjustment isn't constant. An oil with a high gasoline component might sell at a higher adjustment when the refiners are gearing up for the driving season. And then are adjusted down when fall comes around. The adjustment of any index price is a value negotiated between a seller and buyer. Not even all the oil produced in the N Sea is sold at the Brent price...some might sell for more...some might sell for less. All depends on the trade. It does matter when an index price changes because it changes the final price. I'm not an oil trader but I suspect some of the contracts use an adjuster that also varies with the absolute price of the index. If the index moves too high/low the adjuster may change by some prearranged amount. And if that isn't complicated enough there's the future players who make the game even more complex by their activities.
Oil falls as US supplies outweigh Mideast tensions
Wouldn't the Brent price be the benchmark off of which most sea-borne imports to the US are priced?
It would seem much more relevant than the price of landlocked oil in Cushing?
Louisiana Sweet is priced about the same as Brent.
Merril - I suppose buyers and sellers could use any index they wanted but it would make sense to use one close to where the transaction occurs. I'm not an oil trader so all I can do is make some generalization. A Brit refinery could buy Nigerina Light for Brent -$3 (just making up a number). And if WTI is pegged ar $15 less than Brent they could buy the same crude at WTI +$12. In the end the price they pay using either index is the same. But I would think that the players would want to use an index that's the most responsive to the dynamics in their market. As I understand it these folks use an index for the sake of long term sales contracts. IOW I agree to buy 100,000 bbls/month Nigerian Light for the next 12 months. No one knows what that oil will be selling for in, say 6 months, so how do we agree on a price? Easy: I'll pay Brent - $X for those future loads.
Is there a chart that can tell you what is actually being spent for oil? I've followed the Cass freight index and it looks like the same amount of money is being spent by companies now, as when oil was $147.
http://www.cassinfo.com/frtindex.html
How could there be such a disconnect between what was really being spent, and the wti index?
which index is right? Is there a better index to watch?
When the WTI hit $147 was oil actually changing hands at that price or was it just a number generated by a computer somewhere?
n - If I recall correctly the $147/bbl was either the top futures price or top spot market price that day. But how much total oil was sold that day and at what price is a number no one knows with any great accuracy. First, almost all oil sales are confidential. Very few folks say they bought X amount of oil last month for $Y/bbl. And not all WTI sells for the same price. Depending on the exact composition of a tanker of WTI, the distance to the delivery point and the negotiated price subject to local market pressure determines how much a bbl of oil is sold on any given day/month. The spread may just be a few cents or several dollars or more. Oil is often sold on a monthly contract basis. Again, depending upon local conditions one operator may have a contract to sell his WTI for the WTI index + $2.00 or WTI - $3. Just depends on the trade. The day the $147/bbl mark was reached there was a lot of low grade oil being sold for WTI - $40. And maybe less. Some years ago I know one operator selling his very sour crude for WTI -$12. But WTI was selling for $18/bbl at that time...yes he was selling his oil for less than 40% of the WTI index. There are some sweet crudes that carry a lot of "yellow wax" and they might have sold at the peak for $160/bbl.
Bottom line: to get to the absolute amount of money spent on oil for any month you need to know the volumes and exact amount each load of oil was sold for. With those two numbers you can calculate the average price paid for oil. But that number doesn't mean as much as the absolute $'s spent IMHO. That would be a very interesting number to see plotted over the last 30 years or so...especially if it were done so in inflation adjusted $'s. But I've never seen anyone try to offer a rough guess of that number.
"China just announced that they increased their imports to 5.13 million barrels per day in January the 4th highest rate on record."
And it ain't just oil:
RE: Oil Shock in 2012?
Of course there will be an oil shock in 2012, and in 2013, and 2014, and every year there after.
There will also be a US debt shock, as US debt goes higher than 100% of GDP.
Dollars will buy less and less oil, the IMF will soon make a new world currency!
Obtain hard assets quickly! Paper money's days are numbered.
Cool - I chuckled a little when I saw that headline. Maybe it's just me but I've worked in the oil patch for 36 years and we're in an oil shock at $90+/bbl IMHO. Maybe it's just me...maybe everyone one else thinks this is the now normal price.
Isn't that the truth, this is now normal. Didn't take long. Prices here~3.30/unleaded, 3.60 diesel. People sounded like howler monkeys last time it was this high. I imagine we'll approach 4 here this summer before the chorus starts, but how much higher will it go?
Definitely on a big tooth saw blade, pointing up. I think the US will handle $5-6 gas without that much change in demand. Demand change will take much longer than price increase. Food, clothing up. I don't believe they'll fall that far back. So where's the money to come from? Housing? So much for real estate recovery. Your lifestyle is shrinking.
Seems even Leanan's virtual candy Valentine for the Feb 14 edition of Drumbeat have met the budget ax.
Obama budget boosts transportation, energy, R&D funding
It will be belittled here as "Too little, too late" . . . but I still believe that the Obama administration has a stealth peak oil program. Money for trains, nuclear power, alternative energy, etc. They cannot utter the phrase "peak oil" but their budget priorities speak louder than words.
What we need now, is something the size of a space program to get ahead this thing.
We certainly do. Perhaps you can persuade your state's congressional and senate delegation of the seriousness of the issue. ;-)
You know, I actually did write a letter to Dr. Chu,the Secretary of Energy with a lot of recommendations, but never received a reply of any kind.
Well Dr.Chu gets it. Your (Nebraska I'm assuming) representatives . . . not so much. I'm guessing their response would be "Drill, baby, Drill" . . . of course that really won't help the situation . . . it will just help burn through the limited oil we have faster. But if they can be given drill, baby, drill in exchange for some other measures (gas tax, rail programs, charging infrastructure, etc.), I'd be happy with that.
I think that you are probably right about Dr. Chu. It is surprising that he didn't even send a canned "thank you for your concern" letter in return with the obligatory signed photograph. I guess he thought that silence was the best response. Pretty unusual for a politician.
Hard to get "ahead" when we are already "in the hole" to the tune of $14 trillion!
Those days are long gone and it's too late now.
Cut your losses and be ruthlessly efficient.
Give the President wartime powers.
I give up. They'll never get it.
Obama wants to add $2.50 per passenger/per flight to pay for airport expansion/etc... The response is ugly.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41586513/ns/travel-news/
It drives me crazy when businesses fight against things like that . . . that is the market solution. The consumers of the needed government services pay for them. The airlines & airports are asking for corporate welfare if they want it to be paid for out of general government funds.
That seems to be just about what we're talking about. The amounts mentioned in the quotes from Steve Hargreaves add up to a bit over $40 billion. The proposed NASA budget is $18.7 billion.
Or were you referring to the 1960s space program?
Federal revenues in 2000: ~$2 trillion
Federal spending in 2000: ~$2 trillion
Federal revenues in 2010: ~$2 trillion
Federal spending in 2010: ~$3.5 trillion
As you can see, Federal revenue is NOT growing over the last 10 years.
Therefore all the spending increases cannot be covered.
$3.5 trillion is equal to $12,000 per year per American!
It is time to reduce the spending back to $2 trillion immediately.
STOP the WARS, STOP the overseas aid programs, STOP all the non-sense now.
China only spends $50 billion on defense and the US spends $700 billion.
Bububu...but..but, we're a superpower.
right?
aren't we?
Yes, we are.
But oil depletion hits everyone. And you can argue that it will hit a superpower harder than others since that super power status is largely powered by oil. Those fighters, tanks, Bradleys, Hummers and helicopters are not powered by pixie dust.
If all the other Military spending in the budget including interest on wars were added, the total would be 1.1 to 1.5 trillion.
Minor detail - think about how many people's wages are being paid directly or indirectly with all of this spending. If we cut the spending, the unemployment rate will go way up. Oops! Not that I like soldiers around the world.
The military could be converted to working on high speed rail lines here in the US instead of blowing up things in other countries.
I don't think high speed are really needed....Decent pax trains would suit just fine. What's the hurry in a slower more localized world? Upgrading yes, new high tech too much new money for the value. Just MHO.
Thats the problem with Austerity. Cut gov spending and the economy goes south even faster. Then government revenues go dowm, and OMG we gotta cut spending even more........
I suspect some of those promoting austerity do understand this. To them unemployment is good, because it gives capital more power over labor. Our
current recession has corp profits going up, while average wages stagnate or go down. For these folks thats a win-win situation.
Not a minor detail, but these people should make the economy more productive when their talents are released back to the free market.
Poor people getting a pittance of welfare = great scorn and disdain
Middle-class and upper-middle-class and wealthy folks getting welfare from government spending in the MIC = objects of admiration and role models.
Time to call MIC spending what it is: high-rolling welfare disguised with the patina of smug and delusional self-righteousness.
I know.
Why are vines overtaking the American tropics?
This is a bigger problem than it appears, and appears to be happening in the sub-tropics as well. Maybe one of those 'black' swan events.
Yep, sure sounds like a few more threads are being yanked from the ever more frayed tapestry of global ecosystems.
I don't know, but Id be willing to bet it probably has nothing to do with that global climate change hoax that certain climate scientists have been perpetrating just so they can make make a quick buck at tax payer expense.
Maybe that massive flora and fauna extinction that has been rumored to be happening is going to be sped up a few orders of magnitude as well.
Nah, not to worry, the deity du jour, who created this little paradise for us to exploit would never let that happen to her chosen folk... All we have to do is go out and sacrifice some goats and all will be well again soon!
Heh, come to think of it, who woulda thunk a 'Black Swan' could be green. Though I think the next one will be cyan as in cyanobacteria. I've also been noticing more and more mats of red brown algae covering all the bleached dead and dying corals on my local reef. Here come the black, blue, brown and green swans.
Yeah, bring it on momma nature, this planet is going turn right back into the primordial soup!
We TODers are used to folks thinking we are a little ... off, but relative to what? I offer proof that many people realize that things are out of wack on Planet Earth, and that dog people are at least as crazy as Peak Oilers.
Disclaimer: I used to associate with these folks more than I do now.
It's just the 'Free-Bio-Market', following a price indication and producing alternative products when the old goods weren't competitive (with Chainsaws, perhaps) anymore.
This invisible hand has market mechanisms we've hardly dreamt of yet.. but we've got front row seats now!
Some idiots that live a couple miles down the street from me have about 50 acres of forest on their property with a lot of very large old trees. A couple years ago Kudzu started growing there and now about 10 acres worth of it has been destroyed by the stupid vines. There have been several 4ft+ diameter tulip trees brought down by the stuff and every year a couple more trees are brought down as it continues to spread. It's even jumped across the road to some of theneighboring yards.
It drives me mad because they don't do anything about it. They declined our local conservancy group's help in clearing the vines out. I've gotten to the point where I think I might just sneak out there in the night with a large sprayer full of high concentrate glyphosate and take it out myself. Hopefully they don't have guns.
Just what exactly do you think they can do about it? Here in Pennsylvania we are overrun with Autumn Olive, Japanese stiltgrass, Japanese knotweed, multiflora rose, and a miltitude of vines and plants I cannot name. Not to mention stinkbugs and the like, and that the ash trees are all dying and perhaps the oaks will be next. They are here to stay and there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to get rid of them permanently. Thanks to human activities there has been a huge mixing of flora and fauna all over the world. It is not reversible, it is still going on and it will take millennia to settle out. What you can "do about it" is to try to adapt to your new environment while it develops. Just like the carp in the great lakes.
We are not in control - we have the ability to really screw things up, but we do not have the ability to fix it.
Well they could start by killing the kudzu. It's not easy, but with cutting and systemic herbicide it can be done. Maybe two days worth of work.
It will be back, in just the same way it got there before.
Funny this vine thing has come up, I manage ~500A of Forest that hasn't been logged in 50-80 years in a county with out a traffic light (Newton County, AR) Hammered by the 100 year ice storm in 2009, Trees with the grape vines had no chance, broken or uprooted. Forest was Devastated, 1/3 down, 1/3 main and crown busted and 1/3 escaped major damage. Prime walnut, hickory, oak, cherry, etc. Doing some research, I found a Kentucky forest management practices guide that says to cut the vines, so I have cut thousands of them at the base, These monster vines will hang for years or until the ice snaps them. I can also control some of the Virgina creeper and poison ivy by cutting them in late fall and using a tiny bit of 2-4-D on the vine trunk, but they are not a big threat to the trees, As I understand it, Kuduz can be controlled by goats in 3-4 seasons, but you just have to be careful they they don't eat everything else and cause erosion. If anything could make ethanol, Kudzu should. The E10 gas in the saws will drive one mad. Take the time to find pure gas!
World phosphorous use crosses critical threshold
The US Minerals databrowser has charts on phosphate and potash as well as other minerals from the USGS DS140 dataset. Many of the analyses we use when studying fossil fuels are applicable to other mineral resources. Here's a familiar 'net exports' plot showing how the US, once the world's largest producer of rock phosphate, has become a net importer over the last 15 years:
Happy Exploring.
Jon
Doo Doo will be the stinky brown gold of the next decade-or maybe the one after that.
An elderly nieghbor of mine has been relieving himself in the woods behind his house anytime the weather is nice for about the last sixty years or so;I believe he does this simply to get out of the house and into the trees and commune with nature in a very basic way for a few minutes each day, as he has had modern plumbing for at least fifty years.
The trees on the quarter acre or so immediately behind his house are at least fifty percent bigger than trees a bit farther away.
"Doo Doo will be the stinky brown gold of the next decade-or maybe the one after that."
It already is. My henhouse produces several hundred pounds of the good stuff yearly, mixed with wood shavings. Poop doesn't get enough respect:
Not to mention that a lot of that nitrogen is bound up in uric acid, a significant component in all bird guano. On the other hand it sure gives another meaning to the goose that lays the golden egg...
Have you hugged your bag of NPK today?
Actually, pee pee may be the way to go. We pee out lots of phosphorous and water-treatment plants should be collecting it.
#1 is #1! ;-)
OFM we have a septic system at our house and live on a steep hill. The drain field is downhill away from our house into the backyard. Following our construction in 2004 I allowed reforestation up to within about 80 feet of the drain field (the cleared portion of our yard is basically a 1/2 acre opening cut into many acres forest).
Being a rather swampy old-growth forest, the trees that grow are Sweetgum, Sycamore, and Tulip Tree. After 6 years, the new trees (from seed) are about 15 ft tall everywhere around the house...except downhill of the drain field. The sycamores growing there are 30ft tall easy, double the size of the other seedlings. In the summer their leaves are also much larger and a darker green too.
Well ain't that an odd coincidence?
Good comments all, guys.
We used to be able to get chicken litter by the truckload, cheap, from nearby broiler and layer operations, but now they contract the sale of litter to fertilizer companies.
I used the term doo doo as a euphemism for sewage, which is of course what will be processed on an industrial scale for nutrient recovery as a matter of economic necessity as well as environmental protection..
In times gone by, it was the practice in some monasteries for urine to be saved in barrels, and applied as liquid fertilizer in the gardens and vineyards.
Of course the folks in some parts of China brought the recycling of human waste to an art form ages ago-to the extent even of building pleasant rest stops for weary travelers use alongside their fields.In those days, any trash whatsoever was almost certain to be organic, and virtually any organic matterial was considered precious.
Interesting. They must have had some special techniques for it. I've noticed that with dog urine on lawns, often you'll get a brown spot where the urine was too concentrated & killed the grass . . but around that there would be a ring of taller grass that gained from the urine and grew faster than the grass around it.
'Night soil' was the name used in the UK prior to the widespread introduction of sewers in our major cities. It was a profession and an organisised industry in its own right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil
The midden men they start at Ten.
They have got big shovels and they shovel with them
They shovel all night in the pale moonlight
Shoveling Sh*t by candlelight
Swee------t Violets.
Childrens nursery rhyme or something like that, from where I came from
definition of Midden :- In West Yorkshire a midden is an outdoor toilet, typically in the back yards of terraced houses. Often attached to this small building is an outhouse which houses dustbins.
Green algae in Lake Winnipeg
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/5566656-a-somber-global-warnin...
http://www.oil-price.net/
WTI & Brent gap now $18.18!
Next stop, 20 dollars.
One begins to wonder what will happen first, WTI hitting zero or Brent hitting $200.
A good reminder that careless extrapolation is one of the best ways to earn the title "fool".
Perhaps.. but Heedless Extrapolation can be funny and thought-provoking. In the context of the author of the comment, I'd be unconcerned by anyone calling him names..
That extrapolation makes perfect sense. WTI tending to 0 would indicate Canadian oil being shipped to Asia and Europe for a better price.
Some related questions:
Are there any other geographic locations that can enjoy the same benefit as the US midwest (atleast for a short duration because WTI is cheaper...)
Could this be the future of oil markets, where prices are regional rather than global...
Thanks
In addition to the WTI/Brent price difference, there is quite a divergence of gasoline prices from the East Coast (US) to the West Coast.
Out West, gasoline prices continued to spike higher - which appears to be a knock-on (subsequent) effect of the Alaskan pipeline problem a few weeks back:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/15/markets-products-westcoast-idU...
Meanwhile East Coast gasoline supplies are benefiting from price differentials between Europe and the US (higher in the US resulting in shipments from Europe to the US):
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE71D27Q20110214
Pulitzer Prize winner sees difficult and perhaps divisive succession process ahead for Saudi Arabia:
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405274870465710457614245219522553...
Taking nothing away from the import of the point of the article you post, Charles... but how does the WSJ get away with such poor fact checking? KSA 'produces' [exracts] about 1 of every 7 barrels of oil world-wide (10 of 73, roughly speaking). That makes them the source of less than 15% of global oil, not the 25% stated.
And, again, not to refute the point of the article, but the implication is that the US is largely dependent on KSA for its imports, whereas TOD readers know that KSA is, what, 4th on the list of US suppliers?
WSJ belongs to News Corp (Rupert Murdoch). They don't need no stinking facts. ;>)
Nonetheless losing over a million bbls/day would be catastrophic to the US.
And let's not forget that one of the largest shareholders of News Corp is a Saudi. I'm so shocked to see KSA's role exaggerated by Fox! *rollseyes*
Could it be that SA accounts for a quarter of "exported" oil? Still, wrong. But at least we would know from whence the error arose. But, 'stinkin facts' have been proven to be irrelevant to modern journalism.
I have to say that the WSJ is not really paying attention to what is going on. Saudi Arabia is not producing 1/4 of the world's oil, but close to 1/7.
The US at this point in time is importing over 2 million bpd of oil from Canada (not including refined products, which are pretty substantial too), and less than 1 million bpd from Saudi Arabia. China is now importing around 1 million bpd of oil from KSA, and this is having a major effect on world oil prices. Despite what they claim, I'm not sure the Arabs can keep up with increased Chinese oil demand.
I find it interesting that KSA consumes 2.4 million bpd of its own oil. Canada, which is a highly developed industrialized country with significantly more people (35 million versus 25 million) only consumes 2.1 million bpd. KSA consumption is growing, while Canadian consumption is shrinking, and the decline in Canadian consumption goes straight into the US market, forcing down oil prices in the US Midwest. Canada is now exporting as much oil to the US as it consumes itself, and new supplies of cheap Canadian oil are backing Arabian, Mexican, and Venezuelan oil out of the US market.
There is a complete disconnect developing between WTI prices, which reflect North American conditions, and Brent oil prices, which reflect supply conditions in the rest of the world. The price spreads are getting to be crazy.
Americans (excluding the West Coast) are now somewhat insulated from global oil prices. The people in poor countries which are not insulated are beginning to riot.
Well yes, the WSJ and even some other major media outlets do not appear to be conducting basic fact checking on oil related issues. In general, US reliance upon Saudi Arabia's oil has diminished much faster than the media is portraying. Possibly this may be due to KSA's perception as a past swing producer.
The actual swing producer now might be Russia. They are the ones we turn to for the emergency extra supplies, or at least that is what seemed to have happened during the Alaskan pipeline shutdown of January. Russia has the advantage of being much closer by tanker than KSA, plus KSA has made a number of direct oil deals with China - which can not be easily bypassed in a world of falling real oil output (not counting all liquids).
China called upon KSA in November and December - and they delivered, which is possibly why KSA appears to have cut back exports lately (perhaps rebuilding stocks in storage?).
The US has been lucky that Canada has filled in for KSA, and at a relatively good price - at least for the central and midwest US.
I don't know if anybody is acting as swing producer. Saudi Arabia claims to be acting as swing producer, but I don't know if it can increase its production much more than it already has. I doubt that Russia can step up its production much more. Its oil fields are very old and very tired. It's amazing that they can still suck as much oil out of them as they do.
Canada can and is increasing production, albeit slowly. I think it's up about 400,000 bpd over the last year. That and the fact that North Dakota has approximately tripled its oil production in the last year is a major factor behind the low price of WTI.
But it's questionable if Saudi Arabia has anything left. If the world price goes to $200/bbl, and KSA doesn't increase production, then we can reasonably assume that they don't have anything left.
Greetings, TODers,
Remember, you saw it first, here on TOD.
Aniya's own (original!) hypothesis - (which you may have glossed over! Did you? Or, did you take good notes?) - WRT population (relevant to our discussion here, see: "Overshoot") and the general (let us call it) domination of the female half of the species.
Note: Put this phenomenon together w. the global stats on male-on-female physical violence, and you begin to get a picture.
Now, researchers are starting to take a look at this. Check it out. Give credit where credit is due. :)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/health/research/15pregnant.html?ref=he...
Report Details Sabotage of Birth Control
By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: February 15, 2011
Men who abuse women physically and emotionally may also sabotage their partners’ birth control, pressuring them to become pregnant against their will, new reports suggest.
Years ago, I met a young lady and her older man. She got pregnant and he threw her out. We tried to convince her that she should have an abortion, but she decided to keep the kid, so we found a place for her in a "Home for Unwed Mothers". It turned out that her man had already been married twice and impregnated both women. He had also impregnated two other women. I have often wished I had known that before it was TOO LATE...
E. Swanson
Either it was a very long time ago or that old man was very skillful at skirting his obligations and staying under the radar of Child Support enforcement. I don't think he'd manage to get away with that today... It's still rather sad that someone like that managed to father at least 5 children that you know of...
I have no expertise in the law but as i understand it, the way it works in Virginia at least is that first, paternity must be proven, and second, that child support is determined by taking a percentage of the father's wages or earnings, as determined by past earnings.
So a guy who sees his overtime cut ,or has to take a lower paying job after a layoff, is in deep water, financially and legally.
But if he has no RECORD of having earned any money in the past, and no job at the time of his court appearances, well... judges fan't get blood out of turnips, and they can't rule jobs into existence-except perhaps in the prison laundry.;)
The current pay rate is around twenty cents an hour in most state operated prisons to the best of my knowledge.
It is not against the law to father a child-as opposed to failing to support said child once ordered to do so.
So far as I have been able to find out, a Mormon would be legally in the clear in most or all states if he could prove no underage or coereced relationships with his harem, so long as he just let them them around like a bunch of groupies hanging around a musician or athlete and so long as he provided financially for his children.
Cheap DNA tests have really changed child support. It's pretty easy to prove paternity now. States, including Virginia, routinely use genetic testing if the father won't acknowledge the child, and fathers routinely get paternity tests before agreeing to support a child, if there's any doubt. Or to claim paternity if the mother tries to say he's not the father.
States have also become much more aggressive in collecting child support, and will put liens on property, garnishee not only wages but tax refunds, and suspend driver's licenses until you pay up.
IME, the way guys like that avoid child support is by convincing the mother not to name him. (Often by saying she'll get more money from the state if she says she doesn't know who the father is.)
Privatization of child support enforcement has made a mess of things in many states. My wife had to sue in civil court because the private contractor in her jurisdiction was totally ineffective at recovery (while billing the state for 'services'). It took nine years for her to get a penny. Paternity and the divorce decree were never contested or denied by the father.
I think a lot of our current social structure is courtesy of the fossil fuel fiesta.
Even in cultures where polygamy is allowed, in practice, most men have only one wife, because they can't afford to support more than that.
That's how polygamists get caught in the US. As OFM points out, as long as you don't legally marry more than one woman at a time, it's not illegal to live with them or father children with them. (Mormons don't permit polygamy, BTW; the ones who do it are fringe groups.) Assuming there is no statutory rape or other coercion, the way polygamists are prosecuted is usually some form of welfare fraud. They get their wives to claim to be "single mothers," and live off the welfare they collect.
Unfortunately, Aniya, for some men sex is all about power -- not love. Saddling a (gullible) young woman with a child is just insurance against her leaving. A bully needs someone to dominate, after all. How else is he to feel manly? And, unfortunately -- as Tarzan has observed over the years -- there seem to be some young women who are attracted to these men (mostly, I suspect, because they see these men as "super-masculine"). I've seen it too many times.
I can recall a pretty young divorcee [from an abusive husband] (sister of a friend of mine), who we tried to arrange matches with nice men. But, she only went for the brawler types she met at bars. Some are just attracted to the wrong types, and are just doomed to repeat the bad experience all over again.
http://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/oil-reserve-investment-trading/
Episode (#121)
Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert chat frothily about the possibly exaggerated Heart Attack and early demise of King Abdullah, after a heated Shoe-Tossin phone call with Obama, and follow it with the Wiki SA-reserves story, complete with Max serving up 'THEY'RE LYING about Reserves, the Major Fields are in Decline, PEAK OIL was in 2007'.
Sorry if this was already covered..
From link above: Peak oil believers put their faith in leaky arguments
Aha!! So why would Oman's depletion rate be three time higher than Saudi Arabia's? Aren't they part of the same geographical/geological area. Or could it be that the Saudi reserves are only a third of their stated value?
As usual, no discussion of the fact that Saudi production and net exports started declining, relative to the 2005 annual rate, the year after Matt Simmons' book came out:
Saudi Net Oil Exports Versus US Annual Oil Prices
2002-2010 (EIA, Total Liquids)
Increasing Net Oil Exports, in response to rising oil prices:
2002: 7.1 mbpd & $26
2003: 8.3 mbpd & $31
2004: 8.6 mbpd & $42
2005: 9.1 mbpd & $57
Declining Net Oil Exports, in response to generally (four years out of five) rising oil prices:
2006: 8.4 mbpd & $66
2007: 8.0 mbpd & $72
2008: 8.4 mbpd & $100
2009: 7.3 mbpd & $62
2010: 7.4* mbpd & $79
*Estimated
Possible of course. What is important is this (from ASPO-USA 2008 conference):
Comment on Peter Wells’ more optimistic assessment of KSA reserves last night: "We really don’t have any idea how much is there. 110 billion proven, 260 billion est. What we really need to know is how much is light sweet, and when/how fast will the largest fields decline?"
This is the point that I wanted to make clear on Drumbeat 12 february.
Reserves say a lot, but not everything in the timing of Peakoil.
Secondary EOR they are doing already for many decades and that recovers the 'light (sweet) oil' more rapidly what causes to reach peak production more early and decline in the first few years past peak more steep. The pilot projects are possibly thermal (steam) EOR, like in Oman. They will use CO2 in Ghawar, but it won't prevent oil production decline.
This says nothing regarding production decline. For the U.S., with 89 Gb waiting to be recovered with CO2-EOR, the same counts. KSA will be able to extract 7-9 mbd for many decades in the future, but important are the above ground effects of production decline and ELM in the near future.
Wall Street lower after retail sales report
Interesting how the article states it is 'surprising' retail sales are lower, when it also says commodity prices are higher. For a few weeks there I was wondering what kind of topsy turvy world we live in that provides for such an amazing economic upturn (as cheerleaded on by MSM) while oil price and other commodities prices are rising so high. I wondered if it was the QE's that was making up the difference. No, it just took a few months for it to come home and roost. It seems as though a lot of people threw caution to the wind during this past Xmas and spent freely, possibly thinking the recession was over (via child psychology Govt. pronouncements), then pulled back in the New Year to see if that was really true. No, it wasn't.
But the govt. can muster up a few more QE's and pretend to be interested in balancing the budget, and who knows, maybe the Bakken, Brazil sub-salt, and Tar Sand expansion will all contribute to a cornucopian rise in production, in turn reducing oil price and other commodities down to an economic engine revving 30-40 dollars a barrel. Ha!
One reason they expected higher retail sales is the payroll tax cut. Workers now have 2% more in their pockets.
Of course, that only helps if you actually have a job.
Thats 2% before taxes, and other nondiscretionary deductions, like health care and retirement are taken out. The bump in takehome pay is proportionately larger. In my case its more like 3%. At least in my case gas and grocereries price increase isn't big enough to chew it up. The indirect effect of commodities probably hasn't had time to work through into general inflation yet.
That must explain the alleged rise in household incomes recently reported in the MSM. I couldn't understand how household incomes were up when employment and wages are down. A tax reduction could do it I suppose.
We just got notice of a 10% rise in prices, attributed to rising steel costs, for solar panel support structures.
This might be enough, along with dropping incentives (California cash rebate) to doom one of our solar projects.
I have found aluminum rails and components to be more cost effective here in South Florida. Is that not the case in California? Though in a perfect world we'd be allowed to build an octet truss support structure out of bamboo >;^)
http://bambus.rwth-aachen.de/eng/reports/modern_architecture/einleitung/...
The above picture is included in a book called Grow Your Own House: Simon Velez and Bamboo Architecture
When will we ever learn?
Consumer Prices on Most Goods Expected to Rise in 2011
Sue Martin is a commodity analyst and appears on Iowa Public Television from time to time. She is followed by many farmers to help make marketing decisions. Last Friday she appeared on the Market to Market show and made some unusual scary comments.
Her comments start at about 10 minutes in if you don't want to watch the whole thing:
http://www.iptv.org/mtom/episode.cfm/3624/video/mtom_20110211_3624
Today she has a post which is more or less a summary of her views up on Agweek:
http://www.agweek.com/event/article/id/17930/
According to her, China is going to be a big factor in the grain markets just like it is in oil.
High Speed Rail Has Basically Killed A Dozen Airports In South Korea
Apt post Merrill, but what else can one expect when the beneifits to big business are held in higher regard by politicians than the needs of the people? What is happening in this country is the people that can plunk down 10k for a fundraising dinner are the ones with power and everybody else is out in the cold.
We would be better off setting aside taxpayer funds to pay for political campaigns. Once the money was coming from everybody paying taxes, which includes the middle class, then the political interest would swing that way too.
No. Because the money that feeds the media opinion forming apparatus, is coming from the same corporate sector. And they are very talented at using the latest psychological marketing techniques to trick the voters into voting the way they want.
Ok, just been doing some general musing here. I have a question.
If oil consumption per capita has fallen in the past despite increasing oil production (i.e. due to population growth), then why should peak oil production matter so much?
I've just mocked up a quick graph to show what I mean, note the dip at the beginning of the 80s.
I couldn't find data for oil consumption for earlier years, would be grateful if someone could point me in the right direction.
Sources:
Petroleum consumption: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=5&ai...
Population: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.php
Ah, found some more data so can extend the graph back to 1965:
I do understand that a rising population combined with a declining oil production rate would be an issue. I appreciate that the average quality of life could shadow the graph above.
Perhaps we'll see bigger problems if/when the barrels of oil per day per capita (bbl/d/capita) dips below 0.012?
The interesting thing for me though is the gradient of the decline in the late 70s/early 80s. If that didn't precipitate a descent into a Mad Maxesque world does it indicate that we would require an even steeper decline for that to occur? Or is it another red herring?
Sources:
Oil consumption: http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/re...
Population: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpop.php
"I appreciate that the average quality of life could shadow the graph above."
I think the point is that it might do all sorts of other things than merely 'shadow the average'.
It's why we talk about tipping points, where for example key industries that we don't even know how much we rely on for our current Quality of Life might hit a wall instead of simply a downslope. Let's say ClingWrap production, or 'WhiteOut' suddenly disappeared from the shelves and for unanticipated reasons, these turned out to be the 'Pollenators' that kept supermarket chains functional, or at very least, profitable.
Another tipping point might be 'MOL', a Minimum Operating Level for a given energy supply chain was suddenly upended. Those relationships might not be at all obvious if one is making a broad comparison such as the one you're asking about.
Right now, Governments that had until recently been keeping developing nations sputtering along with a few drabs of international monetary aid (and the strings that went with them).. but are now facing 'Austerity Measures' and so the regional balances might be the ones on the wobbly center of that scale.
Maybe, maybe not.. but smoothed averages are appealing precisely because of the number of spiky little sins they can sweep under the radar..
Right. I think Egypt was a good example of a tipping point. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of "How long can the average global BAU economy / governments tread water before a tipping point occurs and does the availability of oil per capita affect this?".
It does seem that if quality of life slowly deteriorates people tend to accept it more willingly (at least, for a time) when compared to a sudden decrease.
I'm just curious whether the per capita graph would give an accurate reflection of average qualities of life for different peoples (allowing for anomalies in different regions). Would we rate the quality of life during the 70s as higher than now or were we merely less efficient with our oil consumption?
I'm sure I could find answers to those questions if I bothered to look. I just liked the appealing smooth averages too much...
iagreewithnick -
That's why you start with 'cold' water when you want to boil a lobster - less thrashing about.
Ah, I see you'd make a fine leader of nations... ;-)
Lobster (and frog) analogies aside, I think a different approach would be to look at total global energy (BTU's) per capita. Would you see a similar drop?
During the time period on your graph oil, NG, coal, nuclear, and hydro were all used to fuel the economy. Not every nation used oil as heavily as the US.
Yes, I was just thinking the same thing a little further down-thread. Could be very interesting. I'll take a look when I get a spare moment..
Ok, I hear that. Thanks for the add'l detail.
Yes, tipping points and all that, we do also have a tendency to hang on, perhaps 'renormalizing' when we should be insisting on our 'Tips', instead.
My wife just came back from a weekend where she was speaking with some women who had raised kids 20 years back, and they told her, to her great surprise, just how much greater a battle they saw parents of young kids fighting today to get them raised. Where even two incomes are barely sufficient, the willingness of advertisers to brainwash and sell our little pieces of meat up any profitable river they can carve out, the tension and hostility that has raised the discourse to an angry invasion pitch. Where a school lunch means Chocolate Milk and some courses that are truly indistinguishable from Convenience Store fare..
I think it was fairly reassuring to Leslie that she wasn't just 'unworthy'.. thinking that it's been so hard just putting a little person out into this world right now. I'm sure it's never been easy.. but the dangers right now are certainly not imaginary.
Check out this talk by Elizabeth Warren entitled, The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class. She goes into some detail regarding the additional stresses on families as they transitioned from one to two incomes, and how that gets apportioned differently than in the 70's, and how there's more vulnerability now, not less. Quite interesting.
I grow up in a house that there built int the late 70s. The heating system was constructed for oil or firewood. Oil was only used for a few year and then it have been heated with firewood. I guess this i part of the story.
The next step is harder some of firewood could easily be replaced with solar heating and it might be for convenience but only during the summer months. It is located in the country side so public transport is not an option and replacing the fuel for the car is much harder. Even if it can be done it might simply not be worth the effort so abandon the house and move to another place may be a better option.
Good points re: alternative sources of energy.
Thinking about it, the oil graph in isolation is probably fairly meaningless. I think what I'm really after is total energy consumption per capita.
Will investigate..
IAWN- Thx for putting up the graph of per capita oil use. Some thoughts: First and foremost, to really get at the essence of how it affects society, it must be adjusted per EROEI. It's net energy per capita that determines 'quality of life', at least as measured by BAU means (i.e. $$, material goods, etc.) As the EROEI of oil has declined from ~40:1 to ~15:1 over the period in question (70's - now), instead of an 'undulating plateau', it would be a slow decline. Now that we're at (just past, IMO) peak, that decline will accelerate, and if not a tipping point, it's at least an inflection point. As others have noted, the steep drop from 70's to 80's didn't 'hurt' so much, as it was accomplished by harvesting the low-hanging fruit of gross inefficiency and by fuel switching. Not so easily accomplished a second time around (still plenty of opportunity, sure, but the impact on 'quality of life' will be more noticeable.) Additionally, we in the OECD at least, built much of our infrastructure when the net energy per capita was high and growing. The interstates, Autobahns, skyscrapers - you name it - were easily built in a world of ample energy. What we've seen over the past 40 years is the maintenance of said infrastructure in a flat to slowly declining energy environment. Now that oil has peaked, and the EROEI of all forms of energy is in significant decline, we are beginning to see the decay of infrastructure, and the curtailing of BAU quality of life...
I'll be very curious to see your future data gathering efforts. Do include EROEI insofar as possible. I have a paper I wrote on this issue a few years back. Would be happy to share it. e-mail me at adkdan at hot postalserviceyouknowhowitends.
Thanks for the feedback clifman, much appreciated.
Yes, I agree - the holy grail would be an EROEI graph. I must try and see how far I can get with that.
But firstly, I think I will aim a little lower and see if I can just get a bit more data from other energy sources and overlay them on the graph above.
Would love to see your paper. Will send a mail shortly..
No e-mail from you as yet. That was hotmail.com Or lemme know yours here, and I'll send it along.
Apologies, it was late over here in the UK and I turned in for the night! Have sent now..
Thats a little deceptive. We had the low hanging fruit referred to as fuel switching (oil fired electricity) switched over to natural gas or coal. But, that change was a one shot thing.
Even worse the natural gas part could backfire and start to decline.
That's about:
2 liters of crude
72,000 BTU's
21 Kw Hrs
or 3/4th's gallon propane
70 cu ft of NG
per person per day
Very nice, much better way to visualise it.
Smaller cars and substitution - the US used to burn oil for electricity, now you use NG. There are only so many big wins to be had in that area, although of course there are a few left (like banning the sale of anything that gets less than 50 mpg for starters).
I appoint you to explain the need for that to the Republican majority in the HOR. ;>)
Yeah I'll get right on that. Not that the Democrats have any more clue.
Total cooperation among people is not viable
This doesn't make sense to me; a situation where a MAJORITY of people cooperate NEVER happens.
This is clearly not true.
I'm willing to believe that situations almost never arise where ALL people are willing to cooperate. The authors must be trying to say this.
No mystery there either. One doesn't need an academic degree in sociology to know that different people have different VALUES.
This is why implementation of utopian goals always requires totalitarian methods.
I think, what they were getting at was, that a large proportion of people are driven alot less by their values and alot more by the 'herd direction' - i.e. what their neighbors or friends are doing.
When a majority agree (on anything) they have already probably self selected for that outcome.
Example: In a two-party poltical system, a MAJORITY in party A will select it's champion and party B will do the same. These majorities already self selected by joining either party A or B. Mixing people from both parties and expecting them to agree on one individual by a majority generally results in chaos. Just look at our Congress.
I disagree with this research. I live in Sweden where at least historically, before the age of mass immigration, Swedes were extremely good at helping each other in time of need.
Of course, the backside to that was jealousy when things were good for your neighbour.
This has now slowly been drained as the nation is increasingly a nation without shared history or culture and where everyone is a stranger.
But this pattern holds true in places like Finland where the population is 99.5 % finnish. I would say it depends on culture and situation.
In short, it depends what you're working with in terms of national culture, people and region.
The 'General acknowledgment of Need' is key.
NYC in normal days, I found to have many customs of understood cooperation and assistance.. helping people onto a bus, driving an avenue so it could move, .. not effusively warm usually.. but pragmatic in getting one another through the crush, and that was part of the Culture of the city..
Then after 9/11, whew! You were right there in your mama's arms. People knew the time was now and there was no room for foolishness. It wasn't an ethnic 'tribe', but simply a Geographical one.. a Helluva town when the chips were down!
When the "chips were down."
Are you joking?
Endless free money flowing from the Fed to the Wall Street banks, plentiful cheap oil, and having the entire nation suddenly warm up to and stand behind you, and you call that tough times?
When the oil starts to slow, when the money dries up or becomes worthless, when the nation no longer gives a care, when the tourism stops...
When all of those things happen, get back to me how life and cooperation in NYC is. If it is still as you described, then I will genuinely believe you about the spirit of the place, and will eat humble pie.
The point was that NYC, regardless of our still being in the bounty of this power party, had suffered a 'relatively terrifying event' with the complete out of the blue violent devastation of a couple of the World's largest buildings right in our otherwise secure city, buildings that stood AS a solid representation of Economic and Oil POWER, (not that most would have described it that way) and the result was a lot of people cooperating and working together towards some common concerns, and revealing in that condition of high stress that we found a lot MORE attempts to pull one-another together and not apart.
I hear that London during the night bombings was another version of this story.. the point was that it didn't simply descend into riots and Interfraternal Warfare.
Can things fall apart? Duh.
Do other outcomes pleasantly surprise us about our 'innate nature' as well? Yes.
So Leiten. Since I was thinking uprooting and moving the family to Sweden would be a good thing. Sounds like I should set my sites one border firther east. Sounds like Sweden is already corrupted.
This research left out one of the most important factors and is therefore not valid. Other research has shown that there is enforcement of cooperation among mammls and particularly humans. If the community enforces cooperation and punishes cheats, majority cooperation is the norm. Just take a corporation: there is 80% cooperation or so, the ones who don't cooperate are laid off. Even the research you cite comes up with 65% cooperators if the circumstances are right. Also, in the real world it is very common that A does not cooperate with B, but with C while B cooperates with C and D. In that example, there is 100% cooperation indirectly, but only 25% of the people cooperate with their neighbors.
Rising seas will affect major US coastal cities by 2100
Interactive US Map (select save map image icon to create high-res .tif,.jpeg,.gif image.)
Interactive Global Map
Hacked e-mails reveal plans for dirty-tricks campaign against U.S. Chamber foes
They did a lot worst than that
HBGary Targeting Exelon Nuclear Power Plant
From the CEO of HBGary:
Other targets
Change To Win FB Group
Change To Win FB Page
Velvetrevolution FB Page
US Chamber Watch FB Page
Stop The US Chamber of Commerce FB Page
Justice Through Music FB Page
SEIU [Service Employees International Union]
Code Pink FB Page
American Crossroads Watch FB Page
Agit-PoP Communications FB Page
here's a dylan ratigan podcast with glenn greenwald who was also targeted,
http://www.dylanratigan.com/2011/02/15/glenn-greenwald-on-radio-free-dyl...
That dude isn't doing anything, he made the grave mistake of pissing off Anonymous, which is a collective of bored nerds with a smattering of some *serious* technical (and occasional social engineering) skill. Hell, HB Gary doesn't even have a single algorithm on how to do correlations between social media sites and useful information mining.
http://www.computersecurityarticles.info/antivirus/sophos/hbgary-federal...
Related: Symantec releases new report on Stuxnet, warns energy sector to beware
Though it's telling that McAfee has some connections with HBGary
Edit: Another point of view Too much hysteria over cyber attacks: US experts
Cooling fins help keep Chevrolet volt battery at ideal temperature
and from other automotive news
Toyota shows off its new iQ electric-car prototype
Climate Change to Cause 'Massive' Food Disruptions
"Hoarding" is a word as misused as "Liberal" and "Conservative" as political appellations.
One man's old age savings are another 's hoarded wealth.
A national reserve of grains and other storeable edibles makes very good sense-even for a country such as the good ole USA-we don't know that we might not need the stuff in the event of ordinary bad luck, or really bad luck, Black swan bad luck. We certainly will be called upon to help out many and varied countries in the near future.
Without reserves, we can't, to any large extent.
I cannot recall a single comment here in this forum to the effect that the US is "hoarding" oil but we have a petroleum reserve.
It's all in the eye of the beholder.
Reading between the lines, I seem to detect a great desire on the part of many members to capitalize on shortages and dislocations in the economy by investing wisely in corporations well positioned to reap windfall profits resulting from such shortages of any kind.This desire does not square well with many expressed sentiments in respect equal sharing of resources.
One man's meat is virtually always another man's poison.
The very fact that an economist would use the word says a lot about his perhaps subconscious politics and very little that is good about his professional detachment.
US Coal Companies Reap Windfall From Australian Climate Catastrophe
The literally shocking truth about the quality of solar arrays
There may be a business opportunity in trouble shooting incorrectly installed arrays and in repairing those that fail before their time.
Yep, just like there is a business opportunity for car mechanics to repair used cars, plumbers to repair old plumbing, electricians to rewire old houses, air conditioning specialists to repair broken home air conditioners and even doctors to repair old people >:^)
I really can't think of too many things that never need maintenance or repair. Though a well built solar installation really shouldn't need much. I think a bi yearly inspection is probably a good idea to catch any possible developing issues.
Where do people get the idea that a solar system is completely immune to the effects of being exposed to the elements?
Having said that they are pretty robust if well designed and competently installed, check out the Mars Rovers.
Interesting timing. I got a letter from PG&E yesterday (presumably to all grid connected solar people), about an inverter recall. Fortunately my inverter manufacturer's names was not on it.
Yeah, I have personally redone installations due to someone else's poor workmanship, my hunch though is that there is probably a much greater perception of this being a widespread problem than it actually being so. Furthermore I'd be willing to bet that as time goes by the quality of installations is probably going to get better as more installers gain experience and become more competent and the permitting process and inspections become better as well.
To put that in perspective the automobile industry averages about 164 recalls on a yearly basis. That's more than three a week.
http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_15352578
Yeah, I have personally redone installations due to someone else's poor workmanship ...
Me too Fred, usually as a result of the requirement to use a licensed electrician who wasn't trained in high amp DC installations. AC is more forgiving.
Bingo!
Here's an example of lack of understanding of electrolysis caused by poor grounding, poorly insulated copper wire connections and moisture pooling inside aluminum structure housing for low voltage DC LED.
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll225/Fmagyar/ART%20and%20Solar/Elect...
The guys who did the install were clueless licensed AC electricians. At the very least they should have hired some old dock yard marine electrician... As it was we had to redo the entire wiring for 71 of these lights. Imagine two old farts, myself and my buddy, me 58 him 60, up on 20 ft ladders with tools in the hot Florida sun working on this for almost four weeks. We knew if we wanted it done right we had to do it ourselves.
Bill Moyers: America Can't Deal With Reality -- We Must Be Exposed to the Truth, Even If It Hurts
......"most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence," the research found that actually "we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions."
These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal with reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths..........
http://www.alternet.org/story/149925/bill_moyers%3A_america_can%27t_deal...
Many aren't interested in facts at all, but that doesn't stop them. Influential and politically active, their ability to filter inconvenient truths is complete. Fear is the mind killer.