True, but there is also a more simple explanation for the term Peak Oil, Aleklett thought it simply sounded better and more fluid than 'Oil Peak'. And I think he was right.

I've watched at least half of the videos by now. For me, the big disappointment was Robert Hirsch who spent a lot of time psychoanalyzing and a lot less talking about the facts. It was mostly a shortened re-run of his previous talks, but with a lot of science cut out and for some reason he spent most of his time reciting old newspaper articles about the 1970s. A flop.

The most interesting presentation to me, by far, was Arthur Berman's contrarian take on U.S. shale natural gas which everyone predicts will become a huge, cheap and abundant source. Berman says, not so much. And he has done his math. It was a very fact, math and science-heavy, which I enjoyed because there's too much loose talk on some ASPO talks these days.

Werner Zinn also talked a bit about the European prospects of the same phenomenom and he threw could water on it. However, although I agree with him on the basic premise, I did find his analysis to be slightly more loose than Berman's. Another aspect is that his analysis isn't nearly as contrarian, so perhaps he didn't feel he had to go the extra mile to prove his point, but that also suggests the room for error is wider. Berman, on the other hand, came with a much more thorough presentation in my view, even if his views are still quite isolated, I found his take to be persuasive. I've done a lot of independent factchecking since I viewed his talk and a lot of his points are valid, although a lot of them are also hard to check due to a derth of data in some areas.

Oliver Rech had a good talk, which was also heavy on geology, but he was a bit vague. He decided to cut out some categories of liquid fuel, bunch together oil and natural gas and because of all of this, his predictions were a bit messy and tangled up in one another. Still, throughout his talk he did focus on specific areas, and oil was one such area where he was pretty pessimistic.

Steve Mohr did a good talk, but it was a bit controversial among the chemists/petroengineers there. Still, I felt he held his ground. He gave a prediction that by 2016, at the latest, we'll see a decline.

Mikael Höök spoke about CTL and GTL in one of the most understated, yet important talks. He methodically went through it all(he's working on, in fact finishing, a metastudy on all the studies done on these two areas the past decades) and basically told the audience that it's very unfeasable for larger scale projects. China tried it, experimentally, but abandoned it very quickly. It's a great talk. Again, at least to my liking, clear, concise and a lot of data and less speculation.

Kjell Aleklett, however, did one of the best talks not only of the entire conference but of all I've seen. He gave a pretty scary chart which showed that, according to BP, their 2007 'low case' was actually where the world was going on conventional oil production. Kjell, which has had pretty stark words in the past for the oil production, but a strangely sanguine and optimistic tone about our ability to handle this did finally yield a little and there were times throughout his talk that were marked by a slight dampaned tone of alarm, if ever so quickly extinguished.

A general theme for the entire conference was indeed denial about the role of unconventional. There was more talk about it, but the tone is still very much denialist. A lot of people didn't even want to talk about how the unconventional production had screwed their predicitons. And even with talks that were not focused on unconventional, you had weird exclusions based more on a whiff of convenience than anything else(Oliver Rech was a good, but not the only, example. Aleklett was also guilty of this.)

I still think that unconventional won't determine future oil production in the end, but it's potential, as we've seen the past few years, is larger than many skeptics want to admit. What I'd like to see isn't some cornucopian fantasy talk, rather a more realistic 'alternative scenario' where unconventional, toghether with depressed economic conditions and increasing efficiency, would be able to hold off and mitigate a peak. But alas, no such luck. Still, things are improving in this area.

Finally, there were loose talk about 'political implications' which contained a lot of fluff. I would certainly like to see a more rigorous discussion of the dangers of stagnating oil production(which seems the fate the next few years, if not decade) or at least slowly growing(but not fast enough) production. What these effects do to a society, not only politically, but what will that reaction force people to do geopolitically and perhaps even militarily, and what will that then in turn affect oil production? See invasion of Libya. How will Iraq turn out. What will the crushing debt and slowly rising misery in the West lead these nations to do? And how will that affect the Western/Saudi alliance as well as the gulf states?

And what about the fact that Egypt is now no longer a net exporter of oil, as of 2010? It's the largest importer of wheat in the world. Egypt isn't a player in OPEC, but it's the 'cultural capital of the Arab world' and whatever happens there has important implications for the entire Middle Eastern area. And again, what does this do to oil production? The lack of discussions between the explicit link between political constraints and geological oil production isn't explored well enough. A lot of talk about 'we must find a sustainable future' and other sloganeering. A lot less about the specific, right-here-and-now geopolitical effects. This, the dangers of social unrest as a direct threat to geological oil production in of itself is still underserved.

All in all, a pretty good ASPO summit. A bit more self-reflection/self-criticism in their own forecasts is needed, a bit more substantive discussion on the political implications with a direct focus on oil production and the importance to bring in fresh talent is all welcome. I do see improvements in all areas and would like to see more. Finally, if you had to watch just 3 talks, then I'd recommend Arthur Berman, Kjell Aleklett and Mikael Höök. Steve Mohr is a 4th(if you have the time), in part because it was a controversial talk and it was stimulating to watch.

Arthur Berman has made a number of posts here at TOD, for example these:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8914
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8212

Lamb – Difficult to document each trend as far as profitability. I’ve seen some very profitable wells in the trends and many dogs. Without tracking down every well you can’t get to the bottom line. Some of the best profit margins were made by operators who drilled very few wells but sold their undrilled acreage for a bundle. And did you know an operator can make a nice profit by drilling a money losing well? We generally call them “promoters”. We have been hip deep with promoters from Day One in the shale plays. The trade varies some but often goes like this: the working interest (WI) partners reimburse the operator for the lease costs, over head expenses such a salaries, etc. And there’s usually another chunk of cash added on. And the WI partners pay for 100% of the cost of the well but earn only 75% of the net revenue. The operator collects the other 25%. We call this a “third for a quarter” deal. So if a well cost $10 million but only nets $8 million the operator makes $2+ million profit and the WI investors lost $4+ million. Would you classify that as a successful well? About 30 years ago I saw first-hand when a promoter drilled 18 dry holes in a row and he walked away a millionaire.

Also consider the public company angle. What if Pubco A spends $200 million drilling Eagle Ford wells but only nets $160 million back during the years following their 5 year drilling program. But during those first 5 years the market cap of the company increased $100 million due Wall Street’s satisfaction with Pubco A increasing their reserve base y-o-y. The effort was successful for the original shareholders but would you call it profitable?

Then there’s a question of what rate of return you feel is sufficiently profitable. My company is private so no stock to hype. I’ve reviewed Eagle Ford prospects that appeared to be profitable. But I’ve yet to see one with a ROR acceptable to my owner for him to justify the risk. Until NG prices collapsed we could make a better ROR drilling deep conventional prospects.

Then there’s a question of sustainability. The bust in the dry NG shale plays is a good example. Many $billions were invested in the E Texas shale trend. And it looked rather profitable…until NG prices fell. Suddenly many of those profitable wells became unprofitable and many of those very expensive lease positions became worthless and were never drilled. That bust nearly wiped two of the largest US independent companies, Chesapeake and Devon, off the map for good. And did completely destroy many smaller companies.

The question of sustainability may be rising again with the oily shale plays. A public company may actually have a net profitable drilling program in the Eagle Ford but to maintain share value they must drill even more wells to increase their reserve base y-o-y. But the cash flow from their efforts, though profitable, is insufficient to fund an ever expanding drilling program. This may be the situation Chesapeake is facing today. Over the last two years they sold over $12 billion in assets to fund drilling operations but they still admit they are at least $10 billion short of their required budget. And now they are facing falling oil prices that are reducing income even further than previously projected. I have seen more than one company with a profitable drilling program (though perhaps marginally so) fail because cash flow was unable to cover debt payments and their drilling budget.

I hope you get my long winded point: profitability of any play is not as straight forward and readily calculated as many might presume. Some of the negative comments about the shale plays may come across as the plays not being profitable when the real objection is their potential lack of sustainability.

If the debate over RRC versus EIA data for Texas demonstrates anything, it is that the most (semi) reliable data are the annual average data bases. In any case, the annual EIA data show that the largest recent year over year increase in US crude oil production was from 2008 to 2009 (0.4 mbpd), and all of the increase is equivalent to increasing Gulf of Mexico production, as production rebounded following the hurricanes and as new (quick to peak and decline, e.g. Thunder Horse) deepwater projects came on line. The increase in annual US crude oil production from 2009 to 2010 was 0.1 mbpd, and the increase from 2010 to 2011 was 0.2 mbpd, to 5.7 mbpd, which was only 0.3 mbpd above the pre-hurricane production rate of 5.4 mbpd:

http://205.254.135.7/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2&f=A

If we use the annual RRC data for 2010 and 2011 Texas crude oil production and EIA data for other regions, there was no increase year over year in US annual crude oil production from 2010 to 2011, but at the end of the day, the difference between no increase (RRC + EIA) versus an increase of about 200,000 bpd (EIA) is really pretty trivial.

Regarding the RRC data bases, the RRC appears to be quickly and routinely updating the monthly and annual data at the following link:

http://www.rrc.state.tx.us/data/production/ogismcon.pdf

I took the annual Texas natural gas well production data from the above link (for the key 2006 to 2011 years) and I took the Barnett Shale annual gas production numbers from the RRC Barnett Shale data base, to generate the following chart:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-06-25/commentary-america’s-new-energy-reality-bidding-war-declining-global-net-oil-expo
Commentary: America’s new energy reality - A bidding war for declining global net oil exports

Americans are reading, almost on a daily basis, about increasing oil and gas production in the US. For example, Daniel Yergin wrote about his optimistic outlook for increasing US oil and gas production in an OpEd piece in the June 10, 1012 New York Times entitled “Americas New Energy Reality.”

It’s certainly true that US oil and gas production has rebounded from the production low following the 2005 Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, but a careful analysis of the production data suggests that the production outlook it not quite as rosy as most people seem to believe.

The primary new energy reality facing the US is an ongoing post-2005 decline in the supply of global net exports of oil, which we abbreviate as GNE, with the developing countries, so far at least, consuming an increasing share of a declining volume of GNE . . .

Note that the same RRC database shows a steady year over year increase in Barnett Shale gas production from 2004 to 2011. So, a common database shows increasing natural gas production from a large shale gas play, but declining overall total natural gas well production.

After all the back and forth upthread about the organization's acronym, I got a smile out of your mention of "APSO". That of course is the other group that meets in Lhasa.

Yes, and Jean Laherrère, another geologist and ASPO founder, shouldn't be forgotten !

My guess is that it refers to the amount of water used in the battery manufacture or some such aspect.

Interesting article on squandering LNG which I've bookmarked for further study. This issue will soon come to a head with Australia's carbon tax which starts Sunday. The politicians think of gas like the inexhaustible food supply in the kids book The Magic Pudding. Somehow gas will replace coal fired baseload, balance wind and solar, make ammonia for fertiliser input and there will still plenty for export. Already gas supply fears are holding back plans to replace brown coal fired power stations with combined cycle gas, nuclear being illegal in Australia.

There's every chance that the leftish government will be thrown out by the end of 2013 followed by attempts to repeal the carbon tax. However the conservatives seem unlikely to restrict LNG exports just because truckers and power stations want cheap gas fuel. The cornucopian world view is going to be put under severe strain in coming years.

I think you might not have a good grasp on how a post-peak-oil world progresses. The very notion of "History Books" is a product of the leisure-time made available by industrial society. It won't exist in the future.

It's quick, catchy, and makes whole-lotta sense:

No it doesn't make much sense at all! Furthermore it suggests that the 'FACTS' can be found at their site http://www.fuelfreedom.org/

If their myth busting section is any indication they are mostly BAU promoting techocornucopians who seriously believe that alternative fuels such as ethanol and domestic US oil production will save the happy motoring way of life, It seems they have never heard of EROEI...

The author appears to have good "street cred" with the mainstream press. Coverage appeared in major news sources such as Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

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One of the world’s foremost experts on oil, gas, and energy, Leonardo Maugeri has been one of the most distinguished top managers of Eni (the giant Italian giant oil&gas, ranked 6th among the largest international oil companies), where he held the positions of Senior Executive Vice President of Strategies and Development for about ten years (2000–2010),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Maugeri

****************

(Reuters) - Global oil supplies are growing so fast that they could outstrip demand and lead to a collapse in world prices, a former energy executive who is now a Harvard research fellow said on Tuesday.

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/06/26/oil-supply-harvard-idINDEE85P0H...

****************

Most of the new projects examined in Mr. Maugeri's report should be developed or close to completion by 2015. If demand doesn't keep up beyond then for whatever reason—say, a Chinese slowdown—the second half of the decade could be a real downer for peak oilers. Long-term price expectations would follow.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230445860457749082334559804...

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A Fresh Look at Oil’s Long Goodbye
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

My bedtime reading tonight is “Oil: The Next Revolution – The unprecedented upsurge of oil production capacity and what it means for the world.” This mind-bending report points to a prolonged period of rising oil production, particularly in the United States (for reasons laid out below), and a potential collapse in oil prices, with all kinds of implications for security, international politics, the economy and, without doubt, climate.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/a-fresh-look-at-oils-new-bo...

Five extra Saudi Arabias, isn't that exactly the amount needed to continue BAU?

Stew
Actually they were completely unintelligible - I didn't have any subtitles/words on the slides - only pictures. I am writing it up as a (last) summary essay here. But Ive been saying that for months...

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. - George F. Will

Kye - I suppose it depends upon how one rates the probability of success. If I jump out of an airplane w/o a parachute the odds are highly likely I'll die. So if I chose to not jump am I being pessimistic about the outcome? At the other extreme, of course, is a 100% certainty such as flipping a coin and expecting it to land on either heads or tails. There is some very small possibility that it will land on its side and not fall over. Worrying that it might do so would be a rather extreme pessimistic view. Now everything else is life typically falls between those two extremes.

Is it being pessimistic to not accept the possibility that we might discover enough oil in the US over the next 10 years that we could supply all our needs w/o importing any oil? There are probably more than a few J6P's that believe this is possible and that anyone who disagrees is "being a pessimist". OTOH many would classify such expectation as foolish. So is J6P a hero and the detractors cowards? Kinda depends on which side of the fence you agree with.

A critical factor IMHO is "skin in the game". For 37 years I've reviewed hundreds of drilling proposals. Without exception there were always two camps of optimists and pessimists. And not very surprising the optimists almost never stood to lose a penny if the prospect was a dry hole. In fact, in most cases they got their initial investment back and made some profit before the well was drilled. The pessimists were the ones risking their money: drill a dry hole and they might lose $4 million. Or $150 million if it's a Deep Water GOM well (like the last DW dry hole I worked on). Obviously Devon managment was optimistic about the outcome of that particular effort. They were wrong.

I tend to view folks who complain that others are being pessimistic about the future in the same light: what are they actually risking via their optimistic POV? It seems in the great majority of cases they are risking little. Especially when the actual outcome may not come for many years, if ever. If some wants me to accept their expectation of energy independence all they need do is throw a few millions at $20/bbl oil on some 10 year futures. I still wouldn't agree with their expectations but I would accept their feelings as honest. Walking the walking is fine but it still doesn't prove you're correct.

Optimism or pessimism? In the end it just boils down to one's expectation of a realistic outcome.