Peak Oil - Has it already happened?
Discussion
pilchardthecat said:
Total b
ks.There's still more 'available' oil now than there was 20 years ago. Finding it and getting it out of the ground is the tricky bit, but it's there.
The price of oil will no doubt increase, but supply will remain largely unchanged for the foreseeable.
I'm confident that the extraction and production of oil will see me out anyway.
Are you Victorian?
Fittster said:
If there is vast quantities of it left why are oil companies bothering with tar sands?
Reasonable question. I'd have thought that the high extraction costs of things like tar sands are better done while the barrel price is high. I mean , theoretically, the price will only rise, but practically?Fittster said:
If there is vast quantities of it left why are oil companies bothering with tar sands?
Political expediency; Dubya said 'Let there be a domestic(to North America anyway) oil production boost', and lo, there was one. The efficiency of tar sand extraction is bks; you have to burn the equivalent of about 4 barrels oil(in the form of LPG usually) to extract 10 barrels of oil. Utter lunacy, and it's leaving big bits of Canada looking like a slagheap. Does anyone know if they are still planning that nuclear steam generator, or was that just another bit of hubris?
Great Pretender said:
pilchardthecat said:
Total bks.There's still more 'available' oil now than there was 20 years ago. Finding it and getting it out of the ground is the tricky bit, but it's there.
The price of oil will no doubt increase, but supply will remain largely unchanged for the foreseeable.
I'm confident that the extraction and production of oil will see me out anyway.
I like this graph, as it makes the whole "what's in the ground" argument a bit clearer
When they extract oil they leave quite a lot behind as it costs more to extract per barrel the lower the percentage that is left.
As the price goes up the more commercial it is to process, so there will be more to ectract per find as the price per barrel goes up.
Oil is still relatively cheap. its the tax that makes it seem expensive. But thats another story.
BP were caught/ fined for massively underestimating their reserves for tax and other commercial reasons a couple of years ago. Why would any commercial enterprise state what they have in reserve. It would alway be on the very cautious side..
I believe its true that the Norweigians have used very little of their 50% share of North Sea oil. ??
It suits the doomsters and polar bear worriers for all the oil to be nearly gone.
As the price goes up the more commercial it is to process, so there will be more to ectract per find as the price per barrel goes up.
Oil is still relatively cheap. its the tax that makes it seem expensive. But thats another story.
BP were caught/ fined for massively underestimating their reserves for tax and other commercial reasons a couple of years ago. Why would any commercial enterprise state what they have in reserve. It would alway be on the very cautious side..
I believe its true that the Norweigians have used very little of their 50% share of North Sea oil. ??
It suits the doomsters and polar bear worriers for all the oil to be nearly gone.
WOO5IE said:
When they extract oil they leave quite a lot behind as it costs more to extract per barrel the lower the percentage that is left.
As the price goes up the more commercial it is to process, so there will be more to ectract per find as the price per barrel goes up.
Oil is still relatively cheap. its the tax that makes it seem expensive. But thats another story.
BP were caught/ fined for massively underestimating their reserves for tax and other commercial reasons a couple of years ago. Why would any commercial enterprise state what they have in reserve. It would alway be on the very cautious side..
I believe its true that the Norweigians have used very little of their 50% share of North Sea oil. ??
It suits the doomsters and polar bear worriers for all the oil to be nearly gone.
It was Shell who were over quoting their reserves.As the price goes up the more commercial it is to process, so there will be more to ectract per find as the price per barrel goes up.
Oil is still relatively cheap. its the tax that makes it seem expensive. But thats another story.
BP were caught/ fined for massively underestimating their reserves for tax and other commercial reasons a couple of years ago. Why would any commercial enterprise state what they have in reserve. It would alway be on the very cautious side..
I believe its true that the Norweigians have used very little of their 50% share of North Sea oil. ??
It suits the doomsters and polar bear worriers for all the oil to be nearly gone.
Current recovery rates in the North Sea are roughly 50% (ie 50% of the oil in place produced), and getting higher. Recovery rates used to be about 35% before a field was abandoned. "Reserves" have an explicit economic factor- price of oil goes up, reserves go up, as it is worth the additional work to wring the last little bit of oil out.
In the non OPEC countries, it is true that a lot of the "easy oil" has been found and produced, and that all that is left is the harder oil- ie deep water (the Deepwater Horizon was drilling in water over a mile deep) or smaller fields (most of the remaining 50% of oil in the UK North Sea is in little pools). But the Middle East is still massively underexplored (why should the Saudis look for more oil, when they have already found so much?). This does have certain geopolitical implications (bizarre work on tar sands and oil shales in non OPEC countries, wars for oil, the use of the 'oil weapon' and so on), but it doesn't mean the world is about to run out of the 2nd most abundant liquid on the planet after water.
And there are plenty of sedimentary basins that haven't really been explored.... a lot of India, East Africa (look at what Tullow has found there), Northern Australia, the Antarctic, the high Arctic, the South Atlantic (who knowns what the next Falklands well could find- it took a lot of wells before the North Sea was prooved as an oil province), the Mexican side of the Gulf of Mexico, a lot of the Amazon basin, CBM and tight gas outside of North America: CBM- gas produced from coal seams- produces 10% of US total gas production.... how much gas might be in UK coal seams? Tight gas or shale gas - gas produced from shales, (NOT the same as oil shales, where rock is 'cooked' to produced oil) has rocketed in the USA, but is in it's infancy in Europe...what might come out of the thick layers of shale in Europe? Already in the last decade we've seen brand new oil provinces discovered- the Northern Caspian, the pre salt plays in the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Brazil.
I'm confident that I can continue in the oil industry until I retire in 30 years, and I'm pretty confident that YoungFoilist could also retire from the oil industry if he wanted to (and he's 4 now).
If oil was going to become non economically viable within our lifetimes, why would we have to make extra effort to cut back on C02 production? I assume that Coal and Gas have similar lifetimes and comsumption rates... so why aren't BP, Shell et al frantically building nuclear power plants or something?
Its interesting how that single internet blogger sees the future clearly when all world governments and oil companies have their collective heads in the sand...
Its interesting how that single internet blogger sees the future clearly when all world governments and oil companies have their collective heads in the sand...
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