Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

[wintler2]

There are a number of posters on this forum who occasionally claim that 'peak oil' is a fabrication of 'TPTB'/neoconservatives/name your enemy and insist that we are not running out of oil. If'n when i see them i sometimes challenge them, they back down a bit ("okay its not about running out of oil") and then vanish from the thread. This thread (my first) is my foolish attempt to get such peak oil critics (POCs for convenience) to finally put up or shut up.

For newbies, peak oil is the pop-culture tag for the problem of global oil production reaching a maximum and then declining, first quantified by Shell geologist Marion King Hubbert back in the 1950s for the lower US 48 states. He was ridiculed, threatened, and then proven right in 1971. Global oil production is a harder calculation, with Colin Campbell, Jean Leherrere, Samsam Bahktiari, and Kenneth Deffeyes some of the best known geologists & oil industry geeks working on that sum, and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil the academic end of its study.

www.theoildrum.com is where alot of the cutting edge collaborative research is happening online (search for 'Hubbert linearization' if mathematically minded) and www.energybulletin.net a useful news aggregator on same and related issues (the latter i contribute to occasionally, their http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php useful for a longer intro, links to evidence and to the many sites & elists discussing same).

The body of evidence supporting peak oil is actually pretty huge, so i'd appreciate POCs clearly stating on what grounds they doubt it. A short list of supporting evidence might include:
-declining discoveries
-declining sweet-light crude production
-depletion of existing wells & massive new drilling programs
-ever more sophisticated enhanced oil recovery methods required
-exploitation of deeper/harder to reach fields

How these are being fabricated globally by any particular elite is just one of the mysteries POCs never speak of, i look forward to being let in on the secret so i can work on something else. I'm not at all trying to prove that PO will mean the end of civilisation or that its the one burning issue of the day, but the offhand dismissal of the issue by folk who obviously know sweet f.a. has gone beyond a joke. Put up or shut, friends.

[Vigilant Guardian]

I haven't looked into it closely - the scam people mostly seem to cite how the Oil Peak might be driving all the wars in the Mideast - and since wars are based on lies... They also sometimes cite abiotic oil - a Russian scientist recently claims to have proved oil is generated by the Earth and rains in relatively short time spans like decades
http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2006/08/ ... eory.shtml
- Personally I don't buy it but I'd need to look closer...

[medicis]

ref to: "the scam people mostly seem to cite how the Oil Peak might be driving all the wars in the Mideast"

I seem to recall that PNAC folks talked about the need to control oil to support their goals of global hegemony and dom. Certainly, if I were attempting to achieve global dominion, controlling the last reserves of energy would be high on my list of 'To Do's'.....

As you watch the global maneuverings.... it is obvious that controlling energy is one persistent and apparent motive.

There are multiple factors involved in the mideast (and other) conflicts. But energy appears to a signficant one. I would be impressed to hear a compelling argument against that assertion.

medicis

[wintler2]

Right on Medicis, 'why M.East war?' is certainly part of the circumstantial case for peak oil, i can't wait for POCs to explain that one (cheap sand?). I didn't emphasise the geopolitical indicators for peaking because there are usually multiple causes and actors involved, various interpretations etc, where-as the actual physical production is much less open to smokescreening (but i'm happy for others to go there).

On abiotic oil Vigilant Guardian, where is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
http://www.energybulletin.net/2423.html
All of the oil we're burning today is of biotic origin
http://eaps.mit.edu/geobiology/biomarkers.html
if there are accumulations of hydrocarbons formed within planets core, nobody has managed to bring any to market yet. I can't say its impossible, but its certainly of dubious relevance when we burn 84million barrels a day and have a ten year lead time from exploration to market. Not drilling deep enough? The record deep water Gulf Of Mexico discovery this year, the Jack 1 & 2 wells, were of a standard sedimentary basin.

C'mon POCs, where are ya? I know PO is off RI's usual beat, but the conspiracy so often claimed wouldn't be. Masonic Plot? Dreams End? I promise to be nice..

[Vigilant Guardian]

Thanks Wintler - like I said,I haven't lloked into it - the Russia angle is interesting, didn't kno the history there - I've been meaning to look closer and this is a good start

[wintler2]

No worries VG, and i don't expect you take my word for it. If you turn up anything new (say superceding or discrediting content of the second link) i'll be grateful and interested.

Feel i erred in title of thread, i don't expect anyone to 'prove' a hoax. Even just make a case would be nice, i'm curious how it is supposed to have been done.

[yathrib]

I find it odd that "peak oil" is so attractive to people who regard themselves as left wing or part of the left wing subculture. That doesn't mean it's not true, but if it is true it means (for starters) that resources cannot be distributed equitably, and that oil companies and allied industries and governments are only living out their dharma in greedily sucking oil out of the earth and starting wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least that was the underlying message I detected in The End of Oil, the only substantive book I've read on the topic. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but clearly if it is it is much more conducive to a sort of might-makes-right fascism than any kind of left wing thought or activism. Just sayin'.

[wintler2]

Interesting what you got from End of Oil, Yathrib, ".. if it is true it means (for starters) that resources cannot be distributed equitably, and that oil companies and allied industries and governments are only living out their dharma in greedily sucking oil out of the earth and starting wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan." That spin on the implications of PO is around but in no way follows automatically, there are far too many taxpayer-subsidised armed gangs roaming the planet for anything to be considered inevitable. See the Oil Depletion Protocol http://www.oildepletionprotocol.org/ for one effort to avoid the business-as-usual outcome, ODP is a contraction and convergence agreement between nations to match CUTS in consumption in ALL countries to falls in global production, otherwise as at present us rich folks simply price the poor out of the market http://www.businessinafrica.net/features/oil/179500.htm.

There are undoubtedly plenty of left wingers who talk about PO, more social democrats than old school marxists, arguably cos PO supports their desire for better collective action/large social programs. Marx himself was of course mute on the implications of natural limits on resources (like all good industrialists), and its not unfunny reading KM adherents who try to fit PO into his theories. Here in Oz, Green politicans were first to warn on PO (Bob Brown Senate questions in 04?), with West.Aus Labor Minister Allanah Mactiernan http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/200 ... omment.php and Qld Labor MP Andrew McNamara http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Run ... 33942.html
(appointed to Main Roads portfolio after Sept 06 election - hilarious http://www.hawkerbritton.com/hawker-bri ... huffle.htm
) moderately vocal, and Nationals Sen.Barnaby Joyce and Fed.Treasurer Peter Costello making oblique warnings.

There is a fair list of US right wingers vocal on PO, starting with Matt Simmons (Republican & investment banker) and US Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (of SY Moon coronation fame), but also Conservative, Libertarian and financial/gold-bull sites like The Daily Reckoning, Financialsense.com, & www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com . They seem to do more rethinking than most on the Left, i'd suggest have done more to actually get their heads around the multiple finite-planet problems that invite our attention.

Personally i'm a Greeny since wore short pants and have never taken Left-Right pepsi-coke seriously (anyone who thinks Green is a shade of Red/Left is sorely misled, happy to discuss on another thread). In my parents generation it meant something, but i see the institutional left now as possibly more an obstacle rather than any help (because so subverted). For me, very crudely, there are those working towards living peacefully within natural limits, and the planetfuckers, on the left and the right, fundamentalist and moderate.

[yathrib]

Wintler, you write:

"There is a fair list of US right wingers vocal on PO, starting with Matt Simmons (Republican & investment banker) and US Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (of SY Moon coronation fame), but also Conservative, Libertarian and financial/gold-bull sites like The Daily Reckoning, Financialsense.com, & www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com . They seem to do more rethinking than most on the Left, i'd suggest have done more to actually get their heads around the multiple finite-planet problems that invite our attention."

I hate to say this, but this doesn't prove that the right is more open minded and flexible, not to me anyway. If anything, it proves that they see the me-and-my-shotgun world of the future and like it, because it's what they've always wanted anyway. I'm taking special note that one of the sites is called whiskeyandgunpowder.com. That name sums up the conservative/libertarian/reptilian-brained philosophy for me. "Stay away from my f**kin' whiskey and gunpowder or i'll blow you're f**ckin' head off!" LOL. Oh yeah, "Stay away from my f**kin' gold too. Sure it's useless in a post-apocalyptic world since you can't eat it, drink it, or shoot it, but this guiy on TV told me it was really great stuff."

[JD]

I had a howl at reading Simmon's book "Twighlight in the Desert". Chock full of technical errors. I can't believe he didn't get a petroleum engineer + geologist to do some proof reading and editing on the manuscript.

Having given him a little disrespect above I do think however that his basic thesis is correct; albeit the timing he presents may be out by a decade or more.

I believe Simmons presented to the legendary Energy Task Force that was led by Cheney. So that task force had a full blast of peak oil thinking. Helps explain the foreign policy of the Cheney/Bush Administration.

Nice challenge to lay out Wintler2. Since you posted I've been waiting for some real technical arguments that Hubbert was just dreaming all this Peak Oil shit up.

And I don't mean arguments like "they've said it before and been wrong" or ad hominum attacks. I mean some real arguments that make the case that depletion is not occurring in established oil and gas fields and/or that discovery rates of new reserves is not slowing down. Some data would be nice; preferably in the form of pressure, production rates, and watercuts in producing oil fields so we can all see these infinite fields in action.

If anyone wants to play the abiotic oil card, please provide some estimates of abiotic recharge rate of reservoirs and some methodology around how the estimations are made. (Yeah abiotic hydrocarbons are real; however I've never seen any influence from such hydrocarbons in any reservoirs I've studied so if they are seeping in it is really, really, really slow)

For anyone's interest this is a good quick primer for estimating reserves with material balance - just to show that reserves figures are hard to nail down but aren't entirely pulled out of thin air: http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~kleppe/TPG4150/matbal.pdf

I looked but couldn't find a nice introductory primer online for decline curve analysis, or volumetric estimations. If anyone is truly interested I'm sure I can get some material together.

Funny, I was just doing some year end reserve estimations on dozen or so gas pools and after careful consideration of the amount of gas produced, reservoir pressures, phase characteristics of the reservoir fluids I was able to match both the original gas in place to the volumetrics of the reservoirs deduced by drilling results and 3D seismic and the reserves deduced by production decline techniques. And amazingly, no infinite reservoirs. No abiotic seepage keeping the reservoirs full unfortunately LOL.

Believe it or not there are people who actually understand these topics, and considering the economic importance of the subject the physics of the matter of oil and natural gas recovery are fairly (although not completely!) understood.

Sorry for my tone in this post. I just get so damned sick of reading people's opinions on topics that they know sweet jack shit about. Of course knowing almost nothing about a topic doesn't stop such people from speaking with such confidence that they know all the answers because they read about something for a few minutes on the internet. So when Wintler2 dropped the glove I thought I might see the legions of the unknowing step up and was looking forward to some laughs, but alas so far no one's stepping up to provide them.

Oh well, back to the spelunking thread which is far more interesting anyways.

[wintler2]

True Yathrib, theres plenty of confirmation bias in the survivalist & gold-bug Right, but am sure i've read some in that ballpark seriously considering collective solutions like ODP too (no link to demonstrate sorry) which is not easy for them. The British National Party (racist nationalists) and 7th Day Adventists have been spotted using PO to justify their causes, and I have no doubt that if the peak of oil production AND of 'cheap' energy (arguably not the same thing) is upon us then it will be used to justify every toxic agenda under the sun. Therefore its important i think to seperate the fact of it happening and the what-to-do and even what-will-happen guessing, both the latter are inevitably projections of knowledge/experience/assumptions and most vulnerable to manipulation.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Thanks very much for this thread -- most illuminating so far.

[slow_dazzle]

This is the single most important issue of our time.

The warning signs are everywhere. The dollar is in trouble, jobs are being outsourced (horrible term) by the boatload and Ford and GM have made major redundancies. Don't think these events are random and not connected in any way - they are symptoms of a wider problem that comes back to peaking of the oil supply. The key factor is not supply per se - it is how our economic system relies on increasing growth based upon increasing money supply by lending against the assumption that growth will facilitate repayment of the debt. Once oil prices shoot up continued growth is impossible so the money supply will shrink and the depression of the early 20th century will look like a picnic. That is the issue.

As an aside, the term "oil production" should be replaced with "oil extraction". Oil is not produced - it is sucked out of the ground. Ever wonder why the term "oil extraction" is not common parlance?

One really important issue that is rarely discussed is peak gas. Gas is the preferred feedstock for fertilisers, without which, feeding 6 billion people is utterly impossible.

Gas is also used to generate electricity as is oil and if demand for electricity is increasing how can that be reconciled with the peaking of supplies of oil and gas? Logic tells us that the demand and supply lines will cross at some point if they have not already done so. So here's a little thought to leave the doubters with. Go home tonight and turn off the electricity until morning. What will you do without it?

[wintler2]

Cheers for the input JD, there does seem to be little argument so far, curious given the confidence some have expressed in 'hoax'. The timing of peak is of course open to debate, tho i think its fair (perhaps overly) to make the US EIA's current forecast of peak-around-2025-2035 as the outside limit, given the many who have forecast it earlier* (including the US EIA before GWBs coup). Also, the real world can and does already impose all sorts of contraints (pipe corrosion, war, democratic reform, resource nationalism..) that limit extraction and distribution, i think they'll do more to determine the peak than enhanced oil recovery methods or synthesised fuels (like tar sands or shale oil), which makes numerical forecasting a bit of a mugs game.

slow_dazzle, how can you be so sure PO is so important? If i have runaway climate change bringing say permananet El Nino+ to eastern Aus (where i live) peppered with regular category 5 storms, then oil demand could drop very fast and be the least of my worries. If my Fuehrer Howard [spits] backs your Demopublicans in 'staying the course' in Iraq a draft will be required here too and i'm just young enough. Militarism, the stealth plutocracy, elite deviance, patriarchy, neoliberalism, people trafficking and abuse hurt so many every day already that a decline in oil extraction is not the worst thing we have to fear at all.

There will be no overnight collapse, no bell rung, no useful public announcement. If nothing else breaks, then PO may get the glory, because it is the growth-economics-breaker supreme, exhibiting maybe as recession> depression> slightrecovery> deeper-recession> fragmentation, but don't fool yourself its our biggest or scariest challenge. Okay its a nice poster issue for the thermodynamic problem that has confronted/enabled all life ever, but the knowledge exists for us to adapt. Its very hard now to imagine many doing so, but necessity will drive change, like always.

*edit - wanted to add my own Wild Assed Guess at PO as 2005 for sweet-light crude, 2010-12 for all fossil fuel liquids (including syncrude & tar sands, GTL production, LPG). Most transperant public estimate is ASPO's at www.peakoil.net .

[Trifecta]

Peak oil = market manipulation and vast profits for those black budgets, like stealing candy from the babies.

Global warming, peak oil, war in the middle East, war on terra = clash of civilizations.

Free energy in a facum, over unity devices, Tesla tech, implosion technologies et al = peace and abundance, for ALL life forms.

Clash of civilizations Vs Peace and abundance means you cannot control for there is no need to, the power base shifts to the individual (as it has always) except we are programmed and indoctrinated to forget all this.

Plus, the push is nuclear....the push is nuclear...the push is nuclear, I wonder why

Sometimes I wonder in the back of my mind if we have not somehow agreed to being evicted from planet earth as our leasehold runs out ... sounds like a new world order to me