Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

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Re:

Postby DoYouEverWonder » Wed Jan 04, 2012 12:19 am

wintler2 wrote:BenD: Iran has lots of oil (according to Iran)
DoYouEverWonder : Iraq has lots of oil (according to Iraq)

I look forward to you addressing the topic of the thread, some day. I know from experience that evidence will not be forth-coming from y'all, but on-topic is really not too much to ask.


Gosh, isn't that why BushCo wanted to own the place so badly? You don't believe they were there to save the Iraqi's from big, bad Saddam?

Yes, I believe Peak Oil is a hoax. Just like diamonds are rare gems worth thousands of dollar for a pebble. That does not mean I don't believe we need to stop burning the crap for numerous reasons. But no, we're not running out of heroin any time soon.

BTW: I didn't mean to imply that Iraq has more or less oil then Iran. I just thought it was funny that the Iranians are making an announcement about that they have more oil then anyone else and Iraq is announcing that Basra has more oil than any other city.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby DoYouEverWonder » Wed Jan 04, 2012 12:21 am

wintler2 wrote:
Ben D wrote:Seems the dip in your graph is due to the change in policy following the overthrow of the Shah, and then for both Iran and Iraq, the consequences of the Iran - Iraq War...

Thats well known, yes.

Its relevance to this thread is .. what?

Both countries production is <10% of global production.

There's a difference between how much your country is sitting on in known reserves and how much you are pumping out of the ground at the moment.
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Re: Re:

Postby wintler2 » Wed Jan 04, 2012 1:15 am

DoYouEverWonder wrote:Yes, I believe Peak Oil is a hoax.


Why?

DoYouEverWonder wrote:.. I just thought it was funny that the Iranians are making an announcement about that they have more oil then anyone else and Iraq is announcing that Basra has more oil than any other city.

I agree its funny, nearly as funny as the EU and US central banks insisting they have plenty of money to save the banks, umm, financial system. Which of them do you believe?


DoYouEverWonder wrote:There's a difference between how much your country is sitting on in known reserves and how much you are pumping out of the ground at the moment.


Very true, and a point that makes press releases about claimed (not known) reserves mere red herrings in the peak oil discussion. Thats why i posted production graph.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Ben D » Wed Jan 04, 2012 6:32 am

New Year greetings wintler2. :thumbsup

Actually I posted that Iran story here as it was the first one that appeared in a search for a peak oil thread. I didn't think it off topic but in any event, to make amends I hope this post is more to your taste. Now I must admit to not having a preferred belief for or against the question of whether peak oil has been reached yet so I'm not trying to prove anything, this post is just for informational purposes...

The R/P Ratio

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Willis Eschenbach

In oil, as in other extractive industries, you have what is called the “R/P ratio”. In the R/P ratio, “R” is reserves of whatever it is you are extracting, and “P” is the production rate, the rate at which you are extracting and using up your reserves.

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Figure 1. World annual oil production in billions of barrels (blue line), and years left at that production rate (R/P ratio, red line). Right scale shows the proven oil reserves for each year, in billions of barrels (dotted green line). DATA SOURCE: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2011, a most fascinating Excel spreadsheet. PHOTO Spindletop Hill Gusher, 1901

When you divide the amount you have in reserves by the rate at which you are extracting the resource, you get the number of years the reserves will last at that rate of extraction. Accordingly, I include the R/P ratio in Figure 1 as “Years Left”

A couple of things to point out. First, the “Years Left”, the R/P ratio, is currently more than forty years … and has been for about a quarter century. Thirty years ago, we only had 30 years of proven oil reserves left. Estimates then said we would be running out of oil about now.

Twenty-five years ago, we had about forty years left. Ten years ago we had over forty years left. Now we have over forty-five years left. I’m sure you see the pattern here.

Second, this is only what are termed “proven reserves” (Wiki). It does not include “unproven reserves”, much of which is in the form of unconventional oils such as shale oil and oil sands. Even discounting the unproven reserves, while the rate of production has increased, the proven reserves have also increased at about the same rate. So the R/P ratio, the years left at the current rate of production, has stayed over forty years for almost a quarter century..

Now, at some point this party has to slow down, nothing goes on forever … but the data shows we certainly don’t need to hurry to replace oil with solar energy or rainbow energy or wind energy in the next few decades. We have plenty of time for the market to indicate the replacement.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to find a better energy source than oil. In fact, the huge new sources of shale gas will substitute in many areas for things like heating oil, and will burn cleaner in the bargain. And I do think we’ll find new sources of energy, humans are endlessly inventive.

I’m just registering my protest against the meme of “OMG we’re running out of oil we must change energy sources right now tomorrow!!”. It is simply not true. We have plenty of time. We have decades. We don’t have to blow billions of dollars of our money subsidizing solar and wind and biofuels. The world has enough oil to last for a long while, plenty long enough for the market to determine whatever the next energy source might be.

NOTE: Oil figures, particularly reserves, are estimates. Oil companies are notoriously close-mouthed about their finds and the extent of their holdings. The advantage of the BP figures is that they are a single coherent time series. Other data gives somewhat different results. As far as I know the increase in proven reserves despite increasing production is common to all estimates.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby wintler2 » Wed Jan 04, 2012 5:20 pm

Ben D wrote:New Year greetings wintler2. :thumbsup

And a happy solar rotation to you too Ben.

Ben D wrote:Actually I posted that Iran story here as it was the first one that appeared in a search for a peak oil thread. I didn't think it off topic but in any event, to make amends I hope this post is more to your taste.

Feel free to explain its relevance, but on its own it has no bearing on oil production peak - as DYEW pointed out, claimed reserves are not the same thing as real oil out of the ground. 'Reserve revisions' are getting as common as stockmarket swindles.

Ben D wrote:Now I must admit to not having a preferred belief for or against the question of whether peak oil has been reached yet so I'm not trying to prove anything, this post is just for informational purposes...

The R/P Ratio

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Willis Eschenbach


Well well well, Mr Eschenbach is branching out from his chosen field of anthropogenic climate change denial ..
Willis Eschenbach caught lying about temperature trends
http://wottsupwiththat.com/tag/willis-eschenbach/
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/person ... hp?id=1320

..into resource depletion denial. Its a common path, Planetfuckers Incorporated need both to defend their activities. And Eschenbach is using the same pretty limited skill set in your posted article that he applies to AGW - cherry pick some data and waffle.

R/P ratio's are nearly meaningless, because Reserve estimates (and they can only ever be estimates until actually Produced) are notoriously unreliable. Many OPEC members simply made up discoveries from early 80's to present in order to improve their cut in production quotas. Corporations over-estimate reserves to pad out their balance sheets and draw in more cash and exec bonus'. Every oil explorer wants to overestimate its discoveries so it can onsell the find quickly and for lots of moola. All sadly normal profit-seeking behaviour.

Reserves are like promises from a stranger, only Production is real and measurable. And Production of conventional oil has peaked.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Ben D » Wed Jan 04, 2012 7:31 pm

You're a hard man to please... :P
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Jan 04, 2012 8:27 pm

Reserves are estimates subject to mistakes and intentional inflation. (Point has been made often: nations and corps have incentives to exaggerate and thus attract investor attention. The 1985 jump especially was related to OPEC's decision to impose production quotas based on "reserves.")

The last 30 years have seen incredible advances in all of the technologies used to find oil, and these have been applied to almost every corner on earth. You can't assume the next 30 will offer anything comparable. In fact, it's suicidal to look at current (estimated!) reserves or the past rate of discovery and assume anything about what the future will bring.

"30 years left" should have been bloody well viewed as a crisis to confront in 1980 (and the world would be an immeasurably better place for it now). "45 years left" after all these advances and the entry of all remaining nations and regions into the search for oil, and with the now-higher consumption and still-growing population, should be viewed as just as much of an emergency. A greater one, of course, given what can be seen developing with the environment and climate.

Because even if this total of 1383 billion barrels in "reserves" (still in the ground!!!) as of end 2010 is true, those are by definition far harder to get at than the last 1383 billion. The existence of oil doesn't mean it will be accessed at the same net energy to consumers. You will not be discovering significant stores of more easily accessed oil!

Thus the plateau in production since 2005 does not look like much of a surprise.

In addition to the above omissions, the author's excitement about "clean" shale gas tells us a lot.

"BP Statistical Review"

Subsidizing cleaner renewable alternative energy industries is a good way to spend money. It creates jobs.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Ben D » Wed Jan 04, 2012 9:21 pm

Wintler2, Anthony Watts at WUWT is even handed and gives the contrarian view their space..Peak Oil – the R/P Ratio re-visited :|
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby ninakat » Wed Jan 11, 2012 2:20 pm

A Crisis of Civilization? Live Chat with Security Analyst Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. Thursday, January 12th. 3e.
Sami Grover, Treehugger
Business / Economics
January 9, 2012

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Back in December I posted a trailer for The Crisis of Civilization [video below]. Based on the work of security analyst and political scientist Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, this new documentary explores the interconnections between climate change, peak oil, terrorism and our ongoing financial crisis. Mat has also written about Ahmed's work on the connections between peak oil and the Egyptian revolution.

Given the increasingly convincing evidence that no government is prepared for peak oil; that worst-case climate scenarios are looking more and more realistic; and that the Global economic order as we know it may be coming to an end, we thought it might be a good time to talk to Dr Ahmed in a little more detail about how this all fits together.

Join us on Thursday 12th of January, 3pm Eastern. . . .

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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby ninakat » Wed Jan 11, 2012 5:54 pm

Boom And Doom: Revisiting Prophecies Of Collapse

By Debora MacKenzie

January 11, 2012 "New Scientist" -- At the beginning of the 1970s, a group of young scientists set out to explore our future. Their findings shook a generation and may be even more relevant than ever today.

The question the group set out to answer was: what would happen if the world’s population and industry continued to grow rapidly? Could growth continue indefinitely or would we start to hit limits at some point? In those days, few believed that there were any limits to growth – some economists still don’t. Even those who accepted that on a finite planet there must be some limits usually assumed that growth would merely level off as we approached them.

These notions, however, were based on little more than speculation and ideology. The young scientists tried to take a more rigorous approach: using a computer model to explore possible futures. What was shocking was that their simulations, far from showing growth continuing forever, or even levelling out, suggested that it was most likely that boom would be followed by bust: a sharp decline in industrial output, food production and population. In other words, the collapse of global civilisation.

These explosive conclusions were published in 1972 in a slim paperback called The Limits to Growth. It became a bestseller – and provoked a furious backlash that has obscured what it actually said. For instance, it is widely believed that Limits predicted collapse by 2000, yet in fact it made no such claim. So what did it say? And 40 years on, how do its projections compare with reality so far?

The first thing you might ask is, why look back at a model devised in the days when computers were bigger than your fridge but less powerful than your phone? Surely we now have far more advanced models? In fact, in many ways we have yet to improve on World3, the relatively simple model on which Limits was based. “When you think of the change in both scientific and computational capabilities since 1972, it is astounding there has been so little effort to improve upon their work,” says Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It hasn’t happened in part because of the storm of controversy the book provoked. “Researchers lost their appetite for global modelling,” says Robert Hoffman of company Whatlf Technologies in Ottawa, Canada, which models resources for companies and governments. “Now, with peak oil, climate change and the failure of conventional economics, there is a renewed interest.”

The other problem is that as models get bigger, it becomes harder to see why they produce certain outcomes and whether they are too sensitive to particular inputs, especially with complex systems. Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, who studies global systems and has used World3, thinks it may have been the best possible compromise between over-simplification and unmanageable complexity. But Hoffman and Bar-Yam’s groups are now trying to do better.

World3 was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The team took what was known about the global population, industry and resources from 1900 to 1972 and used it to develop a set of equations describing how these parameters affected each other. Based on various adjustable assumptions, such as the amount of non-renewable resources, the model projected what would happen over the next century.

The team compares their work to exploring what happens to a ball thrown upwards. World3 was meant to reveal the general behaviour that results – in the case of a ball, going up and then falling down – not to make precise predictions, such as exactly how high the ball would go, or where and when it would fall. “None of these computer outputs is a prediction,” the book warned repeatedly.

Assuming that business continued as usual, World3 projected that population and industry would grow exponentially at first. Eventually, however, growth would begin to slow and would soon stop altogether as resources grew scarce, pollution soared and food became limited. “The Limits to Growth said that the human ecological footprint cannot continue to grow indefinitely, because planet Earth is physically limited,” says Jørgen Randers of the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, one of the book’s original authors.

What’s more, instead of stabilising at the peak levels, or oscillating around them, in almost all model runs population and industry go into a sharp decline once they peak. “If present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years. The most probable result will be a sudden and rather uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity,” the book warned.

This was unexpected and shocking. Why should the world’s economy collapse rather than stabilise? In World3, it happened because of the complex feedbacks between different global subsystems such as industry, health and agriculture. More industrial output meant more money to spend on agriculture and healthcare, but also more pollution, which could damage health and food production.

And most importantly, says Randers, in the real world there are delays before limits are understood, institutions act or remedies take effect. These delayed responses were programmed into World3. The model crashed because its hypothetical people did not respond to the mounting problems before underlying support systems, such as farmland and ecosystems, had been damaged.

Instead, they carried on consuming and polluting past the point the model world could sustain. The result was what economists call a bubble and Limits called overshoot. The impact of these response delays was “the fundamental scientific message” of the study, says Randers. Critics, and even fans of the study, he says, didn’t get this point.

The other message missed was not that humanity was doomed, but that catastrophe could be averted. In model runs where growth of population and industry were constrained, growth did level out rather than collapse – the stabilised scenario (see graph, right inset).

Yet few saw it this way. Instead, the book came under fire from all sides. Scientists didn’t like Limits because the authors, anxious to publicise their findings, put it out before it was peer reviewed. The political right rejected its warning about the dangers of growth. The left rejected it for betraying the aspirations of workers. The Catholic church rejected its plea for birth control.

Critical points

The most strident criticisms came from economists, who claimed Limits underestimated the power of the technological fixes humans would surely invent. As resources ran low, for instance, we would discover more or develop alternatives.

Yet the Limits team had tested this. In some runs, they gave World3 unlimited, non-polluting nuclear energy – which allowed extensive substitution and recycling of limited materials – and a doubling in the reserves of nonrenewables that could be economically exploited. All the same, the population crashed when industrial pollution soared. Then fourfold pollution reductions were added as well: this time, the crash came when there was no more farmland.

Adding in higher farm yields and better birth control helped in this case. But then soil erosion and pollution struck, driven by the continuing rise of industry. Whatever the researchers did to eke out resources or stave off pollution, exponential growth was simply prolonged, until it eventually swamped the remedies. Only when the growth of population and industry were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did it stabilise in relative prosperity.

The crucial point is that overshoot and collapse usually happened sooner or later in World3 even if very optimistic assumptions were made about, say, oil reserves. “The general behaviour of overshoot and collapse persists, even when large changes to numerous parameters are made,” says Graham Turner of the CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences lab in Crace, Australia.

This did not convince those who thought technology could fix every problem. And with so much criticism, the idea took hold that Limits had been disproved. That mantra has been repeated so often that it became the received wisdom, says Ugo Bardi of the University of Florence in Italy, author of a recent book about Limits. “The common perception is that the work was discredited scientifically. I heard it again at a meeting last April,” says Homer-Dixon. “It wasn’t.”

It wasn’t just confusion. “Misunderstanding was enhanced by a media campaign very similar to the one that has been recently directed against climate science,” says Bardi.

One of the most common myths is that Limits predicted collapse by 2000. Yet as a brief glance at the “standard run” shows, it didn’t (see graph, right). The book does mention a 1970 estimate by the US Bureau of Mines that the world had 31 years of oil left. The bureau calculated this by dividing known reserves by the current rate of consumption. Rates of consumption, however, were increasing exponentially, so Limits pointed out that in fact oil had only 20 years left if nothing changed. But this calculation was made to illustrate the effects of exponential growth, not to predict that there were only 20 years of oil left.

When Matthew Simmons, a leading oil-industry banker, finally read Limits in the 1990s, he was surprised to find none of the false predictions he had heard about. On the contrary, he concluded, population and energy growth largely matched the basic simulation. He felt Limits got so much attention, then lost it, partly because the oil shock of 1973 focused minds on resource shortages that were then largely resolved.

There have been other recent re-appraisals of the book. In 2008, for instance, Turner did a detailed statistical analysis of how real growth compares to the scenarios in Limits. He concluded that reality so far closely matches the standard run of World3.

Does that mean we face industrial collapse and widespread death? Not necessarily. A glance at Turner’s curves shows we haven’t yet reached the stage of the standard run, later this century, when such events are predicted.

In the model, overshoot and collapse are preceded by exponential growth. Exponential growth starts out looking just like linear growth, says Bar-Yam: only later does the exponential curve start heading skywards. After only 40 years, we can’t yet say whether growth is linear or exponential.

We already know the future will be different from the standard run in one respect, says Bar-Yam. Although the actual world population up to 2000 has been similar, in the scenario the rate of population growth increases with time – one of the exponential drivers of collapse. Although Limits took account of the fact that birth rates fall as prosperity rises, in reality they have fallen much faster than was expected when the book was written. “It is reasonable to be concerned about resource limitations in fifty years,” Bar-Yam says, “but the population is not even close to growing [the way Limits projected in 1972].”

The book itself may be partly responsible. Bar-Yam thinks some of the efforts in the 1970s to cut population growth were at least partly due to Limits. “If it helped do that, it bought us more time, and it’s a very important work in the history of humanity,” he says.

Yet World3 still suggests we’ll hit the buffers eventually. The original Limits team put out an updated study using World3 in 2005, which included faster-falling birth rates. Except in the stabilising scenario, World3 still collapsed.

Otherwise, the team didn’t analyse the correspondence between the real world and their 1972 scenarios in detail – noting only that they generally match. “Does this correspondence with history prove our model was true? No, of course not,” they wrote. “But it does indicate that assumptions and conclusions still warrant consideration today.”

This remains the case. Forty years on from its publication, it is still not clear whether Limits was right, but it hasn’t been proved wrong either. And while the model was too pessimistic about birth and death rates, it was too optimistic about the future impact of pollution. We now know that overshoot – the delayed response to problems that makes the effects so much worse – will eventually be especially catastrophic for climate change, because the full effects of greenhouse gases will not be apparent for centuries.

There will be no more sequels based on World3, though. The model can no longer serve its purpose, which was to show us how to avoid collapse. Starting from the current conditions, no plausible assumptions produce any result but overshoot. “There is no sense in only describing a series of collapse scenarios,” says Dennis Meadows, another of the original authors of Limits.

Randers, meanwhile, is editing a book called The Next Forty Years, about what we can do when limits start to bite. “I don’t like the resulting future, but it should be described, particularly because it would have been so easy to make a much better future,” he says. The only hope is that we can invent our way out of trouble. Our ingenuity has allowed us to overcome many limits, says Homer-Dixon, and we can’t predict what revolutionary technological innovations humanity might come up with. Yet he is pessimistic: “The question is, can we deliver ingenuity at an increasing rate indefinitely.” Because that is what we’ll need to do if growth continues.

Instead of declaring we are doomed, or proclaiming that technology will save us, we should explore the future more rigorously, says Bar-Yam. We need better models. “If you think the scientific basis of those conclusions can be challenged, then the answer is more science,” he says. “We need a much better understanding of global dynamics.”

We need to apply that knowledge, too. The most important message of Limits was that the longer we ignore the problems caused by growth, the harder they are to overcome. As we pump out more CO2, it is clear this is a lesson we have yet to learn.

Debora MacKenzie is a consultant for New Scientist based in Brussels, Belgium
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby wintler2 » Wed Jan 11, 2012 7:55 pm

Interesting discussion of mechanisms of oil price manipulation & plausible prediction of coming fall in price:

Naked Oil
Chris Cook

All is not as it appears in the global oil markets, which have become entirely dysfunctional and no longer fit for its purpose,in my view. I believe that the market price is about to collapse as it did in 2008, and that this will mark the end of an era in which the market has been run by and on behalf of trading and financial intermediaries.

In this post I forecast the imminent death of the crude oil market and I identify the killers; the re-birth of the global market in crude oil in new form will be the subject of another post. ...


Alot of it is over my head but i trust Cook, imho he's the most articulate and well informed critic of oil markets. I post this here for reference in the future, note that he also is a peakist.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Sounder » Wed Jan 11, 2012 9:18 pm

thanks for this newsbit wintler2

The silver chart is showing indications of possible deflation with a H&S formation.

Odd times ahead.
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Saurian Tail » Sun Jan 22, 2012 5:20 pm

I wonder how much oil is out there to be fracked now that the technology is there to get at it? My guess is lots. Perhaps the biggest weakness in the peak oil calculation is underestimating the extent that the profit motive can drive technology when required ... as well as the willingness to do _whatever_ it takes, no matter the environmental cost.

Like Fracking? You'll Love 'Super Fracking'
Oil service companies roll out new technologies to break up more earth more cheaply


By David Wethe, Bloomberg News

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/li ... 92012.html

Few energy industry practices have sparked more controversy than hydraulic fracking. First, wells are drilled horizontally below the surface, allowing a single bore or pathway to reach vertical pockets of oil and natural gas trapped between formations of shale and other rock. Then high-pressure jets of water, sand, and chemicals are pumped into the ground to create fissures through the rock so oil can seep out and be retrieved. Regulators, environmentalists, and academics are studying whether the practice can damage the environment.

Undeterred, oil services companies including Baker Hughes (BHI) and Schlumberger (SLB) are continuing their quest to devise ways to create longer, deeper cracks in the earth to release more oil and gas. These companies are no longer content to frack—they want to super frack.

High crude prices and newly accessible oil and gas embedded in shale rock in North America are driving the wave of innovation. The more thoroughly that petroleum-saturated rock is cracked, the more oil and gas is freed to flow from each well, raising the efficiency—and profit—of the expensive process. For example, the growing use of movable sleeves, a tubelike device with holes that fits inside a well bore, lets drillers target multiple spots to dislodge entrapped oil. This technique can reduce the $2.5 million startup cost of a fracking well near the Canadian border by up to two-thirds, according to a recent analysis by JPMorgan Chase (JPM). Multiply such savings by hundreds of wells added in that area each year, and you start to understand why the industry is so eager to hone the process. “I want to crack the rock across as much of the reservoir as I can,” says David A. Pursell, a former fracking engineer who’s now an analyst at Tudor Pickering Holt in Houston. “That’s the Holy Grail.”

Baker Hughes has set its sights on creating “super cracks,” a method of blasting deeper into dense rock to create wider channels. The aim of the technology, branded as DirectConnect, is to better concentrate the pressure of fracking fluids to reach oil or gas farther from the well bore, which existing methods fail to do as effectively.

The company also is trying to speed up the fracking process. Wells usually are fracked in steps, as plastic balls are dropped down to plug the well at various stages and isolate different zones for fracking. It can take days to get a drilling rig to the site and fish out conventional frack balls, which can get stuck over the course of 20 or 30 preparation phases in a typical well before production can begin. With land-based rigs renting for up to $30,000 a day, reducing such delays is critical. So Baker Hughes has developed disintegrating balls, which turn into powder “like an Alka-Seltzer” after a couple of days, says Rustom Mody, vice-president for technology.

Schlumberger, after six years of research, has developed a technique called HiWAY. The technology can generate bigger cracks in surrounding rock formations than current methods by combining fiber with typical fracking materials such as sand so the stuff clumps as it’s being pumped in repeated pulses and at high pressure into the side of a well. The number of customers using HiWAY in North America has grown from two a year ago to more than 20, Schlumberger says. Chief Executive Officer Paal Kibsgaard told investors in October that the HiWAY technology is yielding larger oil and gas production while using less water and sand than conventional fracking. (Schlumberger, in a quiet period prior to the Jan. 20 release of its earnings, declined comment.)

Halliburton (HAL), the No. 1 provider of fracking services, also based in Houston, is trying to reduce the amount of materials and labor used on each well. It’s rolled out RapidFrac, a series of sliding sleeves that open throughout the horizontal well bore to isolate zones for fracking. Fracking fluid is then injected at high pressure through multiple holes exposed by the sliding sleeve, cracking the surrounding rock. The process can be faster and cheaper than the most popular fracking method, which involves sending an explosive charge down the well to blast one hole at a time.

The critics aligned against fracking, let alone super fracking, aren’t impressed. “If critics already think fracking is bad, theoretically, super fracking would be super bad,” says Kirk Sherr, president of Regester Larkin Energy North America, an industry consultant. Doctors attending a fracking conference in Arlington, Va., in early January called for a federal moratorium on the technique in populated areas until the health effects are better understood.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying whether fracking can contaminate water resources. The technique also has raised concerns about excessive water consumption because of the millions of gallons needed to frack each well. And local officials in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Ohio have voiced concerns about recent outbreaks of small earthquakes in areas where drilling has been accelerating. Seismologists and academics doubt that fracking itself has caused the quakes. “The fracturing process is not causing the problems that are perceived by the public,” says David B. Burnett, director of technology at Texas A&M University’s Energy Institute. He also says the wider or deeper fractures that result from super fracking won’t create bigger environmental problems. “No change in fracturing technology would change that,” he says.

However, a 2010 study by seismologists at Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Austin found that the injection underground of wastewater from the wells may be affecting subterranean pressures in the rock, triggering tremors. Says Amy Mall, senior policy analyst at the National Resources Defense Council: “Just like any other type of fracking, we need a lot more independent scientific data and research to understand the risks and how best to prevent them.” Yet as long as high oil prices create big profit incentives to pursue extraction techniques beyond conventional drilling, energy companies likely will continue to explore ways to squeeze money from rocks.

The bottom line: Despite the furor over fracking to extract oil, energy companies are developing ways to make it more destructive—and profitable.
"Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him." -Carl Jung
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby Saurian Tail » Sun Jan 22, 2012 5:27 pm

Possible relationship between the Keystone XL pipeline situation and increased US production due to fracking.

Growing U.S. energy output a threat to Canada

By Gary Lamphier, Edmonton Journal, January 20, 2012

While the media fixates on the political spin around the Obama government’s rejection of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, there’s another, more important element to this story that has been grossly underplayed: growing domestic U.S. oil production, which will slash U.S. dependence on imported oil in the years ahead.

After decades of decline, U.S. oil output is growing rapidly again, thanks to the use of fracking (hydraulic fracturing) technology to open up previously untapped tight oil or shale oil deposits. (So much for Peak Oil theory.)

Some analysts say North Dakota’s Bakken field alone — where output has doubled to more than 500,000 barrels a day over the past two years — could produce as much as one million barrels a day in a few short years.

That’s nearly as much oil as the U.S. now imports from Mexico (its third-largest source of foreign crude, behind Canada and Saudi Arabia), and almost half as much as the 2.3 million barrels a day the U.S. currently imports from The Great White North, the top foreign supplier.

Robert Johnston, director of global energy and natural resources at New York-based Eurasia Group, a geopolitical analysis and consulting firm, told attendees at Thursday’s annual Industrial Heartland Association conference in Edmonton that he sees growing production of shale oil (not just in the U.S., but globally) as a “sleeper” issue that could have a huge impact on world oil markets in the years ahead.

Now, British Petroleum is weighing in on the topic. In its annual global energy outlook, it says U.S. demand for oil imports is likely to fall sharply in the years ahead, as it moves toward energy self sufficiency over the next 20 years.

“The U.S. is on a path that will greatly reduce its demand for oil imports,” Christof Ruehl, BP’s chief economist, told reporters Wednesday, according to a story in the Financial Times.

“The company’s message will be music to the ears of U.S. policymakers, who have long pursued the goal of ‘energy independence’ and sought to free the country from its reliance on imports of crude from volatile countries in the Middle East,” the FT story says.

“The U.S. has long known it is sitting on potentially huge reserves of unconventional shale gas . . . (and now) the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing – in which huge volumes of water and chemicals are injected at high pressure into dense shale rock to release the hydrocarbons trapped there – has unlocked the supplies. Over the past few years production has soared, and in 2010 the U.S. overtook Russia to become the world’s biggest natural gas producer.”

Now that fracking is being used to ramp up production of shale oil as well as shale gas, BP says the volume of oil imports in the U.S. is on track to fall below levels seen in the 1990s, while the U.S. moves toward becoming a net exporter of natural gas in the years ahead.

The shrinking U.S. market for foreign sources of energy has long been apparent on the natural gas side, where domestic U.S. shale gas production has soared, and natural gas prices have plunged to decade lows, leaving Alberta producers in an increasingly desperate situation.

Now, producers who have long viewed the U.S. oil market as virtually insatiable are waking up to the fact that the U.S. may not need foreign oil as much as once thought. And that may one of the reasons ( besides rabid opposition by environmental groups, who are among Obama’s core supporters) why the U.S. State Department has felt no urgency to approve Keystone XL.

It’s a far different story in Asia, of course, where demand for energy of all kinds will continue to soar, according to BP’s 20-year forecast. (Which explains why Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to the West Coast is now viewed by the Harper government as an essential piece of national energy infrastructure.)

“By 2030 China and India will be the world’s largest and 3rd largest economies and energy consumers, jointly accounting for about 35 per cent of global population, GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and energy demand,” the report says.

“Rapid economic development means industrialisation, urbanisation, and motorisation. Over the next 20 years China and India combined (will) account for all the net increase in global coal demand, 94 per cent of net oil demand growth, 30 per cent of gas and 48 per cent of the net growth in non-fossil fuels.”

No, that’s not a typo. Let me repeat that: over the next 20 years, BP says China and India will account for 94 per cent of the net worldwide increase in oil demand.

At the moment, about 97 per cent of Canada’s crude oil exports go to the U.S. Virtually no Canadian crude makes its way to any other markets, including China or India. Now that’s what you call a mismatch between supply and demand.

Put differently, unless Canada as a country can get its act together and find a way to export crude to Asian markets in significant volumes, this country is likely to lose a key source of national wealth generation for generations to come. Let’s hope taxpayers in all 10 provinces — not just Alberta — can understand what that means.
"Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him." -Carl Jung
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Re: Peak oil a hoax? Prove it.

Postby DoYouEverWonder » Sat Jun 09, 2012 8:38 am

Iraq to surpass Saudi Arabia in oil exports in 2017

Azzaman, May 28, 2012

Iraq is to emerge as the world’s top exporter of oil in 2017, replacing Saudi Arabia which has dominated world oil exports for decades, U.S. ambassador to Iraq James Jeffery said.

Jeffery made the remarks at the end of his term as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. He said he was pleased with the economic development taking place in the country but emphasized that the country needed to diversity its income in order to sustain economic growth.

The ambassador said Iraq was turning into something like a magnet for international firms with companies from the world’s major economic powers currently present in the country.

But the leaps Iraq has made in its oil industry received most of the ambassador’s praise.

Iraq’s standing as an oil exporter in international markets has been consolidated recently as its exports averaged 2.5 million barrels a day last month, surpassing those of Iran.

But Jeffery said Iraq should develop economic sectors other than oil to generate income. He mentioned services and tourism as the sectors that are in need of urgent investment.

Iraq’s oil revenues are mushrooming and this year the country expects a surplus that will be enough to address its budget deficit and set aside billions of dollars to be distributed to low-income groups in the society.

Iraq’s oil riches are estimated at 115 billion barrels of proven reserves, but officials at the Oil Ministry say the figure is likely to skyrocket once explorations in the country are completed.

Much of Iraq, particularly the central parts, remain unexplored.

http://www.azzaman.com/english/?p=108
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