The data seem to indicate peak oil already happened. Are we there yet?

Great Debates
61

Many people would not be able to lose their cars, even though it might cost a fortune to run them. The average person is so far in debt and has so little disposable income that they probably would not be able to buy a new car right away, and would resort to carpooling and other means.

Although in our household we have relatively inefficient cars (Corvette and Mustang), we car pool every day, and put less than 100 miles a week on both cars, total, in an average week. Gas would have to break $10 a gallon before we would start changing transportation modes, and then it would likely be to getting a motorcycle/scooter to ride on good days (as we both work only 2-3 miles from home…I know, novel concept, getting a home near work and everything. My average co-worker probably has a 25 to 35-mile round-trip, and some commute more than 60 miles each way! One commutes…good God, I don’t know how far, it’s more than 100 miles each way, and he has to leave his house at 5:00am to get to work by 8:00am)

62

This is exactly why peak oil has the potential to become such a big problem. If we were trying to get America to cut back 5% on its Cheerios consumption, ticking up the price would drive people to switch to Cornflakes. Gasoline doesn’t follow the rules of supply and demand in the same way though. Raise the price and people will pay it. Raise it more and they will charge it. It would have to go up a lot to get a significant decrease in demand, which would screw the economy. And then the supply would just continue to decrease.

63

Not really. The Canadian fields become profitable at vastly lower prices. America has nothing to worry about in the medium term.

64

The Alberta Oil Sands won’t produce enough to make up the difference. From here:

Right now the US consumes about 21 million barrels a day. 1.2 million is nice but not enough.

Once global production starts to drop, it is predicted to do so at a rate of between 2-6%. Taking a 4% drop as an average, here is what global daily yield looks like the first 5 years after the drop:
Year 1- 81.6 million barrels/day
2-78.3
3-75.2
4-72.2
5-69.3

The tar sands production would be overwhelmed. So, you’re probably wrong that America has nothing to worry about because of the Alberta tar sands in the medium term.

65

So when would it become feasible to mine shale oil? The Green River formation (Wyoming) contains several hundred billion barrels of oil-but extracting it would be expensive and difficult.

66

But that is only limited by the amount of investment. More investment and you have more production.

67

No one is going to invest more than a barrel of oil to extract one. That time is coming. Think alternatives are going to be in place?

Drive, drive, drive that SUV.

68

But shale oil is not by any means exempt from peaking. At best, that would forestall peaking for only a few months or years.

You also got to think about how many energy equivalent barrels of oil it would take to extract a barrel of oil from these sources. In the heyday, you could get several dozen barrels of oil out from the energy input equivalent of one barrel of oil. Deepwater drilling and oil sands require much more energy to extract an equivalent amount. It becomes more and more economically unfeasible to extract oil once that ratio approaches 1:1. When you hit 1:1, you might as well shut down the wells.

Or, what adhay said.

69

Even once it drops below 1:1, you’d still have some extraction going on, so long as you can use other energy sources to get it. Medium-chain hydrocarbons have the virtue of being a very portable form of energy, suitable for some kinds of vehicles, and for some applications it’d be worth the price.

70

It is no where near that, where do you get the idea it is?

71

I never said it was anywhere near that. We’re edging closer and closer to that ratio, but we’re still on the positive side of the equation. My point was that extracting useable fuel from tar sands and such yielded much less energy than the inputs required to extract it.

72

That too is difficult. The classic sources of alternative energy — wind, energy, solar, nuclear, hydropower — become harder and less economical to set up as petroleum prices rise. It won’t be easy to build another Three Gorges if we had to carry all that concrete on the backs of donkeys. And why divert all that energy to extracting petroleum, when it could be more efficiently transmitted more directly to the end-user?

Now, end-use energy isn’t all about toaster ovens and flat-screen TVs; we’ll still need something to power our vehicles (that does account for a huge portion of the average Westerner’s energy use anyway), and so far, liquid petroleum gives us the most bang for the buck. Electric vehicles have limited range, hydrogen-powered vehicles are fraught with engineering and supply difficulties and you try running a vehicle any smaller than a train on coal.

You have an excellent point there, and one that I haven’t given much thought to until you brought it up. We can stave off the uneconomical aspect of the 1:1 ratio for a while out of sheer necessity. However, once that becomes more and more lopsided due to exhausting deposits, then we have real problems. We can buy ourselves time at best.

73

They are called oil sands, not tar sands. There is no tar in the oil sands.

But your point is incorrect. If it cost more to produce it then it was worth, then they wouldn’t. This isn’t some perpetual motion device they are building.

74

My bad. Tar does not come from sand. I live in Florida, where the oil I hear about these days washes up in balls on Pensacola Beach.

But you mentioned ‘more investment’. I got this image of squeezing water from a stone when I read that, and I might have taken further than you stated, and further than what you intended.

I will say that I haven’t thought very much about what basically amounts to an energy subsidy for extraction of a source of energy, but only because it seems a roundabout and short-term solution at best. We are not building a perpetual motion machine here. At best, we are building a flywheel — it will keep spinning for a while after we set it in motion, but once the inputs are gone, it will come slowly creaking to a halt.

75

This was a group predicting disaster (back in thge late 1970’s), based upon resource depletion (not just oil). They seem to be forgotten, because (as was mentioned) technology has a way of developing substitute materials.
Inevitably, we will deplete our petroleum reserves…by that time, we will have alternative sources of energy (like bio-engineered plants that produce alcohol directly).

76

Even if it costs more energy to produce a gallon of gasoline than is contained in a gallon of gasoline, it can still make sense to produce it.

Think of the “hydrogen economy” that people like to talk about. There isn’t any hydrogen sitting around underground for us to pump out, every drop of hydrogen would have to be manufactured. That means it will always cost more energy to produce a unit of hydrogen than you can recover by burning that hydrogen.

So that hydrogen isn’t an energy source, it’s a way of storing and transporting and using energy. And gasoline can be thought of the same way. You could mine coal, load it into trains, deliver the coal all over the country, and people could drive steam powered cars, like they had in the early 1900s. Or you could take coal, burn the coal at a central location, generate steam, drive turbines, generate electricity, transmit the energy to houses, plug car batteries into the houses, and charge electric cars. Or you could take the coal, burn it, generate electricity, and create hydrogen, transport the hydrogen around the country, and burn the hydrogen in hydrogen powered cars. Or you could take the coal, and convert it to liquid hydrocarbons, and transport the resulting fuel all over the country and burn it in conventional cars.

The advantage of coal-to-liquid is that we can use our existing transportation fleet, and don’t have to build millions of new vehicles. Of course, the resulting fuel is going to cost more than conventional gasoline, if it were cheaper we’d be doing it already. It would cost a lot to build these plants, and gasoline will have to hit a very high price and stay there for a long time before anyone would want to build a coal-to-liquid plant, because if the price drops you’ve got a very expensive factory that loses money like crazy.

The point is, the energy from crude oil is just one component of the value of gasoline. The other part is that liquid fuels are easy to work with for obvious reasons, and we already have a massive capital investment in liquid fuels. So even if liquid fuels become a net energy sink rather than an energy source, it can still make sense to manufacture them.

77

They are also called “tar sands”.

Bowman, C.W. “Molecular and Interfacial Properties of Athabasca Tar Sands” 7th World Petroleum Congress, April 2 - 9, 1967 , Mexico City, Mexico, 1967. World Petroleum Congress

Ritchie, R. George S. et al. “Pyrolysis of Athabasca tar sands: analysis of the condensible products from asphaltene” Fuel 58.7 (1979): 523-530.

Camp, Frederick W. “Processing athabasca tar sands — tailings disposal” The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering 55.5 (1977): 581–591.

Pullin, N.E. et al. “Techniques applied to obtain very high-resolution 3-D seismic imaging at an Athabasca tar sands thermal pilot” American Association of Petroleum Geologists annual meeting, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 7 Jun 1987

Abramov, O.V. et al. “Extraction of bitumen, crude oil and its products from tar sand and contaminated sandy soil under effect of ultrasound” Ultrasonics Sonochemistry Volume 16, Issue 3, March 2009, Pages 408-416.

I can find a few hundred more citations with a quick search. But I can also attest as an actual Engineer who has actually worked on a tar sands project that yes, they are called tar sands, oil sands, petroleum sands, bitumen sands, and even “those goddamn sands.”

78

Tar and Bitumen are different things, so to be accurate (and to fight ignorance) the correct terms should be used. Tar, Oil Sands.

79

AFAIK shale oil production is limited by the availability of water, and also environmental concerns. ISTM that daily production of shale will not get very high.

80

…and then there’s what the people who own the property, run the processes, and design the equipment call them. Be pedantic about it how they should be referred to if you want to, I’m cool with that, but at least acknowledge that colloquially they are referred to by several different terms.