Excellent and interesting points on this critical issue. But I believe Cecil has ignored the critical concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI).
In short, if you dig 85 million barrels of oil out of the ground, you have to use some portion of that to run your pumps and rigs (and the make those pumps and rigs) to get the next 85 million barrels out. The difference between the two amounts is the net energy that’s left to run your economy on and make people happy with plastic doo-dads.
So if we produce 85 million barrels/day now, at an EROEI of 35, it took 2.4285 million barrels of energy to produce that, for a net of 82.5715 million barrels. Not too bad. But as oil gets harder to extract, this picture gets worse.
Shale has a terrible EROEI of 5, meaning of 85 million barrels produced, only 68 million are available for the economy.
So there’s a treadmill effect here, where the more we produce, the harder we have to work, and if EROEI deterioration goes faster than production growth, we actually end up with fewer barrels to live off of.
I think fracking has changed the picture, but without EROEI included in the analysis, peaking by 2100 is an incorrect conclusion.
By including non-conventional oils, he’s also ignored the issue of peak oil itself. Peak oil is not peak fossil fuels. You can’t put any fossil fuel into a car to make it go, and you can’t get the flow rates from non-conventional oils necessary to keep production increasing.
We are at peak right now. Fighting ignorance is taking longer than we thought precisely because of poorly researched articles like this one.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, gbell, we’re glad you found us. For future ref: when you start a thread, it’s helpful to others to post a link to the column in question. Saves searching time and helps keep us on the same page. No biggie, I’ve added a link to the column I think you had in mind (if I got it wrong, please email me or hit the REPORT button in upper right corner of post, and I’ll be glad to fix it. Cecil has mentioned peak oil a coupla times.)
Plus there is his whole earlier article from 2006 that’s linked in the new one (love the cartoon in that one, BTW). Of course, if you skipped the first half of the new article you wouldn’t have seen the link to the older one, and then, yeah, Cecil obviously didn’t talk about Peak Oil at all.
The article fails to note that the global peak of crude oil happened in 2005. Ergo, the article does not cover peak oil. It covers only ‘peak all liquids’, which is a different matter.
I’ve read the article. The problem is, it doesn’t say what you seem to think it says. The EIA is the only source cited in terms of oil stats and the EIA is hardly credible, since the organization stopped reporting crude oil a few years ago (coincidentally about the time crude oil peaked) and now only list ‘crude plus other liquids’ - that is not crude oil and it is not what Hubbert was talking about when he made his predictions.
So the idea that peak oil is some far distant future phenomenon is bogus. The article goes to one source only - hardly a good journalistic practice. It happens to be a biased source that toes the oil industry line year after year. I expected much better from The Straight Dope.
I can understand you assuming that since the EIA is the only cited source it was the sole source. It was not, however.
Hubbert recognized the importance of other liquids in his paper; see page 14. He just didn’t include them in his graphs. Cecil wanted to be more thorough due to the greater relative contribution of these other hydrocarbon liquids in recent years.
What makes The Oil Drum credible in your eyes? That article doesn’t really do anything to prove your assertion that oil peaked in 2005 as near as I can tell either…it’s merely attacking the EIA’s supposed problems with methodology in calculating reserves and production.
You claim crude oil peaked world wide in 2005, yet that’s easily debunked, since according to this there have been several years of production over that supposed peak in 2005. There are plenty of cites out there showing that production of crude has fluctuated within normal levels between 2005 and here, going up and down (we have been in a series of world wide recessions during that period after all, so it’s militantly unsurprising that there have been those fluctuations), but that production in several years has gone beyond the production in 2005. One would expect that if we HAD reached a peak in world wide oil production we’d see a steady downward trend as production declined. As far as I can tell, we ain’t seeing that, and instead we are seeing a fairly normal up and down fluctuation in production as demand and supply jockey back and forth in a world where world wide economies are sliding back and forth between recession and recovery…or deeper recession.
Peak oil is a complicated concept because it is always tied to current technology and pricing. Oil that is unrecoverable at $70 becomes recoverable at $200. Also, technologies that allow the production of oil from other materials becomes economically viable at certain prices.
Yes, which is why we haven’t yet reached peak oil production. It’s also not going to be a cliff that once we reach it we will just go into free fall and relearn the joys of hunting and gathering again. As the price increases then other viable alternatives will start to come on stream that aren’t economically viable when the price of oil is lower.
