When you bring up the topic of Peak Oil in conservative circles, you invariably get a lot of talk about how shale is the equivalent of the old Texas Tea or free flowing Pennsylvania crude in the glory days of those states. Both TX and PA peaked decades ago, and North Dakota (Bakken shale) will likely peak sooner than expected. As it stands, Bakken is only yielding about 800,000 barrels a day, which isn’t even 5% of U.S. consumption, yet this increasingly tight oil is cited as an “American resurgence.” Watch out OPEC, we’re pretending that we didn’t actually peak in 1970!
Bakken can be fracked to yield liquid oil, but “dry” kerogen shale must be cooked to become usable oil. Amazingly, people claim we have a Saudi Arabia’s worth of kerogen in states like Colorado and Utah (never mind that we’d have to destroy huge parts of the desert to get at it, or all the water required in those arid regions). They completely ignore the massive energy inputs needed to extract oil from kerogen, which has rendered it economically unfeasible so far.
ANWR in Alaska, were it ever drilled, may yield 10 billion barrels at most, which is well under 2 years of total U.S. consumption (about 19 million barrels a day in these recessionary conditions). Yet ANWR is also cited as our key to “energy independence.” Don’t these people ever do the math comparing production (flow-rates) to. consumption? Even at the height of U.S. oil production in 1970, our ~10 mbpd flow-rate was half of what we consume now. That’s a huge gap to fill with marginal shale and dwindling crude. Canadian tar sands are relatively plentiful but costly and dirty with non-game-changing flow-rates (~3.2 mbpd so far). Volume over time is what matters, not just hypothetical volume.
Peak Oil skeptics dwell on hypothetical reserves that assume oil magically rises from the ground with no energy expenditure. They ignore critical net-energy costs aka EROEI. They claim that drilling technology will endlessly advance and negate EROEI, but there’s no evidence for that. Horizontal drilling and fracking is already a dicey game.
I think the media has been lax in explaining Peak Oil, just as they were when the 55 MPH speed limit suddenly appeared (sorry Hagar) and we started negotiating with OPEC. That was almost entirely due to America’s 1970/71 apex of oil production, yet the public only saw it as “gas lines” or “politics.” I see that same conspiracy mentality today. “It’s price gouging, man!” (don’t actually bother to learn any geology)
“Peak Oil” has never meant “running out of oil.” It means declining flow-rates and higher costs for the very reasons the flow-rates are declining. You have to put in a lot more energy, time and money to get usable amounts of oil now. This is exactly why we can’t bring gas prices down to $2.50/gallon, as old Newt claimed in his last campaign.
I’m just trying to figure out why conservatives (who would ostensibly conserve by namesake) refuse to accept that oil depletes in a bell curve, and that the easy, cheap oil peaked in America 43 years ago. Is this patriotic blindness or do they truly not accept our geological predicament or the whole concept of physical scarcity?
http://www.overthinkingit.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/rs-500-us-oil-production1.jpg (Peak Oil humor)
