Why is the "Peak Oil" bell-curve so widely misunderstood?

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)

This chart is the best visual explanation I’ve seen (look up “oil producing countries past peak” for other versions of it). Look at how paltry U.S. oil output is in the scheme of things over time. One can sit around and talk about American pride, but I’m more interested in geological facts.

The Liberals say we are running out of oil and need to conserve- so obviously, there’s a market for strident opposition.
Because it’s all a plot to save striped slugs or some nonsense. America is too cool to run out of oil.

Perhaps they believe that improvements in technology will counteract the trend you foresee.

Anyway, you can buy oil for delivery 10 years from now for only $80 per barrel. (The current price is over $100). So perhaps there’s an opportunity for you to use your superior understanding of the situation to make money.

There is a lot of ignorance on both sides of the political isle wrt what peak oil means. A lot of people who advocate Peak Oil™ are basically doomsday prophets who ARE using it to mean “running out of oil.”, and that this is going to cause the imminent collapse of civilization as we return to being hunters and gatherers scrounging snacks on the Serengeti.

It’s not like the peak concept is something unique to oil. You can apply it anything. Even renewable resources, if it crashes or alternatives are found. Peak coal, peak phosphorus, peak fossil water, peak fish, and at some point there was peak dodo. Peak sperm whale oil was in the 1800s. Some hope for a peak and irreversible decline in trashy reality shows.

Because “The American way of life is not negotiable!”

Well, not quite that bad.

Peak shark

One of the best sources to study oil and politics for almost the past decade has been The Oil Drum. Sadly, the site moves to an archive status at the end of this month. Big Oil has never liked the site and a recent Forbes commentary did its best in supporting the corporate line, while never actually honestly tackling any of the issues The Oil Drum chose to debate.

Peak oil is misunderstood because one side chose never to address it. There’s too much money and politics at stake. In many ways oil energy is a drug. You keep the patient semi-comatose, bur awake enough so they keep paying the doctor to keep them semi-comatose. It doesn’t matter that the price of the drug keeps inching up, nor the patient’s heath continues to deteriorate. The key is to keep the drug flowing into the veins so the money keeps coming in. But at some point, the drug supply will cease, the price of the drug will get too high for the patient to pay, and/or the patient will die. I think the latter two options will occur. Oh, yeah. The doctor will do whatever he can to hide, obfuscate, prevent, whatever, the use of cheaper, more plentiful and just as effective drugs but without the semi-comatose after effects (i.e., alternative energy and conservation).

When peak oil, energy conservation, etc., are brought up, I am reminded of Edward Abbey’s comment, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” As long as people continue to buy the oil company line, the cancer grows unabated and eventually will consume us. Probably much, much sooner than people realize.

Something’s wrong with that chart. The biggest world producers are absent – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Libya and former USSR states.

There’s still ASPO International.

Those countries aren’t past their peak.

I found these duelling pieces from the Atlantic interesting food for thought:

Either way, it seems to me there is no need for doom and gloom.

So what happens when you get a country that has a double peak?

That graph only shows one peak.

Yes. I DID see that myself. But I think it’s pretty safe to extrapolate unless you think we’ve hit peak frack.

A document leak in 2005 from Saudi Arabia says they bungled oil extraction in their largest, most profitable field, Ghawar Field. Apparently they ended up losing something like 50 percent of the field’s reserves because of a fracking mistake. The Saudi’s have been trying to cover up their mistake ever since by claiming other reasons for reducing their maximum daily output. Matthew Simmons got a hold of those documents and exposed the Saudi’s in his 2005 book, Twilight in the Desert.

Thank you!

The current rise is from tight oil (Bakken Fields) which is expected to peak in the next year or two and then drop. Tight oil has an annual drop-off rate after peak of about 40 percent per year.

What makes you think it’s safe to extrapolate? For how long? Past results are no guarantee of future performance.

That’s generally not true for new technology and hydraulic fracturing, at least as applied to shale oil - or maybe it oil shale, always screw that up - is relatively new. That’s what you’re seeing on that graph. Just this year the Monterey Shale in California had its potential reserves announced and those haven’t even begun being exploited. And bear in mind I don’t even really follow this shit. I only hear about the big announcements.

Plus this doesn’t even take account of nat gas from shale deposits which can replace oil in many situations such as petrochemicals. Nat gas has ethane I believe which is normally an oil refining byproduct but is also found in natural gas. In fact because of how cheap it is, many manufacturers have moved back to the US despite the higher labor costs.