Right. And since you’re an expert on the subject, unlike the IEA’s experts, you can say this with some authority. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: I love the fact you compare something like corn to oil though. That’s just classic.
Here’s a simplified water analogy to address your brand of false optimism:
A small farm operation uses 10,000 gallons of water per day on average, and that water has historically come from a free flowing well, going back generations in the farm family. The well only required drilling a foot or so deeper every few years to maintain the flow. They figured they could simply keep drilling for “endless” water.
One month, the farmer notices that his well output has dropped to 8,000 gal./day, then 6,000 gal./day a few months later, a sharp decline from what he’s known. In short order, his operation is barely breaking even and he says “the farm will go bankrupt if I can’t restore that 10,000 gallon flow-rate!”
Then, a salesman arrives and tells him about a “vast underground aquifer” a few miles from the farm, which contains potentially “1 billion gallons” of water (if allowed to replenish at historical levels). Forgetting to ask about the actual daily flow-rate, the farmer sees it as good news and stops worrying about his supply. He figures “Heck, 1 billion gallons would last me 274 years! My family ain’t gonna be around that long!”
Caveat: The salesman fails to tell the farmer that the “vast” aquifer can only provide him with a 1,000 gal./day flow-rate, and many other farmers would be tapping into it, having also depleted their near-surface wells. The aquifer pumps simply wouldn’t run fast enough at an affordable cost and adequate volume due to the aquifer’s geology and rainfall replenishment rates. In other words, hypothetical reserves do not indicate usable flow-rates. You have to understand production & consumption math for any unconventional source.
The above roughly parallels the situation with kerogen shale vs. conventional crude oil, and the false hype that people are banking on. Is this not clear?
Also, a very real scenario exists for shrinking water supplies in the U.S. You may have heard of the “vast” Ogallala aquifer, which is fast becoming non-vast. Plenty of other aquifers and surface water supplies are being strained, just like oil. Water at least holds the possibility of being conserved and replenished, but oil has no means of replenishment (abiotic oil is unproved).
No, I didn’t.
I just think your post is full of shit.
The price of corn, like the price of oil, is subject to many factors and conditions. For oil, there may be major discoveries ahead as there have been in the past that were not anticipated. For corn, nobody has yet been able to predict the weather for next year’s crop.
Vance Packard failed miserably in predicting only 20-30 years in the future, and he drew upon the best experts he could find.
I am an expert on how people can be fooled and how unfettered extrapolation leads to errors. Observations over many decades have shown that the “experts” are more often wrong than right for such extreme predictions and caution is always advised.
I would like to call your attention to this quote from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:
Comparing corn to oil is simply idiotic. Geology is nothing like the weather and does not involve “prediction” as you put it, at least not in any way remotely the same sense. I’m all for extending analogies but at some point it becomes absurd and you’ve reached that point. If that isn’t obvious, I don’t know what else I can say.
But rather than just blather on, if you can cite specific reasons as to WHY the IEA may be in error and would like to try to QUANTIFY what that error might be, I’m sure everyone would like to hear that.
{crickets}
Also, for my butt, monkeys may fly out of it.
Pinning any hope at all on finding new oil is not realistic.
If such a windfall occurs, that’s nifty.
But if things get more serious, it is not going to be just all of a sudden like a spigot turning off. There will definitely be enough time to use the fossil fuels left to massively ramp up solar and other types of green energy which all flow ultimately from solar. And we have lots and lots of solar power coming from the sun. We are not going to just collapse into some sort of crumbling ruins, Dark Ages scenario.
Any postulation about the future is a prediction, whether it’s the corn crop or the oil production.
You may be missing the point. I am not an oil or even energy expert, and am not qualified to dissect the IEA report. But no matter how accurate you may think it is, we have to consider that most long-term predictions and extrapolations of any kind in the past have been wrong, sometimes very wrong. Why should this one be any better? Are you pinning your hopes on this one bucking the trend for the first time?
All scientific predictions have error bars, showing the range of accuracy expected. The farther ahead in time, the greater the range. Far enough ahead, the range incompasses just about all possibilities, from no oil to continuous gushers. About the only thing you can count on for long-term predictions is they will be wrong, not right.
I live next to Lake Michigan, and the levels of the Great Lakes fluctuate, not only seasonally, but over longer periods of time, with a 100 year range of about 6 feet. The NOAA publishes charts showing the expected levels up to 6 months in advance. If you look at that chart, you will see that the error bar range at 6 months in the future is so great that the prediction stops there. And this is of a highly studied phenomena with many inputs (current levels, evaporation measuring, meteorological data of many types). It’s above ground, where we can study it, measure it and quantify it.
In contrast, we simply don’t know what’s underground, never will know, and can only estimate. It is folly to say that using uncertain data to compute with will lead us to certainty in the conclusion. The quality of the conclusion is dependent on the quality of the source, or GIGO.
Do you really want to deny that discoveries have been made in the past and will be made in the future that change the equation? Is there some reason why today’s estimate of recoverable oil is solid and will never be revised? Have energy companies stopped looking for new sources because they know there are none?
And you might want to check your butt occasionally.
Will discoveries be made?
Yes.
Does that change the fact that there’s a limited amount of oil, and we will run out one day?
No.
But if new discoveries are made, it will change the equation and the estimates. That’s all I’m saying.
Which is an empty statement. Everything is limited. The Sun is going to burn out and the particles of the Universe will disappear. You need to give some timeframe for it to be relevant.
I think you’re the one not following the argument. Everyone understands that the IEA is giving estimates. The point is the direction. US production up - up to the point where we produce more than the Saudis. Global production up - up to the point where the global market price falls. So unless you can say something that is actually meaningful and informative that undercuts those points, you’re just talking to hear yourself talk.
You and I will see the end of oil as a personal power source, is my prediction.
Our grandchildren will think of petroleum the way we think of whale oil. imho.
edit-
Oh sure.
At first glance, you have a point, but that graph only shows countries that are officially past peak, which is said to not be true of the OPEC nations you list. But many people think they’re fudging their numbers since they keep claiming their reserves haven’t declined, which is physically impossible. The late Matthew Simmons tried his best to expose their obfuscation.
The most telling thing to me about that graph is the minuscule status of the U.S. near the bottom. Peak Oil deniers pretend that we’re somehow back on top via a boomlet in the Bakken shale (barely into the lower right gray zone of the graph at 800 kbpd) or ANWR (not much better, if ever developed), or ridiculous claims about kerogen shale’s potential, which would require obscene amounts of energy and water.
You don’t have your facts straight.
U.S. production is “up,” due to marginal tight oil sources like Bakken, but not in any meaningful context. We have not surpassed Saudi production. See this site for quick comparisons. Saudi Arabia’s output today is roughly 9,832 mbpd, about where the U.S. was back in 1970, and the U.S. is now at about 6,467 mbpd, just over half of where it was at the 1970 peak. And it is illogical to assume that U.S. production will keep growing, since these are marginal sources prone to peaking unexpectedly. The Bakken is a thin, irregular formation with the latest USGS recoverable reserve estimates at only about a year’s worth of net U.S. consumption (just over 7 billion barrels).
Since exxx is just going to ignore me as well as the facts, I’ll post this AGAIN for the benefit of everyone else - U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels)
US production is INCREASING and is nowhere near peaking. IOW, the US will have a double peak as will virtually every other country in that chart. It will have to be drawn to have double humps for each of those countries most likely since I’m guessing that if they have the geology for free oil, they also probably have the geology for oil shale.
That doesn’t say we are outproducing Saudi Arabia, or that we will. Looks like we about where we were in the 50’s, from that chart.
I wasn’t citing for that purpose. The article I cited earlier goes to that issue. I can’t repost things every other post. Some people are actually paying attention I assume.
Due to site formatting, only the right half of the U.S. Peak Oil curve is shown below. Visualize it as a full bell curve for the sake of this concept. Full graphs are easily found elsewhere.
---------------- Current U.S. oil consumption of ~20 MBPD ----------------
[supply gap]
[supply gap]
[supply gap]
This supply (vs. demand) gap is why America became dependent on foreign sources 43 years ago, and the fundamental geological predicament can’t be fixed with more drilling or new drilling methods. More/better drilling only yields marginal flow-rate gains from the tight oil sources we still have. A relative improvement is not a miracle. It’s all about the flow-rate numbers, not patriotic hype.
[supply gap]
[supply gap]
[supply gap]
---------------- Highest crude oil flow-rate of ~10 MBPD at 1970 U.S. peak production.
--------------------------- Low flow-rates of shale & tar sands, w/increasing prices. Tight oil will always remain near this level.
1970…2013…
Peak Oil deniers claim that the slow-flowing, high cost “tight” oil at the lower right of this curve will magically reincarnate itself as fast-flowing, low-cost oil like we had at the 1970 apex. They make their claims based on temporary gains in the Bakken shale, etc. It’s false extrapolation. Nobody wanted the California Gold Rush to end, either (well, except the Indians).
Some deniers also claim that tight oil can magically double the highest flow rate the U.S. ever saw (from about 10 mbpd to today’s 20 mbpd) and give us “energy independence” and cheap gas again. The math simply does not work. These people ignore the laws of diminishing returns for finite resources.
Also, if you flip that bell curve you get a rough graph of prices, minus inflation and other factors. As flow rates decline, prices invariably rise unless demand crashes, which causes recessions and depressions. Shale and tar sands will also peak and those peaks include much lower flow-rates to begin with. How can they possibly ramp up to America’s oil glory days?
Shale & tar sands production could drag on for decades but it will always be like a tortoise racing a crude oil hare.