Peak Oil (was "petroleum geologist explains US war policy")

[free spirit]

Actually, that is an interesting point with the data in Falcon's graphs - is that historic discovery rate inclusive of the later reserve growth figures? I assume it must be.

 

[free spirit]

incidentally, in my googling to try to find discovery rate figures, I stumbled across an interesting overview of the situation that someone called Richard G. Miller had produced in 2010 for Prof Mackay at DECC.

I don't know if this has previously been linked to, but it provides an interesting overview of discrepancies between IEA projections in recent years and touches on many of the discussions we've been having no this ere thread.

I'm not sure how much influence this paper may or may not have had within decc, but it's at least encouraging that the chief scientific officer decided this was of sufficient concern to him to commission this work shortly after taking office at DECC.

 

[Falcon]

This essentially has been my point about those graphs all along, I don't see the extrapolations as being valid for the actual situation, and this then must logically cause the predicted timings of any peak and declines to also be out. Maybe it only pushes them out by a few years, but then that's all I'm really claiming anyway is that it's not actually happening right now, but may well be in 10 years time or so.

But this is the signature error of the pattern of your arguments - stating immaterial problems as material as a device for avoiding an argument. Running the extrapolate along the base actually reduces ambiguity by making it clearer about any assumption you make about future basin discovery and technology changes (material discovery is associated with both). Any error introduced by running the extrapolate along the base of the increments is insignificant in relation to the magnitude of the extrapolate of the increment that would be required to impact production. Running it through the centre would not alter the conclusion - we are not replicating the exploration conditions that pertained in the 1930's, and that would be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for your argument to be valid.

I'm aware of the phenomenum, and tbh I reckon both sides in this debate are as guilty as each other of using this sort of ambiguity to manipulate the data to produce graphs that neatly support their point of view.

A device is not ambiguous merely because you don't understand it, or dislike the conclusion. It is, in fact, perfectly unambiguous. What *is* ambiguous is the meaning of an extrapolation of unbackdated reserve - it has no physical interpretation.

A graph of cumulative discovery shows what's going on in backdating. Green is cumulative backdated discovery. Red is cumulative production.

Backdated, discovery has a clear asymptote - 2 trillion barrels. This is the total oil that will be discovered at the point where incremental discovery falls to zero. The intercept with the ordinate has a physical meaning - it's the current and future amount of oil that can be recovered at the economic and technical conditions encoded by the historical data.

If you don't backdate, the extrapolate intercepts the ordinate access at a higher figure. That intercept has no physical meaning. But resource optimist institutions use it to mislead the credulous into believing that production can be sustained indefinitely.

Backdating new discovery still causes the ordinate intercept to move vertically. Imagine the difference between pointing a laser at the opposite wall, and comparing the difference between moving your arm up and down, and rotating your wrist. Backdating is the former. Resource optimists do the latter.

 

[ferrelhadley]

Drop in production at the Bakken.
https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/historicalbakkenoilstats.pdf

All the buzz is now Eagle Ford in Tx, has already had a lot of horizontal fracking for gas, but now moving towards 'wetter' (i.e. oilier) wells. Only a hundred odd new wells drilled in ND over November so perhaps the same things that the Bakken did to the Marcellus is happening to the Bakken as Tx has far far better infrastructure and close to the big refinery markets. Also the marketing departments of companies drilling the Eagle Ford are giving it loud and proud that it takes less horizontal drilling for the same well production as Bakken so they are talking about a quicker return on investment. The official estimates for Eagle Ford are 3 billion barrels recoverable (oil) at a max of just under 500 000 barrels a day.

(worth pointing out explicitly that the drop in production is accompanied by a rise in wells. They decline so fast you have to keep real high drilling numbers to sustain production, there are only so many horizontal rigs to go round, zero sum game until a huge new fleet of rigs is manufactured)

 

[ferrelhadley]

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Firm-wants-set-gas-rigs/story-17869725-detail/story.html

Plans for hydrofracturing rocks near Bristol continue apace.

 

[Dr Jon]

UK Oil Output Fell by Record 28% in September-November

 

[elbows]

Yes I was following the Buzzard stuff - it was supposed to be offline for a month but ended up out of action for 2. The increasing maintenance etc outages are a symptom of the state of north sea production, but the actual decrease over those couple of months doesnt tell us much about peak oil at all really if you ask me - uk production already told its story, and a very dramatic one it was too, but as far as global peak oil goes its a question of whether any other areas suffer the same dramatic declines that the uk has.

 

[free spirit]

I appear to have underestimated solar's potential to actually directly replace oil, as I'd not considered that oil producing nations use a lot of oil for electricity generation, and are located in areas with very high solar potential, and good match of consumption with solar generation (as much of the consumption is for air conditioning, which is highest in the middle of the day, on sunny days).

Saudi Arabia plans to boost renewable energy use as a way to pare back on oil consumption used for domestic desalinization and power plants, potentially saving 523,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day over the next 20 years. The country aims to have 41,000 megawatts of solar capacity within two decades, Maher al-Odan, a consultant at the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, said last year.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-31/saudi-arabia-completes-its-biggest-solar-power-plant.html

 

[free spirit]

btw, Saudi has a new policy of prioritising the reduction of domestic oil consumption for the first time to increase the amount of their oil they can get paid for exporting, so that 523,000 barrels of oil a day saving only represents one part of the savings they're intending to make in their domestic oil consumption levels.

I'm not sure, but I'd suspect that the same will apply across OPEC, as the economics stack up far better when energy efficiency / renewable energy is replacing oil that they could otherwise be selling abroad at this sort of price. I'd be very surprised if solar PV electricity isn't cheaper than electricity from oil already.

eta - I don't have a link for this btw, but it came from an ex student of my dads who's now working for the Saudi government on this programme, so the source is credible.

 

[Falcon]

I appear to have underestimated solar's potential to actually directly replace oil, as I'd not considered that oil producing nations use a lot of oil

You didn't, because you also failed to consider that solar manufacturing nations use far more oil to build solar than oil producing nations use oil to make electricity, so all you would do is displace oil consumption to another part of the system.

btw, Saudi has a new policy of prioritising the reduction of domestic oil consumption for the first time to increase the amount of their oil they can get paid for exporting

No, they are doing it because they have overstated their reserves by billions and realise their society will crash when Garhwal fails. That's why they are building a fleet of 16 nuclear reactors to maintain their water supplies - the solar is a PR stunt for the credulous.

 

[free spirit]

You didn't, because you also failed to consider that solar manufacturing nations use far more oil to build solar than oil producing nations use oil to make electricity, so all you would do is displace oil consumption to another part of the system.

no they don't, and you've never once produced a single credible source to back up that position either - for a very good reason I presume.

No, they are doing it because they have overstated their reserves by billions and realise their society will crash when Garhwal fails. That's why they are building a fleet of 16 nuclear reactors to maintain their water supplies - the solar is a PR stunt for the credulous.

It's not an either or situation, they're doing both for the same reason, and 70TWh a year of electricity isn't a PR stunt.

But I did mean to say that this was to increase the proportion of their oil they could export rather than the actual amount of it.

 

[Falcon]

70TWh a year of electricity isn't a PR stunt.

70TWh gross. Not net.

Since you believe the global industrial mining, manufacturing and transportation system of which those devices are the temporary product runs on sunbeams, summer breezes and peasant lunches, (or vanishes when shared between many tasks, I'm never sure what your mental model is for neglecting manufacturing, maintenance and operating energy in your sunny calculations), I appreciate the difference might be lost on you.

A stunt, for the credulous.

 

[Falcon]

I see the oil barrel price is pushing back to $100. Which seems to indicate that the new (i.e. very old) shale oil technology bonanza is indeed a fiction, just like those fuddy duddy peak oil chaps said.

Industrial technologies economies don't function above $90 without printing money because the cost structure (of everything, but chiefly food and transport) becomes unaffordable. So the question seems now to be: how long can we keep printing money?

 

[BigTom]

I see the oil barrel price is pushing back to $100. Which seems to indicate that the new (i.e. very old) shale oil technology bonanza is a fiction.

Industrial technologies don't function above $90 without printing money because the cost structure (of everything, but chiefly food and transport) becomes unaffordable. So the question seems now to be: how long can we keep printing money?

I dunno, when do we hit peak ink?

 

[Dr Jon]

or peak electrons to represent peak digits...

 

[Dr Jon]

An interesting post by Greer on the imminent burst of the fracking bubble.

If you’ve ever shaken a can of soda pop good and hard and then opened it, you know something about fracking that countless column inches of media cheerleading on the subject have sedulously avoided. The technique is different, to be sure, but the effect of hydrofracturing on oil and gas trapped in shale is not unlike the effect of a hard shake on the carbon dioxide dissolved in soda pop: in both cases, you get a sudden rush toward the outlet, which releases most of what you’re going to get. Oil and gas production from fracked wells thus starts out high but suffers ferocious decline rates—up to 90% in the first year alone. Where a conventional, unfracked well can produce enough oil or gas to turn a profit for decades if it’s well managed, fracked wells in tight shales like the Bakken and Marcellus quite often stop becoming a significant source of oil or gas within a few years of drilling.

 

[Falcon]

Those who were paying attention to all the hoopla may have noticed that the vaporous claims being retailed by the mainstream media around the fracking boom resembled nothing so much as the equally insubstantial arguments most of the same media were serving up around the housing boom in the years immediately before the 2008 crash. The similarity isn’t accidental, either. The same thing happened in both cases: Wall Street got into the act.

Wall Street. And the oil companies.

 

[rich!]

IMO, the new building regs part L and their built-in year on year escalation of standards have done a great deal to turn things round in the industry. There's a lot of grumbling from contractors, but the new build homes of today are much more efficient than they used to be.

But the bigger problem by far is the existing stock. All those victorian terraces and pre-war semis leak heat like a seive and are a pain in the arse to fix. Big, hard problem.

I was talking to someone the other day about solid wall insulation on the outside of houses - is it really something that would be a worthwhile idea?

 

[elbows]

I was talking to someone the other day about solid wall insulation on the outside of houses - is it really something that would be a worthwhile idea?

Funnily enough a week or so after Crispy gave me helpful practical suggestions in the face of my defeatism, exactly this work began on a whole bunch of houses on the streets around me. I've been able to see the work in action. I believe this may be a job-lot of houses that are owned by a group connected to the local mosque, probably used as part of the social services they provide to that community. I assume they wouldnt have bothered getting it done if there were not eventually a return on the investment. But the work doesnt look cheap, and I'm in no position to do such things at the moment. Given the decrease in north sea gas production there is little doubt it makes sense to insulate existing stock as much as possible, its just a question of how to pay for it.

 

[BigTom]

Funnily enough a week or so after Crispy gave me helpful practical suggestions in the face of my defeatism, exactly this work began on a whole bunch of houses on the streets around me. I've been able to see the work in action. I believe this may be a job-lot of houses that are owned by a group connected to the local mosque, probably used as part of the social services they provide to that community. I assume they wouldnt have bothered getting it done if there were not eventually a return on the investment. But the work doesnt look cheap, and I'm in no position to do such things at the moment. Given the decrease in north sea gas production there is little doubt it makes sense to insulate existing stock as much as possible, its just a question of how to pay for it.

I've got an end-terrace victorian house (2 floors + attic room) and maybe 3 or 4 years ago I got a quote for external insulation - £12,000. Even if I did it there would still be thermal bridging through next doors house afaik so I think to be really effective you'd need to do the whole terrace as one, free spirit probably has the best idea about this, it was talking to him on threads here that put me off the idea of internal solid wall insulation to investigate external stuff but it was far too expensive to even consider so I didn't bother.
Would make the wall the same insulative standard as cavity walls - basically it's a slab of rockwool next to the brick, with plasterboard outside of that, nailed or screwed into the wall then rendered.

tbh if I had the capital I'd probably do it, heating the house is getting closer to £1k/year and with prices rising it's got to get to a point soon where we'd be getting to a 15yr payback time. I really don't know how much it'd save on heating though so it's a big guess really. Will also add something in value to the house, probably nowhere near as much as 12k but still enough to offset some of that cost in business terms.

 

[free spirit]

I reckon EWI prices should be falling fairly fast due to economies of scale, installers learning the trade and getting faster etc.

damn sure the councils etc won't be paying 12k a property.

 

[BigTom]

I reckon EWI prices should be falling fairly fast due to economies of scale, installers learning the trade and getting faster etc.

damn sure the councils etc won't be paying 12k a property.

Doing them in a block will be much cheaper per house and mine's an end terrace so has an extra wall to do. I've just had an email today about Birmingham Energy Savers scheme which might be offering grants, something about paying back with savings from electricity bills.. so do you think it would be worth it (in energy/heating terms) to externally insulate an end terrace with a party wall to an uninsulated house?

 

[free spirit]

Doing them in a block will be much cheaper per house and mine's an end terrace so has an extra wall to do. I've just had an email today about Birmingham Energy Savers scheme which might be offering grants, something about paying back with savings from electricity bills.. so do you think it would be worth it (in energy/heating terms) to externally insulate an end terrace with a party wall to an uninsulated house?

no, don't go near it, it's green deal, 8-9% interest rates, bit of a nightmare of a scheme really, and I'd expect you'll pay well over the odds through it due to all the bureaucracy.

It's only just started and is still not really sorted out, so give it at least 6 months if you do want to go that route.

 

[BigTom]

no, don't go near it, it's green deal, 8-9% interest rates, bit of a nightmare of a scheme really, and I'd expect you'll pay well over the odds through it due to all the bureaucracy.

It's only just started and is still not really sorted out, so give it at least 6 months if you do want to go that route.

Cheers FS

 

[rich!]

Just a quick one on the solid wall insulation: colleagues have an interesting idea I'm trying to sanity check, so anyone with relevant experience and fancies a chat over beer/food, dm me.

Somehow not surprised by the interest rates. There's another thread about the need for energy co's to cover co2 by this route to be done...

 

[ferrelhadley]

An interesting post by Greer on the imminent burst of the fracking bubble.

Economics of fracking improving rapidly

Faster drill times down, longer horizontal sections per well. They are drilling the best sites but getting a lot more for their money these days.

 

[free spirit]

Just a quick one on the solid wall insulation: colleagues have an interesting idea I'm trying to sanity check, so anyone with relevant experience and fancies a chat over beer/food, dm me.

Somehow not surprised by the interest rates. There's another thread about the need for energy co's to cover co2 by this route to be done...

I can help you sanity check it via pm if you like.

I reckon I probably already know what the idea is, if so, it works, and is already being done by a couple of specialist companies who really know their stuff.

I'm hoping to get chance to do a monitored install at some point, but need to find a willing customer with a suitable building.

 

[Falcon]

Faster drill times down, longer horizontal sections per well. They are drilling the best sites but getting a lot more for their money these days.

Somebody in the PR department (what we call "External Affairs" in the oil industry) will have got a bottle of champagne for getting that whopper placed.

Collapsing aggregate decline rate and exploding aggregate maintenance costs are about to hit the frac sector like a freight train.

 

[rich!]

I can help you sanity check it via pm if you like.

I reckon I probably already know what the idea is, if so, it works, and is already being done by a couple of specialist companies who really know their stuff.

I'm hoping to get chance to do a monitored install at some point, but need to find a willing customer with a suitable building.

Thanks for that - taking it offline.

(We might have a housing trust involved in the mid-term plan, allowing a certain amount of experimentation...)

 

[ferrelhadley]

New, rigorous assessment of shale gas reserves forecasts reliable supply from Barnett Shale through 2030