i think tim makes some very valid points so the question is WHEN is our government going to wake up to this and start looking at alternative fuels and energy sources?? we need more turbines and more solar power, and no i’m not a ‘greeny’ i’m a realist!

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This fails to take into account global warming – as temperature rise less fuel will be needed for heating.

Also as the oil price rises to double or triple then more alternatives become economically viable – oil from coal, solar, wind, hydrogen, war etc. As petrol approaches £5 or £10 a litre people will simply use their cars less and less.

Oil is not going to suddenly run out as these ‘peak oil’ scenarios predict – it will slowly become more and more expensive – even in 10, 20 or 100 years there will still be oil available at a price.

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There are several very important points that I did not mention, for fear of my post becoming a bore… These are:

Oil salination. Sea water is used to maintain well pressures. This is becoming more of a problem in Saudi Arabia (and therefore every other mature well across the globe, now that much of the equipment used is 40 years old. The cost of maintaining wells increases annually and Gas and Oil Separation Plants (GOSPs) are now the size of villages, getting larger in order to deal with more and more inferior quality oil.

Oil quality varies. New sites within perfectly formed rock formations with excellent permeability such as sandstone produce “sweet oil”. This is nearly always floating at or near the top of the field. There is little of this left now. We are drifting toward the mucky stuff in the main. The really mucky stuff is sold as bitumen or tar, if it is easily recobverable. Usually it is left down there.

The 1.5m barrels per day of spare production that Saudi Arabia claimed they had in 2008, mention by Stu above, was not of the high-grade, sweet oil that is required. Saudi’s GOSPs are not equipped to deal with the kind of sludge that they actually have as spare capacity, so it is as good as useless.
Also, “spare capacity” would mean opening the wells more and increasing production. Increasing the flow rate is fraught with trouble, largely because it decreases future production quantities overall. Maintaining optimum flow rates allow the maximum amount of oil to be recovered. Basically, being greedy means you end up with less oil in the end.

When the pressure drops in a well, gas is released naturally from the oil and bubbles to the top. Natural gas. Oil fields producing natural gas are mature fields, such as the north sea. With this in mind, natural gas could be around for many years to come. But as oil supplies run dry, power stations will turn more to the available gas and will bleed that dry extremely quickly.

Personally, I am getting sick of being told to separate this from that and drive 5 miles less (they gonna bring the supermarkets closer then???) and turn my heating down. When will they tell car companies to reduce engine sizes? When will they turn off street lights? When will they tell companies to stop packaging everything so ridiculously? When will they increase aviation fuel tax properly? When will they sort the rail network out? When will they stop everything being built “out of town”?
Come on, so-called government. Show some leadership instead of penalising your flock for your lack of foresight.

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It is possible to squeeze oil out of coal, yes. But I think we will be deep, deep into our world depression by that point.

The point is that the global impact of oil depletion is not going to wait until there’s only a million barrels a day being produced. The rising costs of just about everything will start off a recession that can only get worse. Just the doubling of fuel prices in the next 5 years will more than likely start the ball rolling, just because of the hike in prices for haulage alone.

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Well written. We here across the pond are the biggest offenders, using roughly a quarter of the oil produced by the world. With demand increasing in China and other developing nations, life as we know it in any developed country is sure to change, regardless of when the world’s oil production peak occurs. And after it does so I think we will confront economic and livelihood challenges even greater than those we have been through over the past year.

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In response to Marco (comment 4)

If we are paying £10 for a litre of fuel, we will be living in an utterly different kind of society. This 9-fold rise will also be present in pesticides, fertilisers, home heating and electricity, shipping costs – everything. Our economy, city designs, transport infrastructure, farming and manufacturing will be massively effected. It is not the case that using your car 9 times less will mean everything will be ok.

In response to Paul Smith, comment 5.

You are quite right about the 3 biggest oilfields. A consequence of cutting and pasting before I finished the article.
If nobody knows the true production or reserve figures for Ghawar, how would one calculate it is declining at 6% or 7% per year. Believing any OPEC country’s oil reserve figures is partly the reason we are in the mess we are in. In fact it is quite likely that Saudi Aramaco (the State-owned oil company) don’t know themselves how much oil they have. Their state of the art 3D imaging techniques have been found to be way off the mark several times, as wells are sealed months, if not years before their expected bubble point.

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Tim,

I think Cantarell Field in Mexico is down about 16 or 19% YOY
Our north sea is about the same.

the oil drum is a good site for figures

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The food system can now be viewed as a system that converts non-renewable fossil fuel energy into food (Pimentel and Giampletro 1994). Currently about 10 to 15 calories of fossil fuel energy are used to create 1 calorie of food and although it only uses about 17% of the U.S. annual energy budget it is the single largest consumer of petroleum products when compared to any other industry. This means that it requires about 1,500 liters of oil equivalents to feed each American per year (Hendrickson 1996). As long as the energy resources are cheap and abundant the inefficiencies are unimportant, however dependence on finite resources is quite a vulnerability when those resources become scarce (Gever et al 1991).

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Szia, Istvan es Fred!

My grandchildren are already complaining b/c we have had to make do with less as my wages, and my wife’s, have declined or remained stagnent. We hear propaganda that there is a recovery, and yet the real figures come in as depressingly declining.

Except, of course, foreclosure rates in the US of A, which are rising briskly, thank you very much.

Being raised in the 40s and 50s, I remember a time in the middle of the Age of Oil, when growth every year was the norm. I was already asking how this could continue during the 60s and 70s, and in 1972 suggested to others that with wages in China and India so low, it seemed that wage arbitrage would force manufacturing overseas. Much to my regret, I have seen my fears realized.

Now, we see the emerging nations resisting reductions in use of fossil fuels, because they have not had their bite from the apple, and ‘it isn’t fair.’ There is much truth in that statement, and yet it seems to me to be a non sequitur as to the problems of AGW and peak oil. Fair won’t much matter as push comes to shove, and Mother Nature is about to have her evil way.

Right now, other than drawing down and becoming self sufficient, the best I can see to do is to enjoy the few years we have left, and try to do as little harm as possible during that time.

Good luck to you both, and to others as well.

B.U.E.K.

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@Tim Robbins: my point is that its not going to happen overnight. By the time we reach £10 litre of petrol adjustments will already have been made. e.g people will no longer be buying disposable gadgets made in China in the current quantities – many more people will be growing their own food – meat will not be eaten 3x a day – car trips will be shared…

New technologies will be developed to sustain us, and we still have the military capability to secure our fuel supplies just as in the past decade. Eventually even this wont be enough and ‘they’ will need to come up with more sustainable solutions for ‘us’.

As Chris hints, the only permanent solution will be a change of lifestyles and values – when there is sufficient pressure we will no longer be ‘consumers’.

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Tory boy said:
Tory Boy said: Jan 15th, 2010 at 18:10
peak oil is invented by greenies who just want to tax us more, they are all working for the russians still trying to undermine great britain, hang them all i say, we have plenty of oil and gas in the Uk and we must not change our lifestyles of global warming myths

LOL – funniest thing i ever read – The UK is a net importer of oil and Gas. North sea Oil peaked in 1999 and has been declining at around 10% and i think is up to 19% decline rates now. The UK imports 2 million barrels of oil – but we have plenty hey Tory Boy! Peak oil has happened in USA in 1970, happened in UK, happened in indonesia hence why they left OPEC, happened in Kuwait, happened in Mexico but you keep living in fairyland tory boy

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Just being a bit picky, but your bet might have better chance in the US than the UK, because tax there is minimal and here it’s most of the cost of a gallon of petrol.

So doubling crude oil prices would proportionally increase UK petrol prices much less, while in the US life-style choices would have to be made.

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there is plenty in the canadian shale, we just need to pay more for it, at the end of the day, as the recent fule price hike shows, people will pay what ever it takes to drive and stay warm, both are not considered a luxury in modern life but essential, so i think yeah sure price may double but we have atleast another 200 years of this modern life style left and even then we wont go all mad max and live on organic farms we’ll just use new technologies like solar which by then will be economic relative to the oil. so dont panic,

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Peak oil theory was first published by King Hubbert and was based on easily extractable crude, without considering Gulf of Mexico, Kazakhstan and unconventionals like oil sands.

It’s true that easy oil is peaking, but there are many ‘difficult’ sources which are technically challenging and will require massive investment.

And let’s not forget unconventionals like coal gassification and cabon capture and storage.

There have been some interesting additions to reserve bookings over the last 12 months.

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John Roberts – fantasy words
US shale? Pleeezzzzzz
How many barrels does the US use? 22 million a day?
Canadian shale? what do they get out? 2 million barrels a day? canada still has to import oil.
Iraq? 11 million barrels? whats that a weeks worth of global supply?
Green river? show me the numbers – the real numbers! Whats the EROI as well?
Bill, reserve bbokings? keeping up with depletion rates? Hmm just about, but not for much longer!
Ex- oil worker – plenty left in the North sea – LOL

Sceptics – please do your homework

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good letter there

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Thank you to everyone who has commented. Would those who insist that there is nothing to worry about be able to answer the following questions?

“Jon Roberts 29.” – The Green River Formation does not contain 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. It contains shale which, when super-heated and further treated, provides a certain amount of oil.

Shale is “rock-like” – less recoverable and more difficult and much more expensive to purify than the worst sludge containing oil. How do you get enough oil from shale or coal every day to meet demand?

Why are oil companies not investing in shale recovery?

Why has the price of oil trebled in about 15 years?

On whose evidence does one assume there is so much oil in Iraq?

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Gulf News reported yesterday that a Shell led consortium has signed a 20 year service contract to develop the Majnoon oilfield in Southern Iraq,targetting a production plateau of 1.8 million barrels of oil per day, current production is 45,000 barrels a day.

Currently Iraq is only producing about 2.5 millions a day, this is expected to triple over the next 4 years. Booked reserves rank it 3rd, behind Saudi and Iran, as far as conventional oil goes.

Then there is the Caspian region, Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Australia ……

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Bill 36.
Your post gives the impression that Majnoon will produce 1.8m barrels per day for 20 years. This remains to be seen. Iraq certainly has oil and increased production will ease world decline to a certain extent until the decline in Saudi Arabia and other OPEC and NON OPEC countries.

You say “Then there is the Caspian region, Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Australia” as though these were discovered yesterday. Mexico is in serious decline. The most promising nations recently have been: Angola, Azerbaijan, Russia, Canada then Iraq (until things change) all with increases in production. But the increases in these countries does not balance the decline in countries like Saudi, Norway, Nigeria, Mexico, Iran and the UK.

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