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News from the oil patch

by Donald Prothero, May 02 2012

Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), held in Long Beach, California, from April 21-25. 2012. Although I have done lots of consulting with oil companies over the years, have taught the basics of oil geology all my career, and have many former students working in oil companies, I’m still primarily an academic geologist. Normally I attend the Geological Society of America (GSA) meeting each fall, which is the principal professional meeting for nearly all academic and research geologists. However, it was important for me to attend this AAPG, since I’m currently President of the Pacific Section SEPM (Society for Sedimentary Geology), and had to chair an Executive Committee meeting, judge student posters for our Cooper Award, and present our Lifetime Achievement Award as well. But each time I attend the AAPG meeting, I’m immediately struck by the huge differences between it and more academic conferences like GSA.

The most obvious difference is MONEY: the exhibit area for AAPG is HUGE, and filled with gigantic expensive booths from many of the major companies like Schlumberger and Halliburton. These booths have mini-lecture theaters with multiple big-screen displays where they give free seminars on their methods, thick plush carpets, potted plants, free food and drink, and fancy furniture—all for less than 3 days that the exhibits are open! Professional registration for this meeting is expensive (since most oil geologists make MUCH more than academic geologists, and the oil companies pay their employees to attend), and the dress code is also suits and ties for men (it’s much more casual at academic conferences). You can just smell the money at the meeting, and see lots of geologists hungry to learn techniques so they can jump to a more profitable position in their company, or go off and get rich as an independent (all of whom have smaller booths there as well).

The second difference is the emphasis of the meeting. At GSA, nearly 6000 attendees give more than 4000 talks or posters, 20 talks every 15 minutes for four straight days plus hundreds of posters. By contrast, for the same attendance there were only 5-6 20-minute talks at any given time at AAPG in less than 3 days, and the majority of the attendees didn’t present anything. Their job is to do whatever their company pays them to do, not churn out new research results to present at a meeting every year, like academic geologists must. Most AAPG talks tend to be very narrow and describe details of one particular oil field, not independent research into general principles of geology that academics are trying to decipher. Finally, the demographic differences are striking. Academic geologists are nearly 50% women now, and they are distributed across all age classes. Oil geologists, by contrast, are nearly all old white guys in their 60s or older, with a lot of young men (and a few women) just recently hired in the business. The entire generation that would now be in their 40s and 50s is missing because of the attrition during the oil busts of the late 80s-90s.

But the biggest take-home message is something oil geologists have known for years: oil is never going to be as cheap or easy to obtain again, and the global price of oil will get higher and higher as it becomes more and more scarce, especially with the huge increase in demand from developing countries like China and India. I heard this message  over and over again, from the gossip on the exhibit hall floor with friends, to the plenary addresses by the top people in the oil business. Coincidentally, it was the cover story of the April 9. 2012, issue of Timemagazine as well. This fact  has been known for some time, and was first predicted by the pioneering oil geologist M. King Hubbert in 1953. Using his knowledge of the history of non-renewable resources (which show a “bell curve” history of production, from their initial log growth phase to an equally rapid decline as the easily obtained resources vanish), plus his deep understanding of the amount and nature of oil reserves. he predicted that U.S. oil production would reach a peak in the early 1970s—and his prediction came true in 1971. Since then, U.S. oil production has steadily declined as fewer and fewer large fields were found, and older fields have been used up.

U.S. oil production peaked in 1971 (as predicted by Hubbert in 1953), despite increased efforts to find more domestic oil, and has declined ever since. The slight upturn at the end is due to production from expensive, dangerous "unconventional" sources: offshore drilling, fracking, tar sands—but it will never return the U.S. to levels of production like before 1971.

What about global production of oil? A few quotes from the top people in the oil business says what all the AAPG geologists I met this week have long known:

We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil. Embrace the future and recognize the growing demand for a wide range of fuels or ignore reality and slowly—but surely—be left behind.” 

—Mike Bowlin, chairman and CEO of ARCO, speech in Houston, 9 Feb 1999

Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over

—Chevron, http://www.willyoujoinus.com/vision/

While major new finds cannot be ruled out, recent statistics do provide worrisome signals… Discoveries only replaced some 45% of production since 1999. In addition, the number of discoveries is increasing but discoveries are getting smeller in size. The 25 biggest fields hold some 33% of discovered reserves and the top 100 fields 53%; al but two of the giant fields were discovered before 1970.”  

USGS WPA 2000 part 1 – A look at expected oil discoveries

All the easy oil and gas in the world has pretty much been found. Now comes the harder work in finding and producing oil from more challenging environments and work areas.

—William J. Cummings, Exxon-Mobil company spokesman, December 2005

It is pretty clear that there is not much chance of finding any significant quantity of new cheap oil. Any new or unconventional oil is going to be expensive.

—Lord Ron Oxburgh, a former chairman of Shell, October 2008

As these quotes show, nearly all the geologists (including most oil company geologists) who deal with the realities of oil supply as part of their daily experience, are fully aware that oil is becoming scarcer, and that there are fewer and fewer new oil fields found, and we  are nowhere close to keeping up with demand on a worldwide basis. The figure below shows a very sobering “reality check”: a plot of the discovery dates of US oil fields. Notice that there was a “bell curve” with a peak in the 1930s.

Despite all the increase efforts of oil geologists, almost all the large fields in the U.S. were discovered before the 1930s, and there have been no similar large fields found in the decades since then, even as the price of oil climbs.

Despite the fact that U.S. oil companies have spent billions and developed huge technological advances since the 1930s and 1940s to find oil by better means, the rate of discovery has continued to drop. Even with all these advantages, large oil fields no longer can be found in the lower 48 states. Only the Bakken fields of North Dakota-Montana represent a large new discovery, but they are smaller than the giant Texas oil fields found in the 1930s, and they are the exception that proves the rule. Those in Alaska are near exhaustion, since they peaked in 1988 and are nearly dry now. All these slogans about “Drill, baby, drill” solving our problems are just fantasies. The U.S. oil companies have indeed been drilling as fast as they could everywhere in the U.S., and as the figure shows, getting very little no matter where they look. As the Time magazine article pointed out, now they’re spending most of their time and money on increasingly risky and expensive operations like fracking, pumping water in old fields to push out the last drops of oil, or mining oil sands with all their environmental costs. The biggest push is in offshore oil platforms—and the 2010 Gulf oil disaster (along with previous oil disasters on platforms around the world) shows just how risky it is to drill so far offshore.

One of the favorite arguments is to drill more in Alaska, especially in the ecologically sensitive Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) on the North Slope. The entire issue became a political hot button in the 2008 presidential election, as environmentalists pointed out how much habitat would be destroyed in the short-term search for oil. But the answer is clear, no matter what your politics: such exploration and possible production would be just a drop in the bucket. In 1998, a non-partisan federal agency, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there were at best only 16 billion barrels of oil in the ANWR and most of these reserves are prospective resources, not proven resources. Sixteen billion barrels sounds like a lot until you realize that it’s less than 1% of the total world oil consumption each year. The U.S. alone consumes over 20 million barrels of oil per day, so even if every drop of oil were actually extracted from the ANWR, it would at best provide two to three years’ worth of oil for the U.S.—and then it would be exhausted, and what would remain would be an ecological disaster.

So what about the world discovery rate? That answer has been known for a long time. World discovery rate peaked in 1965, and has been steeply declining ever since, even though more and more exploration is conducted in the farthest reaches of the globe in the past 47 years. The “peak oil” effect has probably already occurred, and we are likely on the slow downward decline in discoveries of cheap, easy-to-pump oil. Knowing that there are likely no more huge fields in our future, the next step is to calculate how much oil is left. Estimates of the ultimate recovery have fluctuated all over the place in the past few decades, but in recent years most of the estimates place the total volume of ultimately recoverable oil in the range of 1.8 to 2.6 trillion barrels, with most estimates around 2.0 trillion barrels. This was the number that Hubbert himself used when trying to determine the amount of oil left and when the peak would occur (he estimated a window between 1995-2000). Depending upon how the model is run, most scientists predicted that the peak of world oil production would occur around 2005-2010, with most estimates around 2006 to 2007. Although it’s still to early too tell if the peak has fully passed until we view it from a further distance, so far that prediction has proven accurate.  According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the peak of global oil production was in 2006, and declined by 6.7% in 2007. As this figure shows, the peak may have occurred between 2006 and  2009, and production has hit a plateau, despite increased pumping while the oil price climbs.

World oil production seems to have slowed down or even declined in the past decade, despite huge increases in demand and rapidly rising prices due to growth in Indian and China. If we have not hit the Hubbert peak for world oil yet, we are very close to it

In December 2009, however, the reports of a few large fields seem to have suggested that the peak might have occurred before 2010. In the same interview, the head of the Brazilian oil conglomerate Petrobras pointed out that the decline in supply was so severe that we would need one new discovery the size of the entire Saudi Arabian oil reserve every two years to keep up with increasing demand!

Meanwhile, demand continues to climb, driving up prices. The booming economies of China and India, along with some other developing nations, are greatly exceeding any increased production due to new discoveries. The numbers are truly staggering. From only 50,000 barrels/day in 1980, world consumption is now almost 100,000 barrels/day. As oil executive Peter Tertzakian pointed out in his book title, we’re nearing the once-unimaginable consumption rate of a thousand barrels a second!Even as the U.S. finds more oil in unconventional places, we cannot keep our domestic prices down because demand outside the U.S. is driving the world price upwards. All it takes is a few oil speculators and/or some political event in the Middle East, as happened this spring, and oil prices jump upward. But when they retreat again, they never return to “the gold ol’ days” but keep ratcheting upward to a new base level—this despite a global recession for the past 5 years.

Despite the best efforts of oil geologists to increase production, demand from India and China have boosted world oil prices so they exceed the oil price spikes of the past—and unlike those short-term shocks due to politics, there is no reason to expect that the current rise will slow down. Not even 5 years of global recession has stopped the rise.

Many oil companies see the handwriting on the wall. They are already spending some of their immense wealth in research and development of alternative energy sources, so their business doesn’t die out when the oil becomes too scarce. In 2000, British Petroleum (BP) decided to market themselves as the environmentally friendly oil company. They changed their logo to a green and yellow shape resembling a flower or starburst, and launched a high-profile $200 million ad campaign touting their alternative energy efforts, with the tagline that “BP” stood for “Beyond Petroleum.” That’s quite remarkable to hear an oil company announce its own transition to non-oil energy sources (even if it was mostly PR hype, since in actuality BP spent only a tiny portion of its research and development budget from its huge profits on non-oil research). Of course, with the BP Gulf oil disaster of summer 2010, the company has other bad publicity to deal with now. As soon as BP dropped its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign, Shell stepped up with their “Let’s Go” ad campaign, touting their research and investment in alternative energy sources, with the slogan, “Let’s make the most of what we’ve got.”

To summarize: the era of cheap, easily obtained, abundant oil is over, and oil will soon become scarce despite more and more costly efforts to squeeze out every last drop from more and more “unconventional” sources.  The fact that Hubbert’s model exactly predicted the U.S. oil peak, and seems to be predicting the global peak, should be strong enough evidence in and of itself. There is also the fact that the peak of discovery of major oil fields occurred 47 years ago, and there have been no giant oil fields found in a long time, and most of the world’s older oil fields are nearing their ends. There are no polls that show just how many qualified experts (geologists and geological engineers within and close to the oil industry) accept the concept of peak oil and the end of cheap abundant oil, but a lot of oil experts are on the record as supporting it, including a number of oil geologists and executives. My many friends in the oil business almost all tell me that “peak oil” is widely accepted among their colleagues, and they have long been forced to work with extraordinarily difficult exploration problems because there are no easy oil fields any more.

There are some who say, “If cheap oil ends, we will just go to alternatives”. They say “We’re finding lots of natural gas,” which is  true—so far as it goes. This sounds fine in theory, but when you look hard at the evidence, it doesn’t hold water (or oil). First of all, even if we stopped using oil for our cars tomorrow, there would still be huge demands in other areas. Most of our nation’s power plants are oil or gas burning, and they account for a huge percentage of our consumption. Natural gas is indeed more abundant, but it only solves part of the problem—it takes much more of it to get the same amount of energy, and it still produces greenhouse gases—nor is it practical for transportation fuel yet. If we got rid of oil- and gas-powered electricity, we’d have to go to nuclear power (which is still controversial here thanks to the Three Mile Island disaster, or the recent disaster in Japan), or coal. We do have abundant supplies of coal in the U.S., but as many people have shown, coal is one of the dirtiest and nastiest of energy alternatives.  Most coal must be extracted either by dangerous shaft mining (which is expensive and produces relatively low quantities of coal) or by strip mining, which literally rips a landscape apart. In addition, most coal is high in sulfur, so it has long been the major source of acid rain. Finally, coal produces far more greenhouse gases than does oil or natural gas, so coal does not solve our carbon footprint problems. And no one is even thinking of using coal to run cars any more (let alone going back to the coal-fired steam locomotives of the past).

People also forget (or do not realize) that we use oil in many other ways besides energy. Nearly every synthetic substance you use, from the huge array of plastics in every product we own, to all the fabrics (nylon, rayon, Dacron, polyester, and many others) are produced from cheap oil. Just look around you and you will probably see dozens of plastics and synthetic fabrics in your clothes, and nearly every object in a typical room has plastic in it. When oil becomes too expensive for these things, what will we do? We will no longer be able to import thousands of cheap plastic toys for our kids’ Happy Meals, or wear synthetic fabrics (even when we need our polyester or spandex), or use products made largely of plastic (like the computer parts I’m using right now), or throw away plastic water bottles by the millions. When cheap oil becomes expensive, plastics will have to be recycled and rationed, and become much too precious for most ways we use and waste it today. And you can’t make plastics cheaply from anything but oil—not coal or anything else.

Anyone who lives in the farm belt knows that there’s another huge consumer of oil: agriculture. When I lived in the farming country of central Illinois for three years, it was striking that all the advertisers for the dinnertime  news broadcasts (aimed at farmers when they were having dinner and watching the upcoming weather reports) were producers of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. All of these products are derived from oil. Nearly every strain of corn we use today is genetically modified by Monsanto to be immune to their powerful herbicide called Roundup, which kills all plants except this modified strain of corn. Thus, Monsanto can sell both the corn and the poison, ensuring a large crop each year. (To top that off, Monsanto genetically engineered the corn to be infertile, so the farmers are obligated to buy new seed from them each year as well). An acre of corn consumes 80 gallons of oil in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, and fuel for the tractors. We’ve replaced the human and animal labor of a century ago with machinery that requires lots of cheap oil. Our entire modern agricultural system of monoculture crops which have no resistance to pests, and which deplete the soil rapidly, can only be sustained by throwing oil at it in the form of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. Without it, our food supply would collapse, and the world would be looking at a global famine. The end of cheap oil will force everyone to re-examine agricultural practices, since you can’t make most pesticides or fertilizers out of coal.

Many of the “energy alternatives” once touted in political campaigns turn out to be illusions. Take the example of biofuels. They have been hyped way beyond their actual worth because they are popular in the farm belt, where politicians must curry favor (especially in Iowa, which has way too much influence because it holds the first presidential caucus). When there was a surplus of corn in the early 2000s, everyone was talking about turning it into ethanol and using it for fuel. But the end result was a classic example of unintended consequences. The increased consumption of corn for biofuels helped contribute to a worldwide food shortage, so that now most corn goes for fuel ethanol or animal feed, and very little goes directly for human consumption. Meanwhile, other countries saw the opportunities, and began to cut down pristine rainforests (with their valuable effect of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and of maintaining the highest diversity of land life) and replaced it with biofuel crops like sawgrass. As reported in Time magazine, 750,000 acres of Brazilian rainforests (equivalent to the size of Rhode Island) were cut down in just 6 months in 2007, all to raise biofuel crops. When you do the calculations, one person could be fed for an entire year on the corn required to produce one tank of gas from biofuels. One editorial cartoon lampooned this brilliantly. It shows a rich fat American in the nice suit pulling the ear of corn away from the starving African child and says, “Excuse me. I’m going to need this to run my car.”

Yet there are also signs of hope. Each time oil prices rise abruptly, or cross some psychological barrier (like $4 a gallon), people do conserve, cut down on unnecessary driving, get rid of their gas guzzlers and invest in higher-mileage cars. We may not be able to get Americans to act by preaching at them or by trying to get our political system to work in our best interests, but economic pressures do seem to work. And there are models for an even better alternative to the roller coaster of oil prices. Nearly all the European and Asian countries that import all their oil have already adopted measures that greatly reduce consumption. Through taxation, most of these countries price their gas at a realistic rate that reflects its true, externalized cost in infrastructure and environmental damage (usually $5 or more  a gallon), so people are strongly inclined to conserve gas and drive small cars only when their excellent systems of public transport are not sufficient. Those taxes on gas then go into the energy and transportation infrastructure, so the citizens get better mass transit, better roads, and they are invested heavily in energy alternatives, like nuclear, wind, and solar power.

Paul Roberts, in his excellent book The End of Oil, pointed out a model for other countries: Germany. Before 1990, German politics were controlled by big industry (especially coal companies) and coal miners’ unions. But the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine galvanized the environmental awareness of the entire world, and by the 1990s, wind farms and other energy alternatives were rapidly emerging in Germany, spurred on by a law passed in 1990 to invest in carbon-free energy production. In addition, the Green Party became a significant force (not just a token party, as it is in U.S. politics). In 1999, the Greens won enough seats that they formed a coalition government with Gerhard Schroeder’s moderate Social Democrats. Soon laws were passed, policies changed, and subsidies granted, and Germany was meeting a higher and higher percentage of its energy needs through wind and solar power, along with biomass facilities which burn crop waste to make energy. Now Germany leads European countries in its energy conservation efforts, reduced carbon footprint, and in the research and development of alternative energy sources. The German policies are closely emulated by the Scandinavian countries, France, and many other European countries. This was all achieved while Germany continued to thrive economically, and today they are less dependent on foreign oil than ever, and have an economy stronger than that of most other  countries. Americans who despair of our getting out of our current addiction to foreign oil need only look to Germany, Scandinavia, France, Japan, and other countries to see that if there’s enough economic pressure and political will, there’s a way.

52 Responses to “News from the oil patch”

  1. Deen says:

    Americans who despair of our getting out of our current addiction to foreign oil need only look to Germany, Scandinavia, France, Japan, and other countries to see that if there’s enough economic pressure and political will, there’s a way.

    Unfortunately, right-wing politicians and media have already quite successfully poisoned that well. What are the odds that the US public will accept a solution that worked in that horrible, pinko-commie socialist Europe? We saw how that played out with the healthcare debate, after all. Besides, the average american seems to be entirely incapable of admitting that the US might be able to learn a thing or two from other countries – after all, the US is supposed to be the Best Country Evarrr.

  2. Jani-Petri Martikainen says:

    I am sorry to be a party pooper, but oil consumption in Germany has been pretty static for a long time (http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_grid/germany/GermanyCountryAnalysisBrief.shtml). Oil consumption in the rich world did decline substantially in the early 80s. The reason? We pretty much stopped using oil for producing electricity. How did we do this? Answer: With nuclear power plants. The added nuclear capacity matches the declining share of oil in OECD quite well. Now bulk of the oil consumption is in transport and replacing it there is REALLY hard without changes in behavior (smaller cars, bicycles, public transportation etc.) Renewable electricity sources do next to nothing to solve this problem.

  3. Max says:

    “Most of our nation’s power plants are oil or gas burning, and they account for a huge percentage of our consumption”

    Power plants mostly burn coal and gas. Oil is mostly burned by vehicles.

    “nor is [natural gas] practical for transportation fuel yet”

    A relatively cheap modification allows cars to run on methanol, which is made from natural gas as well as from biomass.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_fuel

  4. Somite says:

    The best reason to get an electric car is probably to stop giving money to oil companies for oil and push the development of better sources of electrons. My electric car will be charged by nearby wind farms.

    It is the right wing rhetoric that will ultimately be the downfall of the US if our citizens don’t wake up and act rational like the rest of the industrialized countries.

    • MadScientist says:

      You electric car is more likely to be charged by the coal-fired plant down the road or the gas-fired turbine which has 30% reduced CO2 emissions compared to the coal-fired plant.

      • Somite says:

        Actually I get a report from my power company of where my electrons come from:

        http://bit.ly/JfZ28R

        66% wind 33% biogas.

      • Max says:

        It still gets more miles for the same amount of CO2 emissions than a gas engine, because the power plant burns coal more efficiently than a car engine burns gasoline.

      • Somite says:

        That is true as well. But offsetting with wind and other renewables offsets it even further.

  5. Mike Bendzela says:

    Mr. Prothero, a million thanks for this piece. This is one of the more level-headed descriptions I’ve read, and believe me, I’ve read A LOT about this.

    I’ve known about this issue since I took a course in Geology and Human Affairs in 1981, but forgot all about it until I began hearing about “peak oil” on the Internet around 2003. But the din around the peak oil websites was continually apocalyptic, conspiratorial, and unscientific.

    Then, in 2009-2010, the major voices of the “peak oil” cult began losing their minds, it seemed. Several have turned out to be 9/11 conspiracy mongers. Others are astrologers or back-to-the-land agrarian romantics with gloomy views of technology. Some are no more than “cultural critics” with pre-existing axes to grind (usually some form of anti-Americanism), who have adopted peak oil as their rallying cry. A few, like Robert Hirsch of the (in)famous Hirsch Report, turned out to be climate change “skeptics.” Perhaps the most famous pundit, Matthew Simmons, publicly humiliated the whole peak oil movement with his embarrassingly alarmist comments about the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

    That’s when I distanced myself from the movement. The point is: We can’t know what the future will bring, but it is pretty certain that the way we have been doing business will change.

    Call it adaptation.

    • Donald Prothero says:

      Sure, there are extremists in any movement, and lots of junk on some websites. But this comes from oil geologists themselves, and from respected geologists like Ken Deffeyes, with long experience in the oil biz, or thoughtful people like physicist Paul Roberts. The fact that all the predictions are coming true as Hubbert predicted is the strongest evidence of all.

      • Mike Bendzela says:

        If only someone like Deffeyes had been the primary, visible spokesperson for peak oil, we might be in better shape now, better prepared to adapt.

        No, instead we had a chorus apocalypts, Internet prophets, and incompetent lay observers, who possibly have forever tainted the picture of what peak oil is.

  6. Karl Withakay says:

    “Thus, Monsanto can sell both the corn and the poison, ensuring a large crop each year”

    While the use of the word “poison” may be technically accurate in that Roundup is poisonous to the weeds, it seems to be intentionally inflammatory (poisoning the well, so to speak). A less biased word (considering the thrust of this post is in regards to the finite supply of oil and not against herbicides and GMO crops) would be herbicide.

    “To top that off, Monsanto genetically engineered the corn to be infertile, so the farmers are obligated to buy new seed from them each year as well.”

    This is an absolutely false statement. Please check your facts.

    Roundup ready corn is not infertile. Such technology exists, but it has not been commercialized. Monsanto pledged in 1999 and again in 2006 not to commercialize terminator technology. One can be legitimately concerned that Monsanto may renege on this pledge any time they feel like it, but it is factually false to claim that Monsanto sells infertile seeds.

    If Roundup ready corn were infertile, there would be no saved seed litigation by Monsanto against farmers Monsanto claims save seed from their harvest for replanting.

    • Max says:

      So the farmers are obligated to buy new seed from them each year on legal grounds.

    • Somite says:

      Don’t think that makes Monsanto less of a douchebag.

      • Karl Withakay says:

        I never said it didn’t, especially since Monsanto didn’t exactly made such pledges voluntarily out of the goodness of their heart.

        But which is more douchebaggy, selling infertile seeds or selling fertile seeds you require purchasers not to save seed from for replanting?

        At least with the fertile seeds, you can save and replant seed when society collapses and contracts aren’t worth the paper they are printed on, plus there’s no chance the infertile traits could find their way into non GMO crops through cross-pollination.

  7. Michael Caton says:

    This touches on all kinds of denialism, but I always wonder if the Young Earthers check their 401ks to make sure they’re not investing in any Old Earth oil companies. If not, it’s almost like they don’t really believe their own story.

    • Donald Prothero says:

      That’s the irony of flood geology–it bears no resemblance to reality, and we would have no oil at all if we followed it! In my 2007 Evolution book, I cited numerous examples of “flood geologists” who stopped believing once they went to work in oil companies…

  8. Canman says:

    My favorite book on energy is Peter Huber’s “The Bottomless Well”, written in 2006, right before the fracking natural gas boom. Gas is probably doing more to reduce the increase in CO2 than anything else, with highly efficient gas turbine generation of electricity. It’s probably responsible for the cancelation of a lot of new coal fired power plants. It’s also being used to power fleet vehicles such as buses. Unfortunately, it’s also delaying a shift to nuclear energy.

  9. Old Rockin' Dave says:

    I suspect that the best way to get Americans concerned about corn ethanol and subsidies for producing it is to point out that bourbon and Kentucky whiskeys are made from corn, and if corn prices go high enough, the prices of Wild Turkey and Jack Daniel’s will have to go up too.

  10. I wonder how much investment there is from oil companies in renewable petrochemicals like algae, etc.? The infrastructure for internal combustion engines is so deeply entrenched that it’s going to be big big business for a long time, even long past the point that fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive.

    • Mike Bendzela says:

      Mr Dunning, you’ve written from a skeptical viewpoint about peak oil. You seem to have the point of view that the “market” will solve it:

      http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4100

      Has your view on this evolved?

    • MadScientist says:

      Over the years I’d had a number of people ask me about harvesting algae and kelp to produce fuel pellets which you burn like charcoal. The chief problem I have is with the resources (space, energy, time) needed to dry these organisms – they’re over 90% water! Even if you burned them near the site and used ‘waste heat’ as part of the drying process it’s difficult to imagine an operation on a large enough scale to be of much use (although on a small scale it may be beneficial to, say, the operator of a farm near the sea).

      As for petrochemicals from algae – have you got any recent papers on their development?

  11. MadScientist says:

    Big Oil may be spending some money on developing alternative energy (they have probably been the biggest investors in the past 20 years) but it’s just not enough. Keeping the shareholders happy still seems to be the dominant mantra and no one wants to put in huge amounts of money without a short-term return or large government subsidies (after all, spending that money when your competition isn’t is a commercial disadvantage). I wonder what will become of service providers like Schlumberger – they have a multi-billion research budget but are they investing in the future of energy?

    The obvious next source of fuel would be to crack coal as Germany did 70 years ago. I wonder if anyone is doing work on improving that process. It’s not a good solution but at the moment at least it would be an easy source of aircraft fuel. Coal is no long-term solution either; coal consumption is increasing rapidly and adding the burden of extracting hydrocarbon fuels from coal will put immense strain on coal mining.

  12. noen says:

    In the 70’s when I was in school, yeah I’m dating myself, on suggestion at the time that I liked was large solar arrays in geosynchronous orbit. You can beam the energy in the form of microwaves back to collectors on the earth. Say in some desert somewhere and recover a high percentage of it without causing any damage tot he environment or to animals living there. (Since as we all know only total fools think that low energy microwaves spread over several square miles of desert are dangerous.)

    Solar seems like such a no-brainer to me that I can’t understand why we don’t pursue it more.

    • MadScientist says:

      These days my guess is that the problem is largely with the relative cost. Without severe penalties on coal and gas-fired boilers, solar thermal plants just don’t look attractive to an investor. They require a much larger area for a start – the coal-fired stations have a fairly small footprint and the gas-fired stations are even more compact.

  13. Flat Eric says:

    I had difficulty in understanding many of the numbers in this article. They don’t seem consistent, so which if any are right? To take two examples in the first few paragraphs:

    “Sixteen billion barrels sounds like a lot until you realize that it’s less than 1% of the total world oil consumption each year. The U.S. alone consumes over 20 million barrels of oil per day, so even if every drop of oil were actually extracted from the ANWR, it would at best provide two to three years’ worth of oil for the U.S.”

    Either the ANWR can supply the US for three years or it represents less than 1% of annual world consumption, but these can’t both be true.

    and

    “From only 50,000 barrels/day in 1980, world consumption is now almost 100,000 barrels/day. As oil executive Peter Tertzakian pointed out in his book title, we’re nearing the once-unimaginable consumption rate of a thousand barrels a second!”

    This can only be true if there are about 100 seconds in a day.

    Unless I’m misunderstanding the units involved, this is rather sloppy stuff, especially for a post aimed at skeptics. We take numbers seriously, and get outraged by all those newspaper writers who just seem to think all big numbers are basically the same: so billions, millions, thousands…whatever.

  14. Jim Bob says:

    Donald suggests that drilling ANWR would provide at most 2-3 years of supply for the USA. But the oil patch doesn’t work like that. The 16 billion barrels of oil in ANWR would be explored, developed and produced over the next 50+ years. That means that every day for the next 50 years that one small oil field would be producing high paying jobs and lots of business for Americans. Even if only a small part of US energy needs might be met by domestic oil from ANWR, why not meet those needs there?

  15. DJP says:

    I read an article a couple weeks ago on Liquid Sodium Thorium Reactors. The way they operate seems a lot better than other radioactive fuels, are much cheaper, safer, and less polluting. These reactors were tested in the 60’s but were abandoned when the military couldn’t get and “weapons material” from them.

  16. Donald Prothero says:

    World oil consumption will reach over 90,000 bbl/day this year and is expected to top 100,000 bbl/day in a few more years (http://www.philstar.com/article.aspx?articleid=766916&publicationsubcategoryid=200). Alaska’s 16 billion bbl will only last just under 3 years at 20,000 bbl/day in the US. For the world, 90,000 bbl/day consumption translates to 32 billion bbl/year, so that’s where my number was off (sorry–I was jumping between several different drafts). But the rest of the numbers are correct.
    There are 86,000 seconds in a day, and we are consuming about 90,000 bbl/ day, so we are INDEED consuming 1000 bbl/second!

  17. d brown says:

    Methanol is a poison and getting it on your skin can kill you. As will breathing it. I have read that pumping out all the oil costs and cuts profits. So the oil wells are capped with about %75 of the oil still in them. I don’t know how true this is, but the mid-west has a lot of wells that were capped all at once when OPEC turned off their oil. The EPA or the DOT said that a car getting 35 MPG is better than a electric car charged by the coal-fired plant. There were absolutely safe nuclear reactors designed in the 50’s by A-Bomb vets. Their General Atomics company could not compete with types subsidized by the government. (can’t find the ref. tonight) Everybody from the Pope to grad students know food gas is a bad idea. Getting petrochemicals from algae is very hard. Read up on the best way of doing it now. Its a joke.

    • MadScientist says:

      Methanol’s not that bad. I have yet to read of a case of someone dying because they spilled it on themselves. It dessicates your skin and can cause irriration, but unless you sniff too much of the vapors or drink the stuff, it’s a very mild poison and the ‘denatured alcohol’ you buy in stores doesn’t have any unusual warnings on it.

      • Donald Prothero says:

        Heck, even ethanol will kill you if you become an alcoholic, or drink too much of it at once (as happens at frat parties every year).

  18. Flat Eric says:

    “There are 86,000 seconds in a day, and we are consuming about 90,000 bbl/ day, so we are INDEED consuming 1000 bbl/second!”

    Indeed. You proved it, with math.

  19. Guglielmo Boogliodemus says:

    Wow. I used to think this an objective bunch. Now it reads like Democrat Underground. I have worked in oil and gas exploration for 25 years. Those geophysicists who fall for the “Peak Oil” claptrap are few and far between. No doubt there are some who do, but you also stated there are no numbers to show how many or percentages. In my experience it’s not very many.