History is chock full with doomsday scenarios, peddled by profiteering charlatans, scenarios that time and again keep getting postponed decades into the future. Man running out of oil in 20 years has been around for a century. The claim still keeps getting made even by people who really should know better. And every time the goal posts end up getting pushed back.
A German industrial news site PROCESS here reports that leading German consulting group Roland Berger has recently released a new study titled: “Are we running out of oil?”
The answer is “no”. Moreover, Roland Berger writes that the future is oil.
PROCESS writes: “The core message of the study on the topic of oil supply: Supply bottlenecks are not to be expected because of the increasing number of oil reserves.”
The doomsday scenario of depleted oil reserves gets postponed again. PROCESS writes that the price of oil is poised to fall below 70 dollars a barrel. The primary reason for the downward crude oil prices is the increasing number of global oil reserves that are resulting from improved drilling methods. The Roland Berger study writes that currently there are an estimated 2.6 trillion barrels of crude in easily accessible reserves and 3.3 trillion barrels in unconventional reserves like oil sands and shale.
Challenges faced by alternative energy will spur demand for crude oil
The study also writes that the supply of oil will be less subject to political instability due to a supply that is becoming increasingly diversified and that production will increase in non-OPEC nations. According to PROCESS, demand for oil worldwide will also increase, with strong consumption growth taking place in the Middle and Far East, particularly China.
One reason for the expected demand in oil? PROCESS write (my emphasis):
In view of the rapid GDP growth after the financial crisis, the minimal state regulation in emerging countries and the challenges that the operators of alternative energies have to deal with, the demand for crude oil will increase.”
In summary, a global caliber consulting group concludes that alternative energies aren’t going to be able to meet the needs. The future is oil.
Also read about Germany’s Energiewende 2.0: http://www.spiegel.de/html.
“FT: Methane Hydrates Could Be The Energy Of The Future”
http://www.thegwpf.org/ft-methane-hydrates-energy-future/
“Estimates suggest they are enough to power the world 300 to 1,500 years at current rates of production.”
“Supply bottlenecks are not to be expected because of the increasing number of oil reserves.”
That is simply not true. The speed at which it can be produces has nothing at all do with how big the reserve is.
For instance…
There is a lot of tight oil in the Bakken. Millions and millions of technically recoverable reserves.
But they can’t produce it quickly or cheaply.
One well costs $10,000,000.00 and will produce oil for about 45 years.
In that 45 years, with a lot of luck, the well will produce about 665,000 barrels of oil.
That is enough to keep the world running for about 10 minutes.
It doesn’t matter if you have $5,000,000.00 in the bank if you can only withdraw $300 per year.
Their sentence is likely not optimally formulated. Of course they mean the “increasing number of reserves” to be exploited. What they are saying is that there’s lots more oil out there than previously estimated and that it’s going to be tapped.
It matters not what they meant or how they meant it.
Reserves do not dictate production numbers. Period.
And Peak Oil is all about the production numbers. Not about reserves.
Reserves have increased by a lot in the past decade (More than ever before) but production is still lagging.
Investment in new production has increased 300% in the last decade but production (all liquids) has only increased 12%.
The diminishing returns on that investment are only going to diminish more.
There is no reason to be pessimistic. More wells can be drilled to increase the production per time. In the meantime, solar cells drop in price by 50% per decade as production is becoming more energy efficient through innovation in production processes. At any given moment, price differences between coal, oil and solar will drive increases or decreases of production of each one of them.
This is of course simplified; add storage technology development (liquid metal batteries or NaS or flow batteries) and Methane / Gasoline synthesis developments and many more technologies (even wind turbines if you will though I find them dreadful).
The premature subsidation of solar and wind was unnecessary.
Take the issue up with PROCESS, I’m quoting what they wrote and the people at Roland Burger concluded that there’s plenty of oil out there and the technology to extract it is getting better by the day.
If those numbers are correct, that is an average of nearly 15,000 barrels per year per well. But most of the production will be in the early years, so the break even point will likely be in much less than ten years, with nearly pure profit after that. Now multiply that by 10000 wells in the Bakken and we get start to get a reasonable percentage of the annual need, at least in the US. Yes, that sounds like a lot of wells at great expense, but the investment is worth it. Also, with that huge investment at stake, increased R&D will increase the well yield.
These are difficult to extract and dangerous and estimates are surely greatly flawed because of the nature of the beast. In the meantime there is enough extractable gas and oil in the ground throughout the world to keep us going for at least 300 years. That’s time enough to develop thorium and fusion (if it will ever work and I have my doubts).
Re the Der Spiegel article: EU faces financial extinction; jettisons its dear CO2AGW scare; hoping to survive just a day longer. Sweet justice of collapse.
De Gaulle: on n’est pas un européen si l’on est un apatride, que, par exemple, Chateaubriand, Gœthe, Byron, Tolstoï – pour ne parler que des romantiques – n’auraient rien valu du tout en volapük ou en espéranto, mais qu’ils sont toujours de grands écrivains de l’Europe parce que chacun d’eux s’inspira du génie de son pays.
One cannot be European if one is stateless, for example, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Byron, Tolstoy — to only speak of the romantics — would have had no value in Volapük or Esperanto; they are all still great European writers because each was inspired by the genius of his country.
Trust De Gaulle not to mention the grand daddy of them all: Shakespeare.
“to only speak of the romantics”: Not sure that Shakespeare was from the romantic period… Of course, De Gaulle was always reticent to consider the English as European…
Modern English essentially begins with Shakespeare (1564-1616), as does Italian with Dante (1265-1321), French with Rabelais (1483-1553), and Spanish with Cervantes (1547-1616).
Newcomer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_von_der_Vogelweide
Won’t be long before the “Energiewende” will be called a success as it’s nearly completed the energy U-turn back to coal as the primary source of stationary energy in Germany.
It’s looking to be a 360° Wende. 🙂
180⁰ unless the future was always going to be coal (and not nuclear).
Just listen to the instructions from the navigation system when you miss a turn “Bitte wenden.” 😉
I was real tired of the “peak oil” pessimism in 2005. I was real tired of the “peak oil” pessimism in 1995. I was real tired of the “peak oil” pessimism in 1985. I was real tired of the “peak oil” pessimism in 1970 – bought a big station wagon that year. I was so very tired of “peak oil” pessimism in 2013 I bought a pickup truck (used, ’cause I believe in recycling and I need it).
Here is a nice story about gas hydrate resources:
http://geology.com/articles/methane-hydrates/
Loved the way that ‘The Universe’ added .00, for the pennies, to visually exaggerate the costs while rounding up the returns.
Works well for the numerically disadvantaged, I’d say, but not for your average sceptic.
Nice try but 0/10.00!
Pierre,
This reminds of an article I read a few years ago. Apparently most German engineers jokingly refer to the ‘Oil Constant’ and the ‘Electric Car Constant’, both numbers being 20 years, since the 1950s. The Oil Constant is the number of years before oil runs out and the Electric Car constant is when battery cars will replace the most reliable engine every devised by man, the internal combustion engine. Until a new Otto or Diesel is born, we will keep on using the constants.
Don’t forget:
‘PhD constant’: time until I finish my PhD, equals 6 months, for the entire period from 6 months after starting until the actual finishing of the thesis.
‘Natural language automatic translation constant’: time until automatic translation of natural language is as good as manual translation, equals 10 years, from mid-1950s to the present. Given the ideological commitment of Google et al. to the idea that language can be studied statistically from n-grams (n consecutive words in a sentence), this constant is going to remain valid for a long time.
Oh Goodie…….more of THIS:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/01/21/china-usa-pollution-idUKL3N0KV2KU20140121
Just what the world needs. I’m so glad that alternative energy is INCREASING it’s share of the electircity generation market. Both wind and solar CONTINUE to chip away at the dirty fossil fuel generation….:)
Wind still doing nothing, zero, . . .
http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx