Over the past year, American drivers have found themselves longing for the days when two dollars per gallon seemed expensive. Oil prices are rising at an unprecedented rate, and as a result, many are questioning whether the Earth's available oil supply has reached its peak. Are there still oceans of oil awaiting our discovery? How much pain you'll be feeling at the pump in the future depends on the answer.
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EVERYTHING Depends On When And How Fast
- From Dr Marcel Schoppers
By Dr. Marcel Schoppers - NASA Scientist
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The Rate of Decline
Excellent comments on the rate of decline as the key issue. It has slowly been dawning on me that this is the key question. Unfortunately, there seems to be little data from which to draw conclusions.
- Backcreek July 24, 2008 11:35AM
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Decline Rates
While pondering this "how fast" question I collected quite a few decline rates (e.g. Cantarell declining 13-15%), but also realized that those are but one factor among many that will affect the decline rate of U.S. oil-imports (e.g. only 10% of our imports come from Mexico). I now have a short note listing such factors, under-pinning my choice of best, worst, and most-likely scenarios, but that note was too long to post as an "argument", and the O.V. web-site won't upload docs as "evidence". I guess the O.V. team will fix that sometime.
- Dr Marcel Schoppers
July 25, 2008 12:05AM
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Taking All Cars + Planes Off Oil Is Not Enough
I've seen lots of web pages that say about 70% of our oil use is for energy, 30% is for feedstocks, and I wish that were true, but I don't see how to get such numbers from the EIA break-down at http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbblpd_a.htm . The EIA is saying that only 45% is used for motor cars. That's terrible news, because it means that even if all cars became totally oil-free overnight, we'd STILL be importing a lot of crude oil - one third of the 65% we import now - for "natural gas liquids" and everything from "finished aviation gasoline" down. Even grounding all cars AND planes wouldn't get our imports down to zero. That's a bitter pill to swallow.
- Dr Marcel Schoppers
August 1, 2008 12:56AM
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IEA Found 9% Decline Rate; the Export Rate Will Fall Faster
The International Energy Agency (IEA, based in Paris) has just lost its rose-colored glasses, and given us an estimate of the global decline rate in their "World Energy Outlook" annual report ( http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org / ): the world's 800 largest oil fields that are in decline have an average physical decline rate of 9%. (The many other fields still in the plateau phase today, may be expected to decline 9%/year also, sooner or later.) The decline rate in quantities available for import/export must be somewhat higher than that. My guess of 10%/year seems too low, now. This unfortunately tips my expectations back into the realm of national disaster (for industrial economies). Compare a 9% decline to your normal economic recession shrinking 2%, and then have that 9% go on for many years... NOW is the time to do something about it, while energy is once again cheap, for what could become the last time.
The current stunning drop in crude oil prices proves to me beyond any shadow of doubt that supply-rate limits had been hit. The curve of price-per-extra-barrel-per-day must have become very, very steep indeed, if a couple % of reduced demand (world-wide) can cause the price to fall from $147 back to $49/barrel!
- Dr Marcel Schoppers
November 24, 2008 10:08PM
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