Have We Reached Peak Oil?

Have We Reached Peak Oil?

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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  • “Yes”
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Dr Marcel Schoppers

The Nature of the Problem

Dr. Marcel Schoppers

NASA Scientist

Oil exploration is an expensive and time-consuming process. The largest oil fields get found first, meaning the first oil that’s produced is the easiest. Once production ramps up, however, the remaining oil is harder to find, harder to pump, and harder to refine.

This is not like emptying a gas tank, where you can keep driving as though nothing is wrong until the last drop is sucked out. It’s more like sucking juice out of oranges through a straw. Some are juicier than others, but you’ll never get all the juice. After a while you have to suck harder on every orange, and yet you’ll get less out and only become thirstier.

There used to be about 3 trillion barrels of ("conventional" or "light") crude oil on Earth, including estimates of oil fields not even discovered yet. Based on the performance of many known oil fields, only about 2 trillion of those barrels will ever be pumped out of the ground, and the maximum production rate (barrels per day) will be reached when about 1 trillion barrels have been pumped. We’re there today.
 
We also understand quite well how individual oil fields peter out, as we’ve already seen numerous examples of oil fields collapsing in over 50 countries, including the U.S., Russia, Europe (the North Sea), and most recently Mexico (the Cantarell field).

There are many estimates of when the peak rate of world-wide oil production will occur. Petroleum geologists, engineers and scientists estimate 2000 – 2015, while economists estimate 2015 – 2030 on the assumption that the rising price of oil will make more energy appear almost immediately – the technology will arrive before it is needed, and more/all of the in-ground oil will be produced..My estimate, using statistical techniques over the entire 20th century of technology, with economic booms and busts and world wars, gives 95% confidence that the peak of world-wide oil production will occur in 2004 – 2014.

No matter who’s right, there will be shortages in our life-time, but unlike the oil crises of the 1970’s this time the shortages will not end. We will have to tell our children, “You’ll never get to live like we did, we took your share.”

As noted peak oil expert Dr. Hubbert said, “When the energy cost of recovering a barrel of oil becomes greater than the energy content of the oil, production will cease no matter what the monetary price may be.”

Evidence

IcolinkLink
Predicting the Peak (damned if we're early, damned if we're not)
IcoimageImage
The Sum Of All Fields - For The U.K.
Later_fields_decline_faster_main
Every oil field eventually declines; thousands have already done so. More fields are found over time, but the later ones are smaller and decline faster - notice the steeper slopes at the right. The top line is the sum of production from all fields in the U.K. and it's declining today, despite the latest technologies. Adding up the oil productions of all countries is similar, and as individual fields and countries decline, the world total must decline too.
IcoimageImage
Models Of The Global Peak
Ov
Fitting many kinds of bell-curves to oil production data, allows to predict the time of peaking of global oil production. (The bump in the 1970s was due to the U.S. producing and exporting oil as fast as possible, and then being forced, by geological and technological limits, to produce less.) Notice that models with later/higher peaks then decline faster.
IcoimageImage
Global Production To October 2007
World-oil-production-oct-2007_main
Global production has been roughly flat since early 2005, despite soaring demand and prices.
IcovideoVideo
"Peak Oil", A Major Turn In Our Road (3 min)
IcovideoVideo
Richard Heinberg "The Party's Over" (9 min)
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