Peak Oil v Peak Carbon v Giant Carbonised Insects

More on how the rug rats of today are going to live as adults, dodging the gnashing jaws of carbonised giant insects:  is it just me or is the oil peak being pushed out further and further?

Over the last few months, and despite limited interest in the industry (other than to shut it down), there seem to be a plethora of new oil deposits found / exploited.  Big ones.  Some media refer to them as giant fields.  If this observation is correct, then Peak Oil is a thing of the past and we are definitely all going to be gobbled. 

As an aside, with so many giant carbonised insects – such as the meter long centipede referred to in an earlier blog – we will also have a new source of food /protein to feed the masses tipped to hit 10 billion in my [old already] lifetime. 

But back to the new oil sources.  Some months ago I read about BP (and others) making a large find off the northern coast of the UK.  Or was it the end of last year?

Anyway another has been announced only last month.  UPI reports “British energy company Premier Oil announced that it made an oil discovery in the Catcher area of the country's territorial waters of the North Sea.”

And remember a few months ago the announcement of the large oil deposit find off the coast of Ireland;  poor ol’ Ireland that has lost its wealth, its income, and a whole generation to austerity??  Exploration company Providence Resources announced the find off the coast of Cork.  The find was referred to as “major”.  The article went on to say ”The coastal Basins surrounding Ireland have long been known to harbour valuable natural resources. It’s estimated that they could produce 10 billion barrels of oil and an unquantifiable amount of gas. In the past, exploration has been held back by a lack of technology and low oil prices.”

As probably more of a political statement, Kurdistan has started shipping oil to Turkey.  Whilst in east Africa, “Tullow Oil, a London-based explorer with the most licences in Africa, said it planned to accelerate drilling in Kenya after making the East African (Kenya) state’s first discovery earlier this year.  Tullow forecast Kenya has the potential to exceed Uganda, where with Total and CNOOC it plans to invest more than $10bn to unlock an estimated 2,5-billion barrels of oil. $4 per barrel.”

But wait, there’s more.

The Norwegian oil firm DNO International said it is ramping up oil production in Iraq as it confirmed an oil discovery in the country's resource-rich Tawke field and has resumed drilling operations in Yemen. DNO, which explores and produces oil and gas in Iraq and Yemen and plans to expand activities in North Africa and the Middle East

And more.

“Online PR News – 05-July-2012 –PierMax Energy Exploration is pleased to announce that, it has made a significant oil discovery in current onshore Kurdistan oil exploration project.”

And so it goes on and on.

And to crown my paranoia about never reaching Peak Oil (which has been forecast to be occurring around now) and thus never reigning in the carbon problem, I read George Monbiot recent article False Summit (meaning oil summit or ‘peak’).  The great eco campaigner. 

His first sentence is “We were wrong about peak oil: there’s enough in the ground to deep-fry the planet.”  And ends with “But right now I’m not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.”

In between those two emotionally charged sentences, is a great article, and as usual well researched.  Citing various article, he asserts that the recent sustained high price of oil has triggered to new oil resource boom.  That indeed, it is not so much how much oil, but at what price. With US$2.6 trillion spent over this three year period in exploration etc (end 2012).  Some of it extracted using fracking, the environmentally fraught polluter.

Yeah gads!!

So back on the research car and this was found.  Published in 2006, so it overlooks the recent massive investment in oil production and discoveries;  by the way, all of which are found and delivered from very difficult methods / places (fracking, deep sea). These five key points are believed at that time to be irrefutable and the basis of Peak Oil. 

1. The biggest oilfields in the world were discovered more than half a century ago, either side of the Second World War.

2. The peak of oil discovery was as long ago as 1965.

3. There were a few more big discovery years in the 1970s, but there have been none since then.

4. The last year in which we discovered more oil than we consumed was a quarter of a century ago.

5. Since then there has been an overall decline.

So anything written since then to confirm this thesis?  Well in May this year, there is a long post on oil and the industry on scepticblog.org by a reasonably senior academic geologist.  It is extremely lengthy, however sufficiently erudite and simplistic (for this oil idiot) for it to be recommended to all.  These are just a few extracts of interest: 

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. [I just thought this was interesting].

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.

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.

……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.

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.

So by my calc that is ~55,000 years of oil supply at today's consumption levels if we use the 2 trillion estimate with current consumption at 100k barrels per day.  At that level we are toast!! Something doesn't seem to be adding up here.  Then we look at the next argument, of 1,000 per second.  That equals about 86 million barrels per day; being 60,000 per minute;  3.6 million barrels per hour; etc.   So I think he meant 1,000,000 not 100,000.  Which brings the ~55,000 back to ~55 years of supply at today's consumption level.  Phew!!

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.

An acre of corn consumes 80 gallons of oil in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, and fuel for the tractors.  Without [oil], 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. 

And thus cannot replace lost oil with biofuel. 

So rug rats.  There are your choices:  eaten by giant carbonised insects or die of starvation.  Blame the old white guys in the oil industry. 

However, I believe that we can confirm that peak oil has definately come and gone.  So that is hopeful.  Right?