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The Oil Depletion Protocol: An Interview with Richard Heinberg
Ryan McGreal, Raise The Hammer
These days, Richard Heinberg is an amazingly busy man. In addition to his teaching duties at the New College of California and his ongoing essays and lectures on peak oil, he has been promoting an idea he first heard from Colin Campbell about a simple protocol that he believes will help countries to prepare for, and adjust to, the coming declines in global oil production.
The Oil Depletion Protocol is deceptively simple: oil importing countries reduce their annual imports by the global depletion rate; and oil exporting countries reduce their annual exports by their national depletion rate. That’s also the title of his latest book, an in-depth examination of the protocol and its ramifications.
It depends on honest field-by-field oil reserve analysis and open, transparent administration, and it works best if every major oil-producing and -consuming country adopts it, but Heinberg believes it will give every country the best opportunity for making sound decisions based on accurate information and predictable (albeit steadily declining) supplies of oil.
The book itself is a marvel of clarity and economy, packing a detailed analysis of a complex situation into a very readable 151 pages (plus appendices and notes). His calm, lucid style and cant-free delivery take the reader from a grand overview of the framework right down to the methods by which individual communities can plan for the end of cheap, abundant oil.
(26 Feb 2007)
Peak Oil Update – February 2007: Production Forecasts and EIA Oil Production Numbers
Khebab, The Oil Drum
An update on the latest production numbers from the EIA along with graphs/charts of different oil production forecasts.
Executive Summary:
- Monthly production records are unchanged:
- . All Liquids: the peak is still July 2006 at 85.47 mbpd, the year to date average production in 2006 (11 months) is 84.59 mbpd, up 0.01 mbpd from 2005.
- Crude Oil + NGL: the peak date remains May 2005 at 82.08 mbpd, the year to date average production for 2006 (11 months) is 81.40 mbpd, down 0.03 mbpd from 2005 (11 months).
- Crude Oil + Condensate: the peak date remains May 2005 at 74.15 mbpd, the year to date average production for 2006 (11 months) is 73.48 mbpd, down 0.09 mbpd from 2005 (11 months).
- NGPL: the peak date remains February 2005 at 8.05 mbpd, the year to date average production for 2006 (11 months) is 7.92 mbpd, up 0.06 mbpd from 2005 (11 months).
- . No major revisions on the previous monthly estimates in this month release.
- Weak growth continues: November 2006 estimate for crude oil + condensate is 73.41 mbpd compared to 74.11 mbpd one year ago.
(26 Feb 2007)
Mexico Oil Barrel Costs near Double
Prensa Latina (Cuba)
Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) is currently facing an oil-extraction cost increase, from $2.20 to $4.20, per oil barrel, which means a 91-percent increase, according to statistics of the company.
This increase adds to a decrease in production, volatility of prices and an important drop in success of drilling prospect wells, going from 57 to 42 percent, between 2000 and 2006.
According to the information by PEMEX directive board, the increase in the extraction costs and general technical expenses are due to extension of the programs for deposit maintenance.
Other causes of the increase are a rise in the price of natural gas used in pneumatic pumping, more investments in prospecting, and higher costs of labor.
Victor Rodriguez Padilla, expert in energy from the Center for Research on North America of Mexico s Autonomous University (UNAM), warned that this trend will continue in the future.
(26 Feb 2007)
Peak Performance?
Vaclav Smil, TCS Daily
Peter Odell, one of the most astute, life-long observers of global oil scene, calls them “peak-oilers.” Some of them were quite unhappy when I pointed out (in Energy at the Crossroads, in these pages, and in Worldwatch in January 2006) their propensity for wholesaling catastrophic scenarios of the world once the global oil production peaks and begins to decline. But how else can one label such writings as Richard C. Duncan’s “Olduvai theory” according to which the declining oil extraction will plunge humanity into life comparable to that experienced by some of the first primitive hominids who inhabited that famous Kenyan gorge some 2.5 million years ago?
And no one else can be blamed for the repeated failure of their forecasts but the prominent peak-oilers themselves. According to Colin Campbell the global oil extraction was to peak in 1989; Ivanhoe’s peak was in 2000; Deffeyes set it first in 2003 and then, with ridiculous accuracy, on the Thanksgiving of 2005.
Well, the numbers for 2006 are in. And they show that even after OPEC once again cut its production (by 1.2 million barrels a day effective November 1, 2006) in order to arrest yet another rapid fall in prices, the global oil supply for the entire year rose once again, by about 0.85 million barrels a day.
Vaclav Smil (website home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil) lectures at the University of Manitoba in Canada. His latest published books are Transforming the 20th Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences and Energy: A Beginner’s Guide. Energy in Nature and Society will appear later this year.
(23 Feb 2007)
Some familiar objections to peak oil. When are we going to get that Wiki up with the answers to the skeptics in a codified form? How nice it would be to be able to respond to Vaclav Smil’s article with a series of links: “#7b Confusion about the symmetrical production curve”, “#25 Strawman of an imminent collapse,” etc. -BA
UPDATE from Douglas Low in the ODAC newsletter for Feb 26:
Vaclav Smil is a leading member of the anti-Peak Oil club, and as such one ought to keep an eye on what he is writing. Vaclav wrote one of the articles in WorldWatch Institute’s Peak Oil Forum a year ago – see Peak Oil: A Catastrophist Cult And Complex Realities at http://www.worldwatch.org/epublish/1/v19n1.
Here, he uses the most oft-repeated argument by a segment of the anti-Peak Oil establishment to convince readers that Peak Oil is not an issue we have to worry about – namely, previous forecasts for the date of Peak have been wrong, therefore, Peak will never happen, or at least not any time soon. I would like to nominate this as the most absurd argument (in a long list) for Peak Oil being an issue we need not concern ourselves with.
Interestingly, Smil then goes on to argue that the data for 2006 are a sure sign that all is well, if not very well. As mentioned in IEA Medium-Term Oil Market Report – Feb 2007: Diminishing oil supplies?, the oil production data for 2006, for the moment, ought to be a cause for concern. 3.2 Mb/d of new oil were supposed to be coming onstream, EIA states (subject to possible alteration) that for 2006 global oil production, compared to 2005, increased by 0 Mb/d, IEA about 0.7 Mb/d. Smil does not mention all this. He also fails to mention the IEA forecast in IEA report just referenced.
Smil then goes on to attack Hubbert’s original forecasts, which I always thought were pretty good considering he made them about 50 years ago, long before a peaking in US oil production was being discussed by anyone else.
Smil concludes with an illogical argument about oil prices.
