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Jeremy Gilbert’s Comments on TOD Saudi Analysis
Steve Andrews and Randy Udall, ASPO-USA via The Oil Drum
..The conclusions reported seem to me to be credible but I have to emphasise that in any reservoir engineering analysis there are almost always more unknowns than equations. As a result, one is generally faced with having to make estimates for part of the solution and then be concerned about the uniqueness of the solution derived. This is a situation which users of complex reservoir simulators are continually faced with.
It seems likely to me that the conclusions the authors have reached about Ghawar’s current status are broadly correct. However, it’s a big step to take from concluding Ghawar is currently at or close to maximum achievable production rate to saying that that rate cannot be maintained, or even increased, through the addition of additional production wells, through increased or more efficient water injection schemes or through surface facility modifications. ..
Does the situation which the Oil Drum people have described mean that Ghawar’s production rate is about to decline? Possibly, but not necessarily. It depends on the amount of additional investment that would be required to address the problem and whether the cost of this work is economically justifiable. The answer to that depends a lot on the oil price scenario which the company has adopted. ..
(12 Apr 2007)
Peak oil: Get ready for it, says GAO
Kevin Potvin, The Republic
Previously the worry of obscure engineers in technical reports, now the prospect of declining global production of oil is front and centre on the desks of all policy makers.
The US Government Accountability Office in late February issued a report called “Crude Oil: Uncertainty about future oil supply makes it important to develop a strategy for addressing a peak and decline in oil production.” It is to date the most strongly-worded and unflinching view of the state of the global oil supply ever to have been issued by any of the western nations. Importantly, the US Departments of Energy and the Interior both “generally agreed with our message and recommendations,” the report says. ..
What is striking about this report is that its authors don’t consider any scenarios in which the United States, and by implication Canada, can fully escape the economic effects of peak oil, because they don’t see any possibility of doing so. ..
And national schemes to begin voluntary reductions in national oil consumption in smaller, more steady, and totally predictable increments, should be developed and implemented now, rather than waiting a few years for the age of peak oil to cause huge, very unstable, and wildly unpredictable, and forced, amounts of reduction in the national oil consumption rate.
(12 Apr 2007)
Soil Association starts nationwide series of meetings on ‘peak oil’ problem
Staff, FWI
The Soil Association is holding a nationwide series of public meetings on making the transition from ‘cheap oil’ to ‘peak oil’. ..
“So it was that over 450 people packed the Arts Hall at the University of Wales, Lampeter in West Wales, on Tuesday afternoon and evening (3 April) to discuss and act on the theme of ‘Preparing West Wales for a future without oil’.
“Local farmers and townspeople listened to presentations from leading climate change and peak oil experts, then broke into groups to discuss turning the challenges into opportunities, action and solutions. ..
“Rob Hopkins, who founded the ‘Transition Town’ initiative outlined the concept of ‘Energy Descent Plans’, whereby communities can make the transition to reducing their dependency on ‘cheap oil’ whilst sustaining livelihoods and quality of life. ..
Lampeter is the first in a nationwide series of public meetings on making the transition from ‘cheap oil’ the Soil Association is supporting through its One Planet Agriculture campaign.
(11 Apr 2007)
When the lights go out
Larry Elliott, The Guardian
David Strahan and Duncan Clarke take opposing sides on the peak oil debate in The Last Oil Shock and The Battle for Barrels. ..
Hubbert’s many champions have used his work to construct a theory of just about everything. Peak oil explains why oil prices are so high; it explains why George Bush invaded Iraq and why there is a new scramble for Africa. As the world’s oil wells start to run dry, there will be recession and war. After a century or more in which modern industrial societies have been built on seemingly unlimited supplies of oil, the lights are about to go off.
In The Last Oil Shock, David Strahan argues that we ignore the warnings at our peril. Modern industrial societies, he says, are dependent on oil, but over the past 50 years it has become evident that all the big fields have been discovered. Oil companies are busily exploring inhospitable parts of the globe and using the most up-to-date technologies to extract more crude from existing fields, but sooner or later we are going to have accept the inevitable: supply will be unable to keep up with demand.
Even worse, Strahan sees no possibility that alternatives to oil will be developed in time to prevent a full-scale economic crisis. The Last Oil Shock dismisses the idea that we can move seamlessly into an age of hydrogen-powered cars, biofuels and wind farms. Instead, we all need to be changing our lifestyles: buying smaller cars, driving less aggressively, taking our rucksacks to the shops to avoid using plastic carrier bags, spurning apples that have been shipped halfway round the world. ..
Duncan Clarke’s The Battle for Barrels says we should take warnings of impending armageddon with a pinch of salt. The peak oil theorists take an overly deterministic view of the world, he argues, and far from being imminent, peak oil may be decades, perhaps even a century, ahead. His argument is that it is far too simplistic to extrapolate, with any degree of precision, when the world will reach the point of maximum oil production from Hubbert’s 50-year-old study of the US. ..
Although it will win no prizes for the limpidity of its prose, The Battle for Barrels is a useful corrective to Strahan’s argument that the end is nigh. In the end, of course, the peak oil lobby will be proved right. Oil is a finite resource, and once the last drops are squeezed from the Middle East, once the Canadian tar sands have been exploited and the frozen wastes of the Antarctic have been sucked dry, the world will have to find another source of energy. What’s really at issue is when that moment will be.
(14 Apr 2007)
Contributor AC writes: An even-handed analysis in a mainstream British newspaper from their economic editor, clearly acknowledging peak oil at the end of the article but not taking sides in the debate.
