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Discovery/Shock model
WHT, Mobjectivist
To recap, what do we know at this point?
A) We know that oil exploration efficiency has progressively improved over time; every year we critically evaluate bigger and bigger swaths though the earth’s crust, looking for new deposits of oil. Unfortunately, the peak discovery years likely occurred during the early 1960’s and we have since started exploring the fringes of oil’s geological range. This has contributed to a monotonically diminishing rate of discovery, albeit somewhat mitigated by reserve growth.
B) We also know that once we discover a new reservoir of oil, it takes a while to start pumping and then to pump it dry. We obviously have to consider that some period elapses as the region sits fallow, that some period elapses as extraction facilities get constructed, and that some period elapses as the new rigs come online and reach maximum production. These three factors have some average value that we can make an educated guess at. We can also guess at an average extraction rate that works out proportional to the amount of reserve that we have left. This extraction rate, more than anything else, responds fairly quickly and agilely to market and political considerations.
C) We know that a good discovery model should help us quantitatively describe (A) and that a good extraction model should help us describe the dynamics of (B). With some work, we have arrived at a unified Discovery/Shock model which captures this knowledge mathematically.
[…Math and graphs…]
…After doing this exercise, as you can probably tell, I’ve become even more of a fan of the term “undulating plateau”. The cushion of potential discoveries in the future provides a modicum of slack to keep on doing what we do as consumers. Enough slack in the rope, perhaps, to hang ourselves with.
(22 May 2007)
Film review: What a Way to Go – Life at the end of empire
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
Review of documentary film written and directed by TSBennett, produced by Sally Erickson, 2007
“What a Way to Go” is a total rejection of the self-destruction paradigm that hard-wires our culture. Brutal honesty is applied to issues of our day.
…I get excited about very few movies, but this is one of them and is perhaps the most important media message of our time.
The movie centers around the awakening of the narrator, “a middle-class white guy” coming to grips with global issues right in his face that threaten his children’s and everyone’s survival. He tells the story in such a way that almost every modern human being can identify with. His expectations and world-view had been normal. He was a hard-working consumer who believed in the scientific, forward-thinking society that bestowed on him the historically unprecedented material advantages common in the First World.
…Featured interviewees include Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael; Derrick Jensen, author of The Culture of Make Believe; William Catton, author of Overshoot, and Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over. Unlike “The End of Suburbia,” the peak oil movie staring Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler and assorted peak-oil and New Urbanism commentators, Bennett’s movie does not rely so much on a series of talking heads and their constant, sometimes redundant opinions. Instead, specific points are being made, even by unknown citizens who are friends of the film makers.
Their statements gather force as an honest cross section of thinking people, and leads the viewer right up to full realization of our culture’s dead end. The End of Suburbia is a great movie, but perhaps self-limited by the scary implications of peak oil: die-off and the end of urban life as we know it. These topics are only hinted at in The End of Suburbia. One reason What a Way to Go can do it relentlessly and effectively is that the script and images burst the bubble of science as a religion pushing on blindly toward a technotopia.
(20 May 2007)
Yet More Fun With Numbers: $7/Gallon Gasoline
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World
…The bottom line is that, while $3.50/gallon gasoline was a cakewalk (just a catch-up after decades of after-inflation price decreases), $7/gallon gasoline will be nightmarish. Not because we can’t afford to pay $140 to fill our gas tank, but because we can’t afford to pay twice as much for the oil we eat, the oil we wear, the oil that drives our entire economy. And our economy is stretched so tight, and is so over-extended and over-leveraged, we have no room to manoeuver.
This is the incredible bind we’ve gotten ourselves into: Coping with global warming and the End of Oil (before the nightmare outlined in The Long Emergency befalls us) demands a large increase is the price of energy to dampen our appetite for it. But that large increase could easily plunge the world into another Great Depression.
…So the real problem is not that gasoline prices are too high, or that they are too low, it’s that we think the price of gasoline is the real problem, and that changing that price will solve it.
(23 May 2007)
ODAC News – May 23
Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC)
1a/ Darling: lights could go out if power plants are not built [UK] (The Herald, Sat 19 May)
1b/ Fears over looming energy crisis in UK (The Sunday Times, Sun 20 May)
1c/ ‘No chance of nuclear power in Scotland’ (The Herald, Mon 21 May)
2a/ EU bid to wean itself off Russian gas: Nabucco pipeline (Yahoo News, Fri 18 May)
2b/ Kazakh Gas Will Cost Gazprom $160 per 1,000 cu m (FC Novosti, Tue 15 May)
3a/ Car Imports in Russia Up 65% to 289,900 in 1Q07 (FC Novosti, Mon 14 May)
3b/ Foreign Cars Sales in Russia Up 72% in January-April (FC Novosti, Thu 10 May)
4/ Drought puts pressure on electricity (The Age [Melbourne], Sat 19 May)
5/ Mediterranean gasoline prices rise as US driving season approaches (Platts, Mon 14 May)
6a/ The Sands of Time – How Venezuela and Canada are Extending the Life of the World’s Petroleum Resources (OPEC Bulletin, March 2007)
6b/ ‘America’s energy security blanket’ (Financial Times, Mon 21 May)
7/ ‘Era of cheap energy is over,’ says Buckee (Calgary Herald, Thu 10 May)
8a/ Financial bubble – who will say that the emperor is naked? (The Oil Drum: Europe, Sun 20 May)
8b/ Bubbles are everywhere (The Sunday Times, Sun 20 May)
9/ Battle for the Barrels [new book] (Duncan Clarke, Feb 2007)
10/ Petroleum Resources Of The Western Desert of Iraq [not 100B barrels] (Middle East Economic Survey, Mon 21 May)
11a/ OPEC must add more oil to the market to avoid record prices – CGES (Forbes, Mon 21 May)
11b/ Iranian Energy Sector In Crisis, Says CGES (Middle East Economic Survey, Mon 21 May)
(23 May 2007)
