Fossil Fuels

Reserves and Production: A Simple Example (based on Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia)

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So far in this series of technical talks, I have tried to explain some of the pieces that have to be put together to get crude oil or natural gas out of the ground. I intend to go on with the series in the coming weeks, but thought that today I would put some of the different thoughts that I have talked about recently together. So I am going to talk a little about reserve calculations and production and will use an example to show how the numbers are derived. And again, let me stress that this is a very simplified example. It is also only somewhat fictionalized, as I shall comment at the end.

Comments on Scientific American’s “Squeezing more oil from the ground”

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A decade ago, Scientific American published the seminal article by these two luminaries of the Peak Oil awareness movement, that relaunched the debate on M. King Hubbert’s finds, Scientific American appears now as a completely different publication. Now, however, scientific content doesn’t seem to be a requisite for its articles. Among other eerie details, Leonardo Maugeri goes as far as citing “Common Wisdom” to present erroneous facts.

US and fossil fuels – friend or foe? – Oct 20

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-Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says
-Will EPA veto or regulate the plunder of Appalachia?
-Global Warming Accelerating While The U.S. Backpedals

The Ecotechnic Future (book excerpt)

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…A technic society, by contrast, relies primarily on nonfood energy. Modern industrial civilization is simply a form of technic society that gets its nonfood energy from fossil fuels and maximizes production of goods and services in the usual R-selected way at the cost of vast inefficiency. At the other end of the spectrum is the climax community, the ecotechnic society, which gets its nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy and resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.

Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue: World Food Day and the Problem of Equity

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Yesterday was World Food Day, and the media dutifully paid a tiny bit of attention to the 1 billion plus people who suffer from chronic hunger. All the usual problems were trotted out, including multiple quotations in many media from the Australian National Science Director Megan Clark’s observation that to feed a growing population, we will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have in all of human history.

Sound familiar?

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At turning points most market observers and participants are of the same mind. That doesn’t mean the bear market in natural gas can’t continue, perhaps for quite a while yet. But the idea that gas will remain cheap and plentiful for decades because of technological breakthroughs sounds too good to be true, and it probably is.