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Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
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Biggest problem I see is not having 1 hour and 13 minutes to devote to watching that. Who has that kind of free time?!?!! :)
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Can you sum it up and tweet it to me? I'm at #giantbrain
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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In the first 2 minutes... he is using an exponential function to model growth. In real systems things tend to follow more of a logistic growth pattern... which is also an oversimplification.
Like C said, I don't have time to watch that... besides, I spend a couple lectures teaching it so...
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monolith
climber
albany,ca
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Fracking.
His peak oil chart looks much different now with fracking.
Just skim the vid or go to around 45 minutes. Didn't take more than a couple minutes for me.
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john hansen
climber
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Sure wish I could get 7% on my savings account,, :)
0.75 % just dont do it.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Same concept applies to non-conventional oil, it just extends the inevitable while breeding more dependence on over-consumption of a quick, accessible energy source.
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monolith
climber
albany,ca
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Yep, we'll run out of all oil eventually. Just not as quickly as he's predicting. Actually, we'll never run out of oil. It'll just keep getting more expensive. In the mean time, we'll keep adjusting to less oil dependence, but not without some bad spots.
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monolith
climber
albany,ca
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More than just crumbs. His U.S. peak oil chart would have this huge shoulder in it. What are the fracking reserve estimates now?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Isn't fracking the best arguement for this reality.
Fracking is basically getting at the crumbs that are left.
Without watching the video....yes, this is true. I could give a good ten paragraph lesson as to how we know our production rates in the future, but you would have to pay me.
I just finished up one and the engineers are getting ready to frack it. This is a normal reservoir, instead of a shale, so it neads far fewer stages and much less fluid.
And it is right smack in the middle of a city. I'm not worried a bit.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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I do see that the charts above were at least scarfed from the Energy Information Administration which is THE website regarding production and consumption and markets and anything you are willing to read and learn about oil and natural gas. You can become an expert on the field if you read that sucker from one end to the other...if you can pull it off in one lifetime.
Everybody goes off on the Williston Basin and the Bakken shale as if it is going to be a new Saudi Arabia. In fact, it contributes less than a million bbls/day of our 19 million bbl/day consumption. It has provided a small bump in the decline curve of U.S. production, but only because oil prices are through the roof.
These wells cost as much as 10 million bucks to drill, and you have to drill a lot of them. You have to pay out that 10 million dollars to make the well profitable, and if oil went to fifty bucks from the current ~90 bucks, all Bakken drilling would cease.
There is a thing called "finding costs." That is how much a play costs to find each bbl of oil. The finding costs on horizontal stage frac wells are very high. In Saudi Arabia you can drill a 7000 foot vertical well, which costs about 700 grand in the U.S. It will make millions of bbls per well, so the Saudi's have a finding cost of only a few bucks per bbl. The finding costs in the Bakken are up in the tens of dollars per bbl. After production taxes and royalties, the economic situation gets tougher.
If I wasn't busy packing to fly out tomorrow to go buy my sailboat (Yay!), I would pull some wells out of the Bakken and do full economics, post them, and let you see. I have the software and can do a well in about twenty minutes. I already have every well in the midcontinent to Canada zapped into my computer. Everything. Depths, casing, production tests, frac details, pressures, you name it. Everything. I can place everything on a one terrabyte drive, including all of the software.
So I hate it when Republican as#@&%es bitch that Obama had fewer federal permits than Bush. Permits have nothing to do with the President. Economics dictates where you drill and how many wells you drill. All of these plays are also on private land for the most part.
The Bakken is really interesting, because it is the only true "oil shale" similar to "Shale Gas."
Gotta stop. I could go on for hours. You guys have probably seen it. I know my stuff.
Maybe I will watch the video on my trip, but basically this is all you need to know:
We are running out of oil. Yes, there are places where I can drill hundreds of wells and hit oil in all of them, but they won't come close to paying out the drilling cost.
It is all about economics. Government policy has very little to do with it, and there isn't any "corporate welfare" or subsidies for the oil industry. There are two tax writeoffs, and they aren't even used by most companies.
Another thing. Reagan was the worst president for the oil industry. Go read, "The Prize" and email me in a month.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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OK. Above is a quicky map of the Elm Coulee Field in NE Montana, one of the better Bakken Shale fields. Each little square is a square mile.
The black dot is the surface location. The line of the wellbore is shown, so you get to see which direction the hole is drilled.
I have the full depth, azimuth, inclination surveys for each well. I have the production decline plot for each well. The wells make most of their oil in the first 4 years and then taper off and pump at a low rate for a long time.
This is one of the better Bakken Fields. I've read that it is the biggest onshore field found in the lower 48 in over fifty years. It's reserves are less than 500 million bbls. 500 million bbls isn't that much, considering that the country has already produced 190 billion bbls of oil. So that big ass field is less than half a percent of all U.S. production since day one.
It is nice for North Dakota, because that is a lot of money for the mineral owners. The shitty thing is that it and all of the other Bakken fields aren't enough to matter a bit.
There have been several much larger fields found in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico in the last twenty years. Thunderhorse is one. The field that the BP Macondo well discovered will probably be much larger than the onshore Elm Coulee field, and they will be able to produce it from four or five platforms. You can drill alot of wells from one platform, and depending on depth, you can reach a several mile radius around the platforms.
I don't work offshore. Anyway, hate to say it but the Bakken is nice and all that, but it isn't a drop of piss in the world market.
Understand? Take wild claims about the Bakken with a grain of salt. It would be a big deal if we didn't consume a quarter of the world's production output.
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karodrinker
Trad climber
San Jose, CA
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I'd like to see a Macro economic breakdown of all the good and bad that oil has done for humanity. Obviously there would be far too much speculation and subjectivity determining the net damage that oil has caused to be truly scientific, but it really has caused so much damage.
Oil transformed the world, but I'm not sure I'm happy with the transformation. Pollution, commuting, suburbia. The Industrial revolution really revved up once oil became the go to energy source, which just inadvertently sped up the decline of the family and also of society overall by demanding that 1, or often 2 parents leave the house daily, all day, to go work. This leaves the raising of the children to be done by others, institutions and televisions.
Sure modern marvels like cars and plastics and bright shiny light everywhere are cool, but are they worth it?
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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Can anyone find a problem with this reality? (the long version)
Why not make it a double feature.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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John M
climber
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He gives some long winded explanations for what exponential growth means and its affects in support of zero population growth. For all those who still believe that we have 500 years worth of coal as a backup to our oil, he explains why this isn't true.
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Nothing new since 1798.
Just another neo-malthusian.
Didn't Paul Ehrlich loose a whopper of a bet about 15-20 years ago?
Something about the price of raw materials?
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Scared me into catatonia yesterday morning.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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The point is that because of exponential growth we will use the remaining amount of oil much faster than we have used the oil we have already consumed.
Oh. That one is easy. Hell yes. We are using the last third or so of our oil and natural resources with a fully functioning modern hydrocarbon and mineral intense species. It took us 100 years to get here, and I would guess that the thing that will slow population growth will be the huge cost of energy in the future.
No more airplane rides except for the ultra rich. Airplanes are the least efficient form of transportation fuel-wise.
It is that way with all of our resources.
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mechrist
Gym climber
South of Heaven
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Not many people realize how much petroleum is absolutely required to get them their food. Many deadbeat washed up old climbers may have a garden and be just fine, but those scary inner city folks that kill each other every night don't. They will be coming after YOURS.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I jumped through the video...
...it amazes me that anyone can argue against it, basically the number of people is increasing and their energy requirements are increasing, and that spends out the resources at an increasing rate.
As Base points out, the reserves are declining, the cost of the petroleum is going up and it makes it economic to recover, but that is also a limited resource. That combination results in using up all the reserves...
You can mine all the data out of this site that you need:
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm#resources
When you look at graphs like the above it's important to know what you are looking at graphed...
looking at the graph of Petroleum and Other Liquids Overview, you can see that oil production is currently about 50% of consumption, and while there is an "uptick" around the late 2000's it's not a very big one... the reason being that our consumption has, for the most part, increased.
To put that "bump" into even better perspective, look that chart "Crude Oil Production and Crude Oil Well Productivity, 1954-2011" and you see how this might fit on the chart in the video... there is a similar "shoulder" on the plot around 1984, the peak was 1970.
In the energy resources section one sees that the cumulative production since 1977 exceeds the cumulative reserves, now by a factor of 2 for crude oil, and about 1.5 for natural gas, which is to say that we're using up the source faster than we're finding new sources.
Proved natural gas reserves started to increase in the early 2000's.
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karodrinker
Trad climber
San Jose, CA
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just watched the whole thing. Good lecture. We are what, at 11:58 in the bacterial metaphor?
base, ed, how much longer do you guys expect civilized society to keep going?
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