PowerSwitch

Charles Hall is Distinguished Professor at the Environmental Science and Forestry Foundation at the State University of New York. His seminal research focuses on the question of energy return on investment and energy contribution to economic growth. This marks an important physical approach to our understanding of economics and the societies we live in. In this unpublished letter to the New York Times , co-authored with his graduate student, Nate Gagnon, he turns to the task of debunking the widely held faith in technological solutions to that most intractable problem, peaking global oil production.

The recent front page article ?Oil innovations pump new life into old wells? by Jad Mouawad (March 5 page 1) is dangerously misleading. The author would have us believe that technological innovations will increase the proportion of oil recoverable from known fields sufficiently to compensate for the dearth of new discoveries.

It gives a false sense of security about our difficult oil situation based on a very selective interpretation of data.

For example, the graph used to support the article undermines the author?s main thesis. It shows that steam injection is not new but has been used in the Kern River field since 1965 and also that oil production in this field peaked in 1984 and has been declining sharply since about 1997. In fact most of the ?oil innovations? mentioned in the article, including the injection of steam and various gases, are old technologies, first implemented in the 1920s. Innovations have always been occurring in the oil industry.

The important question is whether these technologies are increasing production more rapidly than depletion is decreasing it.

Considerable information indicates that depletion is a more important force in petroleum extraction than is technological development. The increases in production from the Kern River and Duri fields that the article mentions, and indeed even from the much larger Alberta and Orinoco Tar sands deposits, are small relative to the far larger production declines from many of the world?s most important oil fields, including the North Sea, Cantarell in Mexico (recently the world?s second largest producer), America?s largest fields including Prudhoe Bay, East Texas and Yates, Samotlor in Russia, Yibal in Oman, Rabi-Kounga in Gabon, probably Burgan in Kuwait and so on. All of these fields have been subject to the kind of technologies mentioned in the Mouawad article, sometimes for many decades, and all except possibly Burgan are clearly in steep decline or have virtually ceased production. The best oil field technology in the world has not stopped the US production from declining by 50 percent since its peak in 1970. Likewise clear peaks in oil production have occurred in such important producers as Argentina, China, Egypt, Indonesia (a founding member of OPEC), Mexico, Norway and the United Kingdom, even while prices were increasing.

It is not clear yet whether modern technologies such as horizontal drilling will principally increase total yields or simply increase rates of extraction. Furthermore, many of the technologies mentioned in the article tend to be extremely expensive. This is so not only in dollars but also in energy. The importance of the increasing energy cost has been documented in reports, published in quality journals, that show that the energy return on investment (EROI) for US domestic oil production has dropped from greater than 100 Btu returned per Btu invested in the 1930s to about thirty to one in the 1970s to perhaps 15 to one in 2000. Our research indicates a similar declining trend for world oil.

Making steam and pumping it into the ground, or moving gases from their source points to dispersed oil-field sites, requires enormous investments of energy. Thus while increasing prices can indeed make more low-quality resources economically available they generally also mean that more energy is being expended relative to production returns.

Eventually we may reach the energy break even point.

Thus, much of the oil cited as ?probable? or ?contingent? reserves is unlikely to be worth exploiting regardless of price. The article?s dismissive comments about peak oil theory and its advocates are ill-informed and ignore the importance of the message coming from a sophisticated and growing community that includes many hundreds of geologists, other scientists, environmentalists, financiers and citizens who see a serious situation ahead of us for oil and, especially in North America, natural gas. Whether peak oil production (or as has been suggested an ?undulating plateau?) has occurred, is occurring now or will not occur for several years or possibly decades makes little difference from the perspective of the life times of our children. Hiding our heads in the sand and putting our faith in technological developments that so far have been unable to compensate for most depletion seems to us to be a very bad idea.

Andy Hunt wrote:http://www.sandersresearch.com/index.ph ... ew&id=1163

The recent front page article ?Oil innovations pump new life into old wells? by Jad Mouawad (March 5 page 1) is dangerously misleading. The author would have us believe that technological innovations will increase the proportion of oil recoverable from known fields sufficiently to compensate for the dearth of new discoveries.

It is not clear yet whether modern technologies such as horizontal drilling will principally increase total yields or simply increase rates of extraction.

kenneal - lagger wrote:From what I understand the increase in oil flow is due to the number of rigs being thrown at the resource ….

kenneal wrote: ..but due to the unprecedented decline rate of the wells this growth is likely to peak in about 2020.

kenneal wrote: Lets celebrate all that growth!!

Keep crowing, Ralph!

EIA Administrator wrote: “That is the largest single-year growth in U.S. production all the way back to the drake oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859,” Sieminski said. “

http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/01/08/us-o ... ment-says/

woodburner wrote:As I see it, we either stop burning fossil fuels, and it's catastrophe for humans, or we carry on burning fossil fuels, and it's climate catastrophe.

UndercoverElephant wrote:The climate catastrophe and human (non-climate) catastrophe are both dead certainties.

Even if we managed to implement a fast-as-possible reduction in the burning of fossil fuels right now, it would still be too late to stop irreversible, catastrophic climate change. And even if climate change wasn't happening, there are so many other environmental/ecological problems being caused by industrialised civilisation that it would be doomed to self-destruct anyway.

Happy Christmas!

ShortFall wrote:

UndercoverElephant wrote:The climate catastrophe and human (non-climate) catastrophe are both dead certainties.

Even if we managed to implement a fast-as-possible reduction in the burning of fossil fuels right now, it would still be too late to stop irreversible, catastrophic climate change. And even if climate change wasn't happening, there are so many other environmental/ecological problems being caused by industrialised civilisation that it would be doomed to self-destruct anyway.

Happy Christmas!

.... and a happy New Year?

Ralph wrote:

woodburner wrote:As I see it, we either stop burning fossil fuels, and it's catastrophe for humans, or we carry on burning fossil fuels, and it's climate catastrophe.

Could be. But folks, they