Thanks for that information. I had actually come across the BP report prior, but not the blog entries. I absolutely agree that we need alternative energy as soon as possible. I appreciate the pdf, but have some comments. Somebody crunched some numbers in a spreadsheet and came up with the peak oil graph. As someone who has managed to make some very accurate mistakes by using a spreadsheet, I always look at projections with a bit of a jaundiced eye.
The first thing you notice is that anyone can plug in any numbers they want to and come up with any answer they want to. I'm not saying that as a criticism; it's in the nature of the beast. What that means is that you have to be sure of your inputs to have any confidence in the projections at all. Spreadsheets can be wrong several places to the right of the decimal. They give you a false sense of precision even when they are precisely wrong. This particular projection goes out to 2145 and shows a gadzillion bbl deficit which is, of course, absurd given the fact that it drops below zero in 2030.
The first number to examine is 'proven reserves.' This is the oil that can reasonably be thought recoverable under current conditions, though some might require some additional investment. This actually has a legal edge because companies who brag about proven reserves can affect their stock market price. They've got to be very careful about what they claim. In the projection you will notice the numbers increase until 2020 and begin an immediate fall. This does take into consoderation consumption--and that's an issue to discuss below.
The point is that the projected increase in reserves is much more conservative than we have actually experienced in the past. Production increase is pegged at 8%. There may be good reason for this. Our technology may have improved to the point that we are much better at projecting proven reserves than we used to be. The point, though, is that it is a statistical guess. The numbers through the years are uniform. This is a mathematical exercise. In fact, much of the oil issue is based on probability theory.
The consumption side is projected at 12% a year. This is also a mathematical guess, though perhaps based more solidly on past experience. Look how quickly this increases. We're at 31 bb in 2007 and by 2017 it has tripled. Are we sure this will happen? This kind of reminds me of the Club of Rome predictions that we would all starve by the year 2000 because the land is farmed arithmetically and the population increases exponentially. It didn't happen. The point here really is that any time you stick in a production value lower than a consumption value, no matter how much reserve you start out with, you reach zero eventually. It's an a priori conclusion.
Yet economically if the commodity gets scarcer, the price will rise. Paradoxically, this will bring UNPROVEN reserves into contention because it will then be economically feasible to go after them. Unproven reserves aren’t even factored into the Peak Oil graph at all! Further, only ‘conventional’ oil is counted as a reserve, which amounts to 30% of the total oil supply. Heavy oil, extra heavy oil, and oil sands are excluded. ALSO excluded is oil that is ‘protected’ by law, such as ANWAR and off-shore areas, which are not that well explored anyway.
One of the issues is the assumption the developing world will develop into completely modern societies. I guess I hope so, truly. That would be a fair thing to happen, but the issue is that they are projected to consume energy at the same rate as the US/EU. Yet these areas have the opportunity to develop a much more efficient infrastructure than our own. For example, they will not need to lay millions of miles of copper wire for land line telephones because they can use cell phone technology today.
So, we have several issues. Consumption and production figures are speculation. Proved oil reserves have historically been severely under-reported, and political factors have limited production increases. There has not been a new refinery in the US for many years. And there are even people who debunk the entire idea of ‘peak oil’
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=764 saying we have vast untapped quantities and may have consumed between 7 and 9% of supplies meaning we have between 100 and 200 years before Peak Oil takes place. And we haven’t even gotten into the issue of abiogenic (abiotic) oil. Predictably, the MSM doesn’t report stuff like that.
I am not in a position to claim I know what is real and what is unreal in this debate. All I know is that I have a variety of graphs to choose from and no real way to tell who is correct. Like climate change, the whole thing is a matter of dueling experts. I suspect much of this is political and that a pure debate based on verifiable facts is impossible.
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