Why Peak-Oil Predictions Haven't Come True
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
If you've got a steep price curve, such that a little bit of extra demand means that the cost goes way up (because of constrained supply), then it also means that the price curve is also steep on the way back down.
What that means is that if a demand spike makes the price skyrocket, then all sorts of alternative fuels become economical when they weren't before. And then, as more people switch to them and the demand for oil relaxes even a little bit, the oil price can fall dramatically as well, until some of those alternative choices don't seem as economical.
Even just a simple model like that can explain all sorts of brain-numbing conversational patterns. Like the certainty that big oil has had the knowledge of clean, cheap energy and that they keep it secret to make money on oil... or that they'll pump up oil prices to lure the alternative energy people to make business risks, and then purposely flood the market in order to put them out of business, etc.
In reality, it's not so simpel because there are untapepd sources that become available with higher prices and technological advances, and governements like the USA have proven to be willing to trade ground water plus security against oil and gas. But the peak oil model could still hold true - we just don't seem to be able to predict the when.
And the production is distributed, so the wells won't stop at the same time, so prices could indeed regulate the transition a bit. But that only works if that process is slow enough -> peak oil doubts that.
Edit: hihi, downvotes. Guess I made many hidden attacks -.-
Your comment basically reads "Peak oil isn't ridiculous if you believe the entire globe is so unaware of what they're individually doing that they're going to run out of oil without any warning their own wells are going dry, because the wells aren't operated collectively, so we require ALL the operators do this at the same time in the same manner. Also, there isn't going to be a decades long transition because all of these people are on exactly the same schedule because... er.... Also! No one will switch to other power to lower the demand on in-the-ground oil because as I just said, it'll all happen at the same time incredibly fast."
I mean, I guess you're welcome to believe it, but it relies on several facts that just aren't true, and is too simple of a model to fit if those facts are included.
While I do agree that people are generally selfish, my experience with various executives across industries is that they're hardly stupid, and that there are many smart people working on the world's problems, even if only to make a buck off it.
More to the point, I only need to think that a one-in-a-million person cares to do anything about the "peak oil problem", is intelligent, and is in a position to do so in order to believe that there are 7,000 people working actively on it.
There are only a few hundred major oil companies globally, meaning that each one will like have a dozen (or more, for larger ones) people who are intelligent, highly motivated one-in-a-million people working on it.
I think you greatly underestimate the number of people and the scale at which humans currently operate.
It would be borderline impossible for them to all be short-sighted in the same way, at the same time, given the sheer number of people who are working on the problem, particularly given that there's a strong economic incentive to not make that mistake.
tl;dr: No, your belief requires that literally everyone in the oil industry thought process (tens or hundreds of thousands of people) not be looking after their own self-interests if they're driving the bus off a cliff, and that they will all do so in the same manner and at the same time.
Anyone who does robust [] estimation for a living (me, say) looked at it and said, "Yeah, that makes sense." A lot of people who have never produced an accurate estimate of anything said, "That proves we're all doomed!" and "That's clearly wrong!" both of which are wildly inaccurate.
You point out the steep price curve of liquid petroleum as if that made things OK, but in economic terms, ten years ago, it was the cause for concern: when conventional oil started to get scarce, prices would go up. We knew that. But the new equilibrium price of fuel would depend on what alternatives were technologically* practical, and it wasn't clear that unconventional oil was going to live up to its hype. If it had stuck us with $250/bbl oil due to technological limitations, the economic hit would have been considerable, even if over a decade or two the price came down due to technological improvements. I'm emphasizing technology here because anyone reading this should realize that it can take rather a long time to go from "yeah this is basically feasible" to production at scale.
With hindsight we now know we are OK, but again: ten years ago unconventional oil was not ready for prime time, and it wasn't obvious it ever would be. Boosters within the industry were claiming that it would be ready to go Real Soon Now, but there were skeptics in industry as well, and therefore it behooved those of us on the sidelines to be a little bit concerned.
[*] Robust estimates are not the most accurate, but the least influenced by extraneous factors, special assumptions, etc. They are by far the best way to go when estimating highly uncertain things (like software delivery schedules) because they are the most difficult to game.
The price of energy matters too, not just its derivative. We can make synthetic fuels that existing infrastructure can use but they're too expensive to support our civilization.[2]
Imagine your robot vacuum can run an hour on a charge and takes 15min to make a roundtrip to its charging station. If you move the charging station so the roundtrip takes 30min, you'll get dirty floors, and they'll still be dirty a year later. The robot's EROI has gone from 4 to 2 and it can only handle a smaller house, or one that sees less activity.
The EROI of a commodity like oil is approximately inversely proportional to its price. For commodities, competition brings price to the marginal cost of production, which is the cost of the embodied energy (so for fuels, this cost is unitless). The synthetic fuels are expensive because their synthesis is energy-intensive.
It's something policy makers should understand when they advertise energy projects as creating jobs. Manifestly, the more jobs an energy source requires, the worse it is. Energy is a means to an end not an end in itself.
Is this elasticity of substitution quantified? I'd like to read more about it if you have a link. My gut feeling is that this elasticity is improving (despite increasing oil consumption) due to general technological advancement and a high-speed globalised economy.
How well can we respond to a price spike now versus 30 years ago? Can we mitigate the economic impact of a price spike faster than we could 30 years ago? These are the trends I am interested in investigating.
“a 10 percent permanent increase in oil prices reduces oil demand by about 0.7 percent after 20 years.” [1]
So to put things simpler : there is no elasticity in the price oil to speak of. It is almost like this : for all intents and purposes, people will die, rather than stop buying oil (in most of Northern Europe, of course, people will die without oil, ditto for most of Canada, Alaska, Russia, ...) (another way to say this would be : look at why the US/"West" went to war at any point after Vietnam. Decide for yourself why those wars happened, what would be the cause ? Oil price. Even ISIS and Sudan, to a significant extent, are oil wars. Well, it's muslim lunatics, but they wouldn't be a threat to anyone without oil)
As for peak oil, it's happening. Oil production has plateau'd since 2005. Conventional oil peaked in 1998, but horizontal drilling got it to go back up. In 2007 we really started to see a drop of 1-2%, but then the shale revolution happened (massive production spike, supposedly short-lived, in America matching declines in pretty much everywhere else in the world). Of course, the shale revolution skipped Europe. This is distorting the picture in America. In America it really looks like oil production has gone up, but that is not true globally.
Recently, (massive) consumption slowdowns in China have masked a small decline, but that's probably noise. To be honest, it is extremely scary that this has not lead to a significant price decline (talking 5-10% here, we've seen 1-2% at most).
I would also argue that while small declines are indeed noise, there's 2 factors that I feel still deserve some attention.
1) Since 2005, oil has been on a very small, but very (very) steady decline. The amounts are less than the noise, but it's hard looking at the graph and not see a decline.
2) Production has remained somewhat steady, but consumption has definitely shifted. Firstly internally : middle eastern countries' oil consumption has grown on the exponential curve. The same goes for pretty much all significant oil production countries. Since the internal market is subsidized in nearly all cases, this means that effective oil available on the international market (where e.g. Europe has to buy it) has gone down 5-8%.
3) The fact that the US did not have a way to export it's oil is masking fuel prices within the United States. It's one more factor that's making oil prices lower in the US than you'd expect given the rest of the world.
[1] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2011/01/pdf/text.pdf
The average age of cars on the road is 11 years, and apparently rising.[2]
Technology itself is notorious for lock-in effects. Windows 10 was announced today... I use a Dvorak keyboard (1936) but most still use QWERTY. You can ponder when Bret Victor's dreams will come true. In teaching technology, we're arguably no further than Papert was in 1980.[3][4]
In Garrett's model (op. cit.) the value of civilization's accumulated wealth in years of current production (GDP) does fall over time. In 1980 it was about 60 years. Today it's about 45 years. (In 1820, it was about 300 years.)
[1] http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-econom...
[2] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-automotiv...
Instead persistent high oil prices and new technology have made previously uneconomic oil sources economically viable.
This is exactly what the peak oil people have been saying, you can't claim they're "looking at it the wrong way" and then restate exactly what they were claiming. Peak oil was never about running out of oil, it was always about the rate and economics of extraction. "the size of the tap, not the size of the tank" etc.
This "recent boom" in the US remains cash negative - about 600b capex for about 500b in oil. And we don't know yet whether that's going to change.
Currently "geology is not only winning, it is crushing technology" http://blogs.platts.com/2014/07/30/peak-oil-forecasts/
See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06peak.html
They do claim the production rate will decline, and conventional crude has. The wells from this boom in the US have a production rate decline of 40% per year, so production is already declining nearly as fast as we can drill more and is predicted to peak soon.
Edit: Myself, I guess it's true that by throwing even more resources at oil (e.g. pursuing tight oil in other countries like in the US) we could still kick the peak down the road a little more and raise the production rate, but when the world economy can't afford such prices and the EROI is so poor then it seems more like playing word games than an honest rebuttle of the implications of peak oil.
Yes! This is the critical point: Peak Cheap Oil. We're pouring money into more and more costly holes in the ground.
We'll never run out of oil; it's never been about running out of oil. We've just run out of the cheap stuff. It's not coming back.
He predicted that U.S. oil production would peak, probably in the early 1970s, and then decline. It would resemble a bell curve.
If M. King Hubbert were alive today—he died in 1989—would he admit defeat? Probably not
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Stat...
I think the main issue is that the article confuses worldwide oil production with US oil production. US oil production undeniably peaked in the 1970's. Worldwide oil production did not. The claims made about peak oil were specifically made about US oil production. The claims were proven to be 100% correct.
The past decade truly marked the global shift to the end of cheap oil prices. So given the possibility for margin of error, it was a fantastically good estimate.
The article seems way too harsh on someone who made a prediction over 50 years ago that has stood the test of time flawlessly. He was objectively correct when looking at actual data.
The only counter point actually given in the article to peak oil is that it might be theoretically possible for production to beat those 1970's levels which isn't much of a counterpoint.
So we have to look at world oil production, not just domestic. And, although world oil production is still growing, that growth is clearly in decline as most new sources for oil require far more effort to extract than in the past (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Oil_Production.png).
I'm not a peak oil alarmist. It's entirely sensible to expect that as oil becomes more difficult to extract, its price will go up, and as its price goes up, new sources of oil will become more feasible to engineer.
But, so much of oil production and consumption and everything associated with it is horrible and disgusting and a potential ecological and economic disaster waiting to happen. (...Deepwater Horizon...)
We shouldn't need peak oil scaremongering to move us off of oil dependence quickly. It should make sense to do so anyway, especially as other technologies continue to improve.
What about all the good it makes possible? Fossil fuels made it possible to build and run the hospitals that save our lives. Try running an ICU on wind and solar power alone, without a huge, expensive and very uneconomical battery. Think also of the food we eat - while you can quibble about the merits of particular diets, there's no way that the 7 billion people alive today could get the calories they need to stay alive without tractors, fertilizer, etc. These two examples are the the beginning - our lives are made possible by oil.
While burning fossil fuels may have a negative effect on climate, is that effect so bad that we should abandon them? Fossil fuels give us such good control over our climates that climate-related deaths (everything from storms to hurricanes, etc.) have dropped precipitously over the past century: in the past 80 years, there has been a 98% decrease in deaths due to climate. Couple those facts with the abominable track record that everyone has about predicting the severity of future conditions (remember the shrill predictions of the 60s and 70s?), and fossil fuels come out ahead of everything else out there, short of nuclear.
Not yet. But the benefits you list all took effect long before the downsides, as with most forms of pollution. That short-term reasoning has worked so far, but we're pretty sure that it's starting to fall apart. Pretty soon we're going to be burning increasing amounts of oil to mitigate the effects of burning too much oil, and there aren't a whole lot of ways that can play out. Those shrill predictions from the 60s and 70s were ultimately wrong about how the shape of the supply curve for oil would evolve, but they also completely failed to consider the possibility that using oil could reduce reserves of natural resources other than oil. That's something we now know to be worth worrying about.
If moving away from fossil fuels was free we'd do it. The problem is the huge cost. Hopefully it will happen over the next 100 years. Most people would happily spend 100 / year to get off fossil fuels. But 10K? 5K? That's the question.
Now we can spend money on research which has a huge payoff.
> Fossil fuels give us such good control over our climates that climate-related deaths ... have dropped precipitously over the past century...
What? Are you sure this isn't due to better construction materials and practices? I haven't heard this before.
> ...and fossil fuels come out ahead of everything else out there, short of nuclear.
This probably isn't true, although it depends a lot on how you measure "ahead" and which numbers you choose to run with. If we're looking at EROI (or EROEI -- I guess it's lost a letter recently), then oil is somewhere between 10:1 and 5:1, and falling, and that puts it behind wind and hydro, but ahead of nuclear and solar. (I was surprised by the numbers on nuclear years ago when I first looked at this.) e.g. http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/argument-over-the-...
There are also some strong arguments for the adverse health effects of burning coal and oil (e.g. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/coal-a..., or just go live in Beijing for a year and try not to get a respiratory infection).
I am all in favor of continuing to produce and consume oil where it makes sense to do so. I am also all in favor of continuing to develop replacements for oil as expediently as practical.
Do you think that's an unreasonable position?
What? Are you sure this isn't due to better construction materials and practices? I haven't heard this before.
Construction materials and practices, made possible by what fuel? What powers the excavators, drives the furnaces to used to make steel that goes into everything from rebar to Catepillar tractors to the steel toe in the foreman's boot? What source of energy do people use to get a log from a mountainside to the mill, through it, and then to your backyard? What are the hardhats that everyone wears made of? (Plastic, which is made from oil.) Need I go on?
This same energy source is very cheap. That means that more people can afford new(er) homes. Homes which are equipped with better features that help them resist natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, extreme heat, cold, etc.
Suppose energy were 50% more expensive. It doesn't take an economist to predict that under those conditions, many homes wouldn't be as nice, new and safe. How many more people would have to do without air conditioning? Clean drinking water? How many more people wouldn't be able to afford fresh fruit and vegetables in the winter?
You seem to be saying that the price of energy not only underpins the entire world economy, but that it is the greatest factor in the world economy almost to the exclusion of everything else. I cannot believe that would actually be your argument, so I must be misreading you.
While the cost of energy is certainly a big factor (and I'd readily agree that cheap energy is largely responsible for the industrial age), the world civilization would have collapsed already if it were tied that closely to the barrel price of oil.
Do you think that's an unreasonable position?
I am in favor of people developing any new technology they see fit, on their own accord, and at their own financial risk.
If something is truly better, it will win on an open market. A recent example: when people switched to smartphones, no one had to ban/levy huge taxes on feature phones, or give Apple huge sums of taxpayer money for decades to come up with the iPhone.
Edit: By the way, on the topic of subsidies: many environmentalists argue that fossil fuels get massive subsidies, and that they need subsidies to compete. First of all, this is not true, if you compare the amounts of money redirected per energy unit released by energy source.
On that topic, here's a revealing question: if the subsidy argument were genuine, why are there no calls by environmentalists for the abolishment of all energy subsidies?
Edit 2: s/the greens/many environmentalists/
...Or, were you only suggesting we stop subsidizing the things you don't like?
edit: you edited your comment while I was writing my reply. Had your comment had the phrase "the greens" in it to begin with, I wouldn't've bothered replying to either of your comments.
Which works out to what per kWh? And what's the comparable number for wind? Solar? Or even wind and solar combined?
The most comprehensive report on this to date seems to be http://www.iisd.org/gsi/sites/default/files/relative_energy_... (pdf). It both supports your point and contradicts your conclusion, noting for example, "Readers should exercise caution when comparing one energy type's subsidy estimate with another...", and, "Whether to reform a given subsidy is not necessarily indicated by its total or per-unit magnitude alone."
That said, they estimate a 1.7c/kWh subsidy for nuclear, a 5c/kWh subsidy for renewables (excluding hydroelectricity), a 5.1c/kWh for biofuels, and a 0.8c/kWh subsidy for fossil fuels. They allow for a lot of room in their estimates, with cautions all over the place that hard numbers really aren't readily available, and so on, but let's say that's within an order of magnitude of correct.
So far, there's a solid argument that alternative energy developments are only being propped up by governments, which I assume is your position.
But! There's a catch. Their estimates are based on a single year of energy production -- 2007.
The average wind turbine has a life expectancy of around twenty years (http://www.windmeasurementinternational.com/wind-turbines/om...). The average solar panel has a life expectancy of maybe 25 or 30 years (http://energyinformative.org/lifespan-solar-panels/). The average barrel of oil has a life expectancy of a single combustion engine or oil product.
If we could do something simple like apply a 1/20 multiplier to the subsidy given per kWh for renewables -- and I really have no idea if that's honest or not, since their paper is not as comprehensive when it comes to their sources and calculations -- but if that were possible, then renewables are actually receiving a smaller subsidy per kWh than fossil fuels, produced over the lifetime of the energy product.
But, y'know, this is all really far afield from the original argument to begin with.
It is inarguable that fossil fuels are getting more expensive and should be expected to continue to get more expensive. You yourself rang the alarm over expensive energy in another comment. And we can probably at least agree that cheap energy fueled the industrial age. So, what if it were possible to eventually make energy even cheaper, if we invest in its development now?
Is that really such a terrible idea, investing in the future?
Actually, you don't have to answer that. I guess the label "green" fits me as well as any other label you'd like to use, so I'm de facto wrong about everything anyway.
So what?? In the future, they can be made possible by something else!
Your comment is s complete non sequitur. It's as if you can't see any gray area between something being totally good and being totally bad.
No, all I'm saying is that on balance, something is either totally good for you, or not. (I suppose a third possibility is that it could be neither a net benefit or loss, but that's really splitting hairs, and totally not the case with fossil fuels.)
However, I still have a hard time seeing this as a sustainable path forward. In energy terms it may give us enough time to transition to renewable sources, but the main sources of remaining new carbon are tar sands, fracked shale, and deep-water/arctic drilling, all of which have huge and increasing opposition from local citizens and environmentalists, all of which have a far worse EROEI than traditional crude oil plays, and especially in the case of fracking appear to have absurdly short well lifetimes.
All of this combines I think to demand a fair amount of skepticism for the idea that these alternate sources of carbon can long offset the ongoing peak and eventual decline of crude oil - the EROEI if nothing else seems to metaphysically fuck the idea of transitioning increasing portions of our energy needs to those sources.
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-oil-drum-meant.ht...
I don't think the more intelligent people who argued that peak oil was a reality ever thought it was about anything other than the economics of extracting oil. Most of the discussion on the oil drum focused on what happened when the cost of energy outpaced economic growth.
While I think fracking has been a reprieve, and that natural gas can supply our electricity grid, I still think that there are a number of long-term issues we may face as there are no direct substitutes for cheap oil and all of the infrastructure we have invested to it (let's call it the oil grid).
It's not cheap to replace or retrofit an infrastructure of 250 million cars / trucks / etc in the US that run on gasoline. Or retrofit the gasoline stations for natural gas for that matter. Natural gas may be an alternate source of electricity, doesn't mean it is a perfect or necessarily cheap substitute for oil.
Similar techniques to fracking have been in the industry for many years btw - they started out with nitrogen injection. It did have the effect of temporarily boosting production in declining fields. The unintended consequence however was that instead of a gentle decline, when the fields using nitrogen injection did finally decline in production their 'curves' went very sharply down (instead of a gentle gaussian curve). The rate of decline after nitrogen injection has been extreme in many oil fields around the world.
See what happened to the super giant oil field in Mexico - Cantarell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_Field
I think like Hubbert's peak - which attempted to sum the aggregate harvesting of oil at the time given what technology he was aware of - has been a fairly good approximation until very recently of what actually happened. In my opinion, while new technology may have turned the curve back upward for oil production, I think the aggregate use of fracking may also result in a curve that on the global level also declines sharply (just as in individual fields with nitrogen injection).
I remember at nights the family would sit around a bonfire and talk. The elders would smoke cigars. I still can remember the feeling of the dry summer heat and the star-filled sky.
Sometimes the topic would come up of what would happen if great-grandfather's oil wells dried up.
He always laughed and said the same thing, "Every time they say we're running out of oil, the price goes to the moon."
Then he'd ash his cigar and stare into the fire, "They've been saying it for sixty years. But those wells just keep pumping."
Great-grandfather isn't around anymore, but his wells are still pumping.
This last part isn't related to oil, but one year my great-grandfather tossed a box of fireworks into the bonfire. It was epic. I never laughed so hard in my life. Still haven't.
http://photo.capital.fr/l-enorme-desastre-ecologique-du-petr...
Actually it should remind us of "the limit to growth" book: the meeting point of pollution and lack of resources will destroy us.
Oil extraction costs have risen. Cars have shrunk and alternate energy sources have thrived as a result. If oil supplies continue to be challenged, prices will rise again, and you'll start to see truck fleets switch to natural gas (which is ridiculously abundant).
Society isn't going back to the 19th century.
It doesn't really account for the fact that as the price of oil increases, people get a lot more innovative at finding new supplies of oil. In other words, s is not some constant, but itself some other function, at the minimum dependent on p: s = g(p). Therefore, p = f(g(p)). Lo and behold, we have a way more complex relationship between price and supply than some naively assume.
The fact that the earth has a finite amount of petroleum is irrefutable. Whether or not that matters on any "real" timescale is up for debate.
If we have to we can convert coal to oil, which we wont since other oils aka all the other fossil fuels are pretty plentiful given current tech.
I can't see energy costs going up by a factor of 10 changing my lifestyle much for $ reasons, so harvesting natural gas, oil, coal will be always viable. Even if that 10 times increase is only for a while my net worth's will be so high through technological innovations another 10 fold increase won't matter to me either by that time.
Part of those technological innovations will be cheap energy though so it won't really mater, oil aka fossil fuels won't run out, they will just become redundant.