Has Saudi Reached Peak Oil?

silverharp

http://www.aspo-ireland.org/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20Newsletter66.pdf

If you read the second article in ASPO june newsletter, It doesn't look like they can expand oil production from current levels. It remains to be seen if production will drop.

Pocari Sweat

Nice one silverharp, I was looking for an up to date study like this.

The graph on page two shows that the production of Regular Oil reached its peak somewhere between 2004 and 2005 and hence the hike in oil prices over the last year.

Apart from gas and more diverse sources of oil which appear to reach their peak in 2010, it all seems to be all downhill from now on.

It shows the decline up until 2050 where production levels are going to be approximately 50% to 60% of what we currently produce for oil and gas.

From memory I think population is expected to reach over 10 billion by 2050 and because of accelerating oil prices, the cost of grain is due to rise steeply with fertiliser rising inline with oil prices.

The study also shows the need of 1000 tons of water required to produce a ton of flour and 5000 tons of water to produce a ton of cheese.

The depletion of aquifiers (underground water sources) in the US and across the world due to a higher dependence on water required for growing bio-fuels as a supplement to the depletion of oil stocks will ultimately assist a world wide shortage of water along with the effects of climate change.

The rumours that wars in the future will be fought over water as they were over oil in the past springs to mind. Although, well established technologies are already available for processing seawater into extremely high purity water in major plants that have the capacity of over 10 million cubic metres per day at prices (10c per cubic metre / 1000 litres) below conventional water supply sources, so any wars my be a while off yet. Half the operating costs will be for electricity and this is going to rise inline with fuel costs, so water is still going to get very expensive.

It mentions the time bomb of China's economy that is currently racing headlong into massive economic expansion and population growth fuelled by oil at the eclipse of the oil age, which would lead it to cash in the massive dollar holdings which would itself accelerate their devaluation.

Britain is noted as moving to nuclear finally after dragging its heels after peak production of oil and gas was reached thirty years ago and building of new nuclear reactors stopped in 1984. A massive house-building programme is also planned in the UK for an influx of foreign workers which is expecting to increase the population to 67 million within a few years due to a negative national fertility rate.

So water, oil and electric are going to become very expensive year on year from now on regardless of population growth which again I am guessing is expected to double soon after 2050.

I'm sure we will muck through, but I reckon if the gulf between rich and poor is bad at the moment in many countries including the west, there are going to be even more really skint people in the future and some major amounts of idle rich.

silverharp

Pocari Sweat - As you mentioned water, there was a good interview I heard over the weekend, you can listen to it or read the transcript, it covers alot of what you mentioned. As you say the poor will be the first to suffer as the west can outbid everyone else for resources.

http://www.financialsense.com/Experts/2006/Pearce.html

http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/2006/0610pearce.html

Pocari Sweat

I notice the commentary looks at over use and depletion of source water from rivers and aquifiers globally.

It mentions that water is essentially renewable, but it is being badly managed and wasted globally.

Recently in the south of england, one of the main water authorities, in an attempt to approach the problem of ever dwindling supplies to its users, looked at the cost of building a major new reservoir.

The outcome of their costings and approach to the problem came to a very clever conclusion. Instead of wasting water and over using the finite resources available and spending millions on new infrastructure, offer instead free water saving appliances and plumbing to all their customers.

Sure enough, every customer got free water efficient washing machines and dual flush jacks delivered and fitted by the water authority.

The main use of household water : 28% by flushing loos, and 150 litres for every washing machine load, meant that supplying water efficient appliances to customers would approximately save the sort of additional water needed in building a new reservoir, and the savings were offset back to the customer, promoting further awareness of water conservation.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.rte.ie/news/2006/0614/water.html

Water conservation campaign launched

14 June 2006 20:01

According to local authorities, more than 150 million litres of water are wasted every day in the Greater Dublin Region, mainly due to leaky pipes.

In a campaign launched today, the authorities are urging members of the public not to waste water.

According to the Department of the Environment, each person uses an average of 150 litres of water every day.

The campaign is also encouraging people not to let the tap run, to fix leaky taps, to have showers instead of baths and not to use hosepipes in their gardens.

Every day the Greater Dublin Region produces 520 million litres of drinking water, however, 28% is unaccounted for mainly through leaks.

Local authorities say the situation is improving. They say they are spending €118 million euro rehabilitating old pipes.

For more information go to http://www.taptips.ie

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.taptips.ie/in-the-house.htm - water consumption of various activities.

boomshackala

I read recently that Saudi has an area the size of California as yet unexplored for oil in the economist

subway

does water not fall out of the sky for free?

Capt'n Midnight

subway wrote:

does water not fall out of the sky for free?

47% of our planet land surface is categorised as either desert or arid.

Unexplored or undrilled ?
They've almost certainly done satellite surveys, geological ones, and aerial ones by the by. Canada has huge hydrocarbon resources, that aren't economic at present. Depending on who you believe maybe only half the oil is recovered from saudai wells - as much as has been taken out is still down there - the problem is recovery.

Bacteria that could use oil as a food source and convert it to a gas/volatile liquid could be interesting - if it actually worked.

subway

what is the % population of these desert or arid areas?

silverharp

boomshackala wrote:

I read recently that Saudi has an area the size of California as yet unexplored for oil in the economist

I'm not sure about that, but you have to ask why they are looking for oil offshore if there is easy oil to get on land?

Pocari Sweat

The best indication of a shortage of new oil reserves is a steady and consistent pattern of oil price increases. We have been experiencing a consistent and fairly sharp increase for the last 4 years, where petrol was around 65 cents per litre to todays prices of up to 1.20 cents per litre.

I suspect this 2005 regular oil peak has been predicted years ago, and until the labour government were absolutely sure about it and knowing also that the public were clear about it too, it was then they announced a move back to nuclear.

Remember the UK reached peak oil production 30 years ago in the north sea so regional oil reserves do eventually start to dry up, there is only so much of the stuff.

As for water, it may just fall out of the sky for free, but even families that have private rain water tanks with 5,000 to 10,000 gallon capacities fed from roof water collection find that they often dry up and are left with bugger all water.

It is not only water required for private use but the major use in agriculture and industrial production. Remember we all eat food and read newspapers and it takes 1000 litres of water to produce 1 kilogram of flour and 5000 litres of water for 1 kilogram of cheese. Paper making for newspapers uses a huge amount of water and most other products we use daily.

So although the average family use of domestic water is around 120 to 140 gallons per day, the actual water requirements needed for all the food and products we buy comes from a finite supply chain.

silverharp

Pocari - I would disagree slightly with you “price” indicator as indicating peak oil, as price can go up for all sorts of reasons, refinery issues, geopolitical reasons, inflation, demand increase being greater then supply increase (it’s a peak of sorts), I would guess that the current price of oil has a $10 terror premium built in and a $10 investment/futures premium built in, that being said I believe it is one of the canaries in the mineshaft, but if anyone wanted to dismiss peakoil on price they would just point to the 1970s, when oil gets to $200 then it is almost certain.
I’m not sure if any gov. have taken Peak Oil on board, Bush is aware of it as Matt Simmons is/was one of his advisors, however knowing something and acting on it are 2 different things, even the Head of BP thinks a peak is way off, it’s a societal flaw to ignore problems that affect the status quo, look at the Eastern Islanders, the Vikings in Greenland, probably even the Roman empire are examples of societies that couldn’t change their ways until it was too late. Try to convince anyone to give up the suburban dream/nightmare depending on your point of view and you will see what I mean.

boomshackala

The economist went on to say that peak oil may be the wrong word, plateau by 2030 may be a better word as;

• Still many unexplored areas, or areas too expensive to drill now, when they become economical with higher prices they will be tapped, some estimates put a few hundered years of shale oil in the ground.
• As I said already there are large swathes of land undeveloped for oil. As for Saudi Arabia, it is not an optimised oil drilling machine like privitised Russia etc. as its all state owned, incurring all the usual fumblings of goverment industry.
• Natural gas can be converted to diesel without too much bother and there's more of the stuff around than oil.
• Blending with renewables is taking hold and increasing, reducing sole dependance on drilled oil.
• Other alternative forms of energy are now becoming viable, more suited for heating etc...which at the end of the day comsumes more fossil fuels than transport, so the proportion of our total dependance on oil is decreasing.
  All these factors point to a higher than present sustained price for oil and energy in general....until we get an alternative cheap form of energy.

Many people are of the opinion that high oil prices are good, or in fact still to low (or too lowly taxed), as theres no incentive like fear to help us reduce our neglect of the environment:)

silverharp

boomshackala wrote:

The economist went on to say that peak oil may be the wrong word, plateau by 2030 may be a better word as;

• Still many unexplored areas, or areas too expensive to drill now, when they become economical with higher prices they will be tapped, some estimates put a few hundered years of shale oil in the ground.
• As I said already there are large swathes of land undeveloped for oil. As for Saudi Arabia, it is not an optimised oil drilling machine like privitised Russia etc. as its all state owned, incurring all the usual fumblings of goverment industry.
• Natural gas can be converted to diesel without too much bother and there's more of the stuff around than oil.
• Blending with renewables is taking hold and increasing, reducing sole dependance on drilled oil.
• Other alternative forms of energy are now becoming viable, more suited for heating etc...which at the end of the day comsumes more fossil fuels than transport, so the proportion of our total dependance on oil is decreasing.
  All these factors point to a higher than present sustained price for oil and energy in general....until we get an alternative cheap form of energy.

Many people are of the opinion that high oil prices are good, or in fact still to low (or too lowly taxed), as theres no incentive like fear to help us reduce our neglect of the environment:)

The article mentioned shale oil and although the reserves numbers are big, you are talking about heating an area the size of florida up to 400 degrees, so that you can extract the stuff, from what I have read the daily output will not be above 2mbd, plus you have to use alot of energy to extract in the first place. so the net returns would be less then from previous reserves

The main problem with Saudi is that they don't allow auditing of their reserves, you have to trust them, also remember that in the 80's all the countries doubled their reserves to keep quota, so how real were these increases?

I didn't read the article but some studies underestimate depletion of exisiting reserves, which is where Saudi comes in , if they do go into decline then no combination of new discoveries would make up for this shortfall.

That being said high prices are the only way to change unsustainable behaviour so bring it on, but be prepared.

Pocari Sweat

Sean, I think the pro-coal lobby are giving you the jitters on the stats, when there is clear and regular stats, not so much about safer mining in the US nowadays but more about the cost to life in the US because of its use.

Use of coal in the US does actually cause a regular listed figure of around quarter of a million deaths every year, listed not just by one US department regarding statistics but several. It is not a guessed at figure, it is widely accepted and a regularly studied figure which hovers around the quarter million mark from several official sources on the web.

Take 3 minutes to google - "Coal Deaths", add "US" and you will soon see several confirmations of this figure.

Miner deaths in the US do pale into significance compared to actual coal use, but look at China regarding coal mining deaths each year and you will find vast amounts of miner deaths every year.

Get the nearest 10 official sources for stats, add them together (ignore any stats with magnitudes that are multiple factors above or below) and then divide the figure by 10 to get a mean number that you can agree on just to avoid arguements if you want.

Do this for US population deaths per year because of general coal use.

Do the for Chines miner deaths per year because of coal mining.


Now folks, look at the deaths of just these 2 countries, for particular deaths listed from particular activities for just a single 12 month period ....

And then compare these figures, to the same TOTAL 50 year death total in all countries of the world for the whole history of nuclear generation from mining through to use by end users, and using the same mean numerator divisions of reliable stats, give me something that worries me more about nuclear, than coal in total deaths caused, from decade to decade.

I'll gladly put my money where my mouth is. I'm confident enough to know that the understood coal death stats mean I have 100 euros cash to the first no waffle poster that gives a clear, undisputed argument of this.

You have one week. Infact I'll raise it to 200 cash, no worries.

Glenbhoy

Pocari Sweat wrote:

The depletion of aquifiers (underground water sources) in the US and across the world due to a higher dependence on water required for growing bio-fuels as a supplement to the depletion of oil stocks will ultimately assist a world wide shortage of water along with the effects of climate change.

But then the desalination plants required will be a great way of counteracting rising sea levels;)