free html hit counter Peak Oil Debunked: 53. OIL WILL PEAK IN 5 MINUTES

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

53. OIL WILL PEAK IN 5 MINUTES

I'm being facetious, but this is the basic message of the early peakers. Peak already happened or is going to happen very soon. How credible are these people?

Deffeyes: Predicts peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005 (i.e. a few months from now), but is now saying his prediction was "tongue in cheek".

Boone Pickens: See #12.

"Olduvai" Duncan: See #31.

Kunstler: Novelist. No technical background. Knows nothing about oil.

Ruppert: Ex-cop. Conspiracy theorist author. No technical background. Knows nothing about oil.

Savinar: Unemployed lawyer. No technical background. Flogging peak oil merchandise from his website.

Simmons: Has zero first hand knowledge of his primary topic, the Saudi oil fields.

Colin Campbell: Colin's past forecast can speak for itself (click for a clearer picture, source):

Note that world oil production right now is about 84mbd. Campbell predicted a figure of about 50mbd.

Look at the chart again. What if Lynch turns out to be right, as he has been so far? I know this is hard to imagine if you're a doomer, but what if? It's not going to be any big surprise if the early peakers turn out to be wrong, once again. They're a totally rag-tag bunch. The only one among them who really cares about the numbers is Boone. That's why his "predictions" move up with the actual production numbers: 82, then 84, then 84 or 85, then 85 (see #12). He knows them and follows them closely. Campbell, on the other hand, is asleep at the switch, still predicting 82 for this year.

5 Comments:

At Thursday, August 25, 2005 at 10:45:00 AM PDT, Blogger James Shannon said...

The oil curve will likely be a bumpy line trending down, rather than a mirror image of the first half of the parabola. When oil was $10/barrel, there was no incentive to explore for oil. At $68/barrel, there is plenty of market incentive, and the profits from those high prices provide the companies with the resources to explore where they haven't gone before.

 
At Monday, October 31, 2005 at 9:25:00 AM PST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Perhaps the "peak oil problem" is overstated on a global basis by the "doomers".
However locally there are CURRENTLY oil/gas peaks.
Here in the UK natural gas has switched from being a net export to a net import.
Domestic gas bills have doubled in 2 years ... and will probably rise a lot more.
A lot of our power stations run on natural gas ... with more and more gas being imported from fragile countries via fragile routes. Our nuclear reactors are mostly at their end of their lives and many will be closed down in the next few years.
Overnight the UK's energy situation is changing for the worse.
Although there is apparently "plenty of natural gas in the world", the UK is going to be badly hit.
I assume that the oil decline, however slow, will also create severe local "point" problems ... probably sooner than we would like, or expect. How many countries such as the UK [the 4th biggest economy] will it take to go "offline" economically before the total world economy starts creaking?
Richard

 
At Friday, March 10, 2006 at 4:10:00 AM PST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry JD,
I have moved away from Doomerism, but sometimes you go too far.

A recent geology conference in Oz in serious oil circles had about half the audience putting up their hand to say, "Yep... it's here pretty soon if not now!"

It's not just a few retired geologists (and who honestly CARES if Colin Campbell gets the final figures wrong by 2 or even 5 million barrels a day? Doesn't that just mean a year or 2 out? Doesn't it take 20 years for a smoother transition — Hirsch report?)

Check out the ABC's Catalyst before trying to portray an early peak as just a few cranks.
Catalyst


Oh yeah, and don't forget Chevron either.

 
At Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 11:11:00 AM PDT, Blogger The Words of Truth said...

Your attempts to discredit all the authors trying to bring to light the peak oil theory is rather sad. I've read Twilight in the Desert (along with Kunster's and many other's books) and unless he is a liar, which you have no supporting evidence to prove, he does know quite a bit about oil. If you've read his book you would know that it is based on a number of papers from the Society of Petroleum Engineers, and unless he is a human incapable of reading and figuring out the facts, I think he would know a heck of a lot more about oil than you, cause you've never read a single one of the SPE papers(I'm just assuming) The real question is how credible are you as a debunker. Your bias and arguement seems to be right on the side of those proponents of the war on Iraq.

P.S. Were you the one feeding intelligence to Colin Powell for his UN presentation?

 
At Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 2:37:00 PM PDT, Blogger Baba McKensey said...

Onboard High-Tech Oil Rig, U.S. Answers to Rising Prices
Ever-increasing fossil fuel demand has companies going farther and digging deeper for oil than ever before. We visit America's most promising patch.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/extreme_machines/4255407.html

Note the part of the article that says:
Proponents of peak oil, a theory that says we're at, or near, the time when little new oil will be found, causing a rapid decline in petroleum production argue that the action in the gulf is nothing but the last desperate gasps of a dying way of life. Peter Jackson, a senior director monitoring oil industry activities at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an independent think tank in Boston, disagrees. "The overall U.S. supply is gradually decreasing, but that rate of decline will be slowed by contributions from deepwater reserves in the whole Atlantic basin, from the gulf to Nigeria, Angola and Brazil." Jackson sees oil production reaching a plateau, rather than a sharp peak, but not for decades. "And that means we'll have time to mitigate and make some plans and legislate, and that's very different from saying there's going to be a peak in, say, 2010, followed by a precipitous decline."

And it's hard not to argue with a simple fact: Shell and other oil companies aren't spending billions of dollars without believing that it'll pay off for years to come. "We're putting all of our free cash into oil and gas development," says Russ Ford, vice president of development for Shell. "We believe hydro-carbons will be there for a very long time. Nothing is going to knock down oil."
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There's more than twice as much heavy oil as there is conventional oil.
http://www.slb.com/content/services/solutions/reservoir/heavy_oil.asp

http://heavyoilinfo.com/
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This is an optimistic article. Some are more pessimistic.

Natural gas reserves exceed projections, industry claims
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080731/BUSINESS/807310334

The U.S. has enough natural gas resources to last up to 118 years, or 2,247 trillion cubic feet, said the study by Navigant Consulting for the American Clean Skies Foundation. That group is largely funded by natural gas companies.

The Potential Gas Committee, an independent research group, estimated in 2006 that the U.S. has an 82-year supply of natural gas.
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Debunking the Hubbert Model
http://www.gasresources.net/Lynch(Hubbert-Deffeyes).htm
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Oil Shale
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/30/magazines/fortune/Oil_from_stone.fortune/index.htm

Some in Congress are blocking it.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/06/news/economy/birger_shale.fortune/index.htm

 

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