I’m writing up a story to help dispel some peak oil doomsday silliness, and was looking up various estimates of global hydrocarbon occurrences. I quickly came across the seminal Rogner 1997 paper, which I recall reading back in grad school, that serves as part of the basis of the IPCC’s SRES scenario energy use projections among other things. It tells a rather convincing story:
(Click to embiggen. Also, while consumed is too small to see on this chart, its about half oil and half coal with a sliver of natural gas added in.)
However, a lot has happened in the world since 1997, including the discovery of just how large the North American shale gas formations are and various reassessments of oil, coal, and gas availability. I’m trying to figure out if anyone has produced an updated estimate of global hydrocarbon availability. An updated estimate of cumulative consumption to date (Rogner’s data stops in 1994) would also be handy.
embiggen? 🙂
ivp0: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/embiggen
More interesting charts from the IEA..
http://www.iea.org/weo/docs/weo2010/key_graphs.pdf
Cheap oil is certainly going to peak. There are alternatives, but they are going to be expensive, and energy intensive.
Zeke,
Interesting subject, especially for younger people like you. 😉
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It is prudent to remember that how much fossil carbon (of each type) can be economically extracted depends very much on market price, aided by technological advances. Should current relatively high market prices endure for more than a year or two, these will dramatically expand recoverable reserves. For as long as I have followed the reserves figures, official estimates have always been far lower than they turn out to be some years later.
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There is a lot of available fossil carbon, the only real question is when alternatives like nuclear and solar become competitive in cost. For everything but nuclear, that day seems to me to be very far away.
bugs,
Yep, but thankfully expensive energy drives the development of alternatives (and more efficient use) rather than ending society as we know it (as some of the shriller voices proclaim). The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and all that jazz.
SteveF,
Unconventional sources provide an effective backstop for energy prices, so while “cheap” oil might be a thing of the past, there are limits to how expensive it can become (and how fast). At $200 a barrel we can cost effectively make oil out of coal and gas prices at the pump will be comparable to those Europeans pay. The externalities associated with making oil out of coal, well, those are another story.
Vast quantities of gas
http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/
According to EIA proven global crude oil reserves have more than doubled since 1980, from 645 to 1,342 billion barrels. At this rate we will run out of oil – well, never.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/crudeoilreserves.xls
Coal can be converted to gasoline for <$50/bbl, and at a higher grade. South Africa has been doing it for decades.
NG from coal is cheaper than getting NG from the ground!
slimething,
Color me skeptical of those numbers. If true, why would current world oil prices be above $100 a barrel? And why would South Africa be importing any oil at all (synfuels are only 25% of so of their consumption).
Zeke,
The IEA agrees that coal-to-liquid fuel costs from $50/bbl equivalent. On page 4 of this .pdf: http://www.iea.org/papers/2010/Flyer_RtoR2010.pdf
The reason CTL hasn’t replaced oil is that the price hasn’t been high enough for long enough to justify building the gigantic conversion plant that would be needed. South Africa built theirs due to international sanctions.
$100 a barrel may be the kick for synfuel. Sasol is talking with Tata and the Chinese, so maybe. The last I saw was $2.31 a gallon estimate for synfuel. That would be a little over $3 at the pump.
“bugs,
Yep, but thankfully expensive energy drives the development of alternatives (and more efficient use) rather than ending society as we know it (as some of the shriller voices proclaim). ”
Society will not end abruptly – however the end of cheap resources can well produce first the end of economic growth , and then a severe and long recession – which is already a problem, actually probably much worse than the climatic one. I think that the long lasting economic crisis that we are currently experiencing is mainly the aftermath of conventional peak oil that occurred in 2006 – and that’s only the beginning.
expensive energy drives the development of alternatives ? yes but only of expensive alternatives – so the demand is also lower, because you cannot indefinitely create wealth with indefinitely raising costs and diminishing yields. You do not replace a lack of corn with caviar.
SRES scenarios are essentially unrealistic since they assume we could extract unconventional resources at the same pace as conventional one – which is disproved by the observation of oil production. Tar sands are very far to produce as much oil as the corresponding conventional saudi reserves , for instance, and will never do. Peak oil is just proving that all optimistic scenarios are bogus – and apocalyptic climatic ones as well. But the issues will come from elsewhere.
”
The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and all that jazz.”
That’s exactly the issue : stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, but fossil fuels age will. That’s why we’ll have to face unknown – and probably formidable issues.
This is why we cannot assume technological development makes reducing carbon emissions easier. Technology is a neutral force, and in the future shale gas and gasified coal may benefit from technological development as much or more than efficiency, wind, solar or nuclear. If we chose to reduce emissions, we will need to do so via collective political action — waiting for scarcity and/or technological progress to make the transition easier may backfire as progress mitigates scarcity.
Total hydrocarbons is not the same as total economically feasible to recover hydrocarbons. There is a fundamental metric called “Energy Return on energy Invested” (usually abbreviated as EROI) that measures how much energy you have to spend to get energy. Oil started with a EROI of about 100:1. IOW: You got 100 units of energy for every 1 unit of energy used to produce it. It is currently running more like 20:1 – and still falling. As we exhaust the easily obtained (inexpensive) sources we progressively move to the difficult to obtain (expensive) sources and at some point, long before physical exhaustion, they become too expensive to make economic sense to recover or use.
An analogy: There is an immense amount of dissolved gold in the world’s oceans. You can refine gold right from seawater with sufficient effort. But the *cost* of doing so would exceed any possible profits and so will probably never be done on an industrial scale.
That a resource *exists* doesn’t necessarily mean it is usable in practice.
“If we chose to reduce emissions, we will need to do so via collective political action”
Not so much “action” as appropriate decisions. We could decide to build massive infrastructure to deal with coal to oil conversion to delay the effects of peak oil from declining crude reserves. And still drive around in our combustion engined cars and so on…
Or we could decide to build massive infrastructure to support renewable energy creation. PV solar is my favorite of these.
Either of these options represents a massive infrastructural change to civilisation and whilst we will inevitably do both to some extent, its obvious which direction we should favour.
“Cost” is an illusion. Its not like any components of renewable energy technologies are particularly rare. At today’s rates they do cost more to build in energy usage terms though.
Its all money circulating around the economy so if renewables “cost” more then that simply means more employment to make it happen. Right now, the energy cost is probably still seen to be prohibative, but IMO as we move further from peak oil and costs increase to try to maintain energy production, those costs wont seem so bad.
“The age of cheap oil is over!” or ““cheap†oil might be a thing of the past” … Hmm. If I turn off the kitchen tap then conclude the dam is empty, and so I must begin drinking Coke, then you may conclude that my argument is weak.
The US appears to have turned off its onshore oil tap in the 1970s with tough environmental regulations and now is politically doing the same for its offshore oil reserves. Is US oil now becoming too expensive to drill? Yes. Is the US running out of oil? … Hmm.
It seems that “possible/proven” world oil reserves are too easily substituted with “economically recoverable” world oil reserves, forgetting what factors go into the “economically” bit.
http://en.mercopress.com/2010/10/30/new-ultra-deep-pre-salt-offshore-find-confirms-brazil-an-oil-giant?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily
It also seems that the idea (ideology?) of Peak Oil is easier to accept/promote when these assumptions are not questioned too seriously.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/05/offshore-drilling-realities.html
@Zeke
I assume you’re already aware of it, but if not:
– Kharecha, P.A., and J.E. Hansen (2008): Implications of ‘‘peak oil’’ for atmospheric CO2 and climate. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 22, GB3012, doi:10.1029/2007GB003142.
Julian Simon proved right again. The fact that he is ignored by warmists even though his work is proved right again and again shows that their concerns are not based on reason.
JD
Zeke,
That graphic seriously needs error bars.
Including methane clathrates is highly questionable as no one has a clue as to how to actually recover them, assuming they even exist in concentrations high enough that they would actually be a primary energy source (EROEI > 3). We know beyond a reasonable doubt that OPEC oil reserves are overstated by as much as a factor of two because their production quotas are based on stated reserves.
As for the IEA opinion on conventional oil production:
The real problem is the expenditure on energy as a percentage of GDP. That was over 6% for petroleum in 2008. Remember 2008? The spot price for Brent oil on 4/5 was $122.87/bbl. When, not if, inflation takes off, things will get really ugly.
Conversion costs are based on current prices for the commodities used to build a plant. Energy costs go up, plant construction and conversion costs go up too.
Re: JD Ohio (Apr 7 07:34),
I’m curious why you think that warmists and peak oilers are equivalent. The logical thing would be for peak oilers not to worry about global warming because fossil fuel consumption will peak and fall long before things become really bad in terms of CO2.
For reference, from 1950 to 2010, oil expenditure as a percent of GDP was in the 1-2% range most of the time with 1973-1986 being the major exception period.
DeWitt Payne,
I agree that error bars would be useful (and frankly, the whole thing is highly speculative). The general point is a) there are unconventional sources available that limit long-run price increases beyond a certain point and b) we won’t stop burning fossil fuels because we run out of them (though the decreased availability of cheap oil will make non-fossil alternatives more cost-competitive).
JD Ohio,
Peak oil folks are not too fond of the IPCC, which assumes few constraints to future fossil fuel consumption (though I would argue that the SRES A2 scenario in particular is incredibly unrealistic, but more for its population growth projections than its fossil fuel use per se).
We’ll have peak toilet paper if current energy policy continues and the enviros are allowed to bring our economy to ruin. There is no shortage of oil or it’s cousins.
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As the dollar collapses and oil continues to rise into oblivion simultaneously (they are joined at the hip) along with everything else, only then will Americans realize we’ve been screwed worse than anyone could have imagined. For 30 years opponents of domestic oil production say it will take 10 years to get new oil wells online.
Zeke
Have a look at the November 30, 2010 US Congressional Research Services report on [country-by-country] global hydrocarbon reserves.
Or Peter Glover’s March 23, 2011 article in the Energy Tribune on the same subject.
The USA has by far the largest combined recoverable hydrocarbon reserves on earth. Russia is 2nd, Saudi Arabia 3rd, China 4th, Iran 5th and Canada 6th [based on sources within in the Canadian energy industry, the numbers for Canada are quite conservative].
Throw in the very rapidly growing numbers on proved and recoverable shale gas reserves around the world, and it is clear that the world has hydrocarbon energy reserves for a very long time, without even taking into account the abundance of methane hydrates.
The key element in the equation is not the absence or abundance of hydrocarbon energy reserves, but existing contraints in production rate. That is by far the most important driver of prices.
“Easy”, light crude reserves are likely to have have plateaud, but heavy crude reserves are very large [industry insiders estimate Canadian oil sands contain recoverable reserves twice the Saudi’s]. And access to massive and growing reserves of “easy” gas provides a ready and low eemissions energy source for a long time to come. E.g: at twice today’s production rates Canadian gas reserves equal 100 years plus.
Bruce said in Comment#73108, April 6th, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Vast quantities of gas
http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/
———
Bruce, as your linked source says, horizontal drilling along with hydraulic fracturing has “greatly expanded the ability of producers to profitably produce natural gas from low permeability geologic formations.”
Fracturing, however, is not without risks. It can contaminate water underground, and is suspected of causing earthquakes (Arkansas). The jury is still out on how risky it is.
I hope the verdict favors fracturing. But I will admit to being biased. I hold mineral rights in an area that has know deposits of natural gas.
Comment#73159) Dewitt Payne
Warmists think we live in a finite world. (See Andy Revkin’s blog and his viewpoint.) Simon believed and has demonstrated quite well that increases in human knowledge outpace scarcity. I agree that from a purely logical standpoint peak oil could help the warmist cause because it could lead to less CO2. Instead most warmists use Peak Oil as part of their overall catastrophic viewpoint — human beings (from their perspective) have fouled a finite planet, and peak oil is a symptom of human beings’ over consumption.
JD
Zeke
You may find it interesting to have a look at Robert Hazen’s [Carnegie Institution for Science, DC] Deep Carbon Observatory program, funded by the Alfred Sloan Foundation.
It aims to get a better understanding of all carbon in the Earth, not just the carbon in the atmosphere, oceans, etc., but more in particular carbon in the earth’s mantle and core. This where we get diamonds and graphite from. And maybe also crude.
Western petroleum geology has traditionally held that hydrocarbon fuels are biotic, i.e. that they are various forms of “dinosaur juice” 🙂 thereof the moniker “fossil” fuels. Some 125 years ago a Russian scientist, Mendeleev, argued instead that temperatures and pressures of the mantle would convert carbonates and water into hydrocarbons. The Soviets adopted the idea [which probably contributed to its continued rejection in the West] and there is a body of evidence that it has merit.
The bottom line is that if it turns out that hydrocarbons are abiogenic [i.e. not fossil], than they are in all likelihood considerably more abundant than we understand, and will be found in places where we haven’t even started looking.
Max_OK
If the hydrocarbons are there, they will get used. With nuclear wingshot after the Japanese earthquake[s] and a growing body of data that shows that wind and solar can not be relied on in terms of “being there when you actually need them” [ref the latest report by the Muir Conservancy [sic] on wind power in the UK], there are no alternatives.
We are now seeing environmental considerations redirecting how the oil is extracted from the Canadian oil sands: no more strip mining, the entire process occurs underground using recycled water. Same thing goes for coal gasification: in Alberta it is being done “in situ” -i.e. in and around the coal seem- far underground. No more mining. The same “gentrification” will happen with shale gas extraction as well.
tetris,
I’m fairly skeptical about abiogenisis of oil. This seems to provide a good overview of the problems with the hypothesis: http://static.scribd.com/docs/j79lhbgbjbqrb.pdf
I’ll look into Hazen’s work though.
Also, I hear from my energy mentor Arnulf Grubler that Rogner will be publishing an updated assessment this year, but in general the hydrocarbon numbers haven’t changed that dramatically.
tetris (Comment#73175),
.
Yes, thermodynamics (and some confirming lab results from heated diamond-anvil presses) suggest that there exist combinations of temperature and pressure where water, carbonates and reduced iron (eg, iron, magnetic iron oxide) can combine to generate abiogenic hydrocarbons. There is no real doubt this is true.
.
What is doubtful is how much (if any) abiogenic hydrocarbon is actually formed in the Earth. There have been a few cases where test wells suggest hydrocarbons may exist in locations where they are not expected, and this is consistent with an abiogentic origin, but all this is very sketchy. What is clearly known is that most of the chemical structures in liquid/semi-solid petroleum come from biological sources (by the way, mostly algae, not dinosaurs!).
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I would not bet the ranch on a significant amount of petroleum being of non-biological origin.
Max_Ok: “Fracturing, however, is not without risks. It can contaminate water underground, and is suspected of causing earthquakes (Arkansas). The jury is still out on how risky it is.”
No, the jury is still out on how well the anti-fracking propaganda will succeed. The science says fracking is safe.
““We deal in facts based on sound science,†said DEP acting Secretary Michael Krancer. “Here are the facts: all samples were at or below background levels of radioactivity; and all samples showed levels below the federal drinking water standard for Radium 226 and 228.†”
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/03/radium_tests_contradict_new_yo.html
On the other hand, drinking water wells ARE contaminated by Radium, but they get a pass.
“Of the 59,000+ community water systems in the United States, at any time, approximately one to three percent exceed the drinking-water standard for radium.”
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q3383.html
I doubt the NY Times propaganda sheet mentioned that fact.
TimTheToolMan (Comment#73139),
.
So taking this logic to its conclusion, we can simply pay more people to build cars by hand and abandon lower cost methods with no economic harm? Wealth = (net production/number of people). Anything that reduces net production (like very high cost alternative energy and all the investment and labor needed to make it) reduces wealth.
DeWitt Payne said “Including methane clathrates is highly questionable as no one has a clue as to how to actually recover them”
—
Actually, extraction works with technology we have now. Have a little faith in human ingenuity.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/clathrate-to-production/
For more on the economic viability of methane hydrates, see: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Research/TNT/WEB/Workshops/hydrates/Methane_Hydrates_Agenda.html
Short story is that lots of folks are working on ways to harvest them.
Nice find, Zeke. Thanks for posting!
I don’t know the author, but the resource base picture is bog-standard for natural resources. The rule of thumb: size of the resource (as actual quantity of the goodies contained) goes up by an order of magnitude as the grade drops by half. This is for metal ores, mind (my field), but I’m sure the mineral-fuels guys have a similar RofT.
See
http://www.nohotair.co.uk/2011/63/1876-shale-gass-wow-moment.html
for shale-hosted NG resource news. H/t Bishop Hill
Cheers — Pete Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Arizona and New Mexico (USA)
And a further thought:
Lots of shale-gas is Really Good News, because the spread of prosperity is critically dependent on cheap energy, and NG is a whole hell of a lot cleaner fuel than coal. Let’s hope lots of experienced hydrofrack engineers are headed for China — though it would be a bit of a shame to burn all that NG in power-plants.
Does anyone know how easy it is to convert a coal-fired generating station to NG?
Cheers — Pete Tillman
—
“As Breeders Test DNA, Dogs Become Guinea Pigs.”
–New York Times headline, 12 June 2007
Re: Zeke (Apr 7 11:38),
Zeke said, “I’m fairly skeptical about abiogenisis of oil.”
I’m very skeptical. I’m not an oil geologist, but lots of my friends are, and I don’t know any who take the idea seriously.
Be nice if it were true. Cold fusion would be even nicer….
@SteveF (Comment#73195)
That would be true if renewables were labour intensive in an ongoing sense but the high costs are initial ones. Setting up the factories to build them and so on.
Thats one of the big reasons I prefer PV solar over say wind. The ongoing costs are far lower.
Bruce said in Comment#73182) April 7th, 2011 at 11:46 am
Max_Ok: “Fracturing, however, is not without risks. It can contaminate water underground, and is suspected of causing earthquakes (Arkansas). The jury is still out on how risky it is.â€
No, the jury is still out on how well the anti-fracking propaganda will succeed. The science says fracking is safe.
—————————
Unfortunately, the jury is still out.
The SAB is in the process of reviewing the draft of the EPA study.
http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/class2/hydraulicfracturing/upload/HFStudyPlanDraft_SAB_020711.pdf
Zeke/Lucia
the present shale oil comments bring me back to my home town (Broxburn, Scotland) history on this very thing, if it worked then but was dropped because of cheap crude being cheaper, then it could work again now (maybe).
link – http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/broxburn/broxburn/index.html
The best data I’ve found is at:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ndp030/global.1751_2007.ems
TimTheToolMan
The economic cost is the economic cost. It matters not if it is assoicated with high capital investment, high continuing materials cost, or high continuing labor costs. Alternatives are not close to economically competitive with conventional sources, especially natural gas. Making the substitution of higher cost supplies for lower cost supplies must reduce wealth.
SteveF (Comment#73226)
“Making the substitution of higher cost supplies for lower cost supplies must reduce wealth.”
Not necessarily true. The problem with energy use is that external costs are not accounted for, which means that we are fooled into using energy that is ultimately higher cost, because it is immediately lower cost. A carbon tax is a good way (i.e., economical way) to address this problem.
KAP,
The problem with external costs is that they are ill defined and ambiguous… the ‘external cost’ is mainly in the eye of the beholder. You might (and I suspect do) value the external costs of fossil energy production very differently than I do. It is essentially a political question, not an economic question.
Oh, I wouldn’t call the EPA a jury. More like a bought and paid friend of George Soros who stands to lose a lot of money if cheap gas undermines his “green” investments.
Zeke [et. al.]
Before anyone jumps to conclusions, just because I brought up the subject, I did not say that I have any particular reasons to support the abiogenic hydrocarbon hypothesis. I do note however, [1] that a number of generally upper grade business/industry media have cared to actually take it seriously enough to mention it. And [2] that over the past decades hydrocarbons have actually been found in places where traditional [western] petroleum geology excluded such discoveries. Hard to argue with crude in a barrel.
And Peter D. Tillman, like you I also know a number of highly respected geologists -recognized experts in their fields who have served as outside consultants to multinational mining and oil-and-gas companies for years, who are very much aware that there is a body of data you can not ignore which supports the abiogenic view of things [just for teasers, have a look at the geological underpinnings of the recent Brazilian offshore finds]. There are a good number of industry folks who would tell you that those are not necessarily “classical” geological circumstances. So please don’t shoot the “messenger”.
Meanwhile, fact remains that the world has no shortages of hydrocarbon energy sources as things stand.
My only point was the original one: just assume for a moment that Mendeleev was correct..
SteveF
I am a hard nosed investor who does not bet the farm. Ever.
Until I learn of something new that is serious and verified and that I can “hang my coat on”, I have a broadly diversified set of holdings which include the entire hydrocarbon investment spectrum.
The developments of which -as you may have noted from my comments here- I track with keen interest. Should a credible company produce verifiable evidence of abiogenic hydrocarbon energy sources, once I properly understand its implications, I will adjust my portfolio holdings accordingly.
SteveF (Comment#73229)
“It is essentially a political question, not an economic question.”
Wrong. The external costs are economic, measurable, and have been measured. What to do about it is the political question. I think you and I can agree that the external costs are greater than zero. Hence, the current zero carbon tax is economically unjustified.
@SteveF “Making the substitution of higher cost supplies for lower cost supplies must reduce wealth.”
Not necessarily because the total cost may not be higher. There is still significant cost associated with exploration, retrieval, processing and distribution of fossil fuels and these are ongoing costs. Compare that to a much higher upfront cost of say switching to PV solar but then potentially much lower ongoing costs.
I dont think its as cut and dry as many would believe.
Plus if you’re an AGW alarmist you have the added bonus of reduced “cost” to the environment. I’m not convinced on that one myself but politically its a real factor.
SteveF: your
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I would not bet the ranch on a significant amount of petroleum being of non-biological origin.
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That would be wise. Larry Ryckman, pro sports team and entrepreneur spent a lot of money on trying to prove abiotic oil. He would have been better off not spending those millions, as he went bankrupt in 1996.
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However, even if oil was abiotic, the formation and migration from the upper mantle to a recoverable depth would be measured in geological time. In other words, nature will not refill the tank in any time frame needed by human consumption. But, the tank might be filled in a hundred or so million years after our passing.
The oil will eventually run out, regardless of its origins.
Max_Ok: Your
.
Fracturing, however, is not without risks. It can contaminate water underground, and is suspected of causing earthquakes (Arkansas). The jury is still out on how risky it is.
.
Let me speak as an expert, and a court recognized expert in fracturing, having been asked to testify as an expert in a civil case.
Fracturing, in the 60 plus years it has been used, and the millions of fracturing treatments, has never once to have found to have been the cause of ground water contamination.
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All ground water contamination cases have been found to have been:
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1. Methane producing bacteria in the ground water
2. having drilled the water well through coal (and methane) formations.
3. leaking cement or casing from the drilled well.
.
The last is a function of drilling, not fracturing. Its also a ‘point source’ leak, so relatively easy to repair. Repair is also mandated by most provincial and state laws.
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Its also physically impossible for most fractures to reach ground water. Fractures initiate and spread radially until they reach a barrier. The barrier can either be mechanical (stronger rock) or a permeability barrier. This last one is where the fluid leaks off faster than the solids entrained in the fluid, and the solids plug the fracture.
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Thus, for a fracture to reach surface, it assumes no barriers. For all gas producing formations, this is impossible. If there were no barriers, there would be no gas. It would long ago have leaked to surface.
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It is also impossible from a volume perspective. Assume a fracture is initiated at 2000 meters below the water table. Assume a barrier below, but none above, so the fracture is semi-circular in shape.
A fracture of 2000 meters radius, and 1 mm across the fracture, would have a volume of about 6250 m3, or just under 40,000 bbls.
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A fracture of 1 mm is impossibly small, as the sand carried in the fluid cannot enter the fracture, and the treatment would pressure out.
.
A very large fracture treatment is a few thousand barrels in size. Most treatments are a few hundred bbls. To pump 40,000 bbls, you would need 1000 large tanks. Put in a line, the tanks would be 2 miles from the first to the last.
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As a fracture is radial in shape, and assuming a limit in pump rate, the farther from the source, the lower the velocity of fracture initiation at the edge. Eventually, the vertical velocity would be less than the settling velocity of the sand, and a pressure event would occur, and the fracture stopped, at least vertically.
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Using pressure analysis, one can determine the height and extent of a fracture, real time. If a fracture is suspected to be going out of zone, it would be stopped, as its just extra cost, for no return, to continue pumping. Its uneconomic to pump outside the zone of interest.
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As for the earthquakes? Well, a fracture treatment IS an earthquake, on a very small scale. We are splitting the rock in a local area.
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The smallest energy earthquake that can be felt is about magnitude 2, or about 1.3 x 10^8 joules of energy. This is an order of magnitude greater than the horsepower of the pumps being used to fracture the rocks, in the largest treatment ever done. Its two orders of magnitude greater than an average treatment.
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While it is possible for a fracture to initiate an earthquake, it only means that the fracture was literally the straw that broke the camel’s back. That fracture was ready to slip anyway.
Les, I hope you are right.
Show me evidence that any significant find of oil has a 13C/12C ratio that is consistent with abiotic origin. Traces of methane with such ratios have been found in hard rock mines, but the operative word is traces. There’s also the problem that no one has ever shown that methane can be reformed into long chain (C16 or higher) hydrocarbons under geologic conditions. Any concentration of short chain hydrocarbons like ethane and propane at high pressure and temperature are in equilibrium with methane and will crack back to methane as the pressure drops.
Kerogen (the organic part of oil shale) cracks to shorter chain hydrocarbons as the temperature and pressure increase. At sufficient depth, it cracks all the way to methane. But that methane still has a lower δ13C than in carbonate rock.
KAP,
I don’t think we can even agree on that. If rising atmospheric CO2 and slightly longer growing seasons at higher latitudes have increased food production, reducing global average food prices, then burning fossil fuels might even have a net negative ‘external cost’. The analyses I have read on external costs (some years back, I admit) were unpersuasive. Too many value judgments involved. If you can site a study or two of external costs that you think are rigorous and non-ideological, I would be happy to look again.
Re: Roger Andrews (Apr 6 20:46),
Look at the details of that spreadsheet, particularly in the 1980’s for the OPEC countries. Iran’s “proven” reserves went from 48.8 in 1987 to 92.85 in 1988. Iraq went from 47.1 to 100.00 the same year. Those numbers are bogus. They were raised in response to the OPEC policy of production quotas being proportional to proven reserves. The UK was supposed to have domestic coal supplies that would last for hundreds of years until suddenly they didn’t. The UK now imports more than half the coal it consumes annually. Coal to Newcastle indeed!
tetris (Comment#73239),
As DeWitt noted, there is no credible evidence of abiotic petroleum… from anywhere… and that includes the recently discovered “surprising” Brazilian deep water fields east of Sao Paulo State. Production of abiotic petroleum is thermodynamically allowed under certain circumstances, but it is not clear if those circumstances actually ever occur on Earth (outside of a laboratory). The overwhelming evidence (chemical structures, isotope ratios, geological formations, etc.) is that all known petroleum, including all known reserves, is biological in origin.
DeWitt and SteveF
All I did was flag that the Deep Carbon Observatory program -which appears to be a bona fide scientific undertaking- also intends to take another look at the “abiogenic” hydrocarbon question. I merely noted that the concept has been around for some 120 years and that it has been roundly rejected by western petroleum geologists. I did not say that I am aware of any verifiable proof that it actually exists -only that it would likely have interesting implications if it did. I did not suggest that the Sao Paulo finds in Brazil in any way constitute evidence for “abiogenic” hydrocarbons, only that given the geology involved these finds, in the eyes of a good number of industry experts, were “surprising.
DeWitt,
I thought the declining UK coal production was more due to the “dash for gas” in the ’80s and Thatcher’s crushing of the coal miner unions than actually running out of the stuff.
It also may be quite a bit cheaper to import the stuff than produce it domestically; the UK hardly has the wide open areas that the U.S. has that make coal production more economically viable even with high labor costs.
There’s something I find mysterious about coal.
In 2005 99% of the coal in the UK and Germany vanished compared to what they had in 1980. That’s quite a reassessment of reserves. People must have been incredibly stupid back in the 70’s. When I was in school (c. 1987) the geography books said West Germany alone had hundreds of years worth of coal and German GDP grew about 3%/year subsequently. It beggars belief to be honest.
Funny that all that coal vanished while the CAGW bandwagon was building up steam. A minor update on Rogner I guess.
1987-2005 are on pages 25 & 26 of this .pdf:
http://www.peakoil.net/files/EWG-Coalreport_10_07_2007.pdf
Unrelated trivia: Mrs. Thatcher was married to a senior executive at Burmah Oil (BP).
Re: Zeke (Apr 8 13:32),
From the link in the post above
North Sea oil and gas as well as politics had a lot to do with coal production in the UK, but as I said above, there were lots of proved reserves until suddenly there weren’t. I don’t trust any OPEC country’s reported petroleum reserves, or rather I trust them to be inflated by at least a factor of two, and even the USGS has been wildly overoptimistic in the past.
DeWitt Payne,
You don’t trust OPEC but you accept 50 billion tonnes of German coal disappearing in 2004 without batting an eyelid?
Regardless, there’s twice as much in oil sands than there is in conventional crude reserves, even if they get away with the Carbon Capture and Storage aka EOR scam.
Those hydrocarbon bonds were much too lovingly constructed to break just for the energy within them. We need them for structure, to house and clothe the teeming billions, and to contain all their ‘stuff’.
==============
DeWitt
Are you suggesting that there are no credible data bases for hydrocarbon reserves available today, and by extension that whatever data we have is overestimating the actual reserves?
The Dutch thought the latter until a few years ago. It has since turned out that the “known” and accessible natural gas reserves under the North Sea are in fact by far larger than estimated a couple of decades ago. All because of then unknown or unproven extraction technologies.
As you have pointed out before: it is not the necessarily the reserves that are all important. It’s the production capacity that is the key.
Where you and I may be on different tracks, is that I hold a more optimistic take on our ability to increase production. Markets [taken all together] in the end will rule. If it’s there, it will be extracted at a market price. And as Julian Simon’s [by now verifiable] legacy tells us, that is all that counts.
An interesting post, with oil hitting $112 – even more interesting.
When discussing oil, you have to look at the Green River Oil Shale in the US and the Oil Sands in Canada. New tech will allow even more oil to be recovered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands
The estimates for recoverable oil in the Green River Oil shale are astounding:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2005/5294/pdf/sir5294_508.pdf
“As the Green River oil-shale deposits in Colorado became better known, estimates of the resource increased from about 20 billion barrels in 1916, to 900 billion barrels in 1961, and to 1.0 trillion barrels (~147 billion tons) in 1989 (Winchester, 1916, p. 140; Donnell, 1961; Pitman and others, 1989).”
SteveF (Comment#73278)
I would start with the ExternE project, an ongoing assessment of the EU. http://www.externe.info/oldvolumes/vol8.pdf
For a comprehensive review of the current literature, including a massive number of references, see Tol 2007: http://fnu.zmaw.de/fileadmin/fnu-files/publication/working-papers/margcostmetawp.pdf
The main message of Peak Oil isn’t about how much hydrocarbon material exists, it’s about the rate at which it can be brought to market. It doesn’t matter how much oil is present if we can’t get around 85 million barrels of it to market every day. To bring it to market takes huge quantities of steel, skilled manpower, drilling rigs, etc. These are in limited supply, the low-hanging fruit is long gone, and the notion that we are presently producing about as much oil as will ever be humanly possible seems quite credible. That remains true even if there are gazillions of barrels of ultimately recoverable material.
Re: FergalR (Apr 8 18:35),
It didn’t disappear. It was never there in the first place.
It’s interesting to note figures 6 and 8 in the paper you link to in the OP. They predict that once oil gets to around $70 or 80 a barrel in 1990 dollars (a bit over $100 a barrel in 2010 dollars) the supply will become very inelastic and dramatic price rises will not produce a significant increase in supply.
Figure 6 shows this for oil and gas, and figure 8 says that the same economics holds for the supply of all hydrocarbons.
On the one hand, if I’m interpreting it correctly (maybe I’m not?) this implies a severe peak-oil price shock when oil hits $100 a barrel or so (in 2010 dollars) (i.e., current conditions).
On the other hand, as Rogner notes at the end of this paper, this also means that “humankind is well positioned to substantially increase climate-destabilizing and local air quality–assaulting emissions … [and] this can be done quite cheaply.” If we run his numbers through David Archer’s online interface to GEOCARB, it gives a peak atmospheric CO2 concentration of around 2500 ppm (roughly nine times preindustrial), a peak warming of around 10 Celsius (assuming a 3.0 C climate sensitivity), and significant changes in ocean pH.
Put this together with Sherwood and Huber’s work, suggesting that 11-12C warming could (note “could,” not “will;” there’s a lot of uncertainty) very well be sufficient to produce sporadic heat waves that would kill everyone without air conditioning in most of the currently inhabited parts of the planet, and we’ve got a concise statement of the problem.
Part of adaptation to climate change, in this event, would mean providing many billions of people in parts of the world that are currently extremely poor with air conditioned homes and sufficiently reliable electricity that it won’t conk out for even a couple of hours under peak load conditions, and at prices they can afford when fossil fuels are all selling for the equivalent of $100 a barrel oil or more.
tetris:
“Western petroleum geology has traditionally held that hydrocarbon fuels are biotic, i.e. that they are various forms of “dinosaur juice†thereof the moniker “fossil†fuels. Some 125 years ago a Russian scientist, Mendeleev, argued instead that temperatures and pressures of the mantle would convert carbonates and water into hydrocarbons. The Soviets adopted the idea [which probably contributed to its continued rejection in the West] and there is a body of evidence that it has merit.
The bottom line is that if it turns out that hydrocarbons are abiogenic [i.e. not fossil], than they are in all likelihood considerably more abundant than we understand, and will be found in places where we haven’t even started looking…”
Hummm…
Titan’s Surface Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html
Peak ‘anything’ is an economics question.
So if people are talking about production peaks of anything in an economics sense then it’s not silly.
The ‘peak’ production of coal will occur when the cost to extract and deliver it to market exceeds the cost of a substitute good.
Hence, ‘How much coal is in the ground’ is a not particularly elegant way to estimate how much coal humanity may potentially use unless one concludes that no substitute will become available at any price.
The IPCC scenario’s are based on how much coal is in the ground.
Which to use Zeke’s phrase is ‘silly’.
The current price of a tonne of 5500kcal/kg steam coal on global markets is currently $130/ton and rising at an average rate of 20% per year. This gives coal fired generation a floor price of 6.5 cents/KWh. Increase at the rate of 20% per year.
If I use an installed price for a solar panel of $7,000 KW in an area with a solar insolation factor of 4 hours/day and a panel life of 25 years I get a cost of 19 cents/KWh.
If the price of coal continues to rise at the rate of 20% per year in 7 years solar panels will be cheaper then burning coal in much of the world.
If the price of coal stays the same and the price of solar panels continues to drop by it’s annual trend of 8% per year then solar panels will be cheaper in 10 years.
The math within the US is completely different because we have Powder River Basin where hundred foot thick coal seams a few feet from the surface are just begging to be dug up and burned.
The rest of the world has nothing that even comes close to the Powder River Basin. A single miner in the Powder River basin can scoop out 30 tons in an hour. The EU’s most efficient coal mines are in the UK and a miner there can manage all of 1.5 tons per hour…then we go over to China and a miner can manage to scoop out a ton of coal in 3-4 hours.
Humanity doesn’t stop burning coal or gas or oil because we run out. We will stop when something else is cheaper.
Charts and graphs about how much ‘resource’ is available don’t tell use anything more then ‘how much resource’ is available. No one burns coal, oil or natural gas because they are emotionally attached to it. They burn it because it is priced more competitively then substitutes.
Re: harrywr2 (Apr 9 14:51),
So solar is 19 cents/kWH with insolation of 4 hours /day. Does that include the cost of the battery packs and associated electronics so that electricity is available 24/7? Somehow I don’t think so. If you want to use NiMH batteries remember that for longest life you can’t use more than 10% of the capacity as in the Prius where it charges to only 55% max and discharges to 45% min with an efficiency of 66%. With deep cycle lead/acid, you can use more of the capacity because they aren’t going to last more than about three years anyway. Maybe you and your neighbors can get together and buy a trailer full of sodium/sulfur batteries from Japan for load leveling. They’re close to 90% efficient. Don’t think you’re going to get a free ride from the local electric grid. They only do that now because the law forces them to do it and then only for a small percentage of the customers.
DwWitt Payne,
Regarding disappearing coal, the Energy Watch report I linked above tells us what happened to it:
“The new numbers comply with the recommendations of the UN-ECE, within the context of the definitions specified by the SER.â€
The (European) Strategic Energy Review – which reported 3 years after the disappearance – was billed as “Driving Investment in Clean and Secure Energy”.
The coal was put beyond use to justify the existence of the useless renewables industry. Good luck to them against shale gas.
DeWitt Payne (Comment#73399) ,
Yes, solar electric power is very uneconomical. As the Germans are learning… to their dismay.
KAP (Comment#73358),
Thanks for posting those links. I looked over the (very long) study from the European commission. It is very much like the studies I had read before. Here are some of the the problems I see:
.
1) Virtually every future ‘cost’ (which is what present day ‘investment’ of high fossil fuel cost is supposed to avoid) is based on extremely uncertain data, the most obvious of which is uncertainty in the magnitude of future warming. The further into the future those costs are projected, the larger and more uncertain they become. Which is to say that the dominant ‘external costs” are far in the future…. and very uncertain. Nobody really knows what is going to happen.
2) Almost every cost has a ‘value judgment/political’ component. The importance of the wealth of people who will suffer due to global warming compared to the wealth of those who emit CO2 is but one example.
3) The range of discount rates examined is comically low. Nobody invests in a project with very uncertain benefits unless the rate of return is over 10% (more like 15% to 20% would be a more typical minimum rate of return for a project with reasonably certain return). The maximum discount rate (10%) examined in the study (and the discount rate the study authors insist should not be used!), even assuming all the cataclysmic future costs are correct, show that the net present value of CO2 emission is low. If you consider a more realistic discount rate (one more suitable for low certainty estimates of return), the present value of CO2 emissions would be tiny.
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If you know someone who is involved in evaluating capital investment projects, you might ask them what the internal rate of return is on major projects that gain investor approval.
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So, not much has changed since the last time I looked at this kind of study. IMO, these are studies that are done to confirm a certain politically desired outcome. I find them entirely unconvincing.
Zeke (Comment#73299) April 8th, 2011 at 1:32 pm
I thought the declining UK coal production was more due to the “dash for gas†in the ’80s and Thatcher’s crushing of the coal miner unions than actually running out of the stuff.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
UK coal production peaked in 1913
Link
By the 1950s mined out seams were shutting a great many old mines. Especially the shallow narrow seams that had been economic in the days before the big coal mining machines.
‘The dash for gas’ was the 90s, the drop in UK coal production was the 50s and again in the 80s when subsidies for mines were stopped.
The loss of much of the shipping and hence steal industry meant there was less domestic demand for coaking coal, also a factor. But what ultimately killed UK coal was the advent of much cheaper coal from abroad.
The coal is down there, but it is in tight, tough to mine seams and getting it out to turn to oil is not going to produce oil you can fly to Spain for £99 with.
DeWitt Payne (Comment#73399) April 9th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Re: harrywr2 (Apr 9 14:51),
So solar is 19 cents/kWH with insolation of 4 hours /day. Does that include the cost of the battery packs and associated electronics so that electricity is available 24/7?
Dewitt, the point of my comment is that the cost trend lines between ‘coal’ and ‘renewables’ is headed towards a point of intersection.
The ‘intermittent’ issue resolves when fuel costs and solar costs intersect.
I.E. When the price of power from the grid exceeds the price of producing power on my roof using solar panels I will use the power from my roof when the sun shines and buy grid power when it doesn’t.
The current residential rate for electricity in California is about 15 cents/KWh. In Southern California the solar insolation factor is 6.
Not including interest payments(a valid argument) you can get solar panels installed for about $7,000/KW. Which works out to a lifecycle cost(not including interest) of about 12 cents/KWh.
Most of that $7,000 is sales and installation cost. I.E. The solar panel installation contractor makes good money. The price might be substantially lower if the project was coupled with say replacing your roof which has to be done periodically anyway.
Solar is the ‘worst case’ of the alternative energy options.
If I work take out a 20 year loan at at 5% the monthly payment would be $46. I would get 180 KW/month from my solar panel which would cost me $27 if I bought it from the Southern Californian grid. Given the price of solar is decreasing by 8% per year it will be 6 years before the cost of the solar panels drops enough so that the value of the electricity they produce exceeds the Southern Californian grid price.
Solar has a ways to go.
At $130/tonne(The price Europeans and Asians pay for coal) the fuel cost alone to produce 8 TWh/year in a 1 GW coal fired plant is $520 million.
How much does a nuclear power plant cost?
In China they cost about $2 billion/GW.
If I take out a 20 year mortgage at 5% on my Chinese nuclear plant my annual loan payment will be about $150 million.
A 1 GW on shore wind farm costs about $1 billion.
It will produce 2 TWh per year and has a life of 20+ years.
The annual loan payment on a 20 year 5% mortgage would be about $75 million. Burning the equivalent amount of coal will cost $130 million/year.
Do you think the reason the Chinese are building 200GW of wind farms has to do with their ‘superior environmental concern’ or their desire to save money?
How about the 30 GW of solar panels they plan on sticking out in the Gobi desert?
How about ‘peak oil’.
Residential Natural Gas price in the US is $10/MBtu. A gallon of gasoline contains 114,000 BTU’s and at $100/barrel costs about $2.50 Gallon before taxes,refining and distribution. So a gallon equivalent of natural gas costs $1.14.
A dual fuel gasoline/natural gas Chevy Aveo sold in India costs $1100 more then it’s gasoline only counterpart. (The list price for a Chevy Aveo in India is about the same as the US)
An Aveo gets 35 MPG. The fuel cost running on gasoline is 7.14 cents per mile(excluding taxes,refining and distribution costs), the cost running on natural gas ends up being 3.25 cents per mile.
A savings of 3.89 cents per mile.
The additional payment on a 60 month car loan at 6% interest for the $1100 dual fuel option would be $21/month.
If you drove 539 miles per month using the natural gas tank you would save money.
Dual fuel is nice because you can still go on trips to places without natural gas filling stations.
My overriding point being that the people who are screaming, ‘OMG we will all burn if we use all of our coal, oil and natural gas’ and the people screaming ‘OMG we are going to run out’ are both ignoring economic substitution.
We aren’t going to burn all of our coal, oil and natural gas. Something else will become cheaper long before that happens.
So a $4 billion investment in wind-farms offsets $520/billion a year in coal fired fuel cost.
Harrywr2,
“So a $4 billion investment in wind-farms offsets $520/billion a year in coal fired fuel cost.”
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If that were true, everyone would be falling all over themselves to install wind turbines. It’s not, and they aren’t.
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You continue to suggest that buying power from the local utility when your alternative supply is not available is a viable economic option. It’s not. If a lot of people started to do that, the local utility would have to boost rates to cover capital costs, and make additional capital investment to modify their generating plants to allow people to use lots of power from the grid whenever conditions are not right to generate alternative energy, and little or none when conditions are favorable. Either the local utility has a huge overcapacity and charges a dear price for their not-always-used electricity, or you pay for your own energy storage. And your own storage probably triples the effective cost for any alternative supply. There are no free lunches.
Re: harrywr2 (Apr 10 12:28),
A 1 GW wind farm produces 2 TWh in a year, a ~25% capacity factor. A 1 GW nuclear plant, OTOH should operate at 80% or higher capacity factor producing at least 7 TWh/year. Even in France where they throttle their nukes a lot, the capacity factor is over 60%. Nuclear is base-load and easier to integrate into a power grid. In terms of power produced as opposed to nameplate capacity, nuclear still comes out ahead.
You also have to remember that the Chinese government is still run by a lot of old line communists who have only a passing acquaintance with real economics and the idea of return on investment.
Re: harrywr2 (Apr 10 12:28),
That’s $520 million not billion, right?
And of course that’s not the whole story because wind isn’t base load quality power and coal is. You need a lot of fast spin-up power generating capacity to back up wind. Hydro-electric power is ideal. It’s the effective equivalent of pumped storage. But unless you live in Denmark, it’s much less convenient and even Denmark loses money on their wind farms because they have to sell their excess power to Norway at wholesale and buy power when the wind isn’t blowing at retail. So the true capital cost of wind power has to include the cost of the backup power generating capacity.
— I’m testing a comment plugin. I need to post on Zeke’s thread for this test.