Palast poo-poos peak oil as being a corporate backed panic mechanism; Heinberg lets rip.

The all-important question is, how much oil can the industry pump every day (that is, at what rate can that oil be produced)? That’s what the debate over Peak Oil is all about—not reserves or amounts ultimately recoverable, but flow rates. When will the flow rate that the industry can possibly attain reach its maximum?

With prices high, you say, hundreds of billions of barrels of oil from the tar sands of Canada and from the heavy-oil fields of Venezuela become economical to produce. Right again, though this is not conventional oil we’re talking about, but materials that have to be transformed into synthetic petroleum using energy-intensive processes. Again, the real question is, at what rates? Canada is currently extracting a million barrels a day from the tar sands; Venezuela is pulling a little over half that amount from the Orinoco belt. These numbers are expected to climb—and then level off. Why? Because the process of producing synthetic oil from these low-quality hydrocarbon sources is constrained by physical factors that just do not respond much to economic stimuli. Canada needs lots of fresh water and natural gas to make oil from the tar sands, and both are in short supply. The best published forecasts say that, regardless of the price of oil, flow rates there will max out at about three to five million barrels per day by 2025—a generous amount in terms of the benefit to Canada’s economy. But this is not nearly enough fuel to satisfy the US habit of over 20 million barrels per day—and crucially, it’s not enough to make up for expected declines from the world’s giant and supergiant conventional oilfields once the latter begin their inevitable declines—as they are doing now. There are only about a hundred of those big fields that, collectively, yield roughly half the oil extracted today. Nearly all are old (found in the 1940s through the 1970s), and we’re seeing that, with the newer water-flooding recovery methods, when decline comes it can hit unexpectedly and with catastrophic swiftness—as it did in the Yibal field in Oman, which peaked at 250,000 barrels per day in 1997 and is already down to less than 80,000 b/d.

Link

Related Leave a Comment