Emeritus Professor of Geology, Kenneth Deffeyes. Oh my I've got a lot to say about this one. Maybe later. You read it, hope you figure it out. Sorry the notes aren't very good. There was a massive amount covered, and my fingers can't summarize graphs quickly enough.
"Recent" in Geology is 3m years ago, attoseconds of telecom disconnected from my discipline by 30 orders of magnitude.
In early 1950s electric nuclear engineers said would be too cheap to meter. Wrong, but true for telecom. Princeton university now moving to print on demand. Dartmouth college stopped charging for long distance calls. Spending more money charging for calls than revenue collected. Online but not peer reviewed journals. Don’t like peer review. Whole of publishing is changing.
In the wider world, Bob Ballard at University of Texas, just send the sense organs, not the organs and kidneys. Mars probe next generation should have the sound of the wind. Enhance the feeling of presence.
Picture of swiss army knife with 128Mb USB drive.
1926 in Houston predicted that US oil production would peak in early 1970s, and never come up again. Heavily criticized, but in 1970 it happened. 1970 was peak year. Didn’t know it at the time. In 1972 the Texas Railroad Comission said allow 100% production. No surplus production capacity. US dependent on imported oil. Note that production drop not correlated to demand drop.
WSJ story. Saudia Arabia said that production maxed out. (Story has disappeared from their records!) About two months ago, Mathew Simmonds, biggest merchant bank in oil industry, said Saudis not being upfront, there’s more. Some Saudis turn up in DC and say that given time can build more fields, but existing wells have no more capacity. So OPEC no longer in charge of the price of oil. But nobody else is.
Book -- Hubbert’s Peak - Impending World Oil Shortage.
Simmonds doesn’t use Hubberts methodology. Completely different approach. Same conclusion. Oil fields old.
“What would Jesus drive” – religious right. The answer - “Satan Sucks truck”.
Next book in Dec/Jan, new method.
US production history graph. P/Q on left scale (annual production), Q billion on bottom (billions of barrels) cumulative production, graph goes 45 degree down slope (scattered early on). US most drilled-out area in the world.
Rather cryptic. Method from population biologists.
Have discovered with Hubbert’s math overcomplex. Equation of straight line, y=mx+a. P/Q = a-(a/Qt)/Q. a = y axis intercept. Qt is where oil production is zero. Time is only here as production per year. Running battle per year. Can vary unit, same overall story. P=a(1-Q/Qt)Q
Stuff in parenthesis is oil that hasn’t been produced yet. Going down. Fish analogy. Fishing out pond. # of fish goes down. Go to tackle store for better equipment. Doesn’t help.
Price of oil not there. Economists say there will be new equilibrium price to level supply and demand. Wrong!
Another graph with inverse scale. Bell curve. Fit to data is good.
Now show world production data. P/Q is annual percent growth. From 1983 on is a straight line. If your ability to produce oil depends on the fraction not produced yet, you have to apply Occam’s razor to find explanation. Thing is symmetrical, so RHS of curve like LHS. We’re almost there at 1 trillion barells. Thanksgiving 2005 is where smoothed symmetrical peak rolls over. Uncertainty is a few weeks.
2003 production only 3% more than 1998. Growth clearly has stopped.
Reserves very difficult to report. 2+2 joke. Geologist – between 3 and 5 needs more study. Geophysicist – 3.999999. Petroleum engineer – closes door, unplugs phone, what do you want it to be?
OPEC reserve estimates based on political decisions. Outlier dot where downgrade of reserves exceeded production. Makes for negative value of D/C.
Last big discovery in 1975 off Yucatan. None since.
Lower 48 states – 1930-40 when most oil found. Price down to 10c a barrel, worst economic times, so not standard economic story. Exxon was the winner.
Last billion barrel discovery in US in 1948. All good stuff already gone. Don’t want to live in Libya!
Since 1950, have gone for half a century without finding another in lower 48. Fancy technology doesn’t help.
We’ve found 95% of all the oil. Big dollar value, yes, but discovery game is over. Hubbard did make a mistake. This was to say discovery curve that looks exactly like the production curve, displaced in time. Doesn’t work that way – Pennsylvania. Time constant for hits shorter than discovery than production. Area under the curve the same. Hits almost over. Discoveries peaked. Production about to peak.
Uncertainty? Any two points on graph define a straight line. 1983-1983 for left hand point, 2001-03 for right hand point. Even at the extremes, all go down my 2010.
USGS has some larger estimates. 3tn barrels, not 2tn. More people applied, big analysis, computers. Not a laptop model. Trouble is (and journos get this wrong) if experts disagree there’s no knowledge on subject. But Hubbard is either right or wrong. Doing nothing is a bet (by default) that he is wrong.
If this happens we’ll have to change society in several ways. Will have to prioritize some things.
One possibility that economists love is that we will ration by price.
Nixon govt fixed the price of oil. Ration by inconvenience – lines for gasoline.
End of WW2, Roosevelt had ration coupons. Will be some form of rationing.
What happens when gap between supply and demand opens.
WTC was Osama bin Laden trying to prove he was one to replace govt of Saudi Arabia.
Economists saying this recession unlike others we’ve seen before. Someone else did analysis based on queueing theory. Across a wide range of such systems, when demand for queue meets supply, length gets volatile. Sometimes on freeway traffic is bumper to bumber, but no cause – just chaotic.
Graph of US natural gas prices. Big peaks and spikes. Getting bigger. And most recent prices (not on graph) even bigger – doubled record.
Managers hate uncertainty. There’s going to be a lot more of it.
OPEC saying they’ll set price in $22-$28, but no surplus capacity. $35 now, and they’re cutting back. OPEC price damping going away.
Who gets hurt? Agriculture, automotive, aviation.
Automotive – 75% of oil goes into transport. Natural gas vehicle no longer looks good. Have used it all for electric. During Nixon made it illegal to use NG to generate electric, because it was the premium clean fuel. Used to be NG filling stations. Now high efficiency diesel in Europe.
Very severe aviation impact. Food being flown around out of other hemisphere. Out of season stuff. All those fashion pages will be for vegetables than can be stored.
Aviation engine manufacturers benefit. 2-30 improvement in compression ratio. More to come.
Iowa corn farmer’s costs are 80% fossil fuel. Haulage. Fertilizer very energy intensive. Not very water soluble. Lots of energy to convert. N2, not free, need H2 from NG to process it.
There are plans to make H2 from coal. Coal+steam+O2+higher temp, get rid of CO, process getting better. Texaco have such plants. Sold 10 plants to China. H2 from coal could be good. H2 from H2O 3-5x more expensive.
Colin Campbell in Ireland – monthly newsletter. Analysis on Saudi situation. 249bn official Saudi reserves, says it is really closer to 88.
Europeans much better organized about phasing out of this problem. 100% of Europeans believed Iraq war about oil. Devious thing as a motive, but possible. All mideast oil fields about the size of Montana. Possible plan to seize the lot for all mankind.
This gap between processing and transmitting bits and molecules about to get wider. These worlds will diverge. Processing seismic data used to need six pack of mainframes. Invention of IC, Texas Instruments and Intel.
Big squeeze on hauling molecules. Process, manipulate, transmit, store bits getting cheaper. My grandfather drove cattle to Abilene, wild west, and worried grandson the same.
Q: What about wind, wave, solar?
Not worried about 15 year timescale. 5 year timescale, have to use stuff we have engineered right now. That’s high efficiency diesel car, wind and nuclear.
Each has political problems. Solar still expensive. 60W demo for the book. $1000, even from suplus house.
Case of corn, dead loser without govt subsidies. Biodiesel from canola or rapeseed oil. Not price competitive, since made for $7/gal, retail for $5.
Hydrogen oversold.
Q: Methane in the oceans.
Continental shelves have has hydrates. Total amount of gas is bigger than all the oil and gas put together. Only one intermittent production from hydrates in Siberia. Get it to break down by dropping pressure. But depending on pressure to drive the stuff. Even if you pull a vacuum, only 1 atmosphere. Could try to heat it up (geothermal). Inject methanol in. No success. Nobody knows how to produce it. Opportunity to get rich. Just find places where gas seeps up naturally. Then improve on it. 15 years or more timescale.
Q: I’m an economist. The way world changes is people go along doing stuff. Then something changes to make that thing stop working. Can’t do that anymore. They start to suffer. Then they decide to change. Not suffering now. We will have suffer.
If you wait to apply the brakes until you drive off the cliff….
Q: What about fuel cells?
Supply of hydrogen in petroleum and fertilizer. Electrochemical. Norsk hydro. Norwegian WW2 raids to stop Nazis getting heavy water. New process use 1.65-1.7x voltage to deliver H2. In fuel cell, get 0.7 if idling. More load, less voltage (0.5). So worse than carnot cycle. Jeremy Rifkind book on H2. “Moore’s law for H2 about to kick in”. Sorry, wrong metaphor.
New book about the other fuels that come out of the earth. Uranium, coal etc.
Q: Of 100 units of energy for automotive, 80 wasted as heat, 19 move vehicle, 1 moves us. Toyota – think of smarter cars that make them lighter by not colliding, less tank like. But unmarketable.
Took 0.5 a barrel of oil to get me here. MUST get to teleconferencing mode.
Q: How does India and China affect us?
Very scary. Economies acquiring automobiles. Will run out of gas just as they get there.
Need to get word out that there is a serious problem. I am quite upset.
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Meme de-jour? Hubbert's Peak from Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm
It appears that Kenneth Deffeyes' talk at WTF 2004 is finally getting some traction for Hubbert's Peak. See: Fast Company or these notes from the talk at Telepocalypse "Managers hate uncertainty. There’s going to be a lot more of it." ... "It's ...
[Read more]
»
Meme de-jour? Hubbert's Peak from Ascription is an anathema to any enthusiasm
It appears that Kenneth Deffeyes' talk at WTF 2004 is finally getting some traction for Hubbert's Peak. See: Fast Company or these notes from the talk at Telepocalypse "Managers hate uncertainty. There’s going to be a lot more of it." ... "It's n...
[Read more]