but it rains sooo much in oregon

[Guest guest]

an aside..i read twilight in the desert last month...pretty good

 

Oil expert: Output downhill from here

Energy - Author Ken Deffeyes thinks the depletion of fossil fuels could

lead to a worldwide cataclysm

 

TED SICKINGER

The Oregonian

February 27, 2006

 

Few petroleum geologists qualify as celebrities. But Ken Deffeyes, a

former Shell Oil geologist who is now a professor emeritus of

geosciences at Princeton University, recently sold out Portland's First

Congregational Church, where he came to lecture on his latest book,

" Beyond Oil. "

 

Before Princeton, Deffeyes worked as a researcher in the labs of Shell

Oil and taught at the University of Minnesota and Oregon State

University. At Shell, he worked with the now-famous petroleum geologist

M. King Hubbert. Hubbert coined what is fast becoming a fixture in the

modern lexicon -- " peak oil " -- when he predicted that U.S. oil

production would peak in the early 1970s and decline thereafter. Widely

criticized at the time, Hubbert has since been vindicated.

 

Building on Hubbert's hypotheses, Deffeyes recently theorized that world

oil production peaked Dec. 16, 2005, and has begun its permanent

decline, with economic disruptions to follow.

 

Deffeyes sat down with The Oregonian last week to discuss his book and

the peak oil phenomenon. His comments have been edited for length and

clarity.

 

What's the basic math behind your forecast that world oil production

peaked Dec. 16?

 

Hubbert's theory says that the ease of finding oil depends on the

fraction of oil that hasn't been found yet. It's a simple hypothesis

that explained U.S. oil production, where we've already gone over the

peak and we're halfway down the other side. A corollary that comes out

of the math is that the peak occurs when half the oil has been produced.

In Chapter 3 of " Beyond Oil, " I take the date these oil fields were

first discovered, the first wells, and it turns out that the whole world

is mature. We've found 94 percent of all the oil we're ever going to

find. It's easy to extend that line down to the zero level and say that

there are 2.013 trillion barrels that we're on track to discover, and

we've already discovered 94 percent of that. So there's not much

guesswork in that number. So I divide that number by 2 and I get just

over 1 trillion barrels. Then I add up the world oil production from the

beginning and figure out when we're halfway, and that's where the Dec.

16 number comes from.

 

Doesn't a lot depend on the level of oil reserves the Saudis are sitting

on?

 

Matt Simmons has this wonderful book called " Twilight in the Desert. "

It's a very detailed analysis of the Saudi fields based on papers that

the Saudi Aramco petroleum engineers have published in the Journal of

Petroleum Geography. He says they're struggling to keep up.

 

In the supergiant oil fields in Saudi Arabia, the water content is going

up. It's called the water cut, the percentage of fluid produced that's

water. It was 30 percent when Simmons' book came out. There are rumors

now that it's 55 percent. When it gets to 80, things are largely over.

 

What is the highest estimate of reserves out there?

 

Reserves are hard to estimate, but if we talk about discoveries, the

biggest estimate comes from the U.S. Geological Survey, at just over 3

trillion barrels. If you take their number, we have another 2 trillion

barrels to produce and you get a peak in the year 2036. I could give a

15 minute lecture on the flaws in the USGS survey, and I think they're

beginning to back off a little bit. In order to make the USGS or things

like it correct, we've got to find another Middle East plus another

North Sea on top of that. I don't think there's another Middle East

lurking out there.

 

What would drilling in the Arctic Refuge do to the estimate ?

 

Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in the United States, kicked in when

they got the pipeline finished in 1976, and it wasn't big enough to

raise us back to our 1970 level of production. It put a little shoulder

on the downside of the production curve, but that was it. My guess is

that in our wildest dream, ANWAR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) will

prove half as big as Prudhoe Bay. I'd have to work out the number, but

if that's the case, it probably postpones the world situation for two

weeks.

 

What about offshore fields?

 

The only thing on the shelf, literally the continental shelf, is the

South China Sea, which has been drilled around the edge and it's mostly

natural gas. There could be oil out in the middle, but six different

countries claim the South China Sea.

 

What do the oil companies say?

 

With the oil companies, you have to watch what they do and not what they

say. What they're doing is taking in $10 billion and $20 billion a

quarter in profits and handing it out as increased dividends, buybacks

of their stocks, giving it to their executives. They're not drilling,

they're not building new pipelines and not building new refineries. If

there were good prospects out there, they'd be out there drilling like

crazy.

 

Is there a portfolio of alternative energy that makes sense

 

It's those things that we have the technology and engineering ready to

go right now. At the top of my shortlist are the high-efficiency diesel

automobiles being marketed in Europe right now that get 100 miles to the

gallon. Nuclear and wind are things we have engineered right now that

are ready to roll. Wind, even in your wildest dreams, is not going to be

a very big part of the answer, but every little bit helps. Nuclear, we

know how to build and operate safe nuclear power plants. Coal

gasification, where you react the coal with steam and a little bit of

air and get a little gas, would be a win.

 

What about oil shale and tar sands?

 

Oil shale is the fuel of the future and it always will be. In the case

of tar sands, they're very heavy users of natural gas right now, for

heat to melt the tar and to upgrade the oil so it will travel through a

pipeline in a Canadian winter. Alan Greenspan told us more than a year

ago that the North American gas market was gassed out. So they're going

to be natural gas limited or having to compete with other users of

natural gas. There's talk about building a nuclear plant up there, and

that's a good idea, but it'll take 10 years to get a plant in there.

 

Biofuels?

 

There are both people and cows lined up for soybeans, and it's at least

a factor of 2 more expensive than oil right now. Palm oil may be the

closest to being the one ready to go to market right now. Ethanol from

corn is close to being a tossup. You may use the same amount of energy

when you burn the ethanol as goes into the fertilizers, the tractors,

the trucks to haul it around. In Brazil, they're doing well with sugar

cane.

 

Where is the economic impact of peak oil going to be felt acutely and when?

 

Geologists like to look back in time, and I'm not that good at

futurology. I borrow the analogy of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:

war, famine, pestilence and death. Famine because particularly

fertilizer is very energy intensive. The green revolution was based on

better seed varieties, heavy use of mineral fertilizers, pesticides.

Well, pesticides are all petrochemicals, so fertilizer is going to get

much more expensive cause they use a lot of energy.

 

So famine and pestilence really are threats down the line. And if you

look up Amos Nur's Web site at Stanford, he thinks the first Gulf War,

the Trade Center attacks and the second Gulf War are the first three

skirmishes in the oil war.

 

Do you envision problems gradually getting worse, or some sudden shock?

 

What I've heard from a lot of people is that it will take something

terrible to get people's attention. You mean the World Trade Center

wasn't big enough? The Iranian situation, that could trigger it. The

hurricanes nearly triggered it. Really abnormally cold winters in the

northeastern U.S. and Europe could trigger it. If we got a civil war in

Saudi Arabia, you could kiss your lifestyle goodbye. The public will

probably say after the fact that XYZ triggered it. That's the naming

rights phenomenon, and I can't say which one is going to win.

 

By the end of this decade, we'll be down about 5 percent from the peak

production, and demand in China and India is moving up fast, and

someone's going to come up short on their ambitions.

 

So you really believe the Four Horsemen scenario is somewhat likely?

 

We're not doing much about it. We could have had a soft landing if we

had listened to Jimmy Carter and started 20 years ago. But in the

absence of a Winston Churchill or John Kennedy, I'm not sure we're going

to get in gear fast enough to avoid this. The mildest form of the

disaster is a global recession worse than the Great Depression, and

that's a form it could take rather than war, famine, pestilence and death.

 

How would you prepare for this?

 

What I'd like to have is farmland on volcanic rich soils so that it

doesn't require fertilizer. And I need a place where there's enough

rainfall. Maybe this could be in Oregon. Owning something that's

relatively energy independent and supplies food for the survivors to eat

would be the sweetest target.

 

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306230.xml & coll=7

 

 

 

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