The so-called peak oil debate has taken many twists and turns over the years. After long being an oddball survivalist preoccupation, the debate gathered mainstream momentum a few years ago as oil prices began a long ascent from around $30 per barrel to $147, where they topped out last summer. By the time a barrel of West Texas crude was rising eight bucks a day, scarcity seemed like the best and only explanation–that no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t pump enough oil to meet demand.
But then petroleum prices made like CitiGroup stock and fell 80%. OPEC cut production, inventories rose, and it seemed like, in fact, we had plenty of oil for the foreseeable future and the whole thing had just been hedge fund shenanigans.
Maybe not, Raymond James now cautions. “We believe that the oil market has already crossed over to the downward sloping side” of all-time total production, say analysts at the financial services company. While cautioning that nobody but historians can be sure, they believe production peaked in 2007 for non-OPEC countries (Russia, Norway, Mexico, etc.) and last year for OPEC (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, etc.). “It is entirely intuitive to conclude that if both OPEC and non-OPEC production posted declines against the backdrop of $100/bbl oil–when the obvious economic incentive was to pump at full blast–those declines had to have come for involuntary reasons such as the inherent geological limits of oil fields.” In other words, we had a perfect environment for testing the peak oil hypothesis, and the results are in. We’ve peaked.
My reponse? Yawn. We’re all unemployed Prius drivers anyway these days. Oil is an anachronism.
But, honestly, that’s only what stupid, short-sighted people like me say. Eventually demand will recover and/or supply will continue to fall, and we’ll get back to a place where oil costs $147 a barrel. But, if these Raymond James analysts are right, this time it will just keep going up. Then it will go up more. And so on, forever.
The biggest immediate crisis would be in transportation, because that’s where most of our oil goes. When gas hit $4 per gallon last spring, the financial strain was hitting the breaking point for many households–particularly outer suburban households. The arrangement of many American cities started to look insane: Working class people commuting 50 miles by car each way to their jobs?
The answers in this scenario would have to be rapid. No 30-year development plans. Instead: find cheap and efficient ways of getting lots of people around, and find them pronto. As a start, that would mean making it much easier for people to ride bikes, take trains, and form van pools.
Peak oil has always been an eye-roller in the establishment debate. It’s not clear that Obama has ever even been *asked* about it.
But Raymond James isn’t exactly a society of crazy socialists. At what point do enough credible people and organizations endorse the possibility that we have to start really planning for it?
Planning for it in, say, the way that Jim Kunstler discussed in this recent Infrastructurist interview.
UPDATE: The headline previously read “investment bank.” Raymond James apparently isn’t an investment bank anymore–it’s a bank holding company.
May 4th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
The first prediction of “Peak Oil” occurred less than twenty years after the first oil well was drilled. Every twenty years or so since, somebody serious has claimed that the world was running out of oil.
These predictions are always wrong because they work under the assumption that there is this singular substance called “oil” and that it pumped out the ground with a fixed technology . In reality, their is a wide range of hydrocarbons interred in the earth and has our technology changes we can make use of wider range of those hydrocarbons. About a 25% of our existing oil used today is made of hydrocarbons that we couldn’t use 50 years ago. As technology changes, the oil we can reach changes as well.
Likewise, known reserves always underestimate future oil supplies because (1) no one prospects for oil that they don’t expect to use in less than 15 years and (2) no one can predict what technology will be available to harvest oil 20+ years down the road.
We’ve got more oil today than at anytime in history. To the extent we face shortages it is because our economic growth, especially in the developing world, is causing demand to exceed supply. This is an entirely different problem than demand remaining fixed and supply decreasing.
I doubt well see any major natural shortages oil before replacement technologies come along.
May 4th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
There is a wide range of hydrocarbons. Funnily enough, the hydrocarbons on the “wider” end of the range are more and more of a pain in the ass to draw out of the ground:
located in more distant locales, thicker, containing more sulfur, et cetera. Some of the deposits are known to take more energy to extract than they will yield. And all that lovely technology has done very little to raise output in Texas or the North Sea.
But please, Shannon. Keep up the good work of keeping our country from preparing. You’re doing a fabulous job.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Omri,
But please, Shannon. Keep up the good work of keeping our country from preparing. You’re doing a fabulous job
And please keep up a 130 year tradition of fostering counter productive hysteria. The problem with hysteria is that they tend to get politicians involved and then things go to hell.
I just started reading a book on “Peak Coal” warning about the inevitable end of coal in Britain the consequently inevitable decline of British civilization. It was published in 1865.
The basic problem is that your fundamental model of natural resources is flawed. Resources are created by technology. Increasing technology increases resources. You and everyone else who has predicted resource exhaustion ever since Malthus fail to grasp this concept.
May 5th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Resources are created by technology.
Move over, Lysenko…
May 5th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
As a working petroleum geologist, I think its ridiculous to say that because production didn’t increase when the price popped up to 147$ that there is clearly a peak that has been reached. That neglects the time it takes from discovery of a potential oil field to get it fully up and producing, which is often 3-10 years depending on size and complexity. So to assume that you can just ramp up production because oil price is increasing, you would therefore assume that all the companies would stop exploring and producing after oil prices dropped. It just doesn’t work that way, and it certainly is not a fast process. The other reason that production didn’t ramp up is that when oil was at 147 everyone and their mother was screaming trying to get time on a fixed number of rigs and drill ships, and costs for drilling, seismic exploration, and every one of about 200 costs went up with people trying to get their cut of the increase. Those costs didn’t ramp down until early this year, as people thought the downturn might be super temporary.
We’re still talking about way less than 50% recovery of oil in nearly every field ever worked on. Every tech that therefore increase production even marginally dramatically increases total oil reserves
May 5th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Production has been at a plateau for years, and just about all new projects involve secondary recovery methods, which means they will not restore the spare production capacity the world had just 10 years ago.
This bears paying attention.
May 6th, 2009 at 1:03 am
It’s amazing that conservatives love the status quo so much they can’t make logical conclusions about change. Change is the only thing that is constant.
You critics of peak oil chaos won’t consider the real problem. The truth is that the earth will never run out of oil. The peak oil study never predicted that earth will run out of oil. The problem is going to be a declining production rate. Declining production is going to cause extreme fuel shortages, starvation and war. It’s too late to prevent these problems. The earth cannot sustain 6.5 billion folks with declining oil production.
There are currently 880,000,000 gas guzzeling vehicles in the world. Our civilization depends on these vehicles for the generation of wealth and food. There is nothing anyone can do to solve this problem in a manner that will avoid chaos.
May 8th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Conservatives say peak oil doesn’t exist since God made the entire world for our ab/use, and peak oil is incompatible with God. If God put oil in the earth, it was for us to use to our hearts desire.
” And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.”
May 18th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
[...] is good news obviously. If, as the energy analysts at Raymond James and some other experts believe, we face dramatically higher oil prices in the years ahead, it is [...]
May 22nd, 2009 at 11:27 am
[...] is good news, though one wonders how it will look in few years. If, as the energy analysts at Raymond James and some other experts believe, we face dramatically higher oil prices in the years ahead, it will [...]