Largest Oil Scale Reserves BY FAR in the world!

[GHook93]

...my liberal science professor claimed peak oil would happen in 1999 and the world would be out of oil by 2010! He made us read this short story following a worker in a Carless, oilless New York City. Basically every went by bike or the extremely over-crowded subway and there were regular blackouts. The only mention of oil left was what they military had left in order to fuel their vehicles, which they never used! The only way to get overseas was by ship, but they did toss in the little nugget that shipping costs were so expense that most things were manufactured stateside like it used to be. It was doom and gloom and the story ended with, if my parents, grandparents and great grandparents, knew this was going to happen why didn't they seek out alternatives?

This was the liberal professors intro to the wonders of solar, wind and other renewables sources. Remember this was right before IL did the grand wind turbines and farms. What was going on at the time was the passing of the wind turbine and farm projects. They wanted wind and solar to provide 25% of our IL energy by 2010 (currently its 1-2%). In 2007 IL General Assembly mandated that wind MUST produce 25% of our energy. Fat chance of that.

I remember my professor's prediction, since I was scared as hell at the time thinking oil was a thing of the past. Our cars would be fully electric 2005 and wind and solar would make up 50% of the NATION'S energy supply by 2010. Illinois is extremely ambigious with wind and they make up 1-2%! Libs!

Well, it's been 40 years since the first predictions of peak oil, and still more and more oil deposits are being found.

So where is the accuracy in your analogy? Oil use = Heroin Addiction.

It has been way over 100 years since the Government Scientist predicted we peaked in oil production in the 1800's.

“I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has characterized the last twenty, and will probably characterize the next ten or twenty years, is nevertheless, not only geologically but historically, a temporary and vanishing phenomenon – one which young men will live to see come to its natural end” (1886, J.P. Lesley, state geologist of Pennsylvania).

- “There is little or no chance for more oil in California” (1886, U.S. Geological Survey).

- “There is little or no chance for more oil in Kansas and Texas” (1891, U.S. Geological Survey).

- “Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels of oil, perhaps a ten-year supply” (1914, U.S. Bureau of Mines).

- "Within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production, and from that time on we will face an ever-increasing decline." (1919 director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines)

- "Oil shales in Colorado and Utah would be exploited to produce oil, because the demand for oil could not be met by existing production." (1919 National Geographic magazine)

- "The time is, indeed, well in sight, when the United States will be nearing the end of some of its available stocks of raw materials on which her industrial supremacy has been largely built. America is running through her stores of domestic oil and is obliged to look abroad for future reserves. (September 1919, E. Mackay Edgar, in Sperling's Journal)

- "The position of the United States in regard to oil can best be characterized as precarious." (January 1920 Dr. George Otis Smith, Director of the United States Geological Survey)

- "Americans will have to depend on foreign sources or use less oil, or perhaps both." (May 1920 Dr. George Otis Smith, Director of the United States Geological Survey)

- "On the whole, therefore, we must expect that, unless our consumption is checked, we shall by 1925 be dependent on foreign oil fields to the extent of 150,000,000 barrels and possibly as much as 200,000,000 of crude each year, except insofar as the situation may at that time, perhaps, be helped to a slight extent by shale oil. Add to this probability that within 5 years--perhaps 3 years only--our domestic production will begin to fall off with increasing rapidity, due to the exhaustion of our reserves" (1920 David White, United States Geological Survey)

- During the period 1919-22, imports of crude oil from Mexico had been large--equal to 22 percent of total United States consumption in 1921. But salt water began to appear in some Mexican wells, and by 1921 geologists were debating whether Mexican production was not "through." in commenting upon the Mexican situation. "A great slump in Mexican production seems sooner or later inevitable. Thus there was not only alarm about the United States oil potential but also about our primary foreign source of supply. Lendling encouragement to these doubts were statements appearing in foreign publications describing the United States oil position." (1921, David White of the United States Geological Survey)

- "Given a resumption of trade and the consequent demand for oil products in, at the most, a year or two, the world will be confronted with an oil shortage such as has never been experienced before. (1921, E. Mackay Edgar)

- “Reserves to last only thirteen years” (1939, Department of the Interior).

- “Reserves to last thirteen years” (1951, Department of the Interior, Oil and Gas Division).

- “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade” (President Jimmy Carter speaking in 1978 to the entire world).

- “At the present rate of use, it is estimated that coal reserves will last 200 more years. Petroleum may run out in 20 to 30 years, and natural gas may last only another 70 years” (Ralph M. Feather, Merrill textbook Science Connections Annotated Teacher’s Version, 1990, p. 493).

- “At the current rate of consumption, some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil … will be used up within your lifetime” (1993, The United States and its People).

- “The supply of fossil fuels is being used up at an alarming rate. Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use” (Merrill/Glenco textbook, Biology, An Everyday Experience, 1992).

Quotes like these could fill a thousand pages easily. _PeakOil?

One interesting example of a big oil find in the midst of "an exhausted field" occurred in Kern County, California. Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, and initially it was thought that only 10 percent of its heavy, viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil. As pointed out in 1995 by Morris Adelman, professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the few remaining energy gurus, “in the next forty-four years, it produced not 54 million barrels but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining.” But even this estimate was wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today, Kern River still puts out more than 80,000 barrels per day, and Chevron reckons that the remaining reserves are about 480 million barrels.

"Proven Reserves" are those that can be produced "economically." But the definitions of economical production are constantly changing, as the technology (and the politics eg, Iraq) changes.

And then there are the "unconventionals," such as heavy oils, oil sands, oil shales, coal to liquids, gas to liquids, and biomass to liquids. A doomer will not even stoop to discuss this 50 ton gorilla in the room, but any good economist would be forced to consider them.
The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.

To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that’s trillion – over a century’s worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption. _WallStreetJournal Jan 2005_quoted by_PeakOil?

 

[RGR]

Well, it's been 40 years since the first predictions of peak oil, and still more and more oil deposits are being found.

As someone else has already pointed out, peak oil/running outters have been around for quite a bit longer than that.

 

[manifold]

I think it makes good strategic and tactical sense to use up the rest of the world's oil and natural gas before we set about depleting our own.

I'd be interested to hear solid reasoning to the contrary.

 

[RGR]

So, where is the next Gwarar? There isn't one.

Screw Ghawar (depending on one's definition of oil, perhaps only the 3rd or 4th largest oil accumulation in the world), I think they should go find another Orinoco!

 

[RGR]

Hubbert's prediction was dead on for the US. It is accurate for the rest of the world, also.

Now Rocksy, that's bullshit and you know it. Hubbert (1956) ONLY hit the US oil production mark (in only 1 of his 2 scenarios I might add), his US natural gas projections AND his world oil projections missed by HUNDREDS OF PERCENT.

While peakers are stupid enough to confuse a MULTI HUNDRED PERCENT MISS as "accurate", I expect better from people with actual brain pans.

Peak oil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

M. King Hubbert created and first used the models behind peak oil in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970.[1] His logistic model, now called Hubbert peak theory, and its variants have described with reasonable accuracy the peak and decline of production from oil wells, fields, regions, and countries,[2] and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains.

Bad quote Rocks. Hubbert did not base ANY of his work on the production profiles of wells or fields, NONE. And his method DOESN'T work for nearly 3/4's of the worlds production (by volume)...in other words...it works okay maybe 25% of the time (and I am being reasonable with "works okay" rather than strict) and that is under limited circumstances.

Wiki was written mostly by peaker fools as represented by our own local peaker parrot. Only an idiot would think that oil wells produce like bell shaped curves and assign such nonsense to Hubbert who never even used them as examples of anything. Nor fields. Another peaker invention, that field production profiles are bell shaped curves.

 

[Trajan]

technology will march on, I posted the ny times blurb on the fantastic potential of the Texas eagle ford find....



remember- 20 years ago, russia was a net oil importer.....times change. and this does not include anwar, off shore east west coast etc etc etc etc ...