ds v. light oil, or different categories of reserves, based on risk).
So, many folks believe that the world was endowed with around 2 trillion barrels of conventional, recoverable oil. So the RESERVES for the world were 2 trillion barrels before any oil was produced. Most folks think we have produced about 1 trillion barrels of oil. So, that would leave current RESERVES of 1 trillion barrels.
Now, that’s a lot of oil! Why all the fuss? Well, here’s the punchline, and it has as much to do with the lack of cognition of Peak Oil as anything:
The maximum production RATE for a given field or group of fields in not arbitrary! In other words, it can’t just be anything you want it to be! For instance, if a field has RESERVES of say 10 million barrels, the maximum RATE might be several thousand barrels per day, but it could never be 1 million barrels per day.
Why? OK, here is the key take-away:
Due to the physics of the flow of oil through rock, a field’s (or a country’s, or the world’s) maximum oil production RATE is not arbitrary but is dependent on the RESERVES’:
- SIZE (how big is the field in terms of area and thickness?)
- AGE (is the field newly discovered/produced, or is has it been producing for 40 years?)
- QUALITY (how well does the oil flow through the rock?)
- All of the world’s largest oil fields – Ghawar, Cantarell, Burgan and Daquing - have excellent SIZE and excellent QUALITY ... but their AGE is old! Hence, all of these (except possibly Ghawar) are in decline (their RATE is declining each day).
- The Athabasca tar sands, on the other hand, have excellent SIZE, they are essentially “new” in AGE (relatively little compared to the RESERVES has been produced so far), but they have the very poorest QUALITY – the oil is so thick it won’t flow and must be melted with heat, dissolved with solvents or mined.
Most who take the “no Peak Oil” (or no Peak Oil until 2030 and then an “undulating plateau”) side of the debate speak of RESERVES. They don’t often address the difficult topic of trying to explain where the RATE will come from.
Recently this author attended a trade conference concerning “unconventional resources”. “Unconventional resources” is another way of saying “difficult to produce at a high rate, but prevalent in a given area”. For the most part, it’s what we’re left with, especially in the
With respect to oil production RATE (which is what Peak Oil is all about), he may as well have been showing a map of coal resources.
What he didn’t explain was the fact that
The Canadian tar sands producers have a roadmap for increasing the production RATE from those huge RESERVES to a total of ... 3 million barrels per day, by 2015! That’s an increase of only another 1.9 million barrels per day, but over 7 years, and with additional tens of billions of dollars injected!
So, that huge amount of RESERVES is limited in RATE because it is of the poorest QUALITY.
To put this in perspective and show why it is important - why Peak Oil is important - take a look at the second largest field in the world, Cantarell, in
Compare this with the Canadian tar sands production increase of only 1.9 million barrels per day over 7 years - after a huge incremental effort. Factor in the depletion going on in most every field around the world – and you have an idea of the problem at hand, and a better understanding of Peak Oil. Among other things, huge RESERVES of poor QUALITY oil are not going to be able to provide the RATE of production necessary to stem the declines from the giant high QUALITY fields that are now old in AGE, much less continue to increase our total RATE.
In summary, Peak Oil is about RATE. And RATE is dependent on the SIZE, AGE and QUALITY of the RESERVES.