aximum rate that can be achieved, and that rate occurs when roughly half of the RESERVES are depleted.
Currently, the average rate of oil consumption/production is around 85 million barrels per day, and many believe that there is little current "surplus capacity". Some believe that Peak Oil may be 80 – 85 million barrels per day, ie we are “already there”. Others believe that the world may be able to achieve 100 million barrels per day by 2011 or so. And the IEA has forecasts that indicate that it will be possible to produce as much as 120 million barrels per day in 2030!
But what if the world population grows, developing nations develop, and 2.4 billion Chinese and Indians just want to use a little more oil? Well, if the demand is 110 million barrels per day, and the world can only produce 100 million barrels per day, then the price will go up until the demand abates. And if worldwide economic growth is proportional to the rate of growth in energy consumption (as it has been since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution), then if we can’t grow energy consumption, we’ve got a problem with growing the economy!
To make matters worse, after the maximum oil production rate (Peak Oil) is reached, then the rate begins to decline - at least within a few years! (Hirsch's recent work with respect to "plateaus" is not encouraging.) So, post-Peak Oil, the economy not only can't continue to grow, but it must contract – IF economic growth is proportional to growth in energy usage (as it has been in the past).
So far we’ve talked about production RATE. Now let’s cover one other concept: RESERVES. RESERVES are "how much oil that there is left in the ground, which can be gotten out".
Once again, understanding RATE and RESERVES are the keys to understanding Peak Oil:
- RATE (in our context) is the maximum rate of oil production for a group of fields, or for the world.
- RESERVES are how much oil that is in the ground that can be ultimately be produced (for this analysis we won’t even differentiate between oil types, ie tar sands 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 R