SYNOPSIS: The fine print of The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View report downplays the potential of oil shale, a misnomer, and Canadian tar sands.
Without any press conferences, grand announcements, or hyperbolic advertising campaigns, the Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world’s largest publicly owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years.
However, as with all advertisements, it’s best to read the fine print. ExxonMobil’s world oil production forecast shows no contribution from “oil shale” even by 2030. Only about 4 million barrels of oil per day from Canadian “oil sands” are projected by 2030, accounting for a mere 3.3 percent of the predicted total world demand of 120 million barrels per day. What explains this striking disconnection between the magnitude of the frontier resources and the minimal amount of projected oil production from them? Canadian “oil sands” are actually deposits of bitumen (tar), which are the result of conventional oil degradation by water and air. Tar sands are of a completely different character than conventional oil deposits; making tar sands usable is a capital-intensive venture that requires special procedures such as heating to separate the tar from the sand, mixing the tar with a diluting agent for pipeline transport, and constructing specially equipped refineries for processing.
What all this means is that the petroleum industry is approaching a turning point. Conventional petroleum production will soon–perhaps in five years, ten at best–no longer be able to satisfy demand. For their part, American consumers would do well to take a cue from their Western European counterparts, who enjoy a comfortable lifestyle despite a per capita use of petroleum that is half of that in the United States. The sooner the United States begins this transition away from oil, the easier it will be. That’s a far more attractive option than trying to squeeze oil from stone.
The most serious constraint, though, is natural gas supplies. Production of oil from tar sands requires between 400 and 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas per barrel of oil produced, depending on the extraction method used. Natural gas production, despite a near doubling of drilling activity, is flat or decreasing both in Canada and in the United States–which has prompted prices to triple over the past few years. Given these high gas prices, it almost makes more sense just to sell the natural gas directly rather than use it to produce oil from tar sands.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=what+is+the+world%27s+largest+oil+company&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=1msx&oq=worlds+largest+oil+company
http://peakoil.blogspot.com/2005/05/exxonmobil-sounds-silent-peak-oil.html
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Duration : 0:9:25
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