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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corn, oil, wheat, lead, copper, manufacturing
gold, silver, lead, zinc, car production.
Duration : 0:9:25
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December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
PO will result in a …
PO will result in a massive die off of the earth’s population. Somewhere around minus 80-90%. All you need do to convince yourself of this is to overlay a population on top of a chart of world oil production. 1-1.5 Billion people is where we’re headed. It’s not the end of the world. Just a different kind of world. One without globalization, Tilapia from Vietnam, Beef from Uruguay, Sea Bass from Chile, and definitely without the mountains of plastic crap from China that is shipped here every day.
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
agreed
agreed
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
Seems like homo …
Seems like homo colossus will devolve into homo pusillus.
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
I welcome the …
I welcome the coming post peak oil age even though life will be much less comfortable then. The economical world we experienced in the last 6 decades has ruined many cultures. The age of homo colossus plundered the Earth like never before. Today we are governed by bankers and their bought politicians. It would be great if we peak oil could free us from those owners of the modern world and grant us a chance for a new beginning on a very basic human level, that’s the promise of the coming dark age
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
It may be negative …
It may be negative indeed EROEI. And even if it is positive the net energies gotta be low..
Thanks,
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
Thanks, I keep …
Thanks, I keep hearing stories from some of my friends and colleagues that keep bumping into evidence at conferences etc. All of the peices of the puzzle are starting to fit together very clearly.
I think that Peak OIL is appearing more and more likely to be the mainstream academic consensus. This is bad news for the species because the infrastructure problems we’re going to be facing in the very near future are going to “rock our world”. TSHTF scenario is definitely not off the table IMHO.
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
Great Report….. …
Great Report….. 2010 gonna be rough… gotta believe XOM is doing the best data crunching they can …
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
BLynchCAN, Kudos.
BLynchCAN, Kudos.
December 31st, 2009 at 12:11 am
Indeed, it takes …
Indeed, it takes more ‘energy’ to produce
oil from sands that it yeilds.