1920/1943 Warnings of Peak Oil

[MKSheppard]

I found this interesting article from about 88 years ago; it even mentions such things as oil shale.

The New York Times; May 3 1920

ASSERTS AMERICANS FACE OIL SHORTAGE

Bureau of Mines Predicts Reserves Will Be Exhausted Before End of Summer.

GREAT INCREASE IN MOTORS

Geological Survey Estimates We Will Use Up all Our Own Resources Within 18 Years

Special to The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, May 2.—The latest figures on the world's oil supply compiled by the united States Geological Survey of the Department of the Interior show that the foreign countries are using only half as much petroleum as the United States, but have seven times as much oil in the ground.

These countries are now using about 200,000,000 barrels of oil yearly, but they have resources large enough to last more than 250 years at this rate of consumption. In striking: contrast are the production figures for the United States, which at the present rate of more than 400,000,000 barrels a year has only an eighteen-year supply. In other words, the United States is using up its own oil supply fourteen times as fast as the rest of the world.

Not counting all to be obtained from shales and other retortable materials by distillation," said the announcement, "the world's supply of recoverable petroleum amounts to as much as 60,000,000,000 barrels. Of this amount 43,000,000,000 barrels may be regarded as oil more or less definitely in sight as shown by actual drilling with successful results. The remainder covers the available oil which it is believed will be found in other regions in which oil seeps, asphalt deposits or favorable geological conditions point to oil, although no producing wells have yet been drilled. Of this great amount, which is thirteen times the oil already taken from the ground in America and about nine times all the petroleum yet produced in the world, 7,000,000,000 barrels only, in round numbers, are believed to be left in the United States and Alaska, the remaining 53,000,000,000 being in foreign countries.

This latter supply is nearly equally divided between the old world and the new, the Americas having a total very close to that of the remaining continents. However, as in the case of coal, much more oil will be developed north of the equator than to the south.

" Fortunately it is simply impossible to discover and take out the oil remaining in the ground in the United States, 7,000,000,000 barrels, in so short a period as eighteen years. Instead of mining our petroleum so rapidly, we must either depend more and more on oil from other sources or get along with less oil. Our children will doubtless do both."

[J]

Heh, those were they days when they found oil fields by looking for surface seeps and drilling near graveyards. Graveyards? It turns out that graveyards were often located on anticlines, which are pretty good hydrocarbon traps. Seismic sounding was still a decade in the future, and prospecting was limited to finding ridge-like structures or surface seeps and drilling them.

[Gandalf]

Is this meant to be one of the earliest points at which people realised that oil was finite and should be treated accordingly, or was this one of the earlier predictions of when we'd run out?

[MKSheppard]

One of the earlier predictions of Peak Oil.

Here's a very fun fact for you. Germany's Synthetic Oil program during WWII was a result of a Peak Oil scare in the twenties.

Basically, Carl Bosch and IG Farben collaborated together on a synthetic fuel program to the tune of 330 million Reichsmarks; and the construction of the first coal-to-oil hydrogenation plant was begun in 1926, and Bosch planned to rake in bucketloads of Reichsmarks from his synthetic oil as natural supplies of oil ran out.

Unfortunately for Bosch/IG Farben, the prospect of Peak Oil caused a wave of exploration, which resulted in major development after development in Venezula, California, Oklahoma, and Western Texas. Adding insult to injury, when the huge "Black Giant" was found in East Texas in the Fall of 1930; the world price for oil collapsed.

But Carl Bosch refused to give up, despite him being able to simply write off the synthetic fuel program as a loss for his company -- it could easily absorb that kind of loss. So of course, Bosch sent several of his top aides to make contacts with the Nazi Party, in particular, to meet with Hitler; who was a well known motoring enthuasist.

The end result was that by the late 1930s; while the true cost of one liter of gasoline in Germany was 20 Pfennigs (about the same in the US); the German customer paid 39 Pfennings for his gasoline. Why? Because it cost about 30 pffenings per liter of gasoline to crack it from coal - in effect, the Nazi Party massively subsidized IG Farben/Bosch's synthetic oil plants; the taxes on imported oil were also used to generate critically needed revenue for the Reich Finanance Ministry -- the Nazi economy was in trouble even well before WWII started.

[MKSheppard]

Seismic sounding was still a decade in the future, and prospecting was limited to finding ridge-like structures or surface seeps and drilling them.

So what about 1943, twenty years advanced in technology and prospecting, then, J?

NYT July 14, 1943 Page 18

IMPENDING OIL CRISIS

A large-scale bombing raid on the Ruhr district consumes gasoline worth $800,000. With thousands of naval vessels and merchant ships and countless trucks, tractors, planes and stationary engines consuming oil or gasoline, Secretary Ickes does not exaggerate when he says that a mechanized war gulps "the content of a major oil field every day." No wonder the petroleum economists warn that at this rate our known reserves of only twenty million barrels will last us barely fourteen years.

The warning is not new. It has been sounded by the United States Geological Survey ever since 1889. Nobody paid much attention. Vast new fields were discovered by new prospecting methods, new drilling methods were developed, new ways of exploiting declining fields were devised, with the result that production and consumption mounted and the alarmists were discredited. Now the day of reckoning is coming. Unless about 500,000 new oil acres are found, operations cannot be maintained on the old basis in 1944 and 1945, and we shall have to import more and more oil from regions which are themselves no longer flush.

The first step is obviously to find new proved oil lands. But this is a form of gambling which is hazardous and expensive. Wildcatters and oil companies will not undertake it unless the ceiling on crude oil prices is raised and unless the restrictions on the use of steel equipment are relaxed. As usual, the responsible Government agencies are in conflict on the issue. The Price Administrator would subsidize explorations, marginal drilling and secondary recovery provided the Government shares the profits. Secretary

Ickes calls this "a complicated patchwork" which cannot produce immediate results and advocates the higher crude prices demanded by the companies. It matters little who wins the debate. The wells are drying up, and neither subsidies nor higher crude prices can make them yield more. Though it is not likely that the present consumption of about four million barrels a day will reckon with the exhaustion of our reserves in thirty years.

What of the future? It is not hopeless. Oil-shale deposits in this country could yield an estimated 108 billion barrels of oil at high cost. We have vast coal resources from which enormous amounts of liquid fuel could be won by the Bergius and Fischer-Tropsch process on which Germany is now dependent, but again at high cost. Both sources would become profitable when crude oil reaches $2 a barrel. We might also compress and bottle coal-gas and run cars and farm engines with it—what Europe has been doing for the last four years. And lastly we might turn to cheap alcohol, which can be obtained by fermentation from any kind of vegetation, but which means engines of higher compression than we have now and a problem in corrosion because of the water usually found in commercial alcohol. Come what may, the nation will still run on rubber-tired wheels, still drive its ships with liquid fuel, still flit from city to city in fast planes. The inventor, engineer and chemist will have to tax their ingenuity, Never in the annals of technology has a need like this been presented. It is inconceivable that science will abdicate.

[Starglider]

Oil-shale deposits in this country could yield an estimated 108 billion barrels of oil at high cost. We have vast coal resources from which enormous amounts of liquid fuel could be won by the Bergius and Fischer-Tropsch process on which Germany is now dependent, but again at high cost. Both sources would become profitable when crude oil reaches $2 a barrel.

Come what may, the nation will still run on rubber-tired wheels, still drive its ships with liquid fuel, still flit from city to city in fast planes. The inventor, engineer and chemist will have to tax their ingenuity, Never in the annals of technology has a need like this been presented. It is inconceivable that science will abdicate.

I miss that attitude. Of course if it was still around, nuclear power would have long since become the dominant form of electricity generation.

[MKSheppard]

The fun part comes when you convert 1943 prices to 2007 prices, that $2 dollars is about $25-$27.

I miss that attitude. Of course if it was still around, nuclear power would have long since become the dominant form of electricity generation.

What, you mean the "SCIENCE WILL PREVAIL!" attitude? It sadly died in the seventies; with all the goddamn environmentalists and NIMBYs.

[Darth Wong]

You never tire of this "people have made mistakes in the past, therefore all science today is crap" style of argument, do you? You're talking about predictions made so long ago that they hadn't discovered the neutron yet and they thought the female orgasm was some kind of hysterical madness.

[Wanderer]

they thought the female orgasm was some kind of hysterical madness.

You mean to tell me they thought women got no pleasure from sex and it was abnormal if they did???

[MKSheppard]

You mean to tell me they thought women got no pleasure from sex and it was abnormal if they did???

Clearly the woman is hysterical; we must sedate her with morphia.

*gets out 1890s Mad Quack Kit*

[SCRawl]

they thought the female orgasm was some kind of hysterical madness.

You mean to tell me they thought women got no pleasure from sex and it was abnormal if they did???

Look up the history of the vibrator. Seriously, it's kind of funny.

[Adrian Laguna]

You're talking about predictions made so long ago that they hadn't discovered the neutron yet and they thought the female orgasm was some kind of hysterical madness.

I could have sworn I made a post about the subject a while back, which addressed that misconception. I suppose you don't have time to read everything, ah well. The short version is, you're a couple of decades off.

[Phillip Hone]

Aren't there are also numerous optimistic predictions from the past that turned out to be completely false? For example, I believe that Herman Melville wrote an essay about the absurdity of the idea that human beings could have serious impact on the whale population.

[MKSheppard]

I'll answer Mike's questions a bit out of sequence, so it'll flow better.

You're talking about predictions made so long ago that they hadn't discovered the neutron yet and they thought the female orgasm was some kind of hysterical madness.

In December 1973, the Minister for Minerals and Energy of Australia, Reginald F. Connor declared that Australia's known recoverable resources of crude oil would run out in eight years.

As we all know, that time frame is about the same time of the documentary films which revolved around the life of Main Force Patrol officer Max Rockatansky.

You never tire of this "people have made mistakes in the past, therefore all science today is crap" style of argument, do you?

I've been looking at the old newspapers and Peak Oil arguments seem to reoccur every twenty or thirty years; and they're usually based around the statment that "we have X barrels of proveable reserves, but we are consuming them at Y rate; therefore we have Z years left.".

Anyway, posting this kind of stuff in the random peak oil threads that pop up from time to time would IMHO, be trolling, sos I decided to simply post them here since they are history.

And it's funny how the same things keep cropping up; for example, Oil Shale just won't die; and in the article I found containing the 1973 statement by the Aussie Minister, there was talk about using cut down forests to produce ethanol as a motor fuel.

And this thread is worth it anyway, for the spinoff alone - the female orgasm is a sinful sinful thing.

[Wanderer]

Anyway, posting this kind of stuff in the random peak oil threads that pop up from time to time would IMHO, be trolling, sos I decided to simply post them here since they are history.

Then lets vote Megatron for President and let him solve our problems with energon, or what ever hell its suppose to be.

And it's funny how the same things keep cropping up; for example, Oil Shale just won't die; and in the article I found containing the 1973 statement by the Aussie Minister, there was talk about using cut down forests to produce ethanol as a motor fuel.

Seriously?

And this thread is worth it anyway, for the spinoff alone - the female orgasm is a sinful sinful thing.

Good thing I have a copy of the Kama Sutra with which to try different techniques for maximum orgasms with my wife

[MKSheppard]

Seriously?

Yes!

December 9, 1973

AUSTRALIA STUDIES SOLAR-ENERGY USE
Fears Eventual Exhaustion of Coal and Oil Reserves

By ROBERT TRUMBULL
Special to The New York Times

SYDNEY, Australia, Dec. 8 —Warned that even Australia's rich deposits of mineral fuels have limits, the Government has begun an Intensive study of the power-producing potential of the country's most enduring and plentiful asset and liability combined—sunshine. Because of abundant local resources and a neutral policy in the Middle East, which has kept Arab oil flowing here, Australians have escaped the personal discomforts caused by the fuel shortages elsewhere.

There is some fear of price rises on imported goods as the oil shortage in other countries worsens, and of damage to industry as victims of the Arab sanctions cut down on buying. But gasoline rationing is not considered even a remote possibility here, nor are restrictions on driving planned. However, the more far-reach-ing implications of the current worldwide energy crisis have shaken the normally complacent Australians into giving considerably more thought than they ordinarily do to the future of this bountifully endowed country.

The Minister for Minerals and Energy, Reginald F. Connor, has stated that Australia's known recoverable resources of crude oil, which now supply 70 per cent of the nation's needs, will run out in eight years.

And a scientist has declared that the known coal fields, which fuel much of the tremendous industrial plant of industrial p!ant of Japan, will-be exhausted in a century.

Jolted by these dire predictions, Prime Minister Gough Whitham's Labor Government has responded with a rash of programs and with promises of vast sums of money to develop new energy sources and conserve the existing ones. A new governmental body, the Petroleum and Minerals Authority, will spend $75-million a year on exploration, in collaboration with foreign companies in the field.

The Minister for Science, William L. Morrison, decided to coordinate all the more or less casual investigations of solar energy here into one integrated, imaginative program under the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, a Government agency that has worked in fields ranging from wrinkle-proof wash-and-wear wool suits to fats without cholestoral content.

Sun-Conscious People

Millions of Australians are conscious of the sun most of the time because of its effects on the national life.

Australian sunshine produces handsomely tanned citizens and outstanding athletes. But the same glaring solar rays make vast areas of the interior a semidesert, where stranded motorists have died of dehydration in a few hours.

The enormous energy in the sun's heat has been harnessed in an elementary way by many Australian householders. Water passing through metal coils on a sun-bathed roof comes out hot enough for a family's heating needs.

With sufficient attention and expenditure, the same rays could furnish up to 25 per cent of Australia's total energy needs by the end of this century, according to Roger Morse, 59-year-old head of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's department of mechanical-engineering, who has been appointed director of the solar studies program.

Solar Heating for Homes

"By the year 2000 our solar energy technology will he sufficient to produce the degree of low-grade heat that will he needed for Australian homes," he predicted.

Mr. Morse mentioned a figure of 40 billion Australian dollars, equivalent to $60-billion in United States currency, to achieve the goal by the end of the century. This would require an investment annually of 2 to 3 per cent of the gross national product, he said.

An associate, F. G. Hogg, explained that the basic concept is to tap the solar energy stored in trees by developing forests, and then converting the plant material to a liquid fuel, such as ethanol, as a substitute for gasoline.

"This is just a chemical engineering process using the stored solar energy," Mr. Hogg said.

Meanwhile, he added, the program is going ahead with development of solar heating by direct sun rays.

[J]

Ja, peak oil is clearly part of a government conspiracy to keep oil prices high so ExxonMobil, Shell, ChevronTexaco, BP, and all the other offspring of Standard Oil and their friends can rake in record profits. It has absolutely nothing to do with supply issues, because as we all know there's trillions of barrels in the US alone, but they don't want you to know that so they say they can't drill the oil for one reason or another. I mean yeah, there's like 500 billion barrels in the Bakken formation, but the USGS which is part of the conspiracy puts out a news release saying there's only 3.6 or so, so that way no one goes and drills it. And there's also another 200 billion up in ANWR and the Arctic, plus the trillions in oil shale, which could be produced anytime except for you know, the conspiracy to suppress it and keep it hush hush. I mean the Saudi oil minister said there's something like 5 trillion barrels of oil and we've barely gone through 20% of it, so clearly, the current "oil shortage" is fake, and part of a grand conspiracy.

[MKSheppard]

I think you meant to post that in the Testing thread, and got this thread mixed up with that one. It's the only explanation that makes sense.

[Darth Wong]

Female orgasm tangent split.

[Darth Wong]

I've been looking at the old newspapers and Peak Oil arguments seem to reoccur every twenty or thirty years; and they're usually based around the statment that "we have X barrels of proveable reserves, but we are consuming them at Y rate; therefore we have Z years left.".

Logically, this will happen every time reserves start to dwindle or supply starts to dry up for some reason. At that point, new exploration efforts or technologies will kick in, opening up more supply. However, to assume that this cycle will repeat endlessly would be silly. At some point, the limitations on oil recovery will be such that they cannot be overcome except at great cost, thus changing the fundamental relationship between the cost of portable vehicular energy and other commodity costs in society. The supply is finite, after all.

Anyway, posting this kind of stuff in the random peak oil threads that pop up from time to time would IMHO, be trolling, sos I decided to simply post them here since they are history.

And it's funny how the same things keep cropping up; for example, Oil Shale just won't die; and in the article I found containing the 1973 statement by the Aussie Minister, there was talk about using cut down forests to produce ethanol as a motor fuel.

Oil Shale is like the flying car: it's a wonderful idea but it always seems to live in the future. And didn't some of the earliest cars actually run on vegetable oil? Mind you, a lot has changed in the last half-century: namely, a gigantic increase in the global human population. This time, we really have done something that was never done before: we ballooned our population to 7 billion.

And this thread is worth it anyway, for the spinoff alone - the female orgasm is a sinful sinful thing.

The history of medicine is pretty bizarre, and the treatment of the female orgasm as a sickness was but one example. As recently as the 1960s, many doctors believed that babies are incapable of feeling pain, and dismissed the screaming of male babies during zero-anesthetic circumcision as some kind of mindless reflex action.

[Adrian Laguna]

And this thread is worth it anyway, for the spinoff alone - the female orgasm is a sinful sinful thing.

The history of medicine is pretty bizarre, and the treatment of the female orgasm as a sickness was but one example.

I think you should read the first of posts you split, or follow the link I posted earlier in the thread. Female orgasm was never regarded as an illness.

[Darth Wong]

And this thread is worth it anyway, for the spinoff alone - the female orgasm is a sinful sinful thing.

The history of medicine is pretty bizarre, and the treatment of the female orgasm as a sickness was but one example.

I think you should read the first of posts you split, or follow the link I posted earlier in the thread. Female orgasm was never regarded as an illness.

Fair enough: they thought female arousal was a mental disease, and that orgasm would cure it. Doesn't change the point though: people often forget how poor our scientific understanding was at the time.

[J]

I've been looking at the old newspapers and Peak Oil arguments seem to reoccur every twenty or thirty years; and they're usually based around the statment that "we have X barrels of proveable reserves, but we are consuming them at Y rate; therefore we have Z years left.".

Logically, this will happen every time reserves start to dwindle or supply starts to dry up for some reason. At that point, new exploration efforts or technologies will kick in, opening up more supply. However, to assume that this cycle will repeat endlessly would be silly. At some point, the limitations on oil recovery will be such that they cannot be overcome except at great cost, thus changing the fundamental relationship between the cost of portable vehicular energy and other commodity costs in society. The supply is finite, after all.

Technology has advanced a lot from the old days, we've progressed from surface surveys to magnetic surveys, seismic surveys, underwater seismic surveys, and now, 3-D seismic with computer enhancements. As of right now, every spot on the planet except Antarctica, Greenland, and the sea under the Arctic ice cap has been worked over with magnetic & seismic surveys, the chances are vanishingly small that we've missed a supergiant oil field somewhere. If it's a big oil field, it's very likely we've found it already. There isn't a 100 billion barrel field just waiting to be found off the coast of Oregon or Florida, a Hibernia sized field of a couple billion barrels is possible though and that's the most we can reasonably expect.

On the production side, we've also taken it about as far as it'll go. We have water & detergent floods, gas injection, and computer monitoring & modeling to see where all the oil is in the reservoir so we can pump out more of it. We also have branched horizontal drilling where the holes branch out into a fishbone pattern to maximize contact with the oil bearing rocks, and we can monitor and control each branch for optimal flow & oil recovery. It really doesn't get much better from here, another 5-10% improvement may be possible, but we're not going to come up with some magic technology that doubles or triples the amount of oil we can pump from the ground. We've long passed the point of diminishing returns.

Petrogeology and oil production is now a mature and well understood field. The chances of some surprise popping up and turning all we know on its head is very, very slim to non-existent. Thanks to our technological advancements, we now have almost every last piece of the puzzle, and a pretty good picture of where we stand.