IEA: We've Hit Peak

[Col. Crackpot]

Do you gentlemen have rebuttals to contribute, or are you simply going to cry "conspiracy!" and snipe ad-hominems from the sidelines?

why should I? It's another in a stream of whak o loon end of the world fantasies that emerges like clockwork every few years. People have even predicted this very event a half dozen times! The very study given to the UK government even concedes that this has been proposed before in the past. A few of those proposals had us running out of gas 25-30 years ago.

Why should you rebut an argument? Did I hear you correctly? Try again.

It's trivial to see why the "argument from history" doesn't apply, unless you'd like to show that the arguments supplied back then are identical in logic and fact to the arguments being given here.

i'm not the one foaming at the mouth with quasi religious fervor proclaiming that the end of the world is at hand. You are. Your burden of proof.

[Col. Crackpot]

Perhaps you'd like to explain why world oil production is down about 1.2% from its peak in 2005 (DOE data, Excel spreadsheet), and in particular, why Saudi Arabia, the former number one oil producer has seen its production drop about 10% (DOE spreadsheet). While you're at it, feel free to enlighten us on why OPEC's production has been falling since 2005.

Ineptitude corruption, who knows. To take that information and conclude that it is a peak oil situation is one hell of a leap in logic.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

i'm not the one foaming at the mouth with quasi religious fervor proclaiming that the end of the world is at hand. You are. Your burden of proof.

Refuted the post evidence or concede. Consider yourself called out.

[Col. Crackpot]

i'm not the one foaming at the mouth with quasi religious fervor proclaiming that the end of the world is at hand. You are. Your burden of proof.

Refuted the post evidence or concede. Consider yourself called out.

what am i rebutting? A few economic forcasts predicted increased costs of crude oil and moderate decrease in crude production that resulted in a titanic leap in logic where you and Surlete to proclaim the fall of modern civilization?:lol: Is that what you want me to rebut? The logic is flawed!

[The Duchess of Zeon]

i'm not the one foaming at the mouth with quasi religious fervor proclaiming that the end of the world is at hand. You are. Your burden of proof.

Refuted the post evidence or concede. Consider yourself called out.

what am i rebutting? A few economic forcasts predicted increased costs of crude oil and moderate decrease in crude production that resulted in a titanic leap in logic where you and Surlete to proclaim the fall of modern civilization?:lol: Is that what you want me to rebut? The logic is flawed!

So all you can do in response to physical reality and thermodynamics is laugh and mock science like a creationist? Good luck, shitstain.


By the way, here's a recap, since you're to retarded to read, you won't understand this, but, Some other people may be swayed by science. Pray to Jebus, maybe he'll send you a rain of oil from the sky!

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The level of corporate and social brainwashing required for someone to be able to accuse another person who says that "this finite resource is going to run out" of being a conspiracy theorist is frankly damn-near terrifying. I mean, holy fucking shit, how dare I say that there isn't an infinite supply of dead dinosaurs in the ground!

[Col. Crackpot]

By the way, here's a recap, since you're to retarded to read, you won't understand this, but, Some other people may be swayed by science. Pray to Jebus, maybe he'll send you a rain of oil from the sky!

i'm an atheist you ass. we'll continue this tomorrow. i have to watch my kids.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

i'm an atheist you ass. we'll continue this tomorrow. i have to watch my kids.

Well you're not acting like one, which was the damned point of the comment, is that clear?

[Surlethe]

i'm not the one foaming at the mouth with quasi religious fervor proclaiming that the end of the world is at hand. You are. Your burden of proof.

Have you had your head shoved up your ass for the last three or four peak oil threads? As far as I'm concerned, the burden of proof's been met many times over. Your move, Crackpot: are you going to rise to the occasion and present the arguments -- I'm sure they're varied and all sound -- to show where the peak oil cadre is going wrong, or are you going to sit there and whine about "foaming at the mouth with quasi-religious fervor" and accomplish absolutely nothing beyond making yourself look like a goddamned fool?

[Admiral Valdemar]

So, Crackpot (an apt name if ever there was one), believes PO is a myth. This means he must believe oil is an infinite resource, or at the very least, that declining fossil fuel production when demand is rising faster and faster isn't a problem. This makes him a fool.

He stated that people have been warning oil and gasoline would run out 25-30 years ago when they didn't. This makes him a liar (what he must be referring to, is the American Lower 48 predicted in '56. Guess what happened to the US oil industry in '70).

He attacks the concerns over the impact on the geo-political and social arena as the ravings of a religious cult. This makes him naïve.

There is nothing more to be said. He hasn't refuted shit. Therefore, pay no heed. His rantings are about as pompous and relevant as those of O'Reilly, who I believe also denies PO and climate change.

As for my less optimistic outlook being because I'm from the UK and it's only a tiny island, I beg to differ. The US will fall hardest since the US uses a damn sight more oil than anyone else on the planet. The UK has problems, to be sure. But the US is not going to pull out of this as if it was a big hit on Wall Street and with some determination, things can be rosy again. The US didn't learn from Katrina with respect to climate change. Why on Earth should they change after the oil shocks of old which are so long forgotten?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

As for my less optimistic outlook being because I'm from the UK and it's only a tiny island, I beg to differ. The US will fall hardest since the US uses a damn sight more oil than anyone else on the planet. The UK has problems, to be sure. But the US is not going to pull out of this as if it was a big hit on Wall Street and with some determination, things can be rosy again. The US didn't learn from Katrina with respect to climate change. Why on Earth should they change after the oil shocks of old which are so long forgotten?

We also have the most resources for mitigation by far, and the most surplus capacity in areas that keep people alive to lose. The oil shocks being continuous and relentless and hurting more than some gulf coast hicks and some inner city blacks (let's be brutally honest about why that response was so ineffectual--the areas in question are shit poor), in fact, striking to the core of middle America, will provoke a response. Will it save middle America, that response? Fuck no. But it will preserve an industrial society in the United States, even if it does so on the bones of millions and a complete collapse of all constitutionality and, indeed, moral government.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd be more concerned about a civil war in the US than people going hungry because they can't get a job due to hyperinflation from rising commodity prices. There's a lot of guns and plenty of opportunists in the land to try and take advantage of any truly dire situation, doubly so if it means appealing to those who wish things as they are now would remain indefinitely. I expect infighting to be the biggest threat to Americans than any declared war on China or elsewhere when buying extra oil contracts has become ineffective.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'd be more concerned about a civil war in the US than people going hungry because they can't get a job due to hyperinflation from rising commodity prices. There's a lot of guns and plenty of opportunists in the land to try and take advantage of any truly dire situation, doubly so if it means appealing to those who wish things as they are now would remain indefinitely. I expect infighting to be the biggest threat to Americans than any declared war on China or elsewhere when buying extra oil contracts has become ineffective.

*Shrugs* Fighting a broken-backed war with separatists at the same time we're trying to recover would just make things even more comparable to the Russian Civil War Era, not prevent our recovery; they'd just pile up unnecessary fatalities by the millions and millions and tend to bring totalitarian control measures to the fore. I'm writing a fictional story to that effect right now over in the fanfic section, for that matter.

[Admiral Valdemar]

*Shrugs* Fighting a broken-backed war with separatists at the same time we're trying to recover would just make things even more comparable to the Russian Civil War Era, not prevent our recovery; they'd just pile up unnecessary fatalities by the millions and millions and tend to bring totalitarian control measures to the fore. I'm writing a fictional story to that effect right now over in the fanfic section, for that matter.

TEOTWAWKI.

I was going to do a similar fiction a few months ago, but I see we've been beat by a UK and a German when it comes to printing such stories. Besides, I'm too busy sorting out my life to have at it as a fictional story now. I'm going to see how the real deal plays out (and hope my character makes it to act three).

[Surlethe]

I'm in a giving mood, so I shall sum up the arguments for peak oil in a nutshell. If you doubt, read this then get back to me with some logic or factoid rebutting it. Appealing to past circumstances is a no-go unless you can show that I'm making the same mistakes the past predictions did.

• Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource in discrete packages.
• Therefore, unlimited consumption will cause it to eventually run out.
• Total production in a given area follows a logistic curve (i.e., the less there is in the ground, the harder it is to pull it out; the more there is in the ground, the easier it is to get out).
• Therefore, rate of production will peak and then decline.
• Because of the constant time lag between exploration and production (an empirical fact), we can predict based on exploration data when production will peak.
• World exploration peaked in the mid-1960s. The lag between exploration and production is approximately 40 years. (Data from the Hirsch Report and a little bit of extra knowledge about Hubbert's model.) This puts a peak ... in the mid 2000s.

[Starglider]

This is a significant motivation for myself and many people I know to devote everything we can to working on (very) high-risk high-reward technologies that could avoid the whole mess, if we can develop them in time.

But are you really a scientist?

I'm primarily an engineer. Artificial intelligence research is comparable to rocketry, in that it does involve a lot of maths and (cognitive) science, and there are lots of trials and carefully instrumented prototypes that are somewhat like experiments (sometimes you try and isolate variables and focus on subcomponents, sometimes it's just an all-up integration test). But it's still basically engineering, in that the objective is to produce a system that has certain capabilities, rather than an attempt to find out something about how the universe works.

The people I personally know who are actually doing useful work in nanotechnology, biotechnology and brain-computer interfacing are split roughly 50/50 between taking an engineering approach (focus on building stuff that works) and a scientific approach (make discoveries about structures and laws, publish them - as a direct continuation of preexisting chemistry and biology). That said the distinction is frequently an academic one (no pun intended, honest) and a very strong background in the relevant areas of science is (of course) essential regardless of the exact approach.

I would caution about letting this idea get to your head. The world will always need weed wackers, and Mike has said before about a lot of science grads wanting "glamour work" when in reality very few get there.

What I would like to do is irrelevant. The only question is whether there is a nontrivial chance of me making a useful contribution, and as it happens there is. That said to have a chance of making significant progress you pretty much have to work on it with obsessive fervor, which would be hard if one didn't enjoy it, so unsurprisingly I and most of the other people I know in these fields do enjoy them.

A lot of sciencey people are looking forward to the "death" of the "marketing" and "no skill" types, but when the depression comes they'll be very little money to go around for research that will take decades and everything will be devoted to securing the status quo and using proven technologies.

They're just being idiotic, or at least amusing naive.

In other words, I don't see the depression being good for academic or science types at all.

That was my point. A massive recession is bad news because it makes funding/staff/resources much harder to find. But this really has no impact on strategy, other than maybe some contingency planning, because we're already proceeding as fast as possible. If I was optimising my personal welfare instead of maximising the chance of contributing to a vital field, I would make different decisions.

[Col. Crackpot]

I'm in a giving mood, so I shall sum up the arguments for peak oil in a nutshell. If you doubt, read this then get back to me with some logic or factoid rebutting it. Appealing to past circumstances is a no-go unless you can show that I'm making the same mistakes the past predictions did.

• Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource in discrete packages.
• Therefore, unlimited consumption will cause it to eventually run out.
• Total production in a given area follows a logistic curve (i.e., the less there is in the ground, the harder it is to pull it out; the more there is in the ground, the easier it is to get out).
• Therefore, rate of production will peak and then decline.
• Because of the constant time lag between exploration and production (an empirical fact), we can predict based on exploration data when production will peak.
• World exploration peaked in the mid-1960s. The lag between exploration and production is approximately 40 years. (Data from the Hirsch Report and a little bit of extra knowledge about Hubbert's model.) This puts a peak ... in the mid 2000s.

not a single person here is disputing that oil is an infinite resoure, so do not strawman my argument. The self renewing fields in Russia (Kola) and other places damage the peak oil argument, but more than likely they jut delay the inevetable.

Also, there is a second possible scenerio that fits the supplied data quite neatly: A deliberate artificial scarcity created by the fossil fuel industry to drive up prices. Profit is a great motive for scare mongering, and peak oil puts a pretty face on it.

Look, i'm not a geologist, but i am a banker. And i can smell price gouging a mile away. The stink here is overpowering.

[Surlethe]

not a single person here is disputing that oil is an infinite resoure, so do not strawman my argument.

What argument? Up until now, you've had none.

The self renewing fields in Russia (Kola) and other places damage the peak oil argument, but more than likely they jut delay the inevetable.

Self-renewing fields? I'm skeptical; do you have a source for this?

Also, there is a second possible scenerio that fits the supplied data quite neatly: A deliberate artificial scarcity created by the fossil fuel industry to drive up prices. Profit is a great motive for scare mongering, and peak oil puts a pretty face on it.

Do you have an actual model for this so that you can make predictions? How does it apply to US oil, which peaked in 1970? A Hubbert curve with multiple discovery cycles fits world oil production neatly even after OPEC started its cartel; how accurately does your model make predictions, and if it does is it more parsimonious than the Hubbert model?

Look, i'm not a geologist, but i am a banker. And i can smell price gouging a mile away. The stink here is overpowering.

The only thing this argument does (if you can substantiate it with data) is push the peak back and flatten the production curve considerably; it does nothing to change the substance of my argument.

[brianeyci]

If I was optimising my personal welfare instead of maximising the chance of contributing to a vital field, I would make different decisions.

Some would say the two goals are compatible. When I donate to a hospital, I'm ensuring the future welfare of children who will support me.

The world will still need bankers, entertainers, corporate executives and advertising. Just that they'll be a whole lot less of them, and if someone wants into those fields they'll have to be the best of the best of the best (and perhaps getting that good is not possible in such a time frame). Money and altriusm are not mutually exclusive, though they can be.

What I would like to do is irrelevant.

What you want to do is relevant, and if science is it so be it, but science isn't the only way to make a contribution. Useful contributions as you put it are many and varied. False modesty is unbecoming... academics shouldn't brag about fields they don't know anything about, but at the same time they shouldn't be modest and say what they want to do doesn't matter. What you want to do does matter, because ten years from now if your friends have an easier more enjoyable life with no student loans and a career and you're stuck in a lab somewhere sampling specimens, you'll turn into a jaded fuck who wished the world was more fair instead of being happy with what he has.

What is this non-trivial chance of making a contribution? I've heard of many engineers who graduate and end up on the lower end of the IT junket answering phones the whole day. No offense intended, but unless you have a Ph.D. in your back pocket and are some accomplished scientist, I wouldn't hold my breath about contributing some wonder technology or "high-risk" technology to solve the energy crisis.

[J]

The self renewing fields in Russia (Kola) and other places damage the peak oil argument, but more than likely they jut delay the inevetable.

This one's one of my favourites. Oil is refilling a reservoir from a previously undiscovered source, which is then mapped and added to the reserves. Oil is not magically appearing from some unknown process deep within the Earth as is claimed by the proponents of the Abiotic Oil Theory, it's merely leaking in from a previously overlooked source which is overlooked no more. And of course there's the "unexplained" sudden increases in production in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico which loonies claim as evidence of self-renewal. The actual explanation is much simpler, the seabed collapsed from all the oil being pumped out, compacting the remains of the reservoir and raising its pressure, leading to a temporary surge in production.

Also, there is a second possible scenerio that fits the supplied data quite neatly: A deliberate artificial scarcity created by the fossil fuel industry to drive up prices. Profit is a great motive for scare mongering, and peak oil puts a pretty face on it.

Would you like to provide evidence that energy industry price gouging would result in the production curve seen to date? Would you also like to explain how OPEC, the Big 4, the Russians, Canadians, South Americans, Africans, and every other oil producer in the world manage to act in cahoots despite having vastly differing interests with regards to oil production?

[tim31]

Although I already stated that I'm not qualified to enter this discussion, I have a question: if the world economy implodes following PO, what are the fat cats who are making a killing from this stuff going to do with all that worthless, devalued money they have on paper?

[Surlethe]

The self renewing fields in Russia (Kola) and other places damage the peak oil argument, but more than likely they jut delay the inevetable.

This one's one of my favourites. Oil is refilling a reservoir from a previously undiscovered source, which is then mapped and added to the reserves. Oil is not magically appearing from some unknown process deep within the Earth as is claimed by the proponents of the Abiotic Oil Theory, it's merely leaking in from a previously overlooked source which is overlooked no more. And of course there's the "unexplained" sudden increases in production in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico which loonies claim as evidence of self-renewal. The actual explanation is much simpler, the seabed collapsed from all the oil being pumped out, compacting the remains of the reservoir and raising its pressure, leading to a temporary surge in production.

The Uppsala paper Duchess linked to earlier in the thread also gives the Piper fire as an explanation for the North Sea double peak.

Also, there is a second possible scenerio that fits the supplied data quite neatly: A deliberate artificial scarcity created by the fossil fuel industry to drive up prices. Profit is a great motive for scare mongering, and peak oil puts a pretty face on it.

Would you like to provide evidence that energy industry price gouging would result in the production curve seen to date? Would you also like to explain how OPEC, the Big 4, the Russians, Canadians, South Americans, Africans, and every other oil producer in the world manage to act in cahoots despite having vastly differing interests with regards to oil production?

I had thought the production constriction caused by OPEC's formation was responsible for the mid-1970s drop to a new bell curve? This would have pushed the peak back from the mid-1990s about ten years.

[Surlethe]

Although I already stated that I'm not qualified to enter this discussion, I have a question: if the world economy implodes following PO, what are the fat cats who are making a killing from this stuff going to do with all that worthless, devalued money they have on paper?

They're not. As it's imploding, they're going to be changing that money from paper to real, tangible assets like land, gold, copper, steel, uranium, and energy generators.

[K. A. Pital]

Self-renewing fields in Russia? Are you saying our resources are going to stop peak oil? Shit, all of the non-OPEC is nothing but a softbed before the fall if OPEC is hitting peak. We can raise a little money from exploiting our oil fields to the full, but that's it. The truth is Russia is also around peak capacity and there's Chindia and Japan who want big pipes to be laid before shit hits the fan. So I guess you're misplacing your hopes. If anything, Russia will help the US to get more fucked by softening the fall of SCO members instead of giving all what's left to America as some sort of bail-out. You're holding Iraq hostage, but not a country like Russia.

[tim31]

Although I already stated that I'm not qualified to enter this discussion, I have a question: if the world economy implodes following PO, what are the fat cats who are making a killing from this stuff going to do with all that worthless, devalued money they have on paper?

They're not. As it's imploding, they're going to be changing that money from paper to real, tangible assets like land, gold, copper, steel, uranium, and energy generators.

Suspected that might be the case. Do you reckon they're stockpiling essentials as well? Food, water, dare I say it- oil?