061123
Pemex officiellt: Cantarell faller 14%
VD för det statliga mexikanska oljebolaget Pemex sade i onsdags att man räknar med att det jättelika oljefältet Cantarell kommer att minska med ungefär 14% per år mellan 2007-2015. Den kortfattade artikeln har en del siffror men inte tillräckligt. För att kunna skapa stapeldiagrammet nedan antog jag att nedgången blir 14% även mellan 2006-2007. Även om det är ett löst antagande så visar staplarna ganska tydligt vad en årlig nedgång på 14% innebär. Maximal produktion för Cantarell inföll 2004 med 2,13 miljoner fat/dag. Om prognosen stämmer kommer oljeproduktionen att halveras på bara 5-6 år.


Läs gärna den korta artikeln Mexico's Pemex chief: Cantarell oil field output to drop 14 percent a year

061123
Oljan blir billigare - eller dyrare
Att förutspå framtida oljepriser är inte det lättaste.
Bloomberg News har en artikel där CFC Seymor gissar att oljan kan falla 9% under 2007.

``In 2007, the supply of crude will exceed demand, growth in demand will not match growth in supply,''

 Ungefär manar den kanadensiska investeringsfirman Schachter Asset Management Inc. sina klienter att köpa olje- och gas-papper nu, innan priserna stiger igen.

"We believe the average price will be $70 next year, compared to $66 or $67 this year."

Läs gärna Bloomberg: Commodity Strategists: Oil Prices May Fall 9% in '07, CFC Says
och Winnipeg Free Press: Oil prices about to rise, energy expert warns

 

061121
Irans olja skall dubbleras på 8 år
Irans oljeminister Gholam-Hossein Nozari sade i måndags att Iran har så mycket olja att man kan få en produktion på 7 miljoner fat per dag 2014. Det skulle i så fall bli en fördubbling av nuvarande produktion.

Så här ser Irans oljeproduktion ut historiskt. Klicka för större bild.

          Källa: ASPO-03.
OBS! Prognosen med den skarpt sjunkande produktionen efter 2010 är Colin Campbells egen framtidsgissning. Den kan visa sig stämma, men är som sagt bara en prognos. Irans hackiga produktionskurva har politiska orsaker. 8 år är en ganska kort tid när det handlar om att fördubbla produktionen, även i ett oljeland som Iran.

Här två länkar till notiser från IRNA om uttalanden från Irans oljeminister:
Iran to nearly double oil, triple gas production by 2014
US companies deprived of participation in Iran's oil activities: minister

Ändrad 22/11. Tack Olof för påpekande om slarvig journalistik!
 

061116
Några svar på CERAS pressrelease
Som väntat har det bubblat här och var efter CERAS utmanande pressrelease där Peak Oilteorin utmålas som ett stort hot mot vår gemensamma energiframtid.

Några välkända Peak Oil-människor i USA, ("Randy Udall, Energy Analyst, Co-Founder ASPO-USA, Jeremy Gilbert, Former Chief Petroleum Engineer, BP, Steve Andrews, Co-Founder ASPO-USA") har skrivit ett svar där de avslutande punkterna ser ut så här:

(Mycket och liten text, men naturligvis läsvärt)

What evidence is there to suggest that a peak in global oil production is near? CERA seeks a sober dialogue to identify “clear signposts that will herald the onset” of either the peak or their “undulating plateau” of world oil production. Here, ten reasons why this turning point is likely between now and 2015.

1. M. King Hubbert, winner of the top award in earth sciences—the Vetlesen Prize-- was an enormously courageous, bright, and prescient man who may have done more with a slide rule than his contemporary critics can with a supercomputer, but it’s a mistake to build the peak oil case entirely around his famous curve.
   
   With some exceptions, (the North Sea, the United States, Indonesia, for example, and most of the minor producers who are long past peak) falling reserves are generally not the most important brake on efforts to increase oil production. There are numerous other constraints (including limits on financing, logistics, shortages of rigs and drilling ships, a lack of skilled manpower, extremes of weather, political or military conflict) that make it increasingly difficult to expand production.
   
   These constraints, which sometimes operate synergistically, work to restrain and delay production growth which might otherwise compensate for declines elsewhere. Iraq, for example, has sufficient reserves to theoretically produce 5 million barrels a day. But wishing won’t make it so.
    
2. Globally, oil production is highly concentrated in a small number of countries and regions and is becoming more so. Twenty nations produce 83% of the world’s oil, and production in many has already peaked. As others in this top twenty gradually “roll over,” it will become increasingly difficult for the remaining members of this exclusive club to “up the ante,” increasing their own production to offset declines elsewhere. Indeed, in CERA’s forecast to 2015 published last summer, the authors acknowledge that conventional crude production will plateau around 2010, but forecast that the availability of natural gas liquids will continue to grow as global gas production expands.
    
3. Production outside OPEC is forecast by most experts to peak between 2010 and 2015. Once that occurs, there is no possibility that any combination of non-OPEC countries could offset significant production declines in other parts of the world. A wide range of analysts agree on this, including PFC Energy, ExxonMobil, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and Woods Mackenzie. Their conclusions are supported by other studies carried out by Chris Skrebowski, Tom Petrie, Henry Groppe and others.
    
4. The overwhelming majority of remaining conventional petroleum reserves are concentrated around the Arabian Gulf. There, they are largely off-limits to the world’s independent oil companies which tend to have the best technology and the most highly trained engineers and geoscientists. This technology and these people are increasingly essential to efficiently extract the oil from the increasingly complex reservoirs which hold most of the remaining conventional oil.
    
5. The Middle East region is riven by religious, cultural, geopolitical and military conflicts. It is a cauldron for conflict. Muslim governments control about two-thirds of the world’s remaining conventional oil and are increasingly bitterly opposed to U.S. government policies. In most of these key nations, the ability to expand production is larger than the current desire to do so; they are unlikely to see any benefit in early production of their oil to slake an American or Chinese thirst.
    
6. Increases in production from the non-Middle East OPEC member countries are unlikely to compensate for production declines elsewhere. Nigeria's production has been undercut by insurgents; Venezuela's production is falling due to mismanagement and the "Chavez factor"; Indonesia’s production appears to be in irremediable decline.
    
7. Unconventional petroleum resources (Canada’s tar sands, Venezuela’s bitumen and U.S. oil shales) are very large and very misunderstood. All oil is not created equal. Although they total trillions of barrels in the aggregate, expanding unconventional production is expensive, technically arduous and slow. Because these resources can not be produced at high rates, they can do little to postpone the peak in global production.
   
   For example, at forecast 2015 rates of production, it will take more than a century to produce Canada’s 175 billion barrels of tar sand reserves. (A financial analogy: Imagine having $100,000,000 in your IRA, but being forbidden to withdraw more than $100,000 per year. You are rich, sort of.) With tens of billions of investment, Venezuela could expand its bitumen production, but Chavez is in no rush to do so, nor are the importing countries showing any indication of the investments in refinery modifications which would be required to deal with the increased proportion of very heavy oil.
   
   As for oil shale, global production has never exceeded 25,000 barrels a day, has fallen by half since 1990, and now provides just 1/10,000th of global energy. Typical oil shales have the energy density of a baked potato. (In Colorado, Shell hopes to pull the sword from the stone using electricity: a dedicated 1,200 MW powerplant will be needed to produce 100,000 b/d, making this the world’s largest electricity consumer.) Other oft-heralded types of unconventional liquids, such as gas-to-liquids and coal-to-liquids, are very capital intensive and offer abysmal energy returns.
   
   Biofuels, particularly Brazilian ethanol, will make an important contribution but only regionally. A breakthrough in the production of cellulosic ethanol would be welcome, but is unlikely to occur before oil production peaks.
    
8. Production decline from producing fields is inevitable and relentless, and trees don’t grow to the sky! Not all the world’s oil fields are in decline, but the majority are. No one knows what the average global decline rate is, but assuming CERA’s conservative 5% decline rate in mature fields, the existing global production base loses more than 2.5 million barrels per day/year. This means that by 2015 we may need 20 million barrels per day of new production just to maintain current world production.
   
   Most of the world’s large fields, a few hundred of which are the main contributors to global production, have been on production for decades. Many are known to have increasing water cuts or gas-oil ratios, and are in decline. Examples of major fields which are thought to have gone into decline include Mexico’s Cantarell, Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, Kuwait’s Burgan, and perhaps Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar. (If the Saudis wish to allay fears about the well-being of their major fields, they could do so by releasing data on their production histories. Their reluctance to do this, while perfectly understandable, is not particularly reassuring.)
    
9. Roughly 80% of the world’s remaining oil reserves are controlled by national oil companies such as Saudi Aramco, Pemex, Petrobras, ADNOC and NIOC. In the grand scheme of things, BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell are relatively small players and no longer have the ability to significantly expand production. (Exxon has spent $100 billion since year 2000 with no growth to show for it. Lee Raymond may not “believe” in peak oil, but his company’s recent performance doesn’t exactly refute the idea.) In evaluating whether to invest in increasing production, the NOCs rely on a different set of calculations and motivations than the IOCs.
   
   National interests, which tend to favor ensuring that oil reserves will still exist for the current leaders’ grand-children, often trump what Westerners would define as rational economic decision-making. Recently, a number of these government-owned companies have unilaterally rewritten the terms of existing contracts, rejected joint-development proposals from IOCs, and taken various steps to further restrict access by the IOCs to their reserves. See Putin, who has recognized that energy is the original currency, and with it he can wage a new cold war.
   
   In short, production expansions by the NOCs are likely to take place over longer periods and to lower levels than some analysts had expected.
    
10. Discovery rates are falling rapidly. We are now producing two to three barrels of oil for every additional one we find. New discoveries are also much smaller than those of a few decades ago. It has been 25 years since we discovered a field capable of producing 1 million barrels per day.
    
    During the 1970s, at the time of the first Oil Crises, the North Slope, North Sea, and Cantarell were standing in reserve, ready to ride to the rescue. In contrast, today there are few, if any, large, untapped virgin fields waiting in the wings. The offshore fields that are being developed (primarily in West Africa, the Caspian, Brazil and the deepwater Gulf of Mexico) are smaller, more complex, and, in cases, nearly prohibitively expensive to develop.

Originalartikeln Peddling PetroProzac: CERA ignores 10 warning signposts of peak oil finns hos Energy Bulletin

En annan ganska rejäl respons hittar man hos The OilDrum.

 

061116
ASPO Newsletter No. 70 (Oktober)
Innehåll:
761. Regional Assessments - LATIN AMERICA
762. Newsweek covers Oil
763. Peak Oil and World War
764. Oil Company hints
765. A dip in Oil Price
766. Norway adresses Peak Oil
767. EU Transition to a Sustainable Energy System
768. Russia pressed at G8 Meeting
769. Global Warming and Peak Oil
770. Major Oil Comanyies seem to pass peak
771. ASPO USA Boston Conference great success

Här kan du hämta nyhetsbrevet (PDF 278kB)
 

061115
Seminarium: Olja och säkerhet
Föreningen Folk och Försvar arrangerar ett seminarium den 29 november kl 09.00 - 14.00 i Riksdagens förstakammarsal. Anmälan görs via www.kursanmalan.nu/olja. Antalet platser är begränsat.

"Oljan har en stor ekonomisk betydelse och efterfrågan är stor, samtidigt som tillgången minskar. Bensin, diesel, plast och asfalt är exempel på produkter i vår vardag som är helt eller delvis oljebaserade. Sverige importerar idag merparten av sin olja från Nordsjöområdet. Men i takt med att utvinningen där minskar, ökar vårt beroende av olja från Mellanöstern och Ryssland. Vad innebär det att vi blir allt mer beroende av olja från politiskt mer instabila länder och regioner? Hur sårbara är vi? Vilka åtgärder kan och bör vi vidta? Är det bråttom?

"P R O G R A M
Moderator: Lars Ekeman, generalsekreterare Folk och Försvar
09.00 Inledning: intryck från Kirkenes
Tone Tingsgård (s)
Allan Widman (fp)
09.20 Världens energibalans – utmaningar och möjligheter
Staffan Riben, Riben Consulting
10.00 Kaffe
10.20 Energibalansen i Sverige
Urban Bergström, Energimyndigheten
10.50 Energi och vår sårbarhet – diskussion
Jan Nygren, Svenskt Näringsliv
Sture Nordh, TCO
11.30 LUNCH
12.30 Tillgång på energi – säkerhetspolitiska konsekvenser
Vladislav Savic, författare och journalist
13.10 Energi och vår säkerhet – reflektioner och diskussion
Tone Tingsgård (s)
Allan Widman (fp)
Fredrick Federley (c)
Per Bolund (mp)
14.00 Konferensen slut"

Läs inbjudan som pdf.

 

061114
CERA: Peak Oil är FEL!
Energianalysfirman CERA har vid flera tillfällen ställt sig som motståndare till idén om att världens oljeförsörjning närmar sig en topp för att sedan sjunka. De brukar ha den mest optimistiska synen av alla jämförbara analytiker.

Idag publicerades en pressrelease med titeln Peak Oil Theory – “World Running Out of Oil Soon” – Is Faulty; Could Distort Policy & Energy Debate

Några citat:
"a new analysis of the subject by Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) finds that the remaining global oil resource base is actually 3.74 trillion barrels -- three times as large as the 1.2 trillion barrels estimated by the theory’s proponents"

"CERA finds that not only will world oil production not peak before 2030, but that the idea of a peak is itself “a dramatic but highly questionable image.”

       "Peak Theory Shortcomings

            The CERA review also finds that current “peak oil” advocacy suffers from several problems:

• The peak argument is not presented in the context of a credible systematic evaluation of available data; its proponents have not made available a transparent and detailed analysis that would allow an objective and rational discussion.  At base “their methodology is to impute decline curves against currently proven reserves and declare that the game – and the argument – is over.”
• The underlying analytical model formulated by the late M. King Hubbert both fails to recognize that recoverable reserve estimates evolve with time and are subject to significant change, and it also underplays the substantial impact of technological advances.  Consequently, total annual production at the high point in 1970 was 600 million barrels higher – 20 percent -- than Hubbert’s projection of peak production for the US Lower 48, although he correctly anticipated its timing within two years.  
• Hubbert’s method requires accurate knowledge of the ultimate recoverable reserves of an area, but his 1956 analysis could never have incorporated the impact of giant discoveries in Alaska and the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, and therefore couldn’t have predicted the production profile for the U.S.  As a result, total cumulative U.S. production between the high point in 1970 and 2005 exceeded Hubbert’s predictions by the equivalent of more than 10 years of US production at present rates.
• Hubbert-posited post-peak reservoir decline curve assumptions are rebutted by observation that the geometry of typical oilfield production profiles is often distinctly asymmetrical and does not generally show a precipitous mirror-image decline in production after an apparent peak, even without the application of new technology or enhanced oil recovery techniques.  As a result, in the US Lower 48 where Hubbert came closest to accurately forecasting a peak, oil production in 2005 was some 66 percent higher than projected by Hubbert, and cumulative production between 1970 and 2005 was some 15 billion barrels higher, a variance equal to more than eight years of US production at present rates.
• Those who believe a peak is imminent tend to consider only proven remaining reserves of conventional oil, which they currently estimate at about 1.2 trillion barrels.  In the view of many petroleum geologists, this is a pessimistic estimate because it excludes the enormous contribution likely from probable and possible resources, those yet to be found, and plays down the importance of unconventional reserves in the Canadian oil sands, the Orinoco tar belt, oil shale and GTL projects.  CERA believes the global inventory is some 4.8 trillion barrels, of which about 1.08 trillion barrels have been produced, leaving 3.72 trillion conventional and unconventional barrels, an order of magnitude that will allow productive capacity to continue to expand well into this century.
• The “peak oil” argument is frequently supported with data indicating that new exploration finds are not sufficient to replace annual production.  Their data sets have serious deficiencies.  The peak argument is an incomplete and therefore misleading analysis because it ignores the role of development (vs exploration) projects in expanding reserves, fails to understand economic factors that can point company and national strategies to emphasize development vs exploration work. By focusing on “discovery” and ignoring the increased knowledge and confidence about field volumes, it disregards the fact that revisions, additions and exploration together have generated resource growth of 320 billion barrels – 80 billion barrels more, or one-third more, than total production – during the period from 1995 to 2003.  CERA draws both on its own data bases and those of its parent company IHS, which has the world’s most complete proprietary data bases on oil production and resources.
• Hubbert’s method does not incorporate economic or technical factors that influence productive capacity; most importantly, it ignores the impact of both price and demand, both major drivers of production.
• Peakists’ projections of the date a peak would be reached continue to come and go, the most recent targeted around Thanksgiving Day 2005, give or take a few weeks."

Läs gärna hela pressreleasen. Den är inte särskilt lång.

 

061103
Simmons presentation vid ASPO-USA konferens
Matt Simmons, mest känd som författare till Twilight in the Dessert har hållit föredrag om Peak Oil och framför allt Saudiarabien under några år. Hans presentationer som har gått att hämta från hans webbplats har varit intressanta, men ack så fula. Hans senaste alster är dels snyggare men framför allt mer genomarbetad än de tidigare. Den går inte att hämta hem, inte än i alla fall, men man kan titta på den hos ASPO-USA. Länken nedan leder till presentationssidan, klicka på den lilla orangeröda triangeln under de fem bilderna. Du ser nu en bild på herr Simmons, klicka på den så startar ett  bildspel i Flashformat. Navigationen finns i klartext.

Här finns bildspelet.