The Oil Drum: Europe

Seven am breakfasts in O’Hare are not a habit I plan on developing but there was I, for the second day running, at the same table even at Wolfgang Pucks.. But all in a good cause, as I headed off to Houston for ASPO. Going to the hotel - very new and needed, as the cabby proudly told me,– he asked which Convention I was here for (there is an Olympics meeting of some sort down the hall). I explained about Peak Oil and though initially he had not heard about it, he then mentioned a Houston City Council effort to have the cab companies use hybrids. This is now on hold, since it did not appear to be a well-received suggestion. Concerns that he brought up included the small size of the cars, that they were only 4-cylinder and would not stand the wear that a cab life would impose, and that the cabbies, who have to buy the cabs, could not afford the $3,000 to replace the batteries. Apparently the cab companies had suggested that they would comply right after the police Department bought theirs. Talking at an ASPO break about this, apparently Denver are experimenting with the process, but have only just introduced it with a few cabs., and a quick Google shows that a number of cities have already bitten that bullet.

With getting here a little late I walked into the first joint sessions after they had started, and, as with the ASPO in Cork, the atmosphere immediately conveyed that the meeting would be a success. (Though the initial judgment was made because I had to drop my bag and lean against the wall since there were no free seats, and when more were brought they were still not enough). The audience was obviously knowledgeable and the questions were technical, as were the answers. For the first “Workshop” day the sessions were divided, with TOD stalwarts Stuart Staniford and Euan Mearns giving the story of their incredible detective work in, as an audience member put it, developing the story of Saudi oil with virtually none of the resources or computing power of Aramco, and yet coming very close to what has to be the real story. Stuart explained how the numbers that he, and others at TOD, had put together and painted the picture of Ghawar depletion, (which is in the citation so I won’t repeat it) and Euan put this in the broader context of Saudi Arabia in general. Gail Tverberg acted as moderator to the session and the discussion. Perhaps the crux of the issue is that the authors do not think that Saudi Aramco can produce the volumes that they claim for Ghawar since, in part they assume a higher recovery factor that has been historically true for this type of rock, and with around half the production gone, things are not looking all that good. Reference was made in questions to other papers coming in the meeting that will bring further light to the topic, including such a comment from Matt Simmons.

Roger Bentley has written Global Oil and Gas Depletion - A Letter to the Energy Modelling Community, published by the Energy Economics Education Foundation (The IAEE's education affiliate) and available to download here (.pdf, page 6).

Bentley addresses this letter to the energy modelling community, it is a brief summary of the various approaches and highlights the problems of the past. A fundamental difficulty surrounds the two different data sets of P50 and proved reserves, the use of proved reserves in the mistaken belief they are a reasonable measure of the remaining oil being chiefly responsible for the difficulties.

‘P50’ designates 50% probable, and is an industry estimate at a given date for the most likely size of a field’s reserves. P50 estimates are often approximated quite well by ‘proved plus probable’ reserves.

[Proved reserves] are quite unusable for calculating future oil production as they exhibit serious errors of under-reporting, over-reporting, and non-reporting. These data problems have not been adequately recognised by much of the energy modelling community, leading to serious errors of analysis.