Is there a decent skeptic in the house?

on Aug 27 in Uncategorized tagged by Trevor Hicks

I’ve read a few Peak Oil skeptics recently just in the normal process of reassessing my own beliefs, trying to ensure that I haven’t slipped into any irrational dogmatism or an echo chamber listening only to those I already know agree with me. First, they need to get their stories straight. The comments on this article on Huffington Post contain both a conspiracy theory of Big Oil/OPEC promoting nonsense about Peak Oil to justify inflated prices as well as a conspiracy to discredit Peak Oil to prevent anyone from investing in alternative energy.

My more substantive complaint is that the skeptics consistently point out something to do with reserves.  Saudi Arabia actually has a trillion barrels, not 250 billion, Brazil has found 50 billion barrels since 2007, there is an essentially inexhaustible supply of abiotic oil (ie not from fossil remains) in the earth’s core.  Peak Oil is not about reserves, it’s about production.  Saudi claims of spare production capacity are in doubt.  Brazil has yet to produce a drop commercially from Tupi and has two consecutive very expensive, very high profile dry holes.  I’ll just say that speculation about abiotic oil is yet to gain widespread acceptance and the ultimate source has little to do with actual production rates.  Why don’t the skeptics have something to say about the fact that global oil production did not increase from 2005 through 2008 despite a tripling of the price?  Granted, calculations using the estimated total reserves were the basis of Hubbert’s original predictions regarding Peak Oil, but they honestly aren’t the salient fact about how much oil will be available in 2010 or 2015.  The keyword is depletion, not reserves. How often do the skeptics even mention depletion?

The skeptics do talk a lot about technology and this is a fair point. The massive investment in technology in the last twenty years has indeed created access to reserves that were formerly non-commercial, it has raised extraction rates and, yes, increased the total amount of recoverable oil. But these lower quality reservoirs that are now commercial are smaller and deplete even faster than the reservoirs exploited in past decades. The fact that the production and processing of tar sands is discussed in polite company should give us pause. Tar sands have huge environmental cost, vast quantities of energy input in to the process and rather low quality output product. Also, the assumption that technology will succeed is perhaps a bit optimistic. I have no doubt that the oil industry will continue to become more efficient and capable of extracting more oil at higher rates from new and existing reservoirs despite its many technical, political and personnel challenges. But the unspoken assumption behind technology as the answer is that a technological answer does in fact exist. I can swallow the assumption that if there is a technological solution to Peak Oil that the industry will find it given the trillions of dollars at stake. I’m skeptical that there is a combination of technology, personnel and capital investment that, from this date in the middle of 2009 will permit the global oil industry to substantially raise production from the levels it achieved in 2008.  We hit about 85 million barrels per day that year when you include all the tar sands and various liquids produced along with crude that can, at substantial expense, be refined into end products like gasoline and diesel.  Maybe we can get to 90 and keep it there for a while with a heroic effort. I rate the chances of getting to the 120 million that is projected for demand in 2030 as vanishingly slim.