Peak Oil Is Dead - Gasoline Prices Flat to Down Long Term

[William13]

Shale has been 15-20 years away since the 1973 oil embargo. The same is true of fusion.

[Mookuh]

Huh, this is weird. Just this weekend we had a new all-time high for gasoline prices in Germany. Average was 1.692 €/liter or 6.40€ /gallon. They blame high oil prices.

Article (in German):
Benzinpreis steigt auf Rekordhöhe | tagesschau.de

[TEG]

...Resources don't run out, but they get expensive...

Somewhat related:
Cocktail Party Physics: helium: a weighty question

...In the last decade, helium prices have doubled - at least...

...One-fifth of the world's helium supply is used in MRIs. The typical MRI requires superconducting magnets and, since we haven't figured out room-temperature superconductivity yet, they require liquid nitrogen or liquid helium to keep them in the superconducting state...

...The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken that long to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will dissipate in about 100 years. One generation does not have the right to determine availability for ever." - Robert C.Richardson...

...I have to comment on the quote about kids' balloons costing $100. Richardson was trying to make the point that if the price of helium were determined on an open market, the cost would be so high that that's what the amount of helium in a balloon would cost. One of Richardson's main points is that helium prices have been artificially low, they shouldn't be...

...suggested that helium was too precious to be used in trivial applications like balloons and scientists were killjoys who wanted all the helium for themselves...

...people become interested in conservation only when it becomes expensive to be wasteful...

[Doug_G]

Sure, there's lots more oil out there if you're willing to pay enough money, use astonishing amounts of water, and can manage the various environmental impacts.

Oil shale economics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I doubt the situation is anywhere near as rosy as the WSJ article suggests. At the same time dire predictions of world economic collapse due to oil depletion aren't going to happen, either.

All that said, the much higher cost of energy in the future will have a significant economic impact, as will the growing environmental impact.

[Norbert]

Meanwhile, North Dakota's Bakken/Three Rivers field produces 600,000 barrels a day of unconventional oil—up from 250,000 barrels in 2010 and less than half that in 2008—making that state the second-largest U.S. oil producer. With such changes happening so fast, it's timely to consider their implications.

However that compares to a US consumption of 19,150,000 barrels a day (2010). So while I'm not familiar with calculations like this, I don't see yet how these are supposed to be large numbers.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat...elds/2174.html

Still, the security benefit of North America's new oil is significant. While this production will not be cheaper than conventional production from Saudi Arabia, the magnitude of North America's economically and technically recoverable oil resources (at, say, $70 per barrel) is about 45 billion barrels, or 10% of the total North American oil in place.

This would exceed the magnitude available from the Middle East.

19.15 million barrels a day is about 7 billion barrels per year. So 45 billion barrels would last only about 6 and a half years (when used for US consumption only). Am I missing zeroes somewhere, or missing something else?

[Robert.Boston]

Oil & gas in country A is only fungible with oil & gas in country B if there is:

• Secure transportation -- are pirates going to hijack the freighters? or enemy navies torpedo them?
• Open trade -- are supplies going to be held by countries willing to supply us in the future?
• Commitments not to impose tariffs -- are monopolies going to impose explicit or implicit tariffs, a la OPEC?
• Secure supply -- will terrorists or hostile governments seize/destroy production and/or transportation facilities?

There's a reason why energy independence is a real concern in the Pentagon and the State Department.

[WhiteKnight]

Just for clarity let me point out that oil shale and tight oil in shale are two different things (even though they are easy to confuse):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tight_oil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale

John Deutch is talking about tight oil.

[Doug_G]

Tight oil: Will it change the world? | Energy | News | Financial Post

In Canada, and in many U.S. fields, production from tight oil fields declines by 65% the first year and by a total of 75% within two years, he said. With such steep declines, producers have to invest in new wells every two to three years just to keep production levels flat.

For example, the brokerage estimates that up to $15-billion has been spent by industry to add approximately 500,000 barrels a day of production from the North Dakota Bakken region. To add three million barrels per day of production from fields across the U.S., it would require $75-billion to $100-billion of capital spending every couple of years. Contrast that to the oil sands, which require bigger capital expenditures up front, and then a lower level of maintenance capital, but the projects produce for 30 to 50 years.

“For those who make very optimistic projections about the additions to productive capacity, are they thinking about the amount of capital that is going to take, especially in light of the decline rates being experienced in the reservoirs now being developed?” Mr. Tims asks.

That’s not to say tight oil isn’t profitable. Many tight oil projects achieve payout of the capital invested very quickly because so much of the economic value comes out in the first year, he said. According to Peters & Co. estimates, a median tight oil project is economic, with a 10% rate of return, at around US$52 a barrel.

Nothing is ever simple...

[Vger]

Nothing is ever simple...

Indeed. And it is telling that these cautionary notes, while included in the article, where buried at its end. Actually, I see all this as a great tragedy set to unfold. This very short term production will hold oil prices down just long enough to economically disrupt our momentum toward alternative energy. This, in turn, will hasten our headlong rush toward a tipping point with climate change beyond which catastrophic damage to quality of life and the economy will be inevitable.

Why is it that people can bounce their grandchildren on their knee gleefully, and then go "invest" in such disastrous short-term thinking, that will doom those tiny lives to a non-future of droughts, floods, fire, and famine.

Shameful, I say.

[EVNow]

Along the entire West Coast and on the East Coast north of the Carolinas, natural gas is the marginal fuel in the vast number of hours.

Not in the PNW.