Broken Energy Markets and the Downside of Hubbert’s Peak – The Automatic Earth.
Euan: A few commenters have mentioned peak oil recently. I am cautious about making forecasts and predictions and prefer instead to observe and document the data as the peak oil story unfolds. I have in fact published a couple of charts recently illustrating aspects of peak oil, one showing a possible peak in the rest of the world that excludes N America and OPEC (Figure 1). The other showing the undulating plateau in conventional crude + condensate that has persisted since 2005 (Figure 2). In my last post on oil price scenarios two of those showed global oil production capacity 1 to 2 Mbpd lower in 2016 than 2014. If that comes to fruition, will we have passed peak oil but does it matter?
Figure 1 Global oil production has been split into three geo-political categories: 1) USA and Canada, 2) OPEC and 3) the Rest of the World (RoW). RoW production bears the hallmarks of having peaked in the period 2005 to 2010 and this has consequences for oil prices, demand and prosperity in parts of the world, especially the OECD. Most of the growth in oil supply has been in the USA and Canada where the market has been flooded with expensive oil. Data are crude oil + condensate + natural gas liquids (C+C+NGL) and exclude biofuels and refinery gains that are included by the IEA in their total liquids number.
The current “low oil price crisis” is providing a clear and new perspective on the nature of the peak oil problem. If low price does indeed destroy high cost production capacity then this will raise the question if the high cost sources can ever be brought back? IF low price kills the shale industry can it come back from the dead?
