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How much oil remains for the world to produce? Comparing assessment methods, and separating fact from fiction
How much oil remains for the world to produce? Comparing assessment methods, and separating fact from fiction
Abstract
This paper assesses how much oil remains to be produced, and whether this poses a significant constraint to global development. We describe the different categories of oil and related liquid fuels, and show that public-domain by-country and global proved (1P) oil reserves data, such as from the EIA or BP Statistical Review, are very misleading and should not be used. Better data are oil consultancy proved-plus-probable (2P) reserves. These data are generally backdated, i.e. with later changes in a field’s estimated volume being attributed to the date of field discovery. Even some of these data, we suggest, need reduction by some 300 Gb for probable overstatement of Middle East OPEC reserves, and likewise by 100 Gb for overstatement of FSU reserves. The statistic that best assesses ‘how much oil is left to produce’ is a region’s estimated ultimately recoverable resource (URR) for each of its various categories of oil, from which production to-date needs to be subtracted. We use Hubbert linearization to estimate the global URR for four aggregate classes of oil, and show that these range from 2500 Gb for conventional oil to 5000 Gb for ‘all-liquids’. Subtracting oil produced to-date gives estimates of global reserves of conventional oil at about half the EIA estimate. We then use our estimated URR values, combined with the observation that oil production in a region usually reaches one or more maxima when roughly half its URR has been produced, to forecast the expected dates of global resource-limited production maxima of these classes of oil. These dates range from 2019 (i.e., already past) for conventional oil to around 2040 for ‘all-liquids’. These oil production maxima are likely to have significant economic, political and sustainability consequences…
How much oil remains for the world to produce? Comparing assessment methods, and separating fact from fiction
How much oil remains for the world to produce? Comparing assessment methods, and separating fact from fiction
Abstract
This paper assesses how much oil remains to be produced, and whether this poses a significant constraint to global development. We describe the different categories of oil and related liquid fuels, and show that public-domain by-country and global proved (1P) oil reserves data, such as from the EIA or BP Statistical Review, are very misleading and should not be used. Better data are oil consultancy proved-plus-probable (2P) reserves. These data are generally backdated, i.e. with later changes in a field’s estimated volume being attributed to the date of field discovery. Even some of these data, we suggest, need reduction by some 300 Gb for probable overstatement of Middle East OPEC reserves, and likewise by 100 Gb for overstatement of FSU reserves. The statistic that best assesses ‘how much oil is left to produce’ is a region’s estimated ultimately recoverable resource (URR) for each of its various categories of oil, from which production to-date needs to be subtracted. We use Hubbert linearization to estimate the global URR for four aggregate classes of oil, and show that these range from 2500 Gb for conventional oil to 5000 Gb for ‘all-liquids’. Subtracting oil produced to-date gives estimates of global reserves of conventional oil at about half the EIA estimate. We then use our estimated URR values, combined with the observation that oil production in a region usually reaches one or more maxima when roughly half its URR has been produced, to forecast the expected dates of global resource-limited production maxima of these classes of oil. These dates range from 2019 (i.e., already past) for conventional oil to around 2040 for ‘all-liquids’. These oil production maxima are likely to have significant economic, political and sustainability consequences…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Energy Return on Investment (EROI).
Energy Return on Investment (EROI).
This is the text of a book review that I wrote, and which has just been published online in the journal Science Progress.
Energy Return on Investment: A Unifying Principle for Biology, Economics and Sustainability. CHARLES A. S. HALL, Springer 2017 ISBN 9783319478203; xii + 174 pp; £37.99
The preeminent mathematical physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, famously described energy as being “the ‘go’ of things”. Thus, “energy” is the fundamental, underpinning driver and enabler of all processes in the universe. Since it takes energy to produce energy, in order to survive, animals must derive more of it from the food they stalk and hunt down than they expend in getting it, while to provide food and to serve all the other functions of a complex human society, it is necessary to recover very much more energy, overall, than is consumed in acquiring that energy. Such energy requirements may be gauged from Energy Return on Investment (EROI), the definition of which is deceptively simple: i.e. it is the amount of energy delivered to society, divided by the energy consumed in delivering it (and therefore not available to society for other purposes). As this ratio falls, fewer units of energy are made available for each unit of energy that is consumed in the production process. In the limit, for an EROI of 1:1, there is no net profit, since the amount of energy consumed is equal to that produced, thus rendering the exercise self-limiting and pointless (and for an EROI < 1:1, an energy sink is identified). EROI is a useful metric for determining the viability of an energy source, and we see that unconventional oil sources (e.g. oil sands and oil shale) tend to be more difficult to produce from than their conventional counterparts, and deliver fewer units of energy to society for each unit of energy that is consumed in the production process, i.e. a smaller energy return on investment (EROI).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Book Review: Energy Return on Investment by Charles A. S. Hall
Book Review: Energy Return on Investment by Charles A. S. Hall
ENERGY RETURN ON INVESTMENT: A Unifying Principle for Biology, Economics, and Sustainability
In Energy Return on Investment, systems ecologist Charles A. S. Hall argues that to truly understand most investments, one must view them in terms of energy. This is perhaps most obvious when considering the physical survival of wild animals and human hunter-gatherers. In both these instances, the food obtained through foraging or hunting must yield more energy than was required to procure it, or starvation ensues. Another way of understanding this is by applying the concept of energy return on investment (EROI). As with the more familiar metric of return on investment (ROI), EROI is a ratio of profit–in this case, energy profit–to resources expended. It is calculated by dividing the amount of energy obtained in the course of a given activity by the resources that went into recovering that energy. A positive EROI is one above the break-even point, whereas a negative EROI is one that fails to break even.
This principle extends beyond the individual sphere to encompass entire human societies. Like the lone animal or hunter-gatherer of the previous example, a civilization must maintain a positive energy balance to survive. Most ultimately fail to do so, as evidenced by the long line of failed past civilizations. Consider the ancient Easter Islanders, whose downfall was described so well in geographer Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond recounts how the Easter Islanders relied heavily on fish, and to catch the fish they needed wooden boats. They were depleting their wood supply faster than it could regenerate, and eventually their efforts to obtain more wood no longer yielded positive energy returns in the form of food. Now fast forward to our time and reflect on what’s happened with the EROI of our primary energy source. The oil that powers modernity once came out of the ground easily, but it now requires herculean investments of both money and energy (think offshore drilling, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling) to obtain.
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