{"id":21500,"date":"2016-08-16T13:18:57","date_gmt":"2016-08-16T18:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21500"},"modified":"2016-08-16T13:18:57","modified_gmt":"2016-08-16T18:18:57","slug":"an-updated-version-of-the-peak-oil-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21500","title":{"rendered":"An Updated Version of the \u201cPeak Oil\u201d Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Updated Version of the \u201cPeak Oil\u201d\u00a0Story<\/a><\/h3>\n
The Peak Oil story got some things right. Back in 1998,\u00a0Colin Campbell and Jean Laherr\u00e8re wrote an article published in Scientific American called, \u201cThe End of Cheap Oil.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0In it they said:<\/div>\n
\n

Our analysis of the discovery and production of oil fields around the world suggests that within the next decade, the supply of conventional oil will be unable to keep up with demand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is no single definition for conventional oil. According to one view, conventional oil is oil that\u00a0can be extracted by conventional methods<\/a>. Another holds it to be oil that can be\u00a0extracted inexpensively<\/a>. Other authors list specific types of oil that require specialized techniques, such as very heavy oil and oil from shale formations, that are considered unconventional.<\/p>\n

Figure 1 shows the growth in\u00a0unconventional oil supply for three parts of the world:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Oil from shale formations in the US.<\/li>\n
  2. Oil from the Oil Sands in Canada.<\/li>\n
  3. Oil characterized as unconventional in China, in a\u00a0recent academic paper<\/a>\u00a0of which I was a co-author. (Temporarily available for\u00a0free here<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"Figure<\/a><\/p>\n

    Figure 1. Approximate unconventional oil production in the United States, Canada, and China. US amounts estimated from EIA data; Canadian amounts from\u00a0CAPP<\/a>. Oil prices are yearly average Brent oil prices in $2015, from BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    Oil prices in 1998, which is when the above quote was written, were very low, averaging $12.72 per barrel in money of the day\u2013equivalent to $18.49 per barrel in 2015 dollars. From the view of the authors, even today\u2019s oil prices in the low $40s per barrel would be quite high. Since the above chart shows only yearly average prices, it doesn\u2019t really show how high prices rose in 2008, or how low they fell that same year. But even when oil prices fell very low in December 2008, they remained well above $18.49 per barrel.<\/p>\n

    …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    An Updated Version of the \u201cPeak Oil\u201d\u00a0Story The Peak Oil story got some things right. Back in 1998,\u00a0Colin Campbell and Jean Laherr\u00e8re wrote an article published in Scientific American called, \u201cThe End of Cheap Oil.\u201d\u00a0In it they said: Our analysis of the discovery and production of oil fields around the world suggests that within the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2166,1233,8428,1232,617],"class_list":["post-21500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-colin-campbell","tag-gail-tverberg","tag-jean-laherrere","tag-our-finite-world","tag-peak-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21500"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21501,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21500\/revisions\/21501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}