Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: deepwater drilling, EIA, fracking, IEA, liquid fuel production, oil price, oil price predictions, oil production, Peak Demand, peak oil, refinery gain, shale oil, tight gas, tight oil
Via Kurt Cobb in the CS Monitor:
Back in the year 2000, the IEA divined that by 2010, liquid fuel production worldwide would reach 95.8 million barrels per day (mbpd). The actual 2010 number was 87.1 mbpd. The agency further forecast an average daily oil price of $28.25 per barrel (adjusted for inflation). The actual average daily price of oil traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange in 2010 was $79.61
[...]
So, what made the IEA so sanguine about oil supply growth in the year 2000? It cited the revolution taking place in deepwater drilling technology which was expected to allow the extraction of oil supplies ample for the world’s needs for decades to come. But, deepwater drilling has turned out to be more challenging than anticipated and has not produced the bounty the IEA imagined it would. …
via When oil forecasts get it wrong – CSMonitor.com.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, enegy, frack, fracking, IEA, oil journalism, oil production, oil shale, oil supply, Peak Demand, peak oil, shale oil, tight oil, Tom Gjelten
As NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports:
“Petroleum engineers have always known about the untapped underground oil in the United States, but it was unreachable, trapped in tight shale rock. Then the engineers figured out how to crack the rock. Hydraulic fracturing — fracking — got that ‘tight oil’ finally flowing in places like North Dakota.”
via Huge Boost In U.S. Oil Output Set To Transform Global Market : The Two-Way : NPR.
Wrong, Tom. The tight oil has been ‘reachable’ for several decades, it was just such an expensive process that it made no sense to do it when oil was cheap — a money-losing proposition. Now, all the cheap oil is gone, and out comes the ‘unconventional’ oil.
Gjelten also said that the decline in oil consumption in the US was due to efficiency (check the VMT chart Tom). There was no mention of depletion of existing fields, or the striking decline rate of fracked shale wells. And he reported that cheaper oil is just over the horizon.
Would it hurt Mr. Gjelten to do just a tiny bit of research on the topic of his reports so he doesn’t sound like a complete idiot?
Filed under: maps | Tags: Assem Abou Ibrahim, EEZ, Lebanon, licensing, MEOW, MEW, oil and gas exploration, oil exploration, oil production, PA
…has never been explored for hydrocarbons.
On behalf of the newly formed Petroleum Administration (PA), I would like to welcome you to this website that will focus on matters related to the 1st licensing round for hydrocarbon exploration within the Lebanese offshore EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone). The PA would also like to thank the Ministry of Energy and Water (MEW) for its continued support during the transition process.
via LEB Licensing Round.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, CH4, fracking, horizontal drilling, Natural gas, natural gas flaring, North Dakota, oil production, shale oil, taxes, tight gas, tight oil
Rampant waste and environmental degradation have been part of the Bakken boom. The state doesn’t care about that, but it wants its taxes.
Helms estimates that about 30% of the gas produced in the state is flared, since development of takeaway infrastructure has not matched the pace of drilling.
Producers are currently allowed to flare gas for a year without paying royalties. The new bill would extend that tax-exempt period for two more years if an operator can collect at least 75% of the produced gas.
via N. Dakota tax bills pique industry interest – Upstreamonline.com.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cost of extraction, energy, Kurt Cobb, Natural gas, oil production, peak oil
Here and there on occasion. Kurt Cobb in the CSM:
Currently, there appears to be no new transformative on-the-shelf technology that will significantly reduce the cost of extracting oil and natural gas. And so, barring a deep economic depression, we can look forward to prices for oil and natural gas that are consistently above the cost of production and therefore far above the bizarrely low forecasts in the air today. In fact, we should expect costs to continue to escalate as we seek out resources that are ever more difficult to extract and refine.
via Natural gas, oil prices: why the long-term forecasts are wrong – CSMonitor.com.
Filed under: maps | Tags: Argentina, BHP Billiton, Borders and Southern Petroleum, cute wars, Falkland Islands, Malvinas, North Sea, oil production, Rockhopper, Sea Lion, UK oil production
From oilvoice.com: http://www.oilvoice.com/n/Falkland_Islands_The_New_North_Sea/614e4d43b.aspx
The prospect of the Falkland Islands developing into a major oil producing region has captured the imagination of geologists and investors alike for decades. For many, the area has significant potential as a new ‘North Sea’, bringing opportunities for oil and services companies for years to come. The exploration area surrounding the Falklands to which the UK has a territorial claim is some fifty percent larger than the UK’s portion of the North Sea. In fact, despite being thousands of miles apart there are many similarities between the two. Environmental conditions and water depth are comparable to those west of the Shetland Islands, whilst in terms of geology the basins of the Falkland Islands possess structures similar to those found in the North Sea. The exploration area itself is separated into the geologically distinct North Basin, where the Sea Lion discovery was made, and the South Basin where fellow explorers Falkland Oil & Gas and Borders and Southern Petroleum intend to embark on their own campaign from the end of 2011 having secured an additional rig.
Despite the recent success, there are still those who doubt the Falkland Islands will ever see large scale oil production.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alaska, Beaufort Sea, Coast Guard, energy, Kulluk, oil production, peak oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell
‘Season full of headaches:’
Adding to a season full of headaches for Shell Alaska’s debut offshore-drilling program in the U.S. Arctic, the company’s Kulluk drill rig was stuck Friday in monster seas off the coast of Alaska as its tugboat’s engines failed and the Coast Guard cutter that came to assist became entangled in a towline.
There were no immediate threats to crew or equipment, but Shell Alaska was rushing additional aid vessels to the scene as the Kulluk, which drilled the beginnings of an exploratory oil well in the Beaufort Sea over the summer, sat without ability to move forward in 20-foot seas about 50 miles south of Kodiak.
via Coast Guard cutter hits trouble trying to aid Shell rig off Alaska | Local News | The Seattle Times.
Don’t freak out, but this is what Peak Oil For All Intents And Purposes looks like.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Chris Martenson, frac, fracking, narrative, oil production, technology
Chris Martenson: Well, this is really important. The current story is something along these lines: “Hey, look at how clever we’ve been. Because of the magic of technology, we have discovered how to unlock these incredible oil and gas resources that we just didn’t even know about before.”
When I talk to people who are in the oil business, they say, “Oh, no, no, we’ve known about those shale deposits, we’ve been drilling into and through them for decades. We’ve had horizontal drilling for decades; we’ve had fracking for decades. What we haven’t had is $80-a-barrel oil reliably enough to support us going into those with those technologies.”
So what really unlocked those reserves was price. Not technology, not cleverness, not ingenuity. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of very clever, ingenious stuff going on in those drilling actions, but price was the primary driver here.
via Conservation Not Technology will be our Savior – Chris Martenson (Part 2) « naked capitalism.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2012, 2019, AEO table browser, EIA, energy, Hubbert, oil predictions, oil production, peak oil, U.S. crude oil production
7.54 mbd of crude in 2019. According to the EIA’s “AEO Table Browser:”
AEO Table Browser – Energy Information Administration.
See also: THE AMAZING RED MOUND, BAKKEN DEVELOPMENT BY COUNTY, EPA FRACKING AIR POLLUTION RULES, MONTANA CRUDE OIL PRODUCTION, LIVESTOCK IN FRACKING REGIONS
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Econbrowser, James Hamilton, luck, oil production, peak oil, production, technology, the Cult of Technology
What if our technology had more to do with luck than our luck had to do with technology?
James Hamilton:
My view is that with these new fields and new technology, we’ll see further increases in U.S. and world production of oil for the next several years. But, unlike many other economists, I do not expect that to continue for much beyond the next decade. We like to think that the reason we enjoy our high standard of living is because we have been so clever at figuring out how to use the world’s available resources. But we should not dismiss the possibility that there may also have been a nontrivial contribution of simply having been quite lucky to have found an incredibly valuable raw material that was relatively easy to obtain for about a century and a half.
via Economics in Action : Issue 7 : November 15, 2012 : Exhaustible Resources and Economic Growth.
Yeah.. Don’t dismiss that possibility.
