Wereldwijde economische crisis in aantocht?

[oliepiek]

Een interessante gedachtenwisseling tussen een energiebankier met dertig jaar ervaring, en een Saoudisch oliebaron. Wie moeten we geloven? Artikel hier.





Saudi geologists' papers spell lower output - book Sat May 28, 2005 12:55 AM GMT+05:30
By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Research by Saudi Arabian geologists indicate oil production in the kingdom is at or near its peak and likely near-term declines could lead prices to $100 a barrel in the next three years, a U.S. author claims.

Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in energy for 30 years, tapped more than 230 technical papers published by international research group the Society of Petroleum Engineers, many of them written by current Saudi Arabian nationals, for his book, "Twilight in the Desert," to be published in June.

He concludes that production by state-owned Saudi Aramco, which as a company produces more than any other country, is at or near a peak. When the problem is joined by falling production in North America and the North Sea, oil could spike to $100 a barrel in the next three years, he said.

Simmons said in an interview that the last 50 years of U.S. energy policy has focused on the wrong thing.

"We essentially thought we could always rely on oil in Middle East as long as there was peace in the Middle East. In consequence, oil policy was about geopolitics instead of examining what the oilfields are really like."

A few years ago, Simmons first suspected that Saudi Arabia's oil was being overproduced when a friend in Washington, D.C. told him about an April 1979 U.S. Senate staff report.

The report detailed that water seepage into Saudi oilfields forced Aramco's original owners Exxon, now Exxon Mobil , and the now-merged Texaco and Chevron, to downgrade Saudi's production potential from 20 million barrels per day to 12 million bpd.

Simmons visited a major oil center in Saudi Arabia in early 2003 where the amount of water being processed out of crude shocked him.

With Western geologists who formerly worked for Aramco, he then combed through SPE papers from the late 1990s and early 2000.

Wayne Spence, senior manager at SPE in Dallas, said the group has no opinion of Simmons' work. "It just depends on what side of the argument you're on. There are just as many people at SPE that aren't on the peak oil side of things."

But Saudi Arabia has already made its geological data public, and to reveal any more of it risks "giving terrorists a road map" into the inner working of its most precious resource, said Nail al-Jubeir, director of the Saudi Information Office in Washington.

Simmons said Saudi Arabia has revealed only "skimpy data," in line with a tradition of secrecy at Aramco. Such an atmosphere was initiated by the original multinational owners so they could maximize output before handing the company fully over to the kingdom in 1980.

He said Aramco does not officially discuss its falling production as a whole, but that if read carefully, the kingdom's own geologists, in SPE paper after SPE paper, spell out the decline of its five key fields.

HEAVIER OIL

"There's no way that Aramco would give the wrong information (on oilfield production levels) to the Saudi leadership," said Nawaf Obaid, a Riyadh-based security consultant to the Saudi government, who spoke with Reuters in Washington on Friday.

"That would be inconceivable ... It would be like the (U.S. Energy Department) giving the wrong information on nuclear labs to the White House."

Saudi Arabia is spending $50 billion in an effort to increase its production capacity to 15 million barrels, a level Jubeir said the kingdom can maintain for 75 to 100 years.

But even Jubeir said the quality of Saudi oil is getting heavier and harder for refiners to process. He said the kingdom is hoping to form a producer/consumer group based in Riyadh.

"We need to know how to work together to solve some of these issues," he said.

Simmons said only field-by-field well bore studies approved by third-party auditors can prove how much oil producers have.

He drew a picture of Ghawar, Saudi's largest oilfield, on the sports section of the New York Times for a visitor and furiously dotted the northern end.

He said when he visited Saudi Arabia, Aramco showed him a map of Ghawar which revealed scores of wells had already been bored in the northern section, which holds by far the most oil. Aramco told him, he said, declining rates have forced it to move south in the field, which holds less oil.

"He makes an excellent case for better transparency, and he is starting a movement that will hopefully reshape the industry," said Obaid.

"But he's using the wrong case study. Matt, with his book, has basically shot himself in the foot."

(Additional reporting Chris Baltimore in Washington)



[edit]
[size=1]Edit:[/size]

[size=1]After edit by oliepiek on 27-05-2005 at 23:42
Reason:
--------------------------------

Een interessante gedachtenwisseling tussen een energiebankier met dertig jaar ervaring, en een Saoudisch oliebaron. Wie moeten we geloven? Artikel hier.





Saudi geologists' papers spell lower output - book Sat May 28, 2005 12:55 AM GMT+05:30
By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Research by Saudi Arabian geologists indicate oil production in the kingdom is at or near its peak and likely near-term declines could lead prices to $100 a barrel in the next three years, a U.S. author claims.

Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in energy for 30 years, tapped more than 230 technical papers published by international research group the Society of Petroleum Engineers, many of them written by current Saudi Arabian nationals, for his book, "Twilight in the Desert," to be published in June.

He concludes that production by state-owned Saudi Aramco, which as a company produces more than any other country, is at or near a peak. When the problem is joined by falling production in North America and the North Sea, oil could spike to $100 a barrel in the next three years, he said.

Simmons said in an interview that the last 50 years of U.S. energy policy has focused on the wrong thing.

"We essentially thought we could always rely on oil in Middle East as long as there was peace in the Middle East. In consequence, oil policy was about geopolitics instead of examining what the oilfields are really like."

A few years ago, Simmons first suspected that Saudi Arabia's oil was being overproduced when a friend in Washington, D.C. told him about an April 1979 U.S. Senate staff report.

The report detailed that water seepage into Saudi oilfields forced Aramco's original owners Exxon, now Exxon Mobil , and the now-merged Texaco and Chevron, to downgrade Saudi's production potential from 20 million barrels per day to 12 million bpd.

Simmons visited a major oil center in Saudi Arabia in early 2003 where the amount of water being processed out of crude shocked him.

With Western geologists who formerly worked for Aramco, he then combed through SPE papers from the late 1990s and early 2000.

Wayne Spence, senior manager at SPE in Dallas, said the group has no opinion of Simmons' work. "It just depends on what side of the argument you're on. There are just as many people at SPE that aren't on the peak oil side of things."

But Saudi Arabia has already made its geological data public, and to reveal any more of it risks "giving terrorists a road map" into the inner working of its most precious resource, said Nail al-Jubeir, director of the Saudi Information Office in Washington.

Simmons said Saudi Arabia has revealed only "skimpy data," in line with a tradition of secrecy at Aramco. Such an atmosphere was initiated by the original multinational owners so they could maximize output before handing the company fully over to the kingdom in 1980.

He said Aramco does not officially discuss its falling production as a whole, but that if read carefully, the kingdom's own geologists, in SPE paper after SPE paper, spell out the decline of its five key fields.

HEAVIER OIL

"There's no way that Aramco would give the wrong information (on oilfield production levels) to the Saudi leadership," said Nawaf Obaid, a Riyadh-based security consultant to the Saudi government, who spoke with Reuters in Washington on Friday.

"That would be inconceivable ... It would be like the (U.S. Energy Department) giving the wrong information on nuclear labs to the White House."

Saudi Arabia is spending $50 billion in an effort to increase its production capacity to 15 million barrels, a level Jubeir said the kingdom can maintain for 75 to 100 years.

But even Jubeir said the quality of Saudi oil is getting heavier and harder for refiners to process. He said the kingdom is hoping to form a producer/consumer group based in Riyadh.

"We need to know how to work together to solve some of these issues," he said.

Simmons said only field-by-field well bore studies approved by third-party auditors can prove how much oil producers have.

He drew a picture of Ghawar, Saudi's largest oilfield, on the sports section of the New York Times for a visitor and furiously dotted the northern end.

He said when he visited Saudi Arabia, Aramco showed him a map of Ghawar which revealed scores of wells had already been bored in the northern section, which holds by far the most oil. Aramco told him, he said, declining rates have forced it to move south in the field, which holds less oil.

"He makes an excellent case for better transparency, and he is starting a movement that will hopefully reshape the industry," said Obaid.

"But he's using the wrong case study. Matt, with his book, has basically shot himself in the foot."

(Additional reporting Chris Baltimore in Washington)



[/size]

[size=1]Edit:[/size]

[size=1]After edit by oliepiek on 27-05-2005 at 23:41
Reason:
--------------------------------

Een interessante gedachtenwisseling tussen een energiebankier met dertig jaar ervaring, en een Saoudisch oliebaron. Wie moeten we geloven?





Saudi geologists' papers spell lower output - book Sat May 28, 2005 12:55 AM GMT+05:30
By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Research by Saudi Arabian geologists indicate oil production in the kingdom is at or near its peak and likely near-term declines could lead prices to $100 a barrel in the next three years, a U.S. author claims.

Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in energy for 30 years, tapped more than 230 technical papers published by international research group the Society of Petroleum Engineers, many of them written by current Saudi Arabian nationals, for his book, "Twilight in the Desert," to be published in June.

He concludes that production by state-owned Saudi Aramco, which as a company produces more than any other country, is at or near a peak. When the problem is joined by falling production in North America and the North Sea, oil could spike to $100 a barrel in the next three years, he said.

Simmons said in an interview that the last 50 years of U.S. energy policy has focused on the wrong thing.

"We essentially thought we could always rely on oil in Middle East as long as there was peace in the Middle East. In consequence, oil policy was about geopolitics instead of examining what the oilfields are really like."

A few years ago, Simmons first suspected that Saudi Arabia's oil was being overproduced when a friend in Washington, D.C. told him about an April 1979 U.S. Senate staff report.

The report detailed that water seepage into Saudi oilfields forced Aramco's original owners Exxon, now Exxon Mobil , and the now-merged Texaco and Chevron, to downgrade Saudi's production potential from 20 million barrels per day to 12 million bpd.

Simmons visited a major oil center in Saudi Arabia in early 2003 where the amount of water being processed out of crude shocked him.

With Western geologists who formerly worked for Aramco, he then combed through SPE papers from the late 1990s and early 2000.

Wayne Spence, senior manager at SPE in Dallas, said the group has no opinion of Simmons' work. "It just depends on what side of the argument you're on. There are just as many people at SPE that aren't on the peak oil side of things."

But Saudi Arabia has already made its geological data public, and to reveal any more of it risks "giving terrorists a road map" into the inner working of its most precious resource, said Nail al-Jubeir, director of the Saudi Information Office in Washington.

Simmons said Saudi Arabia has revealed only "skimpy data," in line with a tradition of secrecy at Aramco. Such an atmosphere was initiated by the original multinational owners so they could maximize output before handing the company fully over to the kingdom in 1980.

He said Aramco does not officially discuss its falling production as a whole, but that if read carefully, the kingdom's own geologists, in SPE paper after SPE paper, spell out the decline of its five key fields.

HEAVIER OIL

"There's no way that Aramco would give the wrong information (on oilfield production levels) to the Saudi leadership," said Nawaf Obaid, a Riyadh-based security consultant to the Saudi government, who spoke with Reuters in Washington on Friday.

"That would be inconceivable ... It would be like the (U.S. Energy Department) giving the wrong information on nuclear labs to the White House."

Saudi Arabia is spending $50 billion in an effort to increase its production capacity to 15 million barrels, a level Jubeir said the kingdom can maintain for 75 to 100 years.

But even Jubeir said the quality of Saudi oil is getting heavier and harder for refiners to process. He said the kingdom is hoping to form a producer/consumer group based in Riyadh.

"We need to know how to work together to solve some of these issues," he said.

Simmons said only field-by-field well bore studies approved by third-party auditors can prove how much oil producers have.

He drew a picture of Ghawar, Saudi's largest oilfield, on the sports section of the New York Times for a visitor and furiously dotted the northern end.

He said when he visited Saudi Arabia, Aramco showed him a map of Ghawar which revealed scores of wells had already been bored in the northern section, which holds by far the most oil. Aramco told him, he said, declining rates have forced it to move south in the field, which holds less oil.

"He makes an excellent case for better transparency, and he is starting a movement that will hopefully reshape the industry," said Obaid.

"But he's using the wrong case study. Matt, with his book, has basically shot himself in the foot."

(Additional reporting Chris Baltimore in Washington)



[/size]

[size=1]Edit:[/size]

[size=1]After edit by oliepiek on 27-05-2005 at 23:41
Reason:
--------------------------------

Een interessante gedachtenwisseling tussen een energiebankier met dertig jaar ervaring, en een Saoudisch oliebaron. Wie moeten we geloven?





Saudi geologists' papers spell lower output - book Sat May 28, 2005 12:55 AM GMT+05:30
By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Research by Saudi Arabian geologists indicate oil production in the kingdom is at or near its peak and likely near-term declines could lead prices to $100 a barrel in the next three years, a U.S. author claims.

Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in energy for 30 years, tapped more than 230 technical papers published by international research group the Society of Petroleum Engineers, many of them written by current Saudi Arabian nationals, for his book, "Twilight in the Desert," to be published in June.

He concludes that production by state-owned Saudi Aramco, which as a company produces more than any other country, is at or near a peak. When the problem is joined by falling production in North America and the North Sea, oil could spike to $100 a barrel in the next three years, he said.

Simmons said in an interview that the last 50 years of U.S. energy policy has focused on the wrong thing.

"We essentially thought we could always rely on oil in Middle East as long as there was peace in the Middle East. In consequence, oil policy was about geopolitics instead of examining what the oilfields are really like."

A few years ago, Simmons first suspected that Saudi Arabia's oil was being overproduced when a friend in Washington, D.C. told him about an April 1979 U.S. Senate staff report.

The report detailed that water seepage into Saudi oilfields forced Aramco's original owners Exxon, now Exxon Mobil , and the now-merged Texaco and Chevron, to downgrade Saudi's production potential from 20 million barrels per day to 12 million bpd.

Simmons visited a major oil center in Saudi Arabia in early 2003 where the amount of water being processed out of crude shocked him.

With Western geologists who formerly worked for Aramco, he then combed through SPE papers from the late 1990s and early 2000.

Wayne Spence, senior manager at SPE in Dallas, said the group has no opinion of Simmons' work. "It just depends on what side of the argument you're on. There are just as many people at SPE that aren't on the peak oil side of things."

But Saudi Arabia has already made its geological data public, and to reveal any more of it risks "giving terrorists a road map" into the inner working of its most precious resource, said Nail al-Jubeir, director of the Saudi Information Office in Washington.

Simmons said Saudi Arabia has revealed only "skimpy data," in line with a tradition of secrecy at Aramco. Such an atmosphere was initiated by the original multinational owners so they could maximize output before handing the company fully over to the kingdom in 1980.

He said Aramco does not officially discuss its falling production as a whole, but that if read carefully, the kingdom's own geologists, in SPE paper after SPE paper, spell out the decline of its five key fields.

HEAVIER OIL

"There's no way that Aramco would give the wrong information (on oilfield production levels) to the Saudi leadership," said Nawaf Obaid, a Riyadh-based security consultant to the Saudi government, who spoke with Reuters in Washington on Friday.

"That would be inconceivable ... It would be like the (U.S. Energy Department) giving the wrong information on nuclear labs to the White House."

Saudi Arabia is spending $50 billion in an effort to increase its production capacity to 15 million barrels, a level Jubeir said the kingdom can maintain for 75 to 100 years.

But even Jubeir said the quality of Saudi oil is getting heavier and harder for refiners to process. He said the kingdom is hoping to form a producer/consumer group based in Riyadh.

"We need to know how to work together to solve some of these issues," he said.

Simmons said only field-by-field well bore studies approved by third-party auditors can prove how much oil producers have.

He drew a picture of Ghawar, Saudi's largest oilfield, on the sports section of the New York Times for a visitor and furiously dotted the northern end.

He said when he visited Saudi Arabia, Aramco showed him a map of Ghawar which revealed scores of wells had already been bored in the northern section, which holds by far the most oil. Aramco told him, he said, declining rates have forced it to move south in the field, which holds less oil.

"He makes an excellent case for better transparency, and he is starting a movement that will hopefully reshape the industry," said Obaid.

"But he's using the wrong case study. Matt, with his book, has basically shot himself in the foot."

(Additional reporting Chris Baltimore in Washington)



[/size]

[size=1]Before any edits, post was:
--------------------------------

Een interessante gedachtenwisseling tussen een energiebankier met dertig jaar ervaring, en een Saoudisch oliebaron. Wie moeten we geloven?

<img src="http://www.reuters.com/locales/images/reuters.gif">



Saudi geologists' papers spell lower output - book Sat May 28, 2005 12:55 AM GMT+05:30
By Timothy Gardner

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Research by Saudi Arabian geologists indicate oil production in the kingdom is at or near its peak and likely near-term declines could lead prices to $100 a barrel in the next three years, a U.S. author claims.

Matthew Simmons, an investment banker specializing in energy for 30 years, tapped more than 230 technical papers published by international research group the Society of Petroleum Engineers, many of them written by current Saudi Arabian nationals, for his book, "Twilight in the Desert," to be published in June.

He concludes that production by state-owned Saudi Aramco, which as a company produces more than any other country, is at or near a peak. When the problem is joined by falling production in North America and the North Sea, oil could spike to $100 a barrel in the next three years, he said.

Simmons said in an interview that the last 50 years of U.S. energy policy has focused on the wrong thing.

"We essentially thought we could always rely on oil in Middle East as long as there was peace in the Middle East. In consequence, oil policy was about geopolitics instead of examining what the oilfields are really like."

A few years ago, Simmons first suspected that Saudi Arabia's oil was being overproduced when a friend in Washington, D.C. told him about an April 1979 U.S. Senate staff report.

The report detailed that water seepage into Saudi oilfields forced Aramco's original owners Exxon, now Exxon Mobil , and the now-merged Texaco and Chevron, to downgrade Saudi's production potential from 20 million barrels per day to 12 million bpd.

Simmons visited a major oil center in Saudi Arabia in early 2003 where the amount of water being processed out of crude shocked him.

With Western geologists who formerly worked for Aramco, he then combed through SPE papers from the late 1990s and early 2000.

Wayne Spence, senior manager at SPE in Dallas, said the group has no opinion of Simmons' work. "It just depends on what side of the argument you're on. There are just as many people at SPE that aren't on the peak oil side of things."

But Saudi Arabia has already made its geological data public, and to reveal any more of it risks "giving terrorists a road map" into the inner working of its most precious resource, said Nail al-Jubeir, director of the Saudi Information Office in Washington.

Simmons said Saudi Arabia has revealed only "skimpy data," in line with a tradition of secrecy at Aramco. Such an atmosphere was initiated by the original multinational owners so they could maximize output before handing the company fully over to the kingdom in 1980.

He said Aramco does not officially discuss its falling production as a whole, but that if read carefully, the kingdom's own geologists, in SPE paper after SPE paper, spell out the decline of its five key fields.

HEAVIER OIL

"There's no way that Aramco would give the wrong information (on oilfield production levels) to the Saudi leadership," said Nawaf Obaid, a Riyadh-based security consultant to the Saudi government, who spoke with Reuters in Washington on Friday.

"That would be inconceivable ... It would be like the (U.S. Energy Department) giving the wrong information on nuclear labs to the White House."

Saudi Arabia is spending $50 billion in an effort to increase its production capacity to 15 million barrels, a level Jubeir said the kingdom can maintain for 75 to 100 years.

But even Jubeir said the quality of Saudi oil is getting heavier and harder for refiners to process. He said the kingdom is hoping to form a producer/consumer group based in Riyadh.

"We need to know how to work together to solve some of these issues," he said.

Simmons said only field-by-field well bore studies approved by third-party auditors can prove how much oil producers have.

He drew a picture of Ghawar, Saudi's largest oilfield, on the sports section of the New York Times for a visitor and furiously dotted the northern end.

He said when he visited Saudi Arabia, Aramco showed him a map of Ghawar which revealed scores of wells had already been bored in the northern section, which holds by far the most oil. Aramco told him, he said, declining rates have forced it to move south in the field, which holds less oil.

"He makes an excellent case for better transparency, and he is starting a movement that will hopefully reshape the industry," said Obaid.

"But he's using the wrong case study. Matt, with his book, has basically shot himself in the foot."

(Additional reporting Chris Baltimore in Washington)



[/size]

[/edit]

[Sergei]

De totale inhoud van een oliebron valt moeilijk te meten maar het is gekend dat de spuiters ...een oliebron staat in't begin altijd onder druk zodat de olie vanzelf naar boven komt quasi gedaan zijn. Zodra dat punt wordt bereikt moeten ze de olie geforceerd naar boven pompen door water in de bron te pompen onder hoge druk en vanaf dat punt is het gewoon de bron leegtappen , net zoals je een emmer water zou leeggieten. Naarmate je dichter bij het einde komt begint de kwaliteit echt te dalen omdat de zwaardere olie nu eenmaal naar de bodem zakt.

Toch moet het een en het andere gnuanceerd worden.
het is niet zo dat er enkel een paar grote bronnen zijn, in de praktijk zijn dat eerder een paar grote en vele kleinere en als je de capaciteiet van die kleinere samentelt kom je ook aan een grote capacteit maar de ontginning wordt dan wel moeilijker. Immers, kleinere bronnen betekent dat de boorinstallatie frequenter van plaats moet veranderen. Bijkomend probleem is dat vele bronnen onder de ijskkap zit wat ook een extra probleem is voor de exploitatie en natuurlijk daar ook het milieu aspect meespeelt.

Van een doemscenario is anno 2005 nog geen sprake maar het zal duidelijk zijn dat zowel de prijs van de stookolie als het aardgas (prijs is in België gekoppeld) nimmer een lage stand zal kennen van bvb 30$ per barrel en mocht het gebeuren dan voor een korte periode. Deels is dat mogelijk omdat de grootste bijkomende afnemer ..china meer dan waarschijnlijk zijn plannen tot het uitbouwen van kerncentrales zal doorzetten.

Bijkomende olieontginning gebeurt zowel in Rusland als Alaska al zal dat nog een aantal jaren in beslag nemen.

Saudi Arabia is spending $50 billion in an effort to increase its production capacity to 15 million barrels, a level Jubeir said the kingdom can maintain for 75 to 100 years.

Het klopt dat ze via extra investeringen ..lees meer boorplatformen ook meer olie naar boven kunnen halen. Een bron is niet regelmatig van vorm dus door de eilandzones op te zoeken kan men extra olie oppompen, zelfs als de hoofdbron quasi leeg is.
Trouwens, het is niet zo dat de ganse streek bijna leeggemolken is.
Een boorplatform kost veel geld... net trouwens een groot probleem voor de Russen.

Simmons said only field-by-field well bore studies approved by third-party auditors can prove how much oil producers have.

Waarom zouden die 'producers' liegen? Het zou hun eigenlijk uitkomen als ze ronduit negatieve mededelingen doen, prijs stijgt en dan is er geen omkeren aan tenzij massaal alle kleinere bronnen aan te boren, een werk dat vele jaren duurt.

Simmons visited a major oil center in Saudi Arabia in early 2003 where the amount of water being processed out of crude shocked him.

Tja, een teken dat in elk geval die bron het eind toch nabij is.
Door het injecteren van water mengt de olie zich onderaan en onstaat er een hevige
mix die mee naar boven wordt gezogen. Op zich geen probleem, wel een teken van EOP, End of production.

Een economische crisis zit er wel aan te komen voor de 'oude ontwikkelde' landen maar wel vanwege andere redenen al heeft de olieprijs daar wel natuurlijk deels mee te maken.[edit]
[size=1]Edit:[/size]

[size=1]After edit by Sergei on 28-05-2005 at 01:00
Reason:
--------------------------------

De totale inhoud van een oliebron valt moeilijk te meten maar het is gekend dat de spuiters ...een oliebron staat in't begin altijd onder druk zodat de olie vanzelf naar boven komt quasi gedaan zijn. Zodra dat punt wordt bereikt moeten ze de olie geforceerd naar boven pompen door water in de bron te pompen onder hoge druk en vanaf dat punt is het gewoon de bron leegtappen , net zoals je een emmer water zou leeggieten. Naarmate je dichter bij het einde komt begint de kwaliteit echt te dalen omdat de zwaardere olie nu eenmaal naar de bodem zakt.

Toch moet het een en het andere gnuanceerd worden.
het is niet zo dat er enkel een paar grote bronnen zijn, in de praktijk zijn dat eerder een paar grote en vele kleinere en als je de capaciteiet van die kleinere samentelt kom je ook aan een grote capacteit maar de ontginning wordt dan wel moeilijker. Immers, kleinere bronnen betekent dat de boorinstallatie frequenter van plaats moet veranderen. Bijkomend probleem is dat vele bronnen onder de ijskkap zit wat ook een extra probleem is voor de exploitatie en natuurlijk daar ook het milieu aspect meespeelt.

Van een doemscenario is anno 2005 nog geen sprake maar het zal duidelijk zijn dat zowel de prijs van de stookolie als het aardgas (prijs is in België gekoppeld) nimmer een lage stand zal kennen van bvb 30$ per barrel en mocht het gebeuren dan voor een korte periode. Deels is dat mogelijk omdat de grootste bijkomende afnemer ..china meer dan waarschijnlijk zijn plannen tot het uitbouwen van kerncentrales zal doorzetten.

Bijkomende olieontginning gebeurt zowel in Rusland als Alaska al zal dat nog een aantal jaren in beslag nemen.

Het klopt dat ze via extra investeringen ..lees meer boorplatformen ook meer olie naar boven kunnen halen. Een bron is niet regelmatig van vorm dus door de eilandzones op te zoeken kan men extra olie oppompen, zelfs als de hoofdbron quasi leeg is.
Trouwens, het is niet zo dat de ganse streek bijna leeggemolken is.
Een boorplatform kost veel geld... net trouwens een groot probleem voor de Russen.

Waarom zouden die 'producers' liegen? Het zou hun eigenlijk uitkomen als ze ronduit negatieve mededelingen doen, prijs stijgt en dan is er geen omkeren aan tenzij massaal alle kleinere bronnen aan te boren, een werk dat vele jaren duurt.

Tja, een teken dat in elk geval die bron het eind toch nabij is.
Door het injecteren van water mengt de olie zich onderaan en onstaat er een hevige
mix die mee naar boven wordt gezogen. Op zich geen probleem, wel een teken van EOP, End of production.

Een economische crisis zit er wel aan te komen voor de 'oude ontwikkelde' landen maar wel vanwege andere redenen al heeft de olieprijs daar wel natuurlijk deels mee te maken.[/size]

[size=1]Before any edits, post was:
--------------------------------

De totale inhoud van een oliebron valt moeilijk te meten maar het is gekend dat de spuiters ...een oliebron staat in't begin altijd onder druk zodat de olie vanzelf naar boven komt quasi gedaan zijn. Zodra dat punt wordt bereikt moeten ze de olie geforceerd naar boven pompen door water in de bron te pompen onder hoge druk en vanaf dat punt is het gewoon de bron leegtappen , net zoals je een emmer water zou leeggieten. Naarmate je dichter bij het einde komt begint de kwaliteit echt te dalen omdat de zwaardere olie nu eenmaal naar de bodem zakt.

Toch moet het een en het andere gnuanceerd worden.
het is niet zo dat er enkel een paar grote bronnen zijn, in de praktijk zijn dat eerder een paar grote en vele kleinere en als je de capaciteiet van die kleinere samentelt kom je ook aan een grote capacteit maar de ontginning wordt dan wel moeilijker. Immers, kleinere bronnen betekent dat de boorinstallatie frequenter van plaats moet veranderen. Bijkomend probleem is dat vele bronnen onder de ijskkap zit wat ook een extra probleem is voor de exploitatie en natuurlijk daar ook het milieu aspect meespeelt.

Van een doemscenario is anno 2005 nog geen sprake maar het zal duidelijk zijn dat zowel de prijs van de stookolie als het aardgas (prijs is in België gekoppeld) nimmer een lage stand zal kennen van bvb 30$ per barrel en mocht het gebeuren dan voor een korte periode. Deels is dat mogelijk omdat de grootste bijkomende afnemer ..china meer dan waarschijnlijk zijn plannen tot het uitbouwen van kerncentrales zal doorzetten.

Bijkomende olieontginning gebeurt zowel in Rusland als Alaska al zal dat nog een aantal jaren in beslag nemen.

Het klopt dat ze via extra investeringen ..lees meer boorplatformen ook meer olie naar boven kunnen halen. Een bron is niet regelmatig van vorm dus door de eilandzones op te zoeken kan men extra olie oppompen, zelfs als de hoofdbron quasi leeg is.
Trouwens, het is niet zo dat de ganse streek bijna leeggemolken is.
Een boorplatform kost veel geld... net trouwens een groot probleem voor de Russen.

Waarom zouden die 'producers' liegen? Het zou hun eigenlijk uitkomen als ze ronduit negatieve mededelingen doen, prijs stijgt en dan is er geen omkeren aan tenzij massaal alle kleinere bronnen aan te boren, een werk dat vele jaren duurt.

Tja, een teken dat in elk geval die bron het eind toch nabij is.
Door het injecteren van water mengt de olie zich onderaan en onstaat er een hevige
mix die mee naar boven wordt gezogen. Op zich geen probleem, wel een teken van EOP, End of production.[/size]

[/edit]

[oliepiek]

Vandaag een headline op Yahoo! News, berichtgeving Associated Press.
Een top-geoloog van Princeton University ziet de oliepiek als een totaal doemscenario. Zeer interessant artikel. En van een Princeton prof. Geen gratuite nonsense dus.


Experts: Petroleum May Be Nearing a Peak

By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer 8 minutes ago

Could the petroleum joyride — cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with the pedal to the metal and the AC blasting for decades — be coming to an end? Some observers of the oil industry think so. They predict that this year, maybe next — almost certainly by the end of the decade — the world's oil production, having grown exuberantly for more than a century, will peak and begin to decline.

And then it really will be all downhill. The price of oil will increase drastically. Major oil-consuming countries will experience crippling inflation, unemployment and economic instability. Princeton University geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes predicts "a permanent state of oil shortage."

According to these experts, it will take a decade or more before conservation measures and new technologies can bridge the gap between supply and demand, and even then the situation will be touch and go.

None of this will affect vacation plans this summer — Americans can expect another season of beach weekends and road trips to Graceland relatively unimpeded by the cost of getting there. Though gas prices are up, they are expected to remain below $2.50 a gallon. Accounting for inflation, that's pretty comparable to what motorists paid for most of the 20th century; it only feels expensive because gasoline was unusually cheap between 1986 and 2003.

And there are many who doubt the doomsday scenario will ever come true. Most oil industry analysts think production will continue growing for at least another 30 years. By then, substitute energy sources will be available to ease the transition into a post-petroleum age.

"This is just silly," said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research in Winchester, Mass. "It's not like industrial civilization is going to come crashing down."

Where you stand on "peak oil," as parties to the debate call it, depends on which forces you consider dominant in controlling the oil markets. People who consider economic forces most important believe that prices are high right now mostly because of increased demand from China and other rapidly growing economies. But eventually, high prices should encourage consumers to use less and producers to pump more.

But Deffeyes and many other geologists counter that when it comes to oil, Mother Nature trumps Adam Smith. The way they see it, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway and other major producers are already pumping as fast as they can. The only way to increase production capacity is to discover more oil. Yet with a few exceptions, there just isn't much left out there to be discovered.

"The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier's cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in ground," Deffeyes said.

There will be warning signs before global oil production peaks, the bearers of bad news contend. Prices will rise dramatically and become increasingly volatile. With little or no excess production capacity, minor supply disruptions — political instability in Venezuela, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or labor unrest in Nigeria, for example — will send the oil markets into a tizzy. So will periodic admissions by oil companies and petroleum-rich nations that they have been overestimating their reserves.

Oil producers will grow flush with cash. And because the price of oil ultimately affects the cost of just about everything else in the economy, inflation will rear its ugly head.

Anybody who has been paying close attention to the news lately may feel a bit queasy at this stage. Could $5-a-gallon gas be right around the corner?

"The world has never seen anything like this before and so we just really don't know," said Robert L. Hirsch, an energy analyst at Science Applications International Corp., a Santa Monica, Calif., consulting firm.

Still, he added, "there's a number of really competent professionals that are very pessimistic."

The pessimism stems from a legendary episode in the history of petroleum geology. Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970.

His superiors at Shell Oil were aghast. They even tried to persuade Hubbert not to speak publicly about his work. His peers, accustomed to decades of making impressive oil discoveries, were skeptical.

But Hubbert was right. U.S. oil production did peak in 1970, and it has declined steadily ever since. Even impressive discoveries such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, with 13 billion barrels in recoverable reserves, haven't been able to reverse that trend.

Hubbert started his analysis by gathering statistics on how much oil had been discovered and produced in the Lower 48 states, both onshore and off, between 1901 and 1956 (Alaska was still terra incognita to petroleum geologists 50 years ago). His data showed that the country's oil reserves had increased rapidly from 1901 until the 1930s, then more slowly after that.

When Hubbert graphed that pattern it looked very much like America's oil supply was about to peak. Soon, it appeared, America's petroleum reserves would reach an all-time maximum. And then they would begin to shrink as the oil companies extracted crude from the ground faster than geologists could find it.

That made sense. Hubbert knew some oil fields, especially the big ones, were easier to find than others. Those big finds would come first, and then the pace of discovery would decline as the remaining pool of oil resided in progressively smaller and more elusive deposits.

The production figures followed a similar pattern, but it looked like they would peak a few years later than reserves.

That made sense too. After all, oil can't be pumped out of the ground the instant it is discovered. Lease agreements have to be negotiated, wells drilled, pipelines built; the development process can take years.

When Hubbert extended the production curve into the future it looked like it would peak around 1970. Every year after that, America would pump less oil than it had the year before.

If that prognostication wasn't daring enough, Hubbert had yet another mathematical trick up his sleeve. Assuming that the reserves decline was going to be a mirror image of the rise, geologists would have found exactly half of the oil in the Lower 48 when the curve peaked. Doubling that number gave Hubbert the grand total of all recoverable oil under the continental United States: 170 billion barrels.

At first, critics objected to Hubbert's analysis, arguing that technological improvements in exploration and recovery would increase the amount of available oil.

They did, but not enough to extend production beyond the limits Hubbert had projected. Even if you throw in the unexpected discovery of oil in Alaska, America's petroleum production history has proceeded almost exactly as Hubbert predicted it would.

Critics claim that Hubbert simply got lucky.

"When it pretty much worked," Lynch said, "he decided, aha, it has to be a bell curve."

But many experts see no reason global oil production has to peak at all. It could plateau and then gradually fall as the economy converts to other forms of energy.

"Even in 30 to 40 years there's still going to be huge amounts of oil in the Middle East," said Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.

A few years ago, geologists began applying Hubbert's methods to the entire world's oil production. Their analyses indicated that global oil production would peak some time during the first decade of the 21st century.

Deffeyes thinks the peak will be in late 2005 or early 2006. Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons puts it at 2007 to 2009. California Institute of Technology physicist David Goodstein, whose book "The End of Oil" was published last year, predicts it will arrive before 2010.

The exact date doesn't really matter, said Hirsch, because he believes it's already too late. In an analysis he did for the U.S.
Department of Energy in February, Hirsch concluded that it will take more than a decade for the U.S. economy to adapt to declining oil production.

"You've got to do really big things in order to dent the problem. And if you're on the backside of the supply curve you're chasing the train after it's already left the station," he said.

For example, the median lifetime of an American automobile is 17 years. That means even if the government immediately mandated a drastic increase in fuel efficiency standards, the conservation benefits wouldn't fully take effect for almost two decades.

And though conservation would certainly be necessary in a crisis, it wouldn't be enough. Fully mitigating the sting of decreasing oil supplies would require developing alternate sources of energy — and not the kind that politicians and environmentalists wax rhapsodic about when they promise pollution-free hydrogen cars and too-cheap-to-meter solar power.

If oil supplies really do decline in the next few decades, America's energy survival will hinge on the last century's technology, not the next one's. Hirsch's report concludes that compensating for a long-term oil shortfall would require building a massive infrastructure to convert coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels into combustible liquids.

Proponents of coal liquefaction, which creates synthetic oil by heating coal in the presence of hydrogen gas, refer to the process as "clean coal" technology. It is clean, but only to the extent that the synthetic oil it produces burns cleaner than raw coal. Synthetic oil still produces carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse warming gas, during both production and combustion (though in some scenarios some of that pollution could be kept out of the atmosphere). And the coal that goes into the liquefaction process still has to be mined, which means tailing piles, acid runoff and other toxic ills.

And then there's the fact that nobody wants a "clean coal" plant in the backyard. Shifting to new forms of energy will require building new refineries, pipelines, transportation terminals and other infrastructure at a time when virtually every new project faces intense local opposition.

Energy analysts say coal liquefaction can produce synthetic oil at a cost of $32 a barrel, well below the $50 range where oil has been trading for the past year or so. But before they invest billions of dollars in coal liquefaction, investors want to be sure that oil prices will remain high.

Investors are similarly wary about tar sands and heavy oil deposits in Canada and Venezuela. Though they are too gooey to be pumped from the ground like conventional oil, engineers have developed ways of liquefying the deposits with injections of hot water and other means. Already, about 8 percent of Canada's oil production comes from tar sands.

Unfortunately, it costs energy to recover energy from tar sands. Most Canadian operations use natural gas to heat water for oil recovery; and like oil, natural gas has gotten dramatically more expensive in the past few years.

"The reality is, this thing is extremely complicated," Hirsch said. "My honest view is that anybody who tells you that they have a clear picture probably doesn't understand the problem."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050528/...FjBHNlYwN0cw--[edit]
[size=1]Edit:[/size]

[size=1]After edit by oliepiek on 28-05-2005 at 22:28
Reason:
--------------------------------

Vandaag een headline op Yahoo! News, berichtgeving Associated Press.
Een top-geoloog van Princeton University ziet de oliepiek als een totaal doemscenario. Zeer interessant artikel. En van een Princeton prof. Geen gratuite nonsense dus.


Experts: Petroleum May Be Nearing a Peak

By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer 8 minutes ago

Could the petroleum joyride — cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with the pedal to the metal and the AC blasting for decades — be coming to an end? Some observers of the oil industry think so. They predict that this year, maybe next — almost certainly by the end of the decade — the world's oil production, having grown exuberantly for more than a century, will peak and begin to decline.

And then it really will be all downhill. The price of oil will increase drastically. Major oil-consuming countries will experience crippling inflation, unemployment and economic instability. Princeton University geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes predicts "a permanent state of oil shortage."

According to these experts, it will take a decade or more before conservation measures and new technologies can bridge the gap between supply and demand, and even then the situation will be touch and go.

None of this will affect vacation plans this summer — Americans can expect another season of beach weekends and road trips to Graceland relatively unimpeded by the cost of getting there. Though gas prices are up, they are expected to remain below $2.50 a gallon. Accounting for inflation, that's pretty comparable to what motorists paid for most of the 20th century; it only feels expensive because gasoline was unusually cheap between 1986 and 2003.

And there are many who doubt the doomsday scenario will ever come true. Most oil industry analysts think production will continue growing for at least another 30 years. By then, substitute energy sources will be available to ease the transition into a post-petroleum age.

"This is just silly," said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research in Winchester, Mass. "It's not like industrial civilization is going to come crashing down."

Where you stand on "peak oil," as parties to the debate call it, depends on which forces you consider dominant in controlling the oil markets. People who consider economic forces most important believe that prices are high right now mostly because of increased demand from China and other rapidly growing economies. But eventually, high prices should encourage consumers to use less and producers to pump more.

But Deffeyes and many other geologists counter that when it comes to oil, Mother Nature trumps Adam Smith. The way they see it, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway and other major producers are already pumping as fast as they can. The only way to increase production capacity is to discover more oil. Yet with a few exceptions, there just isn't much left out there to be discovered.

"The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier's cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in ground," Deffeyes said.

There will be warning signs before global oil production peaks, the bearers of bad news contend. Prices will rise dramatically and become increasingly volatile. With little or no excess production capacity, minor supply disruptions — political instability in Venezuela, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or labor unrest in Nigeria, for example — will send the oil markets into a tizzy. So will periodic admissions by oil companies and petroleum-rich nations that they have been overestimating their reserves.

Oil producers will grow flush with cash. And because the price of oil ultimately affects the cost of just about everything else in the economy, inflation will rear its ugly head.

Anybody who has been paying close attention to the news lately may feel a bit queasy at this stage. Could $5-a-gallon gas be right around the corner?

"The world has never seen anything like this before and so we just really don't know," said Robert L. Hirsch, an energy analyst at Science Applications International Corp., a Santa Monica, Calif., consulting firm.

Still, he added, "there's a number of really competent professionals that are very pessimistic."

The pessimism stems from a legendary episode in the history of petroleum geology. Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970.

His superiors at Shell Oil were aghast. They even tried to persuade Hubbert not to speak publicly about his work. His peers, accustomed to decades of making impressive oil discoveries, were skeptical.

But Hubbert was right. U.S. oil production did peak in 1970, and it has declined steadily ever since. Even impressive discoveries such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, with 13 billion barrels in recoverable reserves, haven't been able to reverse that trend.

Hubbert started his analysis by gathering statistics on how much oil had been discovered and produced in the Lower 48 states, both onshore and off, between 1901 and 1956 (Alaska was still terra incognita to petroleum geologists 50 years ago). His data showed that the country's oil reserves had increased rapidly from 1901 until the 1930s, then more slowly after that.

When Hubbert graphed that pattern it looked very much like America's oil supply was about to peak. Soon, it appeared, America's petroleum reserves would reach an all-time maximum. And then they would begin to shrink as the oil companies extracted crude from the ground faster than geologists could find it.

That made sense. Hubbert knew some oil fields, especially the big ones, were easier to find than others. Those big finds would come first, and then the pace of discovery would decline as the remaining pool of oil resided in progressively smaller and more elusive deposits.

The production figures followed a similar pattern, but it looked like they would peak a few years later than reserves.

That made sense too. After all, oil can't be pumped out of the ground the instant it is discovered. Lease agreements have to be negotiated, wells drilled, pipelines built; the development process can take years.

When Hubbert extended the production curve into the future it looked like it would peak around 1970. Every year after that, America would pump less oil than it had the year before.

If that prognostication wasn't daring enough, Hubbert had yet another mathematical trick up his sleeve. Assuming that the reserves decline was going to be a mirror image of the rise, geologists would have found exactly half of the oil in the Lower 48 when the curve peaked. Doubling that number gave Hubbert the grand total of all recoverable oil under the continental United States: 170 billion barrels.

At first, critics objected to Hubbert's analysis, arguing that technological improvements in exploration and recovery would increase the amount of available oil.

They did, but not enough to extend production beyond the limits Hubbert had projected. Even if you throw in the unexpected discovery of oil in Alaska, America's petroleum production history has proceeded almost exactly as Hubbert predicted it would.

Critics claim that Hubbert simply got lucky.

"When it pretty much worked," Lynch said, "he decided, aha, it has to be a bell curve."

But many experts see no reason global oil production has to peak at all. It could plateau and then gradually fall as the economy converts to other forms of energy.

"Even in 30 to 40 years there's still going to be huge amounts of oil in the Middle East," said Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.

A few years ago, geologists began applying Hubbert's methods to the entire world's oil production. Their analyses indicated that global oil production would peak some time during the first decade of the 21st century.

Deffeyes thinks the peak will be in late 2005 or early 2006. Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons puts it at 2007 to 2009. California Institute of Technology physicist David Goodstein, whose book "The End of Oil" was published last year, predicts it will arrive before 2010.

The exact date doesn't really matter, said Hirsch, because he believes it's already too late. In an analysis he did for the U.S.
Department of Energy in February, Hirsch concluded that it will take more than a decade for the U.S. economy to adapt to declining oil production.

"You've got to do really big things in order to dent the problem. And if you're on the backside of the supply curve you're chasing the train after it's already left the station," he said.

For example, the median lifetime of an American automobile is 17 years. That means even if the government immediately mandated a drastic increase in fuel efficiency standards, the conservation benefits wouldn't fully take effect for almost two decades.

And though conservation would certainly be necessary in a crisis, it wouldn't be enough. Fully mitigating the sting of decreasing oil supplies would require developing alternate sources of energy — and not the kind that politicians and environmentalists wax rhapsodic about when they promise pollution-free hydrogen cars and too-cheap-to-meter solar power.

If oil supplies really do decline in the next few decades, America's energy survival will hinge on the last century's technology, not the next one's. Hirsch's report concludes that compensating for a long-term oil shortfall would require building a massive infrastructure to convert coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels into combustible liquids.

Proponents of coal liquefaction, which creates synthetic oil by heating coal in the presence of hydrogen gas, refer to the process as "clean coal" technology. It is clean, but only to the extent that the synthetic oil it produces burns cleaner than raw coal. Synthetic oil still produces carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse warming gas, during both production and combustion (though in some scenarios some of that pollution could be kept out of the atmosphere). And the coal that goes into the liquefaction process still has to be mined, which means tailing piles, acid runoff and other toxic ills.

And then there's the fact that nobody wants a "clean coal" plant in the backyard. Shifting to new forms of energy will require building new refineries, pipelines, transportation terminals and other infrastructure at a time when virtually every new project faces intense local opposition.

Energy analysts say coal liquefaction can produce synthetic oil at a cost of $32 a barrel, well below the $50 range where oil has been trading for the past year or so. But before they invest billions of dollars in coal liquefaction, investors want to be sure that oil prices will remain high.

Investors are similarly wary about tar sands and heavy oil deposits in Canada and Venezuela. Though they are too gooey to be pumped from the ground like conventional oil, engineers have developed ways of liquefying the deposits with injections of hot water and other means. Already, about 8 percent of Canada's oil production comes from tar sands.

Unfortunately, it costs energy to recover energy from tar sands. Most Canadian operations use natural gas to heat water for oil recovery; and like oil, natural gas has gotten dramatically more expensive in the past few years.

"The reality is, this thing is extremely complicated," Hirsch said. "My honest view is that anybody who tells you that they have a clear picture probably doesn't understand the problem."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050528/...FjBHNlYwN0cw--[/size]

[size=1]Before any edits, post was:
--------------------------------

Vandaag een headline op Yahoo! News.
Een top-geoloog van Princeton University ziet de oliepiek als een totaal doemscenario. Zeer interessant artikel. En van een Princeton prof. Geen gratuite nonsense dus.


Experts: Petroleum May Be Nearing a Peak




By MATT CRENSON, AP National Writer 8 minutes ago

Could the petroleum joyride — cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with the pedal to the metal and the AC blasting for decades — be coming to an end? Some observers of the oil industry think so. They predict that this year, maybe next — almost certainly by the end of the decade — the world's oil production, having grown exuberantly for more than a century, will peak and begin to decline.

And then it really will be all downhill. The price of oil will increase drastically. Major oil-consuming countries will experience crippling inflation, unemployment and economic instability. Princeton University geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes predicts "a permanent state of oil shortage."

According to these experts, it will take a decade or more before conservation measures and new technologies can bridge the gap between supply and demand, and even then the situation will be touch and go.

None of this will affect vacation plans this summer — Americans can expect another season of beach weekends and road trips to Graceland relatively unimpeded by the cost of getting there. Though gas prices are up, they are expected to remain below $2.50 a gallon. Accounting for inflation, that's pretty comparable to what motorists paid for most of the 20th century; it only feels expensive because gasoline was unusually cheap between 1986 and 2003.

And there are many who doubt the doomsday scenario will ever come true. Most oil industry analysts think production will continue growing for at least another 30 years. By then, substitute energy sources will be available to ease the transition into a post-petroleum age.

"This is just silly," said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research in Winchester, Mass. "It's not like industrial civilization is going to come crashing down."

Where you stand on "peak oil," as parties to the debate call it, depends on which forces you consider dominant in controlling the oil markets. People who consider economic forces most important believe that prices are high right now mostly because of increased demand from China and other rapidly growing economies. But eventually, high prices should encourage consumers to use less and producers to pump more.

But Deffeyes and many other geologists counter that when it comes to oil, Mother Nature trumps Adam Smith. The way they see it, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway and other major producers are already pumping as fast as they can. The only way to increase production capacity is to discover more oil. Yet with a few exceptions, there just isn't much left out there to be discovered.

"The economists all think that if you show up at the cashier's cage with enough currency, God will put more oil in ground," Deffeyes said.

There will be warning signs before global oil production peaks, the bearers of bad news contend. Prices will rise dramatically and become increasingly volatile. With little or no excess production capacity, minor supply disruptions — political instability in Venezuela, hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico or labor unrest in Nigeria, for example — will send the oil markets into a tizzy. So will periodic admissions by oil companies and petroleum-rich nations that they have been overestimating their reserves.

Oil producers will grow flush with cash. And because the price of oil ultimately affects the cost of just about everything else in the economy, inflation will rear its ugly head.

Anybody who has been paying close attention to the news lately may feel a bit queasy at this stage. Could $5-a-gallon gas be right around the corner?

"The world has never seen anything like this before and so we just really don't know," said Robert L. Hirsch, an energy analyst at Science Applications International Corp., a Santa Monica, Calif., consulting firm.

Still, he added, "there's a number of really competent professionals that are very pessimistic."

The pessimism stems from a legendary episode in the history of petroleum geology. Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970.

His superiors at Shell Oil were aghast. They even tried to persuade Hubbert not to speak publicly about his work. His peers, accustomed to decades of making impressive oil discoveries, were skeptical.

But Hubbert was right. U.S. oil production did peak in 1970, and it has declined steadily ever since. Even impressive discoveries such as Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, with 13 billion barrels in recoverable reserves, haven't been able to reverse that trend.

Hubbert started his analysis by gathering statistics on how much oil had been discovered and produced in the Lower 48 states, both onshore and off, between 1901 and 1956 (Alaska was still terra incognita to petroleum geologists 50 years ago). His data showed that the country's oil reserves had increased rapidly from 1901 until the 1930s, then more slowly after that.

When Hubbert graphed that pattern it looked very much like America's oil supply was about to peak. Soon, it appeared, America's petroleum reserves would reach an all-time maximum. And then they would begin to shrink as the oil companies extracted crude from the ground faster than geologists could find it.

That made sense. Hubbert knew some oil fields, especially the big ones, were easier to find than others. Those big finds would come first, and then the pace of discovery would decline as the remaining pool of oil resided in progressively smaller and more elusive deposits.

The production figures followed a similar pattern, but it looked like they would peak a few years later than reserves.

That made sense too. After all, oil can't be pumped out of the ground the instant it is discovered. Lease agreements have to be negotiated, wells drilled, pipelines built; the development process can take years.

When Hubbert extended the production curve into the future it looked like it would peak around 1970. Every year after that, America would pump less oil than it had the year before.

If that prognostication wasn't daring enough, Hubbert had yet another mathematical trick up his sleeve. Assuming that the reserves decline was going to be a mirror image of the rise, geologists would have found exactly half of the oil in the Lower 48 when the curve peaked. Doubling that number gave Hubbert the grand total of all recoverable oil under the continental United States: 170 billion barrels.

At first, critics objected to Hubbert's analysis, arguing that technological improvements in exploration and recovery would increase the amount of available oil.

They did, but not enough to extend production beyond the limits Hubbert had projected. Even if you throw in the unexpected discovery of oil in Alaska, America's petroleum production history has proceeded almost exactly as Hubbert predicted it would.

Critics claim that Hubbert simply got lucky.

"When it pretty much worked," Lynch said, "he decided, aha, it has to be a bell curve."

But many experts see no reason global oil production has to peak at all. It could plateau and then gradually fall as the economy converts to other forms of energy.

"Even in 30 to 40 years there's still going to be huge amounts of oil in the Middle East," said Daniel Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.

A few years ago, geologists began applying Hubbert's methods to the entire world's oil production. Their analyses indicated that global oil production would peak some time during the first decade of the 21st century.

Deffeyes thinks the peak will be in late 2005 or early 2006. Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons puts it at 2007 to 2009. California Institute of Technology physicist David Goodstein, whose book "The End of Oil" was published last year, predicts it will arrive before 2010.

The exact date doesn't really matter, said Hirsch, because he believes it's already too late. In an analysis he did for the U.S.
Department of Energy in February, Hirsch concluded that it will take more than a decade for the U.S. economy to adapt to declining oil production.

"You've got to do really big things in order to dent the problem. And if you're on the backside of the supply curve you're chasing the train after it's already left the station," he said.

For example, the median lifetime of an American automobile is 17 years. That means even if the government immediately mandated a drastic increase in fuel efficiency standards, the conservation benefits wouldn't fully take effect for almost two decades.

And though conservation would certainly be necessary in a crisis, it wouldn't be enough. Fully mitigating the sting of decreasing oil supplies would require developing alternate sources of energy — and not the kind that politicians and environmentalists wax rhapsodic about when they promise pollution-free hydrogen cars and too-cheap-to-meter solar power.

If oil supplies really do decline in the next few decades, America's energy survival will hinge on the last century's technology, not the next one's. Hirsch's report concludes that compensating for a long-term oil shortfall would require building a massive infrastructure to convert coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels into combustible liquids.

Proponents of coal liquefaction, which creates synthetic oil by heating coal in the presence of hydrogen gas, refer to the process as "clean coal" technology. It is clean, but only to the extent that the synthetic oil it produces burns cleaner than raw coal. Synthetic oil still produces carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse warming gas, during both production and combustion (though in some scenarios some of that pollution could be kept out of the atmosphere). And the coal that goes into the liquefaction process still has to be mined, which means tailing piles, acid runoff and other toxic ills.

And then there's the fact that nobody wants a "clean coal" plant in the backyard. Shifting to new forms of energy will require building new refineries, pipelines, transportation terminals and other infrastructure at a time when virtually every new project faces intense local opposition.

Energy analysts say coal liquefaction can produce synthetic oil at a cost of $32 a barrel, well below the $50 range where oil has been trading for the past year or so. But before they invest billions of dollars in coal liquefaction, investors want to be sure that oil prices will remain high.

Investors are similarly wary about tar sands and heavy oil deposits in Canada and Venezuela. Though they are too gooey to be pumped from the ground like conventional oil, engineers have developed ways of liquefying the deposits with injections of hot water and other means. Already, about 8 percent of Canada's oil production comes from tar sands.

Unfortunately, it costs energy to recover energy from tar sands. Most Canadian operations use natural gas to heat water for oil recovery; and like oil, natural gas has gotten dramatically more expensive in the past few years.

"The reality is, this thing is extremely complicated," Hirsch said. "My honest view is that anybody who tells you that they have a clear picture probably doesn't understand the problem."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050528/...FjBHNlYwN0cw--[/size]

[/edit]

[eno2]

@oliepiek

Allemaal naast de zaak.
De olie (die trouwens nog in overvloed onder de grond zit) kunnen we niet in de lucht hebben, en dat is dat.

[boer_bavo]

http://www.plan.be/nl/pub/wp/detail_wp.php?pub=WP0506

[kelt]

En,is hij er al,die crisis

[oliepiek]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door eno2

De olie kunnen we niet in de lucht hebben, en dat is dat.

Excuseer, wat bedoelt u precies? Mijn kennis van de nederlandse taal is beperkt, maar ik begrijp echt niet wat u wil duidelijk maken.

De olie kunnen we niet in de lucht hebben?

[oliepiek]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door boer_bavo

http://www.plan.be/nl/pub/wp/detail_wp.php?pub=WP0506

Dank je voor die link, boer bavo. Peak Oil is natuurlijk niet zomaar een gewone olie prijs schok. Het impliceert de totale verandering van ons gehele socio-economische model.

[eno2]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door oliepiek

Excuseer, wat bedoelt u precies? Mijn kennis van de nederlandse taal is beperkt, maar ik begrijp echt niet wat u wil duidelijk maken.

De olie kunnen we niet in de lucht hebben?

_________

Olie in dampvorm omzetten is ongezond, dat mengt zich met de lucht op een
wijze die zelfs kanariepietjes van de adem berooft.

Oliepieken liefst onder de grond houden, aub.

[boer_bavo]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door oliepiek

Dank je voor die link, boer bavo. Peak Oil is natuurlijk niet zomaar een gewone olie prijs schok. Het impliceert de totale verandering van ons gehele socio-economische model.

Neen. Peak oil is gewoon een prijsstijging van de olie. Geenenkele reden om ons socio-economische model aan te passen.[edit]
[size=1]Edit:[/size]

[size=1]After edit by boer_bavo on 31-05-2005 at 10:58
Reason:
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Neen. Peak oil is gewoon een prijsstijging van de olie. Geenenkele reden om ons socio-economische model aan te passen.[/size]

[size=1]Before any edits, post was:
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Neen. Peak oil is gewoon een prijsstijging van de olie.[/size]

[/edit]