Another Bad News Post for the Peak Oilers (Good News for Everyone Else)
Max Schulz adds more, uh, fuel to the fiery debate at TCS Daily:
In the years after Col. Drake discovered oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, on the eve of the Civil War, wildcatters could only drill down several hundred feet. If we were confined to relying solely upon the technology available in the 19th century — or, for that matter, the tools available just three decades ago — then yes, quite possibly we could be looking at the end of oil.
But we don’t use those outmoded technologies. Advances in seismology and engineering have placed well within our grasp supplies of oil previously considered inaccessible. Today they are easily and economically recoverable.
Today’s drills don’t stop at a couple hundred feet. They bore miles into the earth. They travel laterally as well, so that a well dug in one spot might recover oil underneath locations miles away. Because of directional drilling, today one derrick can do the work that once took dozens, reducing the surface footprint of oil extraction.
Energy companies today can drill far offshore, too, in very deep water. They recover deposits that doomsayers of the past thought would be impossible to get at. Other technologies and advanced processes have boosted the recovery rates of fields thought to be tapped out.
The Kern River Field near Bakersfield, California, for instance, pumped nearly 30,000 barrels per day throughout much of the first decade of the 20th century. After 1910, production declined for the next 40 years. The field was nearly abandoned.
Innovations like pressurized steam and hot water injections changed that. Production at the Kern River field steadily ramped up after 1960, and the field has produced more than 125,000 barrels of oil per day since 1980. Recent estimates suggest Kern River still holds an additional one billion barrels of recoverable reserves.
That example mirrors the larger trend about oil. In 1970, experts believed the world had 612 billion barrels of proved reserves. Over the next three decades, more than 767 billion barrels would be pumped. Did we use up all the world’s oil and then some? Hardly. Conservative estimates today place the world’s provable oil reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels. New deposits of oil haven’t been created. It’s just that human ingenuity has come up with ways to get hard-to-reach deposits.
Expect that trend of increasing reserves to continue. Earlier this month the Department of Energy released a set of reports suggesting that enhanced 21st century oil recovery techniques might quadruple the amount of recoverable oil in the United States. DOE predicted that carbon sequestration technologies that inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs could soon add perhaps 89 billion barrels to the 21.4 billion barrels of proven reserves. More fantastically, government researchers found that “in the longer term, multiple advances in technology and widespread sequestration of industrial carbon dioxide could eventually add as much as 430 billion new barrels.”
Note that all of this potentially recoverable oil doesn’t take into account the hundreds of billions of barrels recoverable from “shale oil” or “oil from sands” in Colorado and Canada.
So relax, we’re not running out of oil. Peak Oilers, that means you too.
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Selected Previous Posts:
- Nov. 15, 2005 — Passage of the Day: The Wall Street Journal on the Car Luddites
- Nov. 3 — Peak Oil True Believers Are Going Through a Rough Patch
- Oct. 31 — More Real-World Evidence of “Peak Oil†Nonsense
