Image: LANCE IVERSEN Corbis
In Brief
- Forecasts that global oil production will soon start to decline and that most oil will be gone within a few decades may be overly pessimistic.
- The author predicts that by 2030, thanks to advanced technologies, wells will be able to extract half of the oil known to be underground, up from the current average of 35 percent.
- Together with new discoveries, the increased productivity could make oil last at least another century.
On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions.
When Kern River Oil Field was discovered in 1899, analysts thought that only 10 percent of its unusually viscous crude could be recovered. In 1942, after more than four decades of modest production, the field was estimated to still hold 54 million barrels of recoverable oil, a fraction of the 278 million barrels already recovered. “In the next 44 years, it produced not 54 [million barrels] but 736 million barrels, and it had another 970 million barrels remaining,” energy guru Morris Adelman noted in 1995. But even this estimate proved wrong. In November 2007 U.S. oil giant Chevron, by then the field’s operator, announced that cumulative production had reached two billion barrels. Today Kern River still puts out nearly 80,000 barrels per day, and the state of California estimates its remaining reserves to be about 627 million barrels.
Chevron began to markedly increase production in the 1960s by injecting steam into the ground, a novel technology at the time. Later, a new breed of exploration and drilling tools—along with steady steam injection—turned the field into a kind of oil cornucopia.
Kern River is not an isolated case. According to common wisdom, a field’s production should follow a bell-shaped trajectory known as the Hubbert curve (after the late Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert) and peak when half of the known oil has been extracted. Instead most of the world’s oil fields have revived over time. In a way, technology is the real cornucopia.
Many analysts now prophesy that global oil production will peak in the next few years and then decline, following the Hubbert curve. But I believe that those projections will prove wrong, just as similar “peak oil” predictions [see “The End of Cheap Oil,” by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère; Scientific American, March 1998] have been mistaken in the past. New exploration methods have revealed more of the earth’s secrets. And leaps in extraction technology have led to tapping oil in once inaccessible areas and in places where drilling used to be uneconomic. Advanced exploration and extraction methods can keep oil production growing for decades to come and could allow oil supplies to last at least another century.
Although oil and other fossil fuels pose risks for the climate and the environment, for now alternative energy sources cannot compete with their versatility, cost, and ease of transport and storage. As research into alternatives goes on, we will need to be sure that we use the oil we have responsibly.
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
At a time when the world increasingly fears an approaching peak and subsequent decline in oil production, it may be surprising to learn that most of the planet’s known resources are left unexploited in the ground and that even more still wait to be discovered.
On the face of it, oil should last only a few more decades. In 2008, just before the economic meltdown slashed consumption, the world burned about 30 billion barrels of oil a year. Assuming that in the near future consumption resumed at 2008 levels and then stayed constant, our planet’s proven reserves of oil—currently estimated at between 1.1 trillion and 1.3 trillion barrels—would have about 40 years to go.
But proven reserves are only estimates and not fixed numbers. They are defined as the amount of known oil that can be recovered economically with current technology, so the definition changes as technology develops and as the price of crude varies. In particular, if supply tightens or demand increases, resale prices go up, and oil that was once too expensive to extract becomes part of the proven reserves. That is why most oil fields have produced much more than the initial estimates of their reserves assumed and even more than the initial estimates of their total content. Today only 35 percent of the oil in the average oil field is recovered, meaning that about two thirds of the oil in known fields remains underground. That resource is rarely mentioned in the debate on the future of oil.
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46 Comments
Add CommentSilence is the voice of complicity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy love affair with Scientific American came to a screeching halt while reading Squeezing More Oil from the Ground. I sincerely hope that I am not alone in being outraged and that this letter is just one out of many you will receive. I am compelled to cancel my subscription! How can you print an article touting the exploitation of our planet and complete disregard for the long term health of our planet? Where is the discussion of oils role in CLIMATE CHANGE? Seriously?? Not one mention of the ill-effects of the burning of fossil fuels on the health of the global ecosystem? Not one word about air and water pollution, not to mention wholesale destruction of the landscape just look at the photos in your article of the Kern River Oil Field. Do you sincerely advocate turning the rest of the planets sedimentary basins into fields of exploratory drilling rigs? Just because we CAN drill does not by any means mean we SHOULD drill.
Now that the Bush administration is gone, there is not even any debate about the negative effects fossil fuels have on human health and our environment. I would have expected much more from a supposedly scientifically minded publication.
Did I fail to mention I am aghast? Outraged?
I have enjoyed reading this magazine over the years, but after I drop this issue into the recycle bin, I will no longer be able to support your magazine.
James Montgomery
Cary, NC
Silence is the voice of complicity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy love affair with Scientific American came to a screeching halt while reading “Squeezing More Oil from the Ground.” I sincerely hope that I am not alone in being outraged and that this letter is just one out of many you will receive. I am compelled to cancel my subscription! How can you print an article touting the exploitation of our planet and complete disregard for the long term health of our planet? Where is the discussion of oil’s role in CLIMATE CHANGE? Seriously?? Not one mention of the ill-effects of the burning of fossil fuels on the health of the global ecosystem? Not one word about air and water pollution, not to mention wholesale destruction of the landscape – just look at the photos in your article of the Kern River Oil Field. Do you sincerely advocate turning the rest of the planet’s sedimentary basins into fields of exploratory drilling rigs? Just because we CAN drill does not by any means mean we SHOULD drill.
Now that the Bush administration is gone, there is not even any debate about the negative effects fossil fuels have on human health and our environment. I would have expected much more from a supposedly scientifically minded publication.
Did I fail to mention I am aghast? Outraged?
I have enjoyed reading this magazine over the years, but after I drop this issue into the recycle bin, I will no longer be able to support your magazine.
James Montgomery
Cary, NC
Use car sharing...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMr. Maugeri is correct. Proven reserves require that a hole be drilled in the ground. No drilling, no proven reserves. Drilling = proven reserves. It's that simple.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeldon B. Graham, Jr.
Legion of Honor Member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers
Math problem for James Montgomery: A gallon of gasoline contains 124,262 BTUs, and weight of CO2 produced by burning is 19.56 pounds. A gallon of ethanol contains 76,000 BTUs, and weight of CO2 produced by burning is 12.57 pounds. A vehicle requires 124,262 BTUs to travel a certain distance. If ethanol is used instead of gasoline, how many pounds of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere? Mr. Montgomery, do you really want MORE CO2 emissions than gasoline?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell Mr. Graham, I said nothing about ethanol... I agree that ethanol is not going to solve the world's energy problems - of course not merely for the reason you state.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou make no mention of the fact that the plants grown to make the ethanol do what? That's right, sequester carbon. Where does the carbon come from? The air! Correct again. Of course, it is a much more complicated issue than just the carbon cycle and the fact that with the burning of fossil fuels we are releasing carbon that was sequestered from the atmosphere millions of years ago when the world was quite a bit warmer...
The main problem with ethanol is a function of finite arable land - we cannot at this point grow ourselves into independence from fossil fuels and also eat.
Putting pressure on the world's food supply to satisfy our excessive fuel consumption is asinine. Equally asinine is to continue on as we have and as you suggest - by drilling.
We need to put our efforts and money into developing renewable energy solutions. If we do not adapt our methods in the face of the clear signals of a destabilizing environment, we may just end up fossil fuel ourselves.
James Montgomery
As a life long subscriber, I too was deeply disappointed by this science fiction story. Peak Oil is not a "theory". It is a certainty and it has happened in one country after the next, including in the USA (around 1972). The only question is when exactly, global PO will occur. This don't-worry be-happy story is a travesty.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIts not about how much oil is in the ground, it's how fasty you can get it out and at what net energy. This thus article is highly misleading. Here are the Five Horsemen of Peak Oil:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) Geological Peak. That is the point where we have consumed half the oil in the ground. So far we have consumed a trillion barrels. Estimates of remaining oil range, but the number appears to be 3 trillion barrels remaining in the ground. So we are not at geological peak. Hence skeptics of peak oil use this for their arguments, like this SA article does.
2) Flow Rate Peak. That's the point at which you cannot extract the oil fast enough to meet demand. This is especially so with old fields in decline (which is a fact) and new fields which have difficult geology (like this one). The flow rate from them does not keep up with decline, nor keep up with growing demand. The article failed to mention that North Sea is all in terminal decline and the UK has to now import oil. Indonesia peaked years ago and has to import oil forcing them out of OPEC. The Cantarell field in Mexico, the third largest in the world, and the US's 3rd import source, was producing 2.3mb/day at it's height. Today it's 560kb/day with a 41% drop from last year. WE ARE AT FLOW RATE PEAK NOW.
3) Geopolitical Peak. That's when exporting countries, due to their own growing demand, decide not to sell their oil abroad any longer but decide to keep what's in the ground for their own future domestic needs. So far only the US does this, but expect other countries to soon follow that.
4) ERoEI peak. This is the point at which it takes as many joules to extract the oil than you get from the oil extracted. That is, one barrel in to get 1 barrel out. Conventional wells in the 1960s were 100:1. That has dropped to about 25:1 today. Aging fields and new unconventional fields have very low ERoEI. The tar sands in Alberta for example is less than 6:1. Our entire society is based on the NET energy, not what's extractable. Calculations show that we will reach over all break even in oil extraction between 2020 and 2030. Once that is reached it basically means we have completely run out of oil.
5) economic peak. This is the point where the economy cannot tollerate high oil prices and plunges the world into a recession, like this one which was caused by $140.barrel oil.
http://www.theoildrum.com/files/Lionel%20Badal%20Dissertation.pdf
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisand, Christopher C. Swan, "ELECTRIC WATER" (New SocietyPress, 2007) are good cop bad cop background for Maugeri's story line. Swan gives us some distance from oil, foreign and domestic.
Electric railways, hydrogen/fuelcell application to rail mode are requisite in the Peak Oil Solution Set. We are not beholden to cars or trains or planes. We have to maintain a decent life for our families and co-workers and countrymen.
Energy conservation, rolling efficiencies shown in rail transport suggest railway shall continue to be "Guarantor Of Societal & Commercial Cohesion" as stated by US strategic planners in the last century. Background of contemporary military view of rail mode vs. impending freeway mania (circa 1956) can be had from Association Of American Railroads librarian (202-639-2100). Dated and some jingoism, but eerily prescient warnings of homeland attack, and folly of tying US transport Policy to imported Oil...
In website (peakoil.net) see Newsletter 42, article 374 & Newsletter 89 article 1037. Chinese application of Sun Tzu strategic thinking is on the mark; we have given over massive amounts of money, and China currently has some $500 Billion in railway expansion, load & unload, and rail equipment building facilities in the works
Railway is too boring for discussion in POPULAR MECHANICS and SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, sad to say, but strategic planners around the world, with a deeper understanding of the geopolitical implications of Peaking oil, are committed to Parallel Bar Therapy.
Let's say, due to some Middle East event involving Iran, the supply and price of oil get to a place that forces Emergency Federal Executive Order, bringing us into a motor fuel rationing scenario. Railway expansion, extension, and rehab of dormant rail branchlines would not seem boring in the least. Add renewable power generatrion in lockstep with railway electrification where appropriate.
Pacific Electric; Chicago, South Shore & South Bend Interurban Electric Railway methodology typifies new are local/regional rail service. Day passenger/commute and off-hour/night victuals and cargo, to downtown terminals, with deleivery interface.
Railway expansion on a 100 year-old model? Famine prevention? Is we is, or is we ain't looking for a robust distribution model to carry us thru energy emergency, trucking collapse, and random weather/manmade disaster events? This is basic transport planning, and China "Gets It"
I congratulate Scientific American for the publication of the above article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile discussing a problem every different perpectives must be adresseded, not only those more in fashion.
Myself, I am not convinced of the effect of CO2 in weather change and there are a lot of people thinking like me.
Why car-sharing? Because most governments set a target of using one quarter of our present energy by 2050.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDrive around with four people instead of just the driver and we are already at 2050 levels of mileage!
Four times less energy means four times less cost per capita, less pollution, less CO2 and less road maintenance so less tax...Now there's a thing to appeal to the Senate!
The American Chapter of "The Association For The Study Of Peak Oil & Gas" ASPO-USA is having annual meetings in Denver on Oct. 11-13. The theme is: "Time To Reset" , a heads up for the US Chamber of Commerce to think about annual diminished motor fuel flows, high priced as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAmerica heads into climate change era at a distinct disadvantage in several respects. With highest per-capita oil consumption, expect drastic and early change in the way we travel & ship cargo. In best case, we shall be hard-pressed to maintain the consumption economy of the last fifty years.
Reality of over borrowed spending habits and global competition for resources has brought America to point of making some unpleasant choices. Electric cars and exotic Rube Goldberg electro-mechanical designs may work on a small scale of production, but the same safety rules that would make Model T Fords irrelevant will dampen ability of seeing a car for the masses.
How much will we tolerate in the way of road maintenance taxes & fees to keep the 4+ million miles of paving in good working order? Gas taxes fall off as Gasoline/Diesel pump volume is forced down by means political and geophysical. Whatever makes cars run will have to take up the burden of road & highway costs.
Missing from these discussions, whether in environmental journals, or trade publications, public media, even think tanks of fame and respected name, is the mundane need to get sufficient railway matrix back to cover our flanks. That does not even include need to consider ability to maintain ROBUST transport & distribution thru period of unforeseen emergency, weather disaster, or EMP scenario. Railway is quickest & most able to recover after heretofore experienced natural or man made "Stuff Happens". Recent example was the Rail lines to Port Of New Orleans; miles of demolished trackwork and bridges put back to service, without waiting for government or remote directed assisstance.
Railroad is called "Second Dimension Surface Transport Logistics Platform" by strategic planners. This is descriptive of Rail operator's ethic of stand alone recovery and return to service ASAP after accident or disaster. Unremarkable, to the point of being too boring for the news...
Climate change, or Peaking Oil, no doubt if one doesn't change America's transport mode mix, the other certainly shall. Double whammy here, both coming at the same time! At Tahoe, planners seeking rail access ran against idiot resort operators rejecting railways, "Not Sexy". A mistake.
It's entertaining to see all the peakoilers come on and lecture Scientific American about how it has the science wrong and they are right. Do these people know that one of the seminal peak oil articles about peak oil, known as "the end of cheap oil" was in fact published by Scientific American in 1997 and is how I myself found out about peak oil?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, we are now left with the choice: do we decide that the article in 1997 was valid science and this new article in 2009 is not valid science?
I think not.
I applaud Scientific American for it's unbiased science based journalism and as someone who works in the oil industry I can tell you categorically that Maugeri is right.
Peak oil is correct in the sense that oil gets harder and harder to get out and if the profitability is not there to support it, expensive technologies will not be applied to do further extraction. But to rule out technical advances based on 1970s science is simplistic at best.
I wonder if the use of nuclear steam plants with the ability to produce wast amounts of cheap steam for power, injection into the underground and processing the heavy crude from the Alberta oil sands and other places would be worth while.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs has been repeated ad nauseum by those who study the issue, we're in no danger of running out of oil any time soon. What we will be running out of is oil that is:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) inexpensive enough to matter
2) minimally polluting (light sweet crude vs. heavy sulfurous oil)
3) very energy positive (i.e. it takes less energy to get the oil than the oil produces)
4) easily accessible (see item 1)
The new finds are interesting, but many of the newer ones are deepwater finds with fields in scattered areas - expensive to drill. If the types and distribution of oil in these finds has been accurately assessed, I have yet to find the analyses.
In fact, all I see in the press are estimated quantities of oil, which, by itself, is meaningless. What I *don't* see are either production costs or energy yield ratios (i.e. how much oil does it take to produce 1 barrel of new oil) for this new oil.
The "peak oil" problem isn't as much energy as it is money and complexity. Right now, our society and the many complex technological tasks needed to keep it functioning depends on inexpensive hydrocarbons. When they get too expensive, activities like farming, transportation, chemical production and so on either become more expensive, or start breaking down. If we don't adapt quickly enough, many folks on planet earth will be getting unemployed at best and chronically hungry at worst. If governments will not deal with this effectively, we've got social and political problems. Big ones.
Suppose everyone in Mexico couldn't get their produce to market next year or get fertilizer at a price they could afford. What do you think would happen there? And in the US? And central America?
I hope technology can help us get past this. I hope new energy sources are found and implemented quickly. It would be nice if the "free" market can do this before a large number of us starve. Unfortunately, innovation doesn't happen on demand or on schedule.
Out of curiosity, did you think real estate prices would ever decrease or that the free-market capitalist USA economy would ever slow?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSqueezing More Oil from the Ground by Leonardo Maugeri contends that use of tertiary recovery will ensure plentiful petroleum for another century. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of fields are suitable for such methods. Indeed, for every successful steam flood like Kern River, there are hundreds of fields where tertiary techniques are ineffective.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo pretend that tertiary recovery is somehow like Viagra, capable of restoring older petroleum fields to their youthful vigor, is wishful thinking.
Where tertiary recovery is used, it often just accelerates the depletion of remaining oil. In 1999 Mexico installed a billion-dollar nitrogen injection system that doubled production at its Cantarell field to 2 million barrels per day. But production at Cantarell has plummeted to just 500,000 b/d. The field is in terminal decline.
Prudhoe Bay, Americas largest single oil find, peaked at 1.5 million b/d in the mid-1980sbut has now fallen to 262,000 b/d, despite the application of tertiary techniques. Russia shows a similar pattern. Samotlor, the kingpin, peaked at 3.1 million b/d in 1980 and has fallen steadily to 400,000 b/d by 2000.
These are only a sampling of hundreds of fields around the world that are advancing into old age. In short, Kern River is more an anomaly than an example. As petroleum industry professionals know all too well, depletion never sleeps, one reason why global oil production is more likely to fall than to grow in the coming decades.
Randy Udall
All Scientists, there is an update coming on the Peaking Oil study. Oct 11-13 in Denver, proceedings of the US Chapter "Association For The Study Of Peak Oil & Gas" will have a good spread of credentialed speakers. Theme of the conference is "Time To Reset"...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs to whether SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN has Peaking Oil timing right or not, more important is solution set, and understanding need to implement same. Climate Change Legislation is an attempt to time corrective action to satisfy vested interests, and still do needful things soon enough. Climate change is one thing.
Shortage of fuel to maintain agriculture, supply feedstock for petrochemicals, cement, water & transportation infrastructure, that is another. Fault finding for warnings not given, action not taken, civil engineering works not begun, that is futility. The work is immense, and motor fuel energy flow at hand now is probably as much as we will ever see, per annum. World diesel use is a marker. As long as we increase flow of diesel for Agriculture, trucks, trains and aviation, the standard of living can be maintained. There's the rub; many authorities are convinced all efforts to increase production are running against depletion rates that cancel growth of net output.
China is engaged in the world's largest railway infrastructure expansion in history. China, the European Union, even oilpatch countries are quietly expanding railway capacity & reach. This is primarily generic railway work, passenger and freight distribution systems. High Speed Rail lines reaching speeds over 150 mph are in the news, but keeping people fed and having jobs will depend on general railway infrastructure capacity & reach.
In April 1972, scientists Jean-Michel Cousteau joined Lake Tahoe guru Dr. Charles Goldman in the "Blue Tahoe" seminar at Tahoe's Incline meeting center. Among suggested features to improve Lake Tahoe clarity: Electric Railway access and circulation elements, at both North and South Shore development corridors. Because railway was not their primary discipline, their comments made only passing mention of railways. When queried about the railway suggestion on later visits, Drs. Cousteau and Goldman held to the position: "It is up to transportation engineers to solve a transportation problem"...
A suggestion for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and journalists as well, please cover railway mode, electric railways powered by renewable generated power. See theoildrum node 5672, and (peakoil.net) Newsletters 42 & 89; articles 374 & 1037.
Randy Udall,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you for pumping Viagra reality into the discussion about our aging and depleted rock stars (porous rocks that is, who once, long ago and in a far off time of glory were our stars; but alas can no longer "produce" the way they used to).
I myself am not an oil expert and don't pretend to be one. However the evidence posted on TheOilDrum.com (TOD) and elsewhere seems to be overwhelming. The USA calls itself the Greatest Nation on Earth and claims to have the greatest and latest technologies. Yet despite all this greatness and all the high faluting technologies (of today & of days to come), domestic USA oil production keeps declining and declining. It has been doing so steadily since around 1972. No amount of hocus pocus has provided the Viagra revitalization that Maugeri's article claims is just around the corner. We are almost 40 years past Peak in the USA and still denying it. Why?
This is, by far, the worst article ever published in Scientific
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAmerican. This article has no basis in either science, mathematics or economics. At root, it is enumerate and unscientific. It ignores the essence of the peak oil claim, that no matter how much oil is in the ground, the *rate* at which oil can be extracted must reach a peak and then decline. For a much better treatment, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
In particular, the "peak oil deniers" must ignore that production has *already* peaked in the United States and many other countries, *despite* the increasing ability to extract oil from oil fields: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#Peak_oil_for_individual_nations
The article abounds in nonsense. It claims, correctly, that much of the world has not been explored, implying, incorrectly, that this somehow invalidates the peak oil theory. This is absurd. There are economic reasons why much of the world has remained unexplored, and those reasons imply that it would be difficult to extract oil if it
were ever found. To pretend otherwise is to implicitly assert that oil companies have ignored easily gained profits.
It doesn't matter how much oil is in the ground. What matters is how fast it can be extracted and at what cost. The article simply ignores this basic fact.
Indeed, economists are strictly correct when they say that the world will never "run out" of oil. The irony is that the reason is that eventually it will cost too much to extract the remaining oil.
Edward K. Ream
Dear Editor,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswe refer to the article Squeezing more oil from the ground where L. Maugeri holds that we have oil for the rest of the 21st century . We note first that in the Sci. Am. interview Maugeri states that: no one actually knows what the total amount [of oil left in the ground] isnot even its order of magnitude .� This clearly contradicts the main statement of his article.
To correct Maugeris approach in a scientific perspective, we may use his tabulated data on page 62, which express the carbon (CO2) footprint of gasoline obtained from different resources. This footprint may be divided in two parts: the footprint of direct gasoline combustion and the footprint of processes which produce gasoline from oil; the number appearing in Maugeris table is the sum of these two parts. The part related to gasoline combustion may be easily found in literature and it is 8.87 kg(CO2)/gal; so the effect of the production process can be obtained by difference.
The CO2 emission is roughly proportional to the energy obtained or used in the two steps: the combustion of gasoline we use to obtain energy and the energetic cost of oil treatment to obtain gasoline.� The ratio of energy obtained from gasoline to that used to produce gasoline, a ratio commonly called EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Investment), is well approximated by the ratio of the respective CO2 emissions.
EROEI is a method to evaluate the ecologic/economic sustainability of an energy production technology: the lowest the value, the lowest the sustainability. The bottom conceivable value for EROEI is 1, while the lowest practical value is at least 2-3. As a comparison one may consider that the EROEI of oil technology in 1930 was roughly 100: i.e. one barrel of oil was needed to extract and use 100 barrels of oil.
The following EROEI values are calculated from Maugeris table:
Alaska oil: 5.92; steam injection: 2.66; tar sands: 2.25; diesel from carbon: 0.62; this last number means that diesel from carbon is economically/energetically not sustainable; it is an energy sink, not an energy source.
As a first correction, each estimate of the oil reserves contained in Maugeris article should be multiplied by a reducing factor equal to (1-1/EROEI).� As an example the real tar sands reserves are at most one half the value guessed by Maugeri. Let remark that for all fossil fuels EROEI estimates decrease in time, due to the increasing energy cost of the extraction and processing procedures. Thus more realistic corrections could reduce Maugeris guesses even one order of magnitude.
As a conclusion, the estimate of (possibly) large oil reserves indicated by Maugeri is erroneous because it gives hints about the amount of energy contained in the geological reservoirs.� We are not at all interested in such figures: we are concerned about the net energy we can finally benefit of.
Maugeri is possibly aware of this difference but, as many economists, he prefers to consider only the monetary cost of the extraction; Scientific American readers should consider this a too rough approximation, whose improper application contributed to the present economic/ecologic crisis.
Antonio Zecca and Claudio Della Volpe, University of Trento, Italy
Perhaps Scientific American should do an article on EROI.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis a concept that many monetarists appear to not understand because they see the world only in terms of $RO$I, not in terms of energy returned divided by energy invested. When EROI is less than 1, we are losing the energy game rather than obtaining a profit. EROI less than unity is not sustainable, no matter what the "profit" is in terms of dollars.
Cary rightly decries the thought that we may continue our profligate use of oil. I was also disappointed that the author blithely suggests we may be able to squeeze out an undiminished supply of oil for the next century.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut Cary is wrong in condemning SA for publishing the article. A thoughtful scientist looks at all the facts and then deduces conclusions from those facts. The article gave us some facts that are good to know. I will still do my utmost to personally conserve on fossil fuels and to urge alternative sources of power, particularly, nuclear power to fuel electric cars, etc.
Linn Slattengren
More intelligent article than the usual pro-oil industry stuff. Unfortunately, however, the author did pull a few fast ones to make his case. For example, he bases his future consumption estimates on no increases in demand, a situation that is not supported by recent history. With China putting 10,000 new cars a day on the road, and with similar increases from other developing countries, minor oil consumption decreases by the OECD nations will not be enough to offset new demand.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA more troubling point is how he ignores the substantial environmental damage caused from extracting synthetic crude from tar sands, from pollution of aquifers to permanent degradation of the land to huge increases in CO2 emissions from the extraction process (Canada seriously failed its Kyoto quotas because of CO2 emissions from the tar sands ventures). Similar problems exist with the exploitation of the Orinoco extra-heavy oil deposits. As for shale oil, acid rain issues will have seemed mild by comparison.
I agree with you. I thought that when our greedy, stupid warlord president George W. was completely ousted out of office during the elections of 2006 and 2008, we could move forward in our technology and away from these genecidal fossil fuels. What a disappointment SciAm layed in our laps. I wonder how much big oil paid them to print this travesty???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjem,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTake a chill pill man. What is not scientific about technological advances in oil production.
This is great news. Similar to natural gas in the US, where we went from predictions of chronic shortages to plenty of supply for more than a century in one short year due to technological advances.
I would much rather read this kind of story than the latest doom and gloom prediction. "Global Warming on the Way! Woman and Minorities Hardest Hit!"
This should come as no surprise to anyone who actually knows some science. We haven't even begun to tap the planet's oil reserves. ALL oil shortages in the last 50 years have been the result of politics, not physics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWitness the hysteria of the environmental crowd at the very thought that cheap abundant oil might be around the corner.
Dear Disgruntled Reader:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow in the world can you bad mouth an author for writing an article about scientific advancement in a scientific journal?
Like it or not, this is still an oil based economy and we couldn't just quit drilling for oil cold turkey without sending the entire planet into turmoil (no matter how much you fear global warming). As a scientist in the oil industry (I am a geologist), it never ceases to amaze me how much technological and scientific advancement is made to get more oil. We have gone from digging holes to drilling horizontally in a sand for a few of miles. All of geology as a discipline would not be nearly so far along without the influence of oil companies. Every day you use tens or hundreds of things that you wouldn't have without the scientific research performed or at least funded by oil companies (the computer you are reading this on reeks of oil).
Your blanket hatred of an entire industry that provides advances in science and a necessary service for everyone on the planet (even you, no matter who you are...) is as narrow minded and biased as you claim the author to be. And the fact that you bash a scientific article based wholly in facts just because you don't like the conclusion it comes to makes you absurd and very unscientific
Regardless of your views on natural resource use, this is an article on one subject - oil remaining and the technological advances to get at it. When a magazine, especially a scientific one, starts to skew an article (or the publication of one) based on a viewpoint on how, or even if, oil should be used, it severly reduces its journalistic integrity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you don't want to use oil, there is an easy way to do so. Don't buy objects that utilize crude oil for their use or production.
When people actually support the hiding of information, regardless of its content, bad times are ahead.
One thing to remember is that even after oil is no longer the fuel of choice for transportation, it will still be very important for petrochemicals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not sure that smoking cigarettes, drinking boos, and eating a strict diet of swine and potato chips is bad for me either Jampg. In fact, I am of the school of thought that it is our lifestyle which determines our overall health. I think that there are things we can do to be good to our bodies which nurture and promote homeostasis. Do you really think that mother earth is any different than our bodies? That there are not certain things which when done in excess kill her?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPersonally, I prefer booze to boos.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs "mother earth" different from our bodies? Well, let's see, no heart, no mouth, no teeth, no bones. She doesn't really eat or drink, or think for that matter. I don't think "she" could be more different than our bodies.
Record cold in Chicago and many other places today. I can argue all day with plenty of facts and references as to why the theory of anthropogenic global warming was the greatest scientific blunder of the last 500 years, but it won't stop Crap and Tax from being passed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNobody can reason with a hysterical fanatic, not even when the snow is rising up around their knees on a day that their dogmatic climate ideas say should be suitable for growing bananas. And they call me a denier!
Horsehead pumps most definitely DO NOT suck oil from the ground. A pump designed to use atmospheric pressure to withdraw a liquid from underground can manage roughly 30 feet so to remove oil for rather deeper than that use a very different and simple system in the case of the Horsehead. There is a rod and chain system that reaches all the way to the bottom of the bore and at that bottom is a valved plate that weighted which is pulled up which shuts to valve pushing up the bore any liquids above the plate. When the plate goes back down the valve opens and the weight of the plate ( or in the case of certain types of wells. the rod shoves the plate down) and liquids again flow up above the plate and the cycle begins again with the valve being shut by the upward motion of the pump sitting a quarter of a mile above the bottom of the bore. Thus, there is no "sucking" but instead the liquids are pushed up from the bottom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI congratulate Scientific American and the author of this article. Multiple perspectives, that's the scientific way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd, one more thing to all the James out there: don't be so fanatic, it is those extreme positions that kill all discussions and the ultimate reach for the truth.
Carlos
Jem, lets clam down. anyway, did you read at the top?"Forecasts that global oil production will soon start to decline and that most oil will be gone within a few decades may be overly pessimistic" Even if it's not that soon, its coming up! what will we do when the oil actually runs out, and what will become of the countries whose economy is based of oil and its products?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-Shawn
The ill-defined ethnic background and Castrist elected president of Venezuela, Mr Chaves, guaranteed they have oil left for 250 years more. A good new!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have always thought that it may be a good idea to cease using quite so much liquid petroleum, even though in truth we may be nowhere near "peak oil" when that is defined by the constantly shifting scale of what oil is economically recoverable, nor what natural gas, nor what deep tar oil.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBesides which, I constantly keep in mind that the USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal and quite possibly of natural gas as well, which mean that with a conversion cost of less than a dollar per gallon we could make either liquid gasoline or diesel fuel out of either coal or natural gas, which we have abundantly. If those abundant supplies don't work out, why would not methane clathrates in the Gulf of Mexico suffice, which also hold incalculable supplies of energy?
All this is presuming that our politicians will let us do these things. Now, I am also not inherently prejudiced against developing solar power, or wind power, as far as makes any economic sense whatever to do so. In fact, I would rather do that than to maximize the use of every possible fossil fuel.
I do realize, however, that we have to use common sense in deciding which technology deserves the greatest and most long term subsidies in order to return anything at all like the invesment we place in them. I also must include in my calculations the indisputable fact that nuclear energy probably trumps everything else in sheer common sense estimation of benefits to the economic good of the USA versus probable harm to most US citizens, but for the fact that Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada stands on the jugular of nuclear energy with not only a NIMBY glint in his eye, but a sheerly fanatic and deeply unintelligent appreciation of all the common sense technical issues involves. Or in other words, if in 10,000 years a tiny, tiny percentage of today's radioactive values would in fact trickle out in a highly localized leak, what really would be the damage to the future citizens of Nevada?
Why, in fact, would anyone today assume that in 10,000 years whoever lives in Nevada would be completely unable to deal with such a localized and, indeed, miniscule problem?
Truly, jampg, I think like you. The USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal and quite possibly of natural gas as well. If we ignore these natural blessings because of a nearly superstitious belief that humans ruin the Earth by burning fossil fuels, we cave in to backwards politically-convenient hysteria masquerading as serious science, The truth always outs, and the truth is that the global warming of the late 20th century had little to do with CO2 levels, and the cooling of the 21 st century is caused by a combination of factors that humans are as yet too stupid to put in a realisitic perspective, so carried away with the "humans must be to blame" narrative are they.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWill gas still be burned off at well-heads at isolated oil-fields? The effect of such practises means that most oil-producing countries are directly liable for colossal CO2 emissions and should be included in the Copenhagen emissions measures.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am thinking like jampg most assuredly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am thinking like jampg for sure. Last night a TV science channel report on the Chicxulub meteor crater at Yucatan informed me that it is now thought that this tremendous asteroid impact created the lush Gulf of Mexico oil fields because it shattered the bedrock so deeply that really deep oil could flow through the capstone and upward into today's rich pools. This implies that really deep oil exists, at least some places.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHello, I read this article in Scientific American and I was really taken away by the bio organism method of extracting the fuel. Well, there is the bad news and there is the good news. The good news is that this article came just in time, and the bio organism technique suits perfectlyto be the subject for a research assesing the feasibility of this alternative technique. The bad news is that i searched the web but found nothing discussing this thing. Instead, what is discussed is extracting oil from algae which is completely a different thing. So please, I am a sophomore, and I need to find some resources for this very interesting topic. If someone could help please provide me a source via commenting. I am very thankful in advance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can divide most here into 2 camps, those who actually look at the numbers and those armchair ranters. Anyone who has really looked at the numbers know we have hit peak oil. We are only finding 1/bbl for every 3+ bbl's we use.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost fields now are in decline or played out. And we are finding, getting less every day. No amount of tech is going to change that because there is not oil enough at a reasonable price to recover.
Not that there is any shortage of energy, it's all around us and at about $100/bbl, it's more cost effective than oil. From EV's to NG to biofuels and especially eff/conservation will replace oil because they will be far cheaper.
Facts are for a $1.5k/kw windgenerator and my EV it charges I get 50 yrs of transport at far lower costs than oil even now, much less at the $150/bbl next yr, $250-300/bbl it will be within 5 yrs. If I need to go on a long trip, biofuels from yard, crop and forest wastes will get me there at over 100mpg with a generator. Or as Lithium batteries get just a little cheaper, on just EV power. My lead battery EV's get 250 and 600mpg equivalent I drive every day.
Semi's will go cogen say 80hp ICE/30hp Rankine heat engine on NG with a 300hp EV drive will get 12-18 mpg vs the 4-6mpg now. If an electric rail or overhead wires, they can do electric for long stretches.
Facts are we don't need either oil or coal in 25 yrs as RE from river/tidal kinetic hydro, wind, solar, biomass and some nuke if it's cost comes down takes over.
All this will happen because of one thing, cost. These are the low cost energy sources of the future.
Okay, how about we eliminate the use of aluminum. here's a big hint...smelting aluminum uses carbon blocks for anodes and cathodes. in the course of smelting these get used up. not being a chemist i don't know about the exact amount of co2 produced from the reaction of al2o3 and c but i think it's a bunch.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thison a lighter note...how about we eliminate about half of the people from the planet. that'd cut down on carbon dioxide by a bunch and would give more space for the rest of us..."us" you certainly don't think i'm going to give up my space on my earth do you?
As always, predictions assume current conditions. When a [realistic] disaster is predicted then the prediction is responded to, if the response is a good one, then the end changes. One should look a bit more at what is being said and less at wether you like the idea or not.
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