Vital Trivia

On Wednesday 2nd November the Energy Institute held a conference titled Oil Depletion – Facing The Challenges unfortunately I was dodging riots in Paris and couldn’t be there but it seems that Claire Durkin, Head of Energy Markets Unit at the DTI made a very important announcement, she has been quoted as saying:

We can expect that an investigation will be announced within the next few weeks aimed at allowing a more open discussion on the arrival of “peak oil,” the point at which worldwide oil production begins to decline,
Source

If true this is a major development, a formal government investigation into peak oil will have to consider the arguments of ASPO, Skrebowski, Simmons and even Chevron etc. I don’t believe it is possible to evaluate the available data and reach a defensible conclusion that peak oil is more than 20 years away and even such an unrealistically optimistic conclusion of 2025 demands radical action now. I see the evidence pointing to peak extraction rates no later than 2010.

A simple calculation shows what would be required for even a 2025 peak. Peak in 20 years time assuming a very conservative 1% annual increase from today (the last 5 years has seen ~1.8% growth) would require an additional 675 billion barrels extracted before peak (suggesting a URR of over 3 trillion barrels) and an extraction rate of just over 100 million barrels per day. A 5% decline in today’s 84 mbpd would leave us with just 31 million barrels of today’s extraction still available in 20 years time so we’d need 70 mbpd of new production.

To push peak extraction rate 20 years into the future requires the discovery of an additional ~1 trillion barrels of reserves (an average of 50 billion per year compared with today’s rate of 5 billion and falling) and the identification of another 70 million barrels per day of extraction capacity (another seven Saudi Arabia’s or Russia’s brought on line). It just isn’t going to happen.

Ms Durkin should be congratulated on announcing such a study but scalded for only attending to present her paper and not to hear the excellent papers from Roger Bentley or Chris Skrebowski. Does she want to learn about this subject or not!?

This post was written by Chris Vernon