Peak oil "wrong," says Schwartz

Mr. Schwartz really should get some more current information. We no longer need models to see how close the peak in oil production is. We can simply add up the number of megaprojects coming online and subtract the global decline rate -- yes, we're that close to the peak. The graph showing the result is here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4419

But it's too quick to dismiss the models; they tend to cluster around 2 trillion barrels and we've already consumed one trillion barrels (see Dr. Mill's page here and scroll down until you see the globe with straws sticking out, the graph is just below).

Not only that, he is missing the fundamental distinction that most people who don't get peak oil miss: it's not a matter of total reserves, it's how quickly the oil can be produced. The peak of global oil discovery was in the 1960's and every decade since we've found less oil and in harder and more expensive to reach areas. (For a graph of discovery, again see Dr. Mill's page.)

Given that we are currently using 3 to 4 barrels of oil for every barrel we discover, and that the majority of oil producing countries are now in decline (Russia announced in February that its oil production is declining, Mexico's Cantarell supergiant decreased 36% from July 07 to July 08, which is leading Mexico to cease being an exporter by about 2015, and there is indirect evidence that Saudi Arabia is struggling to keep its production up) the only way to be optimistic is if one doesn't actually know what's happening, just like Mr. Schwartz.

André Angelantoni
www.PostPeakLiving.com

this guy is pretty stupid!

Why do these talking heeads keep saying that PO crowd thinks we are running out of oil. That is not the case as PO theory simply covers production rate.
And this nonsense with deep sea being able to replace declining oilfields is just.....
Well just look at thunderhorse that was supposed to be how many billions of barrels and come on-line how quickly?
He is right though in one aspect, it will be expensive, and that will of course help keep down demand so that the mindless masses can be fed stories about oil production going down not becasue we are producing poorer quality and ever harder to reach oil but becasue demand is down for some economical factors. I am sure the finger of blame will start pointing left and right at investors who sit on gold and silver rather than paper "assets" for the global financial debacle.

“Peak oil proponents point out that […] it will become too expensive and resource-intensive to produce meaningful amounts of petrochemical products from other known sources of oil”
“But it'll be climate change catastrophes [such as ..], and more expensive oil, not the fact that we're running out of oil, that will drive change," according to Schwartz.”
Why woud climate change be the reason for more expensive oil and not increasing scarcity?

Around 50 oil producing countries in the world HAVE peaked and are in decline. This is not my opinion, this not an analysis or a prediction, this is not a statement of facts.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/country/index.cfm > just browse data for US, norway, UK, Egypt, Syria, Oman, Yemen, Mexico, Argentina and many, many other

According to most independent scientific studies, global oil production will now decline from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 14%.

This is equivalent to a 33% drop in 7 years. No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always exceed production levels; thus oil depletion will continue steadily until all recoverable oil is extracted.

Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment.

We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.

This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html

I used to live in NH-USA, but moved to a sustainable place. Anyone interested in relocating to a nice, pretty, sustainable area with a good climate and good soil? Email: clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com or give me a phone call which operates here as my old USA-NH number 603-668-4207. http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/

Don't you love the ravings of a delusional now and then. Who pays this guys bills? I think Matt Simmons has more credibility than this clown any day of the week, after all Matt works with the industry and finances it. Put your money where your mouth is Schwartz, save your optimize for the casinos.

The question isn't how much there is total, the question is "how fast can you bring it to the surface in a usable form"- it wouldn't matter if the entire planet proved to be, at its core, a giant blob of oil, if it could only be extracted at a rate of <90 million barrels per day (every day, forever). A subsidiary question is "How much does it cost to bring each barrel to the surface in a usable form?" If the answer is >$200 per barrel, guess when it will be brought to the surface?

This might as well boast that Titan, largest moon of Saturn, has thousands of times the reserves of liquid hydrocarbons on Earth.

Problem is you need an awful lot of gas tanks to get one gas tank of THAT reserve. Same for most oil now left to drill... some of it might never ever be economically viable to get.

He says We really don't know how much oil there is but then says everyone who is watching what is going on is wrong. Do you thing the USA, UK and Indonesia became importers rather than exporters is that they like giving money away? Is Mexico so rich that it can afford to export less next month? He should prove his case first rather than make us prove again and again that he is quack.

Nobody in the peak oil community says we will run out of oil: "We are not going to run out of oil..." it will simply cost more as demand goes up and supply goes down. This is a pretty basic concept, this guy does not sound credible, I'm wondering who paid him enough to sound like an idiot.

Also he claims the estimates of oil reserves is conservative, "...they tend to be very conservative, these estimates..." but ever since OPEC members agreed that they could only pump a limited % of their reserves each year they have been inflating their reserve numbers to maximize profits, SA has a huge population to support and they don't live all that well.

This bozo isn't worth listening to.

Having heard Peter Schwartz speak several times, I am certain he is quite intelligent, extremely well-informed, and imparting valuable information. The focus of this article is a meaningless nuance -- that the peak oil theory is more about difficulty and expense and less about ultimate scarcity. In the "less about scarcity" angle he may or may not be entirely right, but this is irrelevant to the key issue: that changing our sources of energy, as well as learning to use less energy, is really what's important, due to climate change and other factors such as the dangers of shifting geopolitical wealth and the economic strength to be derived from developing a new energy economy. The point of his lecture is always about how best, then, to negotiate the changing energy economy. And for those who doubt his acumen on the subject, he has done quite well in his business of guessing the future.

Gang:

The first rule of keynote speeches is to say something controversial. Schwartz is a very smart guy, and he actually does understand the points you make above. He attacked a straw man ("The earth is running out of oil") to make the somewhat obvious point that we won't run out of oil, it will just get more expensive. I don't want to defend his particular wording, but I get his point: Long before we "run out of oil" we will have to solve the fossil fuel problem. Again, not a deeply insightful or particularly novel point of view, but his main point seems to be that we are not taking a particularly sensible approach to solving the problem.

As a nation, and as a global community, all we have done about the fossil fuel problem for most of the last 25 years is talk about it -- and subsidize corn farmers. But thanks to the George Bush Energy Policy (raise oil prices by screwing up the Middle East), the venture capital community has been mobilized to invest a significant portion of venture capital into some interesting energy technologies -- most of which will take longer and cost more than anyone hopes or expects, if they work at all. This has always been true of venture capital investments. But some of these investments will work out spectacularly, and we will forget about the stupid investments. Still, even if we invest 100% of the venture capital available into brilliant cleantech investments, it won't solve the fossil fuel problem. We need intelligent public policy initiatives and more effective individual and collective action.

If you really think that the fossil fuel problem is serious, as Peter Schwartz certainly does, you would be ranting and raving at the idiocy of our governments and at ourselves as the people who elected them, not at Peter Schwartz.

And, so is Alaska, for that matter, Gov. Palin. The "-stans" are getting ready to head that way.

When Mexico's Cantarell essentially runs dry in a few years, Mexico's economy goes up, and we REALLY have a flood of immigrants, what will Schwartz say then>

Waste and biomass into biofuels. Waste effluent feedstock into mass produced algae based fuels and power. Onboard fuel processing of hydrous fuels. Plug in hybrids and electric vehicles. A gradual shift to power plants and solar roofs. Solar equipped vehicles that make their own power and feed V2G systems. The demand for oil gradually drops as new technology replaces the old. So what’s all the fuss. Relax into it.

My boss used to work for Shell, later than 1986. He still has friends in the oil industry. They are all saying that easy oil is nearly at an end. The King of Saudi has basically said "If you find new oil, leave it in the ground"

While at the same time OPEC are trying to convince consumers that there is a vast river of oil running from Russia somewhere down to OPEC countries and this is why they've been keeping their reserve figures the same for the last 20 years...uh huh.

I wonder who paid him to give that talk....

Actually, this is a straw man argument. I don't know anyone who thinks that peak oil will prevent climate change. There's certainly enough oil left to take us to the point where natural positive feedbacks will make global warming irreversible.

Everyone that I've spoken to about peak oil has been disappointed to hear that. On the other hand, it's a good way to convince skeptics that we need to be taking action to reduce oil usage regardless of what they think about the climate.

Lots of action on this provocative, no doubt intended. I haven't read them all, but people should know about the digital utopians and Chris Anderson, the editor of "Wired" magazine and another member of the Board of The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. Digital utopians believe the continuing exponential growth in their industry will, put simply, save the planet and mankind too.

Ironically, post-peak oil fits exactly one of the utopians favorite theories, "The Long Tail", espoused by Chris Anderson in a book of the same name By memory, this is a graph of marginal computing, really advertising, costs that drops so quickly you can sell all sorts of arcane products to a whole lot of niche markets. Everybody gets their favorite lolly and everyone is excessively jolly.

Oil will never run out. Never. Ever. It will just decline quicker than we would like. This sounds trite, but it is the basis for our concern over peak oil. As various replies have recited, in answers that sound suspiciously like cant, PO is a legitimate concern as well as a basic mathematical truth based on recent about a hundred years of statistics, about twice as long a sample set as computer statistics. I think Mr. Schwarz knows this.

With or without carbon taxes, in the absence of energy policy that promotes a just a little stability (think agriculture...) oil prices will keep going through the roof and then the floor and then sky high and then back to the roof... Each gyration will kill off a few long term plans (conventional and alternative) and shut a few old wells.

Why? Oil is such a useful, concentrated energy source that it simply blows away all its competitors if it is around in any quantity. It's guns versus bows and arrows. If oil products are available in any quantity, special measures must be in place to protect those of gentler entropy and preserve consumer choice and overall resiliency (security).

In other words, if the Saudi's decided to blow off their gas caps, they could probably drive oil prices into the dirt, as they did in the 1980's and again in the 1990's.
As a consequence, they could take dominant positions in a cowed solar and wind industry to complement their desert kingdom's greatest renewable resource and stay very jolly.

If you put peak oil's "long tail" of declining production and rising marginal production costs together with ever tumbling marginal computing costs - specifically its effect on energy production, distribution and efficiency - and you have a formula for mass jollies and unlimited lollies. The rise of the digital cornucopians.

There's a quantum leap involved in this particular ideal, one that I don't buy myself. But I can see (and know) some people who clearly do. There are other cornucopians who are in the game for a host of more sinister reasons, mainly to make friends and influence people. Among other things, they have effectively monkey-wrenched effective action on climate change in North America.

Concentrated useful energy is nothing more than another form of mass/capital. What you are looking for in your ruminations and networking at at Cleantech is the equivalent of the speed of light - squared. Good luck!

Fred M. Strong

what a cheap shot at Gov. Sarah Palin!! She is the only one among the other 3 men, that knows a little more about energy ..

I guess you have not heard about Biden's stand on clean Coal??

As a scientist Prof Schwartz should know that he must based his models of analyses, or theories on hard fact. But Prof. Schwarz is basing his theories on assumptions. And these assumptions seem to come from his state of mind. This is the problem with today's western consumer mindset. Since the mid 1960s we have fallen in love with our own desires and selfishness that it affects our judgement. He is even more absurd than Senator Palin. Senator Palin was born a Roman Catholic - and would have been educated that the Old Testament contained a lot of metaphors, as well as a history of the Jewish people before the birth of Jesus. She would have also been informed that evolution was the work of God, abd that the Book of Genesis is not accurate in the scientific sense, but is a metaphor for the birth of humanity, and the role of pride and humility in the human condition. She would have been taught the teachings of New Testament, concerning human living, are the guide for human happiness, and the basis of Christianity. She then became Evanelical, and chose to believe in the doctrine of Creationism. In the same way Prof Schwarz would have learned all about the scientific method. He would have been taught the importance of studying the empirical evidence. And the importance of compleetely discounting speculation, crowd thinking or his own inbuilt assumptions. But Prof Schwarz then seems to have discarded all of this training and gone for something even more ourtageous than Sarah Palin. This makes it interesting to see him making fun of Senator Palin. They are very alike, in their paths of intellectual digression. Both are fine human beings. But before any of us ask others to believe us, we should get our intellectual honesty in order. We must have the humility to see the facts. Which is probably where Religion and Science are supposed to meet !!!