Sunday, March 10, 2013

Easy oil peaked as predicted. Tight oil will not reverse fall of global production rate.

via @kurtcobb
Resource Insights: Lower highs: The real trajectory of U.S. oil production: "...The world's 100 largest producing giant fields produce half the world's oil. They are growing very long in the tooth; many are over 50 years old. I am skeptical that when these start declining that the frankly pitiful amounts available from the average tight oil well will be able to make up for this decline even under optimistic scenarios for tight oil production.

...In fact, conventional oil--what I call the "Beverly Hillbillies" oil, the easily flowing liquid crude and the stuff that peak oil theorists were actually tracking in the past, appears to have peaked in 2006 according the International Energy Agency. By that metric they were very close to mark as several conventional oil peak projections were for the 2005 to 2010 time period.

Now, we are left with the difficult-to-get unconventional sources. They cost more to extract and often to refine and they therefore come out at a slower rate. And, that is the key metric: RATE of production."