Hi Nelson. Here's some good conceptual stuff about oil.
Refreshing to see top drawer work still coming from the faculty at Princeton.
Isopatch
<Hubbert's Peak: A Guide to Oil Literacy
Thursday, January 17, 2002
David S. Isenberg
Don't let the drop in oil prices fool you: peak oil production for planet Earth
happens next year. Then it's all downhill...
If you like to think about infrastructure, Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth S. Deffeyes
(Princeton University Press, 2001) is an important book. If you're an investor, the book will
offer guiding perspective. If you appreciate the relationship between telecom and energy,
and you'd like the world to stay out of the two-cans-and-a-string zone, the concluding
chapters of the book will bother you.
Hubbert's Peak is a short course in oil literacy and an easy, enjoyable read. Oil, like
telecom, is a critical infrastructure of modern society. Like telecom, oil technology makes a
chunky gumbo when mixed with economics, politics and business. Understanding oil is a
prerequisite to understanding how petrodollars and petropolitics swirl around the world's
power centers. But unlike telecom, humans do not create the oil supply, and the oil supply
is not -- emphatically not -- doubling every 18 months.
The book is equal parts Okie and Ivy. To author Deffeyes, oil is personal. He is the son of
an Oklahoma oilman who "went to nine different grade schools in the first eight grades", but
found consistency each summer with an oil-related job. Then he went to the Colorado
School of Mines with the family business in his heart, began his career at Shell research
and wound up as Professor of Geology at Princeton. Despite Princeton, oil remained in
Deffeyes' blood. "As I drive by those smelly refineries on the New Jersey Turnpike,"
Deffeyes writes, "I want to roll down my windows and breathe deeply."
Hubbert's Peak is more than a memoir. It is a natural history of oil. It begins with how oil is
formed. Before reading the book, I knew that oil came from organic matter. Now I know
something about how organic matter accumulates in pools and how it gets buried to the
depth of "the oil window," a region between 7500 feet and 15,000 feet below the surface of
the Earth, the place where temperature and pressure are high enough to crack organic
molecules, but not so high that the molecules are cracked into such small pieces that only
natural gas results.
There are chapters on why and how discoverable oil deposits form, how people find these
pools and how oil drilling works. As I was pulled along willingly by Deffeyes' personal
anecdotes, I learned about anticlines, salt domes and angular unconformities. I learned
about source rock, reservoir rock and cap rock. I learned about porosity and permeability. I
learned about the "downhole logging instruments" invented by Pierre and Marcel
Schlumberger, about the drilling methods of Erle Halliburton, and about the "tricone"
drill bit invented by Howard Hughes the first. I learned about seismology, gas-liquid
chromatography and the study of local gravity variations. I learned about the very first oil
wells, drilled with "spring poles," and I learned about pumping mud, how to drill sideways
and what happens in a "blowout." All of these facts are basic to oil literacy, and Hubbert's
Peak is a painless, effective short course.
But the book is more than that. Deffeyes not only looks back, he also provides a
prospectus for the future. The book's namesake, M. King Hubbert, was another Shell
research geologist. For a time he was Deffeyes' mentor. In the 1950s, Hubbert took a
careful look at known U.S. oil reserves, at the rate of production of these reserves and at
the discovery rate of new reserves. Hubbert then made a couple of educated assumptions
about statistical distribution shapes, and he concluded that U.S. oil production would peak
in 1972 and decline thereafter. The orthodox geological community, having projected a
more optimistic oil future, reacted with vilification and denial. The actual year U.S. oil
production peaked was 1970.
Deffeyes tuned up Hubbert's methodology and applied it to world oil production. He looked
at world reserves, production rates, and discovery rates. A key principle here is that oil
discovery is not random. Big oil fields are discovered sooner. Even if there is a huge
undiscovered oil field somewhere on Earth, it is possible to estimate its size and its
probability of discovery. Deffeyes refined some of Hubbert's statistical assumptions. He
concludes that world oil production peaks in 2003. Then he turned his attention to the
question of when oil production begins to decline -- his answer, a bit tongue- in-cheek, is
2004.7. But he sternly warns, "There is nothing plausible that could postpone the peak until
2009. Get used to it."
Deffeyes is unequivocal -- his predictions are not presented as scenarios. He reveals his
findings as slow-motion certainties of physical science guided by hard-core estimation
methods. He says, "This much is certain: no initiative put in place starting today can have a
substantial effect on the peak production year. No Caspian Sea exploration, no drilling in
the South China Sea, no SUV replacements, no renewable energy projects can be brought
on at a sufficient rate to avoid a bidding war for the remaining oil."
Deffeyes characterizes the coming energy gap as a "bidding war" but I fear he understates.
In contrast to oil production, world energy use 1999-2020 is expected to rise 66% (USA
Today, 1/10/02). Where will this new energy come from? Ominously, Deffeyes entreats,
"Let's hope that the war is waged with cash instead of with nuclear warheads."
Hubbert's Peak concludes with a chapter on the future of fossil fuels and another on
alternative energy. It is a hard-nosed look -- after all, Deffeyes is an oilman, not an
environmentalist or a slow-growth advocate -- but it leaves no cause for comfort. To those
who believe in the supremacy of market forces, who believe that more capital for
exploration will yield more oil, he reminds that the 1930s were lean depression years when
capital was scarce, but these years saw the largest increase in oil production in history --
and, for that matter, for all time. He warns that alternative energy schemes are too little too
late -- that we will necessarily face a decline in our standard of living. He proposes that
nuclear energy is the strongest future energy alternative, that it has a bum rap for being so
closely linked to nuclear terror, and that it deserves re-examination and renewed efforts by
scientists and engineers.
I wish it weren't so. I wish Deffeyes had devoted more than token attention to conservation,
to efficiency, to Buckminster Fuller's principle of "doing more with less." But no matter
what I wish, and no matter how hard the world tries to deny or discredit Deffeyes' message,
Hubbert's Peak is due to arrive on Earth in 2003 -- next year! After that, there will be less
energy for our telephones, our computers, our servers, our LANs, our automobiles, our
airplanes, our factories, and the heating and cooling of the air that surrounds us. We will
need to get used to it. Fast.>
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