Re: Gulf of Mexico

>>> "Glenn Morton" <glennmorton@entouch.net> 02/03/05 8:56 PM >>>
I got my January Offshore Magazine today. It had a whole section on the
Gulf of Mexico, which has been the US mainstay of production. The
deepwater (>1000 ft of water) has staved off the decline but the number
of discoveries is down.....
Only the rise in deepwater production has allowed the oil produced to be
the same, but not really increase.

The situation cannot go on forever like it has. Everyday we have 82
million barrels of oil less than we had the day before. As Hubbert
predicted, the US reached it oil production peak in 1971 with about 9.5
million barrels a day. Now we produce less than 4.5 million barrels per
day from the lower 48 states plus another 1.5 million barrels or so a
day from Alaska and deepwater GOM. Now it appears that all of these oil
sources are declining.

It seems inevitable that sometime in the future this decline will happen
for the world as a whole. When that time will be is not known (and will
not be completely obvious except in hindsight). Some think we will reach
that point in the next few years if we are not there already, and the
more optimistic push it out to 2030, while only the wildly optimistic
push it out further than that. Here is an article from the Houston
Chronicle also highlighting the depletion problem.:

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.mpl/business/3014803

Fat profits don't buy production
Output is flat, but earnings gain from high prices
By NELSON ANTOSH
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Our policticians generally decry our dependence on foreign oil and
fossil fuels in general, but have not put forth any strong efforts to
make a significant push to release the world in general from this
dependence. To get any idea how this might play out, I have been trying
to think of any resource that we have ever depleted that we heavily
depended on, but have not been able to do so. (Can anybody provide an
example?) What lies in the near future when oil and gas production
begins its irreversible decline is not likely to be pleasant. And it
appears we are not going to put many resources into preparing for this
decline.
Received on Fri Feb 4 12:39:13 2005