Re: Life after the oil crash

glennmorton@entouch.net wrote:

>
> >Glenn, please educate me on what the phrase "move peak oil back ...."
> means.
>
> Any non-renewable resource with politically unencumbered production,
> the production curve will approximate a bell curve. The top of the
> bell is peak production. That peak can be pushed off by 1 week if the
> world either finds 1 billion bbl of oil or conserves one billion
> barrels of oil. Spend a billion barrels of additional energy and the
> peak gets closer by 1 week. Given that we are finding only 3-5
> billion bbl per year, each year we move the peak back by 3-5 weeks in
> time but we are then another year down the road, meaning that each
> year the peak is about 48 weeks closer, whenever that peak occurs. If
> we didn't find any new resources, the peak would be a full year closer
> to us. Hope this helps.
>
This was utterly confusing to me at first, but after supplementing your
explanation with some Googling I should have done days ago, I now find a
world of information opening up I hadn't been looking at before (e.g.
at www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net) -- that had not been a common
phrase to me before (& in our subject line, no less!). It's got my
attention now.
Thanks for the education.

--merv

> I will tell you, unless we solve the energy problem and by that I mean
> the liquid energy problem, we will all be using bicycles, so in that
> sense it is a vehicle of last resort. But before we get there we will
> go through several phases, smaller cars, then motorcycles, then motor
> bicycles, then bicycles.
>
> Let's look at the UK as an example, a microcosm for the world. Here
> are the annual production figures for the UK continental shelf from
> 1993 to 1999. Everything looks great, increasing production, all the
> government officials smiling, Oil industry execs are also smiling.
> Figures in 000 tonnes /year
>
> 1993 100,189
>
> 1994 126,542
>
> 1995 129,894
>
> 1996 129,742
>
> 1997 128,234
>
> 1998 132,633
>
> 1999 137,099
>
>
>
> But then decline set in
>
>
>
> 2000 126,029
>
> 2001 116,678
>
> 2002 115,944
>
> 2003 106,058
>
> 2004 95,443
>
> 2005 88,000 est
>
>
>
> In merely 5 years production dropped by 31%. Do you have any idea
> what that would do to the world economy if the same kind of decline
> began on a world wide basis? There would be zero time to react.
>
>
>
> Between 2007 and 2010 the UK production will flatten out because one
> field was found in 2001, and it will come on line in 2006. It is a big
> field, Buzzard, but it is the biggest field found in 20 years and all
> it will be able to do is flatten production, not increase it
> significantly. This field contains 400 million bbls. That is
> approximately a 5 day world supply of oil. Think about the scale of
> our energy use.
>
>
>
> Also note that it took about 5 years to get Buzzard online. Any
> solution we come to when oil begins to decline will take even longer.
> And when one is hungry one needs to eat today, not 4 months from now.
> When the world gets hungry for energy, it will need it today, not in
> 10 years.
>
>
>
>
Received on Sat Oct 29 23:55:29 2005