Personal Blogs

"Just because output was lower in 2009 than 2008 does not necessarily mean the fall was geologically imposed. We think oil production was lower in 2009 than 2008 because of lower demand caused by the recession, itself caused in part by the spike in the oil price to $147/barrel. That in turn appears to have been the result of an effective plateau from around 2005 to 2008. What's more, output has risen strongly in 2010, rising by 2.8 million b/d in 2010 over 2009, and is forecast to rise by a further 1.5 million b/d this year (IEA - see http://omrpublic.iea.org/). In January this year, IEA figures, which are based on an all-liquids definition similar to the BP Stats, showed production at 88.5 mb/d, against 87.8 mb/d in July 2008. So already we are 700,000 b/d above the previous peak. Chris Skrebowski, ODAC trustee and independent forecaster, suggests the crunch will come in 2012/2013 at 92-94 mb/d. More generally we think that forecasting the precise date is now less important than preparing for the event. Whenever it comes, peak oil is far too close for comfort."

The ODAC team

http://www.odac-info.org/newsletter/2011/02/18 

This is probably the most accurate analysis of the situation I have come across.

Neal

RockyMtnGuy

 "They (The IEA) produced a wonderful study indicating that 25% of the world's oil reserves were in the arctic. As it happens, I worked for a company that ran a drilling fleet of 26 vessels in the Canadian Arctic Ocean for a decade or so. We also drilled a lot of wells in the MacKenzie Delta, and ran seismic surveys off the coast of Greenland. Some people I knew also got involved in Russian oil exploration, which was mostly an exercise in fighting Russian bureaucracy. While we found a lot of interesting things, we didn't find any commercial amounts of oil. It's drastically different from the Gulf of Mexico, which is what I assume the USGS is comparing it to. There's oil, but not enough to justify the costs. There's lots of natural gas, some tar sands, and some huge diamond deposits (now, that's what any geologist with a fully functional crystal ball would have gone after had they only known). But not much oil."

www.oildrum.com