AT: Lomborg
[Lomborg Continues]
That is not happening, nor does any responsible agency project it to happen voluntarily within the next two or three decades. We are not reducing our dependency on oil ? it is still growing. Lomborg?s third argument ? that we can always find a substitute for any scarce resource ? raises questions that we will address in more detail in the next chapter, in a discussion of alternative energy sources. For now, suffice it to say that substitutes, to be successful, must pass certain tests. When Europeans began substituting abundant coal for scarce wood, they soon found that their substitute sometimes contained more energy per kilogram than the original resource. When industrial countries began switching from coal to oil, the substitute was very noticeably more energy-dense. Lomborg suggests that industrial societies will deal with petroleum shortages by switching back to coal, but that means returning to a resource that is substantially less energy-dense and thus unsuitable for supplying society?s vastly increased energy needs. He also mentions natural gas ? but is there enough available to substitute for oil? Again, we will address that important question in detail in the next chapter; for now, it is enough merely to point out that North American production of natural gas is already in sharp decline. Ah, but there is enough shale oil to last 5,000 years! Lomborg helpfully informs us that the dollar price of shale oil will necessarily be higher than the current price of conventional oil, which suggests a lower EROEI, but he does not discuss net-energy figures explicitly. Had he done so, the picture would not have been so encouraging. Shale oil (or oil shale) is actually a misnomer: the rock is not shale but organic marlstone, and it contains no oil, but rather a solid organic material called kerogen. However, promoters have always preferred terms like ?oil shale,? since they encourage the sale of venture shares. Efforts to develop an oil-shale industry date back nearly 90 years, and so far all attempts ? even serious and relatively recent ones by Chevron, Unocal, Exxon, and Occidental Petroleum ? have failed. The recovery process involves mining ore, transporting it, heating it to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, adding hydrogen, and disposing of the waste ? which is much greater in volume than the original ore and is also a groundwater pollution hazard. Processing and auxiliary support facilities require large amounts of fresh water ? a resource intrinsically even more precious than oil. Walter Youngquist sums up the situation well: ?Adding up the water supply problem, the enormous scale of the mining which would be needed, the low, at best, net energy return, and the huge waste disposal problem, it is evident that oil shale is unlikely to yield any very significant amount of oil, as compared with the huge amounts of conventional oil now being used.? 31 Lomborg might also have mentioned tar sands (sometimes optimistically called ?oil sands?), which are likewise reputed to be potential substitutes for conventional oil. The Athabasca tar sands in northern Alberta are estimated to contain an estimated 870 billion to 1.3 trillion barrels of oil (when processed) ? an amount equal to or greater than all of the conventional oil extracted to date. Currently, Syncrude (a consortium of companies) and Suncor (a division of Sun Oil Company) operate oil-sands plants in Alberta. Total production from the tar sands now stands at about one million barrels per day. The extraction process involves using hot-water flotation to remove a thin coating of bitumen from grains of sand, then adding naphtha ? a petroleum distillate ? to the resulting tar-like material in order to upgrade it to a synthetic crude that can be pumped. Currently, two tons of sand must be mined in order to yield one barrel of oil. As with oil shale, the net-energy figures for tar sands are discouraging: Youngquist notes that ?it takes the equivalent of two out of each three barrels of oil recovered to pay for all the energy and other costs involved in getting the oil from the oil sands.? 32 The primary method that is used to process tar sands yields an oily waste water. For each barrel of oil recovered, two-and-a-half barrels of liquid waste are pumped into huge ponds. In the Syncrude pond, measuring 22 kilometers (14 miles) in circumference, six meters (20 feet) of murky water float on a 40meter-thick (133foot) slurry of sand, silt, clay, and unrecovered oil. 33 Residents of northern Alberta have initiated lawsuits and engaged in activist campaigns to close down the tar-sands plants because of devastating environmental problems associated with their operation, including the displacement of native peoples, the destruction of boreal forests, livestock deaths, and a worrisome increase in human miscarriages. 34 To replace the global usage of conventional crude ? 70 million barrels a day ? would require about 350 additional plants the size of the existing Syncrude plant. Together, they would generate a waste pond of 8,750 sq. km, about half the size of Lake Ontario. But since tar sands yield less than half the net energy of conventional oil, the world would need more than 700 plants to supply its needs, and a pond of over 17,500 sq. km ? almost as big as Lake Ontario. Realistically, while tar sands represent a significant energy asset for Canada, it would be foolish to assume that they can make up for the inevitable decline in the global production of conventional oil. When examined closely, Bjørn Lomborg?s arguments amount to an appeal to unspecified future discoveries and to hopeful but vague promises.
AT: Lynch
Lynch’s analysis rests on faulty reports-he also refuses to set a date for peak oil.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 130-133) [Bozman]
As we did with Lomborg?s arguments, let us address Lynch?s one by one. His first substantive point has to do with the USGS ?World Petroleum Assessment 2000,? which predicts such substantial reserve growth as to delay a production peak by many years, perhaps by two or more decades. 36 The USGS is a government agency that employs many competent geologists and data analysts. Is there any reason to disbelieve its projections? Many of the USGS?s own experts criticize what they view as wildly optimistic assumptions contained in the WPA 2000 report. USGS geologist L. B. Magoon maintains a website warning of the imminent ?Big Rollover? world production peak. 36 In fact, the report?s main authors, Schmoker and Klett, explain clearly in their chapter on reserve growth that there is complete uncertainty about reserve growth outside of the US and Canada, but that they believe it is better to use the US lower-48 reserve growth function than none at all. However, there are serious problems with extrapolating historic US reserve growth figures to the rest of the world. The following example may be helpful. Assume a Texas oil field discovered in the 1930s. Examine the reported reserve growth from 1965 to 1995 ? namely 30year reserve growth figures for a 30year-old field. Now apply this growth factor to a Saudi field discovered in 1965, using reported production and reserve figures as of 1995. The result: considerable growth is to be expected from the Saudi field. But there are two main problems with this method: First, the 1930s Texas reserve estimate was probably intentionally understated, and the 1995 Saudi report was probably intentionally overstated. Typically, US oil companies have reported reserves with an extremely conservative 90 percent probability of recovery (P90), while other countries, including Saudi Arabia, use a 50 percent probability (P50) for their reserve estimates. Some countries even report P10 reserves, yielding greatly inflated figures. And, as we have already seen, the Saudis stated a substantial ?proven? reserves addition in the late 1980s that was probably mostly, if not entirely, spurious. True Saudi reserve figures remain a state secret. Second, US reserve growth after 1965 benefited from recent technological recovery advances and included the reporting of at least part of the previously understated reserves. The Saudi estimates of 1995, in contrast, already included the expected impact of all recent technological recovery advances, which became standard in the industry from the 1970s on. Thus it is unreasonable to assume that the Saudi field will experience the same rate of reserve growth in the next three decades as the Texas field did in the past. If the USGS estimates were corrected for these problems, it is doubtful that what the authors call ?potential? reserve growth would exceed 300 billion barrels, an amount that would not significantly affect projections for the peak production year. But the USGS analysis is far more sanguine than this; it calls for a total increase of 1200 billion barrels of oil (discovery plus reserve growth) during the decades from 2000 to 2030, or an average increase of 40 billion barrels per year. During the most productive decade of discovery in world history ? from 1957 to 1967 ? exploration yielded an average of 48 billion barrels per year. If the industry is capable of repeating that feat, why hasn?t it done so in any of the past three decades? Discovery plus reserve growth averaged 9 billion barrels per year in the decade of the 1990s. It is difficult to imagine circumstances that would enable that figure to quadruple in the years ahead. Why would a government agency like the USGS publish a report that gives an extravagantly optimistic view of global oil resources? Nor is such optimism confined to the USGS: the Energy Information Agency (EIA) of the Department of Energy (DoE) has released similarly rosy projections. What?s going on here? A clue is contained in a sentence buried in the EIA ?Annual Energy Outlook 1998 with Projections to 2020?; it reads: ?These adjustments to the USGS and MMS [Materials Management Service] estimates are based on nontechnical considerations that support domestic supply growth to the levels necessary to meet projected demand levels.? 37 In other words, supply projections were simply engineered to fit demand projections. As industry insiders have known for years, USGS and EIA data on current and past production are accurate as can be hoped for, given the fuzziness of the numbers from some producing countries. But their future projections are essentially political statements designed to convey the message that there is no foreseeable problem with petroleum supply and that the American people should continue buying and consuming with no care for the future. This is not a new situation: in 1973, Congress demanded an investigation of the USGS for its failure to foresee the 1970 US oil production peak. 38 In contrast, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) adopted a modified Hubbert-peak forecasting method in 1998, predicting a production peak in 2015. Its World Energy Outlook: 2001 concluded that soon all nonMiddle East oil reservoirs will peak and decline, throwing the world into increasing dependence on a small number of Middle East suppliers. 39 Next let us examine Lynch?s claims concerning the world oil discovery figures for the years 1999? 2000. They were, as he points out, anomalously large. Still, the amount discovered in the better year of the two ? 1999 ? represented only about 62 percent of the amount of all oil extracted and consumed that year. If, in even the best recent year of discovery, the world still used much more oil than was found, this is hardly an argument against the idea that production will foreseeably peak. But let?s look closer. The average figure for discovery plus reserve growth in the years 1996? 2000 was about 10 billion barrels per year. Assuming that this rate could continue, we might, in the next 30 years, expect that 300 billion barrels of oil would be added to current proven reserves (let?s use the credible estimate that 1100 billion barrels remain to be produced globally out of an original URR of 2000). Meanwhile, we must subtract the yearly projected drawdown of those reserves; with a conservatively estimated average demand of 30 billion barrels per year in the decades 2000? 2030, that would be 900 billion barrels total. A quick calculation shows that half the oil would be gone ? and hence production would likely peak ? well before 2010. But remember: these figures are optimistic in every respect; we are assuming, for example, that many more large discoveries like the Kazakhstan find of 1999 will continue to occur, when the actual long-term trend is toward the discovery of less oil with each passing year. Lynch believes that increased drilling in the Middle East and in deep-water areas will make all the difference. While more discovery will no doubt take place in the Middle East, most of the largest fields there were found in the 1960s. Nearly the entire region has been mapped with 3D seismic; and, due to the time interval needed to ramp up production, even the discovery tomorrow of a couple of more ?elephants? in the range of 50 billion barrels each would not push back the global production peak by more than a few years. Deep-water reserves are challenging and costly to access ? in both monetary and energy terms. And again, a few moderate-to-large discoveries in deep-water regions made now will not significantly delay the global production peak. The following paragraph from Campbell and Laherrère?s ?The End of Cheap Oil? (1998) puts matters in perspective: Perhaps surprisingly, that prediction [of a production peak during the first decade of the new century] does not shift much even if our estimates are a few hundred billion barrels high or low. Craig Bond Hatfield of the University of Toledo, for example, has conducted his own analysis based on a 1991 estimate by the U. S. Geological Survey of 1,550 Gbo remaining ? 55 percent higher than our figure. Yet he similarly concludes that the world will hit maximum oil production within the next 15 years. John D. Edwards of the University of Colorado published last August one of the most optimistic recent estimates of oil remaining: 2,036 Gbo. (Edwards concedes that the industry has only a 5 percent chance of attaining that very high goal.) Even so, his calculations suggest that conventional oil will top out in 2020. Tellingly, Michael Lynch refuses to offer his own prediction of when global oil production will peak, even when pressed to do so.
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