Energy Efficiency

Forget or ignore what every economics expert or country leader says, there will be no recovery.

Now this may appear doom and gloom stuff, but you have to remember when you were educating your children, you explained to them cause and effect, for every action there is a re-action, that they be aware that people will tell them things that are untrue, misleading to suit an agenda they might have.

It doesn’t matter whether its Obama, Brown or Rudd, they all sing off the same choir sheet and all expect good to come from bad investment; rather than kill off what is killing the economies of the world off, they are feeding it with more money.

After every coconut tree was felled to roll the volcano rock statues down to look out to sea on Easter Island, virgins were sacrificed to the gods in many cultures, so too are our leaders throwing away our future generations inheritance.

In another article I will offer my view on why the debts being racked up by today’s politicians will be carried on the backs of our children, but in this article, you will be able to asses for yourself how we sit at the edge of an energy abyss.

This is the World Oil Production Forecast Update of May 2009; posted by ace on May 19, 2009 – 9:59am with the topic being Supply/Production and Tags to: colin campbell, iea, jean laherrère, non-opec, oil production forecast, opec, original, peak oil, total liquids [list all tags]

World oil production peaked in July 2008 at 74.82 million barrels/day (mbd) and now has fallen to about 71 mbd. It is expected that oil production will decline slowly to about December 2010 as OPEC production increases while non-OPEC production decreases. After 2010 the resulting annual production decline rate increases to 3.4% as OPEC production is unable to offset cumulative non-OPEC declines. The forecast from the IEA WEO 2008 is also shown for comparison.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) should make official statements about declining world oil production now to renew the focus on oil conservation and alternative renewable energy sources.

Fig 1 – World Oil Production to 2012
World Oil Production

World crude oil, condensate and oil sands production peaked in 2008 at an average of 73.78 million barrels per day (mbd) which just exceeded the previous peak of 73.74 mbd in 2005, according to recent EIA production data. Production is expected to decline further as non OPEC oil production peaked in 2004 and is forecast to decline at a faster rate in 2009 and beyond due mainly to big declines from Russia, Norway, the UK and Mexico. Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production peaked in 2005. By 2011, OPEC will not have the ability to offset cumulative non OPEC declines and world oil production is forecast to stay below its 2008 peak.

Ace’s estimate is of 1.95 trillion barrels (TB) of total Ultimate Recoverable Reserves (URR) of oil is used to generate the forecast shown by the red line below. If Colin Campbell’s estimate of 2.20 TB is used, this is 250 billion barrels (Gb) greater than my estimate due mainly to more optimistic assumptions about OPEC reserves, the peak production date remains at 2008. This shows that an additional 250 Gb of recoverable oil reserves does not change the peak oil date and instead increased production rates occur later as indicated by the green line below. Additional reserves and the related production from prospective areas such as the arctic, Iraq, and Brazil’s Santos basin are highly unlikely to produce another peak but should decrease the production decline rate after 2012.

Fig 2 – World Oil Production to 2100