And, of course, we are certainly not at a plateau.
Petroleum production is increasing rapidly. Look at the chart.
That’s not petroleum. That’s all liquids. Look up what NGL means.
sorry there buyaya, I got distracted and hit post before I was done.
CERA are oil industry consultants. The industry works by persuading people to give them money with which to explore, and then sell the “discovered” leases as fast as they can before failed production appears.
The graph is all liquids. It includes NGLs (Natural Gas Liquids, which are propane and butane and ethane) and those don’t create gasoline. More important, they lump in “biofuels”, which one thinks at first glance is biodiesel, but it’s not, primarily. It’s ethanol.
Your car won’t run on ethanol. Your car will run on 15% ethanol (if you’re a risk taker) or more likely 10% ethanol. The rest is gasoline.
It’s not about gallons or barrels. It’s about BTUs. British Thermal Units. Or Joules. It’s about energy content. A barrel (42 gallons) of crude has 5.6 million BTUs in it. A barrel of room temperature natural gas has 5.6 THOUSAND BTUs in it, and if you cryocool it and turn it into liquid it’s still only 60% of crude’s energy content.
Gasoline is 18,400 BTUs/lb. Ethanol is only 9750 BTUs/lb.
It’s all deception and lies. CERA can’t permit any aura of “improbable” to be conveyed to possible drilling investors.
You want to draw that graph, draw it in BTUs. You need double the ethanol amount to equal a barrel of crude.
The US didn’t produce 10 mbpd of oil this year. It produced about 5.6 mbpd and it’s had to ramp up hugely the number of drill rigs to do that. This is down from 9+ mbpd back in the early 80s. We are sprinting up (drilling frantically) in the US just to offset the down escalator (old field production decline (5+%/yr).
As for worshipping at the altar of horizontal frack drilling, it’s not new. It’s been around for 20 years. It hasn’t been used because of the crushing reality not spoken of by hypesters trying to attract money, namely:
Horizontals Die Vertically.
You drill horizontal, you fracture the surrounding rock to free what is in its pores, you flow the oil, and YOU ARE THEN DONE. It’s not a gravity drainage methodology. You drill, you get production, and when it goes empty, it does so with a vertical avalanche on the production graph.
The average Bakken well is doing a MAXIMUM of 1200 or 1500 barrels a day, it holds that for a year or two and then it CRASHES. The production falls vertically. You are at 50 barrels a day in 3-4 years. They have to drill frantically to get field production up and then after just a few years as the crashes start, they can’t drill fast enough. The field production will fall.
Contrast this with Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, where wells have produced big numbers for decades. Horizontals die vertically. They aren’t the miracle. They aren’t anything but deception.