Report: North American oil output will hit all-time record by 2016

North American oil production will hit a new all-time high by 2016 given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week.

U.S. oil production in areas like the Permian Basin, the Eagle Ford, Bakken and others will rise by a little over 2 million barrels per day between 2010 and 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects.

It’s a reversal of the steady downward production trend that started around 1970, when U.S. oil production peaked at around 9.5 million barrels per day.

Canadian crude production is expected to grow by about 971,000 barrels per day between 2010 and 2016, with much of it headed for U.S. refineries.

Combined, the U.S. and Canadian oil output will top 11.5 million barrels per day, which is even more than the amount produced at the peak in 1972.

The data assumes production levels stay roughly where they are right now, but the study doesn’t take into account predictions of growing global oil demand or the higher prices that follow.

The data was unveiled at a forum on natural gas liquids hosted by Platts in Houston this week.

That production growth will be bumping up against pipeline capacity to move the crude to refineries and other users, said Rusty Braziel, Bentek’s vice president of sales and marketing.

In the past, the flow of oil in the U.S. tended to be from the South to the North/Northeast – mainly from the producing regions of Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana to consumers in major cities.

But Canadian oil production is surging and most of the booming oil fields in the U.S. are located along a region that roughly runs south from North Dakota through West Texas. There’s an oversupply of oil to the Midwestern refineries, which has prompted construction of pipelines to move crude to the established refinery complexes along the Gulf Coast.

TransCanada’s hotly debated Keystone XL pipeline is the most visible of those projects, with plans to move Canadian tar sands oil all the way to refineries in Port Arthur, Texas. There are a number of other new pipelines in the works, however, as well as expansion of existing lines and reversals of existing North-to-South pipelines being considered.

You could go broke shorting oil.......

This is actually the fifth time in modern history that we’ve seen widespread fear that the world was running out of oil. The first was in the 1880s, when production was concentrated in Pennsylvania and it was said that no oil would be found west of the Mississippi. Then oil was found in Texas and Oklahoma. Similar fears emerged after the two world wars. And in the 1970s, it was said that the world was going to fall off the “oil mountain.” But since 1978, world oil output has increased by 30%.

Please don’t ever fall for the sophistry of “peak oil”. We do not burn crude oil in our cars, trucks and airplanes. We burn very carefully refined fuel products made of molecules that are assembled, atom by atom, by a process that breaks down the molecules from some raw, hydrocarbon rich, feedstock.

Crude oil is the primary feedstock for the only reason that, for the time being, it is the least costly source of those atoms. But when crude oil was in short supply during World War II, the Germans used coal as the source of molecules. Based on today’s prices, it becomes less expensive to convert coal to diesel fuel when crude oil costs more than $80/bbl. But we can use other sources of hydrocarbons. A company in Carthage, Missouri was selling a form of diesel fuel that was made by rendering the waste products of slaughtering turkeys. It went bankrupt not because the process didn’t work, but because the resulting product was more expensive than customers wanted to pay. The company had previously run successful tests to convert municipal solid waste and sewage sludge into diesel fuel. They computed that there was enough sewage sludge in the US to supply around half of its diesel fuel needs if properly converted.

The end issue is cost. Presently, fuels made by refining crude oil cost less than fuels made by refining coal, sewage sludge, or turkey carcasses. But the instant those later sources are less expensive, the market will start to use them. We don’t fret about ‘peak whale’ because when overhunting caused the price of whale oil to rise, other sources of oil for lamps was found from coal and crude oil. Then electricity came into use for lighting of homes and streets. Today, even the use of Coleman lamps (that burn a form of gasoline) for illuminating camp sites is giving way to lights that use efficient LEDs and batteries. We can no longer buy whale oil, and who would light their home with it anyway? Neither would they use an open gas flame, as was done for decades.

An exciting frontier of research is to use genetically engineered algaes to produce usable fuel molecules. A recent article stated that at the present time, the break even costs were in the ballpark of $200/bbl. The carbon atoms for algae-produced fuels would come from the CO2-rich gasses from coal-fired power plants.

The plain truth is that we are awash in hydrocarbons that can be converted to usable fuel products. The only issue is cost, that is if government will not intrude and distort economic decisions like it presently does with corn-based ethanol.

“Peak Oil” is a lie that is used in an attempt to stampede policymakers and the public into choices that cannot be productive in the long run, and certainly ones will raise costs and destroy liberty in the process.

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