The Future of Oil

2005: damn..we're screwed 2010: DAMN...we're really screwed 2018: LONG LIVE THE SHALE REVOLUTION!! 2020: DAMN!!....we're screwed

The answer of course is that we, as in our currently planned society, is dependant on the continued consumption of oil, specifically, the byproducts produced besides that of fuels for our transportation. Replace energy/fuels needed by our society due to oil and you are still left with the problem of replacing our plastics, petrochemicals, etc. That means no more cheap production materials. No more of these chemicals we use to increase our food production to feed our fast increasing population.

25:00 looking back now, that last prediction was correct, oil production actually hit over 9 million a day in the US in 2015

Very Educational.....Thanks.

It would be nice to get a 10 year update, but I have been following the peak oil story since 1998. From 1998 through about 2005, mainstream journalists and politicians totally ignored it. Then prices rose by a large amount from 2006 to 2008, and the mainstream began to grudgingly pay some attention to it, although mainly the business-oriented media, while the mainstream politicians that the non-financial media takes its cues from continued to pretend it was a just a price story rather than a geological phenomenon. Then fracking came on the scene, the mainstream quickly declared, "Saudi American! Peak oil is dead!" and then resumed acting as though peak oil was a fantasy rather than a geological and mathematical inevitability. In very recent years, some sources have begun to float the "peak oil demand" meme, and the MSM which ignored the peak oil story as much as possible readily picked up on the peak demand idea and it continues to crop up repeatedly, at least in the business-oriented media. I suspect this tendency will continue until the conventional oil peak of 2006 is followed by the hydraulic fracking peak. Then the price panic of 2008 will recur all over again and the MSM will start to take the peak oil dilemma half way seriously again, although I suspect the politicians will, once again, try to ignore it for as long as possible, or longer. Politicians are happy to scare us over non-events which they claim to have solutions to, such as global warming (which even "true believing" scientists on the green grant gravy train unanimously agree has been "paused" for the last 20 years, and which other scientists say was just part of a natural cycle), but a true problem such as peak oil is consistently evaded in public discussion, perhaps, I suspect, because they have no idea what to do about it.

insightful. gives us all much 2 think on. thank u.

Always been my dream to go to Stanford

It's going to stop whether we change the system or not. The lack of production growth will force the system to adapt to either a much slower rate of growth or a steady state economy and that is assuming that we can keep the flow rate we have now for a long time, which is probably not feasible without very high prices to bring the worst oil to market.

You are welcome. I work in an industry whereas I must research all the time. I was interested in the definition as well. I think that I found some good data and the references were clear on defining uranium as a fossil fuel. It is sad that most people go with what they think they know instead of learning. I did not know uranium was defined as a fossil fuel.

Is EOR truly improving the ultimately recoverable oil or is it a super straw that speeds up the rate at which a field can be produced without significantly increasing the total amount the field will produce? Just because you are able to raise your production rate doesn't mean you will get more oil out of the well, it can just mean that a resource that would have taken 100 years to deplete is depleted in 20 years. How much more of the oil in place can a EOR method achieve?

Very good presentation, but it is several years old. It would be nice to see this updated. For instance current world oil production is up to 92.3 mb/d up from 85 mb/d then.

I don't know why he put down Matt Simmons. Simmons never said Saudi Aramco damaged their fields, he said that during the period between the Saudi Gov announced that it was nationalizing their oil fields and the time that they actually did so, the companies running the fields were recklessly over producing the fields because they knew they didn't need to worry about the long term health of the field and wanted to milk as much as much as they could before they got kicked out.

Good stuff

Concerning his comments on EIA predictions about past and future US dom. oil production, it has turned out in the last few years that the EIA were right again.  There has been a significant steady spike of production over the last 5 years.

I'm only at 28:30 in the video and he has mentioned that we have burned through 1 trillion barrels of oil as of 2008. Using publicly available data, I discovered that from 1990 to 2011, we used 660B barrels. SO to take this back to 2008, you would subtract 93B barrels, so that by 2008, we had used 567B from 1990 to 2008. In other words, we have been using oil for 150 years burning a total of 1T barrels, and 567B of that in the last 18 years. How much longer can this exponential growth go on?

So much for predictions.

Lake Mead is like champagne glass, it narrows as it drops. In 2010 (I think that's the year) Lake Mead hit an all time low and dropped hundred of feet and was at 35% capacity. But say too much silt built up behind the dam, why not just drain it and remove the silt? You don't have to drain it in one day. Remember, I am talking after it can no longer function because of silt build up.

These past periods didn't involve doubling or quadrupling in 3 centuries. These changes happened over millions of years. However, we have a good period to look at. Right at the P-T boundary there was the biggest extinction event in earth's history. The Siberian traps opened up and released enough CO2 to raise the global temp by 5C, that in turn caused a release of methane hydrates which raised the temp 18C and caused over 90% of life forms to go extinct.

@CrazyHorseInvincible Its possible. Renewable sources,geothermal and hydro power,provide effectively all of Iceland's electricity and around 80% of the nation's total energy, with most of the remainder from imported oil used in transportation and in the fishing fleet. Iceland is in talks to either put quick charge(for electric cars) or hydrogen stations (for full cell cars).

I love the irony; A shortage of young people entering petroleum geology fields, yet they are the first to leave after the lecture is over.