Even while so many of us are wringing our hands over the Copenhagen Collapse, the dwindling chances of getting anything even remotely resembling the action we need from China, India, or the US on CO2 emissions, and all the other flavors of angst currently suffusing climate chaos land, we’re still using roughly 85 million barrels of oil every day, worldwide. You can do our own math to convert that into gallons per various time units (at 42 gallons/barrel, of course) and scare yourself spitless without any help from me.[1]

But that whole awful peak oil thing is still really, really far away, like in the science fictional year of 2015, right? Well, it seems yet another notable source is saying nope, we’re there:

World Oil Capacity to Peak in 2010 Says Petrobras CEO:

Mr. Gabrielli, the CEO of Petrobras, gave a presentation in December 2009 in which he shows world oil capacity, including biofuels, peaking in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.

Gabrielli states in his presentation that the world needs oil volumes the equivalent of one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates.

This is a stronger statement than the one he gave in January 2009 in an interview with Business Week when he said the following.

According to the company’s projections, production from existing fields will fall from a little over 80 million barrels a day to maybe half of that even if new techniques are used to slow their rate of decline. So just keeping global production flat is going to require lots of new fields and requires the world to replace one Saudi Arabia per three years.

Gabrielli is clearly concerned about declining future world oil production. His statements are now in alignment with those of other oil company executives including Sadad al-Husseini, former Aramco executive, who states that world oil production is on a peak plateau, and Total’s CEO, Christophe de Margerie who doesn’t see global oil production ever exceeding 89 million barrels per day (mbd). World oil production in December 2009 was only slightly lower at 86 mbd.

See the article for the depressing graphics, especially Figure 1, which shows the aforementioned production peak.

For those of you not familiar with the major world players in the oil infrastructure, here’s the Wikipedia entry for Petrobras.

Since I’ve been talking almost non-stop about climate chaos here for quite some time, let me provide a quick summary of where I think we are on the oil front:

  • I’ve long sided with Chris Skrebowski and his bottom-up forecast of a worldwide peak in 2011. In short, I prefer a bottom-up analysis, which looks at the individual oil fields and projects, including their current production, when they’re coming online, expected declines in their production, etc., and sums them to get a worldwide production capacity. The other main approach, Hubbert’s famous calculation, has always struck me as being far too tied to assumptions that work well enough in a steady state but don’t hold just before and at the worldwide peak.
  • The biggest single wild card in the oil picture is the amount of oil that can be extracted from any given well. Currently, we still get only about one third of the oil out of each well, and many optimists predict and assume that we’ll find a way to ratchet up that percentage significantly as oil supplies constrain consumption and push prices consistently into the $150, $200, and higher (US dollars/barrel) range. Honestly, I don’t know how to interpret this corner of the oil picture. Oil companies certainly have had a lot of financial incentive to develop better recovery technology (and to some extent they have, as in using water or natural gas to push oil out of wells), but we’re still only getting one in three barrels. Perhaps the problem is that prices haven’t been truly high, and in a sustained fashion, to push/allow them to do even better.
  • All projections of peak oil are guesses, but they’re converging on an answer we really don’t like. You can apply all the math and bottom-up field surveys and economics you want, and you can argue that we’re at peak now or in one year or five or ten, but the bottom line is that we’re really close to The Date and are still insanely dependent on oil for nearly all transportation, among other uses. Trying to split hairs about exactly when we’ll hit the peak is like the climate discussions in which people start bar fights over whether we’ll trigger 3.5 or 3.8C of warming by 2100–either answer is so awful it doesn’t matter which one is right.
  • None of the projections of the date of peak oil include the truly nasty above-ground things that can have a big impact, like wars and hurricanes that run roughshod over offshore drilling facilities. That’s not a criticism, obviously, merely a recognition that we can’t predict some things in an arena where we really wish we had a perfectly operating crystal ball.
  • When you read articles about oil issues, please always remember that it’s the flow that matters, not the stock of oil in the ground. If you had 10 trillion barrels of high-quality (”light sweet”) crude oil but could only use it at a rate of a couple of million barrels per day, it would do very little to help us cope with peak oil. This is why we can’t lump things like Canadian oil sands in the same category as Middle East oil from conventional wells.
  • Also remember the environmental impact. In the US, for example, oil accounts for 43% of our CO2 emissions from energy use.

[1] In various public and private conversations I’ve had with mainstreamers, I’m always surprised by how surprised they are when they hear we consume 85 million barrels of oil every single day. One of my neighbors had the knee jerk reaction, “Holy [expletive]! We’re turning the world inside-out!”


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