@Rune

The crude oil stocks can be seperated into USA and the Rest of OECD (Europe and Pacific). I have the data already in a spreadsheet. Will make a new graph with the separation in the next edition of Oilwatch. Currently travelling so can't put it on here now.

Here here Rembrandt,

These are some of the best articles on TOD.
Your graphs are a key indicator to geo-political events.
It is amazing how much your work has been analogous to the work of Walter Youngquist and how it appears that we are headed toward a significant slide (or cliff) right about NOW.
Mr Youngquists' models, of course, being predicated upon the total consumption of net energy per capita - the notorious Olduvai 'slide'.
Something we Americans are finally starting to feel in our painfully truncated consumption of fossil fuels.

Is it by coincidence that tensions in the Persian Gulf seem to be at the breaking point?
At the very same time world oil production (CC + liquids) is at a precarious plateau?!

Coincidence is not a kosher word.....your graphs are worth a thousand words.

I don't know if we've hit the technical peak yet, but when you are on a bumpy plateau does it really matter?

OPECs 86.87 mb/d includes all liquids, which includes lots of different forms - this is not just crude oil. These "other" oils are more costly to produce, and will not bring the price down.

Amory Lovins is one of those who got us into this mess. For at least 30 years he has preached that solar energy would save us. Because of this message, fewer would listen to Matt Simmons.

Net Oil Exports

Hi Henry

I agree it's hard to start defining a peak at this stage. As well as the ELM graph provided by another poster it might also be interesting to overlay a graph of global economic growth? I can't find a decent one online for the whole period covered by I'm betting you would see a clear contrast between the 2005-present chart and one in which oil production has previously levelled or declined. Growth has been strong for the last 3-4 years with levelish oil production. Previous level/declining oil production has accompanied slowdowns/recessions. This inability of oil production to rise with global growth is IMO the clearest warning signal that a peak is here/imminent.

tw

Some of my thinking while looking at the total liquids and biofuels chart is that there is a little double counting. Some of the liquids produced were used up in gaining the biofuels. Of course the same is true in obtaining the liquids; some previously produced liquids are used up to get the gross production.

This is for sure. However, we are measuring liquids production, not 'useful liquids for non-liquid production economy'.

I do agree that it would be interesting to plot the amount of liquids used by the liquid production systems (biofuels, crude oil, synfuel, condendates, NGL, etc).

I would guess that this timeseries would plot as a rising graph, although not necessarily showing a clear exponential trend (not yet at least).

Now getting that data for plotting is a different matter altogether. I think this issue has been discussed here before at TOD.

As for your graph, I am no statistician, but I'd assume you'd have to measure the error for each component measure and then use law of error propagation to calculate the total error estimate (assuming previous component errors were normally distributed).

This would be likely to give you a much tighter "error channel" as you describe it.

Another thing of more interest would be to plot the total error for each measurement point in time separately, as I'm sure the measurement error for crude oil estimates in particular has not remained steady as a function of time in the past 25+ years. Is there a trend in there somewhere, I cannot know, but it'd be interesting to plot it. My guess is that the error has been increasing, esp. for crude oil estimates (i.e. initial estimate vs. the revised number).

The data neatly falls within the upper and lower boundaries of this positively sloping channel. As of the most recent month, April, 2008, the data is sitting right in the middle of the channel, actually right on the calculated line. As long as production numbers continue to fall within this channel, it is unsupported conjecture that we have passed peak.

Hi Henry,

Put oil price on the world oil production chart. What you are seeing is a production plateau held by a massive shift of economic effort into oil production. That cannot last for long. Eventually the economic loss of trying to grow the oil supply will outrun the economic gain of doing so, and we will fall off the plateau. (and it would be useful later for estimating when NG and Coal will hit maximum price and fall off plateau as well).

The prior up/down swings were OPEC supporting its price band. And further back, the Iranian revolution + wars. Price will let you separate out the true shortages.

:...an accurate chart ... showing net production ... might show a worsening situation"

Ding, ding, ding! You are the winner. As you say, declining EROEI is the story behind the story that the MSM, politicians, economists and the masses are utterly missing.

I've read that overall EROEI has been declining by perhaps 3.5% annually since 'the beginning'. Since its an exponential decline, the long initial slope is so minimal as to be indiscernable. As we fell from 100:1 EROEI to 50:1, for example, the cost (energy consumed to acquire more energy) went from 1% to 2%. Nobody noticed. Even as it has fallen from 50:1 to 10:1, the cost went from 2% to 10%. OK, now we're starting to notice, but it still doesn't seem that big a deal. But each step down now takes huge chunks out of the net energy available to do actual work, which as is pointed out below, is what is actually required to keep us all alive - growing food, pumping water - and happy (insert your favorite product/entertainment/activity here). The accumulation of piles of money is utterly irrelevant to this basic concept. But free market capitalism will go to its grave believing the opposite. And, oh, in case you haven't noticed, we're now investing heavily in energy forms that have EROEI's in the single digits or perhaps just fractionally above parity. The game is up. This is what lies behind the financial mess going on. We built this industrial society on an EROEI that is two orders of magnitude greater than what we're now trying to maintain it on - over 100:1, and now single digits to one.

You could have drawn that same channel on the production chart for the U.S. in 1972 and concluded that the status quo was continuing - except that Hubbert's model said it wouldn't.

That is a great chart. It is shocking to know we have only fallen to the middle of the trend channel. I guess this means oil production will have to fall under 72 in a year, or simply hold steady for 2.5 more years before we drop out of the trend channel.

If you look at the way the USA peaked from a distance, it appeared to follow a linear track as well ... until it hit the peak and started going downward. Statistical fluctuations can obscure the real trend.

I'm really dumb. Can someone explain to me ... why oil prices are where they are [falling down today]?

George,

You're not dumb. But you are mixing apples and oranges.

"Price" is an arbitrary number that we humans make up out of thin air. If we chose to say, today only, the price of oil is $20/bbl instead of $130/bbl, then so be it. The available quantity of oil will sell out at $20/bbl for the first few early buyers and then there would be no more for the day. Tomorrow the sellers may decide to swing it wildly the other way to $200/bbl and see how many takers they get. Price can be extremely volatile.

On the other hand, "production rate" is not a number we can make up out of thin air. It is a real physical quantity. No amount of wishful thinking can make production rate suddenly surge to any large arbitrary number. It's apples and oranges.

I think that it also helps to look at monthly average oil prices, which have increased at about 6% per month since May, 2007 (WTI, in dollars). To stay on trend, we would need to average about $140 for July.

Very simple, I am restricted in the presentation by the statistics that are available. I don't have monthly polar oil nor oil sands statistics that are very accurate since these are not published by the IEA or EIA.

I could separate NGL from crude oil, although it would be tricky. However, as Ropert Rapier pointed out:

'butane is blended into gasoline, and isobutane is used in alkylate units to produce high-octane alkylate which is also blended into gasoline. The others can be used as fuel gas in a refinery if economics dictate. So it isn't like NGLs constitute a low-value product.'

'Even the short-chain hydrocarbons in NGLs - besides being used for fuel gas - can be used to produce syngas, which can then be used for all kinds of useful chemicals.'

I think they are classified different because:

* Tar sand is a mined mineral that is refined into "Crude". The peaking profile is therefore different than that of conventional oilfields.

* Polar oil is very difficult to scale, because it requires very long fixed capacity pipelines, so here the production profile is very different from regular oil fields.

It takes more money to extract oil from tar and sands and shale.
Much more costly and resource intensive than crude oil.
Production rates will never be high like the big old crude wells.

I am from the USA, but my step daughter lives in Spain, and I specialize in sustainable locations and relocations. So I have thought about your question. No area in Spain is very sustainable, even the northwest coastal area which has rainfall now, will not have much in the future due to rainfall decline from global warming changes. There are a few places in the U.S. that are sustainable, but not many due to cold climates and the need for irrigation. See my other comments here today about the collapse that is inevitable, and it will hit the U.S. and Europe equally. Given their professional work, there are probably nice places for them besides the U.S. and Europe. A question arises. How could these areas be sustainable in the past, but not now? The collapse is not like going slowly back in time. For a long time there will be no transportation and that makes all the difference between life and death. They are welcome to send me an email for some ideas. clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com.

Given the state of Spain's economy today (an unfolding disaster already much worse than the US), coupled with Europe's history of wars across the continent, I am not sure I would want to be in Europe when the crap hits the fan. However, as cjwirth notes, the US has growing problems of its own, not the least of which is a growing police state mentality by big government and continued denial of serious climate change and the effects of climate change.