Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor doggie a bone,
When she got there
The cupboard was bare
So the poor little doggie had none.

Check out this commentary in the middle of a review last month of some very large new Mercedes SUV.

**
Why, in the midst of a slow-rolling energy crisis, an unpopular war in a region of the world made strategic only by its oil, and the globe's climbing mercury, should precisely the wrong kinds of vehicles remain so popular?

One reason is surely the tax breaks associated with 3-ton SUVs: business owners get a $25,000 tax break on the purchase of full-size SUVs (scaled back from $100,000 in 2004) and five-year depreciation schedule. For people taking advantage of this cozy corner of Section 179, the GL -- with a base price anticipated to be about $60,000 -- will be virtually free. That makes your $4,000 hybrid tax break look pretty punk, doesn't it?

The tax code is the most obvious point of inflection between vehicle choice and public policy. Another knee-point is CAFE -- that's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, in case you forgot, and who could blame you?

Last year, the Bush administration proposed raising the light-truck standard -- long frozen at about 20 mpg -- to 24 mpg by 2011, an incrementalism that is marvelously measured, to say the least. Meanwhile, the administration plans to scrap the current CAFE structure in favor of a size-based regime co-written by the automakers, with larger vehicles required to achieve lower mileage.

Incidentally, some SUVs are so large that they transcend fuel-economy standards altogether. Vehicles with a gross-vehicle-weight rating over 10,000 pounds -- such as the Hummer H2 and the heavy-duty version of the Suburban -- are not counted among fleet ratings that automakers need to hit.

We have been told recently that we are addicted to oil, but we seem to be unable to do much about it. California's clean-air bureaus are trying to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles and are being sued by manufacturers and the federal government for their trouble.

Raising fuel taxes cannot be accomplished, no matter the mood of national urgency and no matter the obscenity of oil companies' profits. Fuel taxes are doubly problematic: For one thing, they are regressive, hurting lower-income consumers; for another, buyers of luxury vehicles are less likely to be dissuaded from their giant purchase.

What about all the alternative vehicle technologies we've been promised? Thanks to a decade-long stonewalling by Big Oil and the trucking industry, it has taken until this year to phase in clean-diesel requirements that will give automakers the slightest hope of meeting 50-state emissions requirements (diesel-powered vehicles can be 25% to 40% more fuel-efficient than gas-powered vehicles). Other technologies -- bio-diesel, hybrids, ethanol, plug-ins, fuel-cells -- can in the near term only nibble at the edges of our 20 million barrels per day of oil consumption.

If we were serious about oil dependence, we would dramatically raise fuel economy standards, impose gas-guzzler taxes on noncommercial light trucks and lower the national speed limit.

None of that is going to happen.

So, in the face of this enormous governmental and regulatory inaction, this paralysis and denial, a curious new market equilibrium has arisen. Call it the marketplace of shame.

**
Maybe Dan Neil reads TOD!

The companies are said to be using both processes to see which one is the best for the bottom line.  But You still need to use something to heat the water to steam the tar out of the sands, even if you use the in-the-ground methods.

For every barrel of Oil you extract from surface mining, the damage to water is said to reach 1,000 gallons.  

I do not know if they are trying to recover the water for repeated use, and also cleaning it up before dumping it out.

If they recover it, they will use energy, and if they do not recover it, they polute on a massive scale.  Water and NG is there in the area, but only for so long.  In 10 years they could run out of both those needed items for the processes.  Besides the fact that the world will need them to double or triple their production rates a lot faster than they have said they could.

In my opinion the Confernce was a Feel Good day of the Major players hoping to convince the public everything is fine,  we can put the egg back together, just give us more more and a lot more time.

On your first sentence, "Since they are making such a big thing of Unconventional Oil...", frankly I was surprised they did not make a bigger deal of it.  This is the first model I have seen that, even if you removed Unconventional oil entirely, still sees no danger of peak until a window somewhat around the year 2060 or 2070, meaning that their "A View of World Oil Supply" chart is very optimistic on Reserves, Reserve Growth, and Exploration.

There are some interesting points in those three areas, to wit:
(a)  Notice that the range on high/low reserves is the same (meaning the medium point is also the same, it would follow!), at 1.0 TB (trillion barrels).
This means they are taking reported reserve numbers as gospel.  It goes without saying that most of the so called "peak oil" projections would debate this strongly, believing that OPEC and others have artificially inflated their reserves. This is the core of Matthew Simmons argument, it is the core of Colin Campbell's argument.

Reserve misjudgment proved very great in the case of the USGS projections used to attempt to discredit M. King Hubbert  (no "d") when he correctly predicted U.S. peak oil production.  Reserve overestimation seems to have already proven to be a real problem in the peak of the Burgen field in Kuwait, and in peak of the British North Sea.

So if we take Reserve estimates to be questionable, it follows we must take reserve growth to be equally so.  These then become "shots in the dark" if you accept the reserve/reserve estimates to be questionable, and one could make a valid case that one of the TB wedges could be taken out if those numbers are suspect, a case that any "Peaker" would make.
But that still puts you out to 2070 before "peak" becomes a major fear.  That's where the remaining pieces of the chart shown become important, those being exploration and non-conventional oil (we will return to the "production" section of the chart in closing)

Non-conventional is a bit of a catch all phrase, usually but not always meaning "tar sand" and "heavy oil".  These can surely be of use in making "heavy oil" products, i.e., asphalt, lubricating oil, certain coking agents for industry, etc., much easier than they can be used for "light sweet" and clean motor fuels, although they can contribute here too, and it would be interesting to see how much "vapor capture" can be used to make the "ane's", that being propane, butane, hexane, etc.  
But our poster Jamie, to whom I am replying touches upon the problematical issue in producing the unconventionals, that being energy put in to get the oil out.

The tar sand industry is already and will continue to be even more so, natural gas intensive.  Projections are that for the tar sands to produce the amount of "oil" they are committing themselves to (which would still be at most 6% of the U.S. motor fuel market) they will need one fifth of Canada's current natural gas production!  This is gas that is badly needed by industry, homes, and electric power producers.  This must put some type of price pressure on North American natural gas, which is already at non-hurricane impact historically high prices.
The "heavy oil" extraction and processing is likewise energy intensive, so much so that in both Canada and Venezuela some have proposed nuclear plants to handle the processing requirements (!), while most accept natural gas and unconventional oil be cycled in heavily to produce the oil.

Either way, this makes unconventional oil as much a "fuel switching operation" as a "fuel production operation", and it is would be somewhat misleading to insert a "wedge" into the chart shown of 1 TB without mentioning you need to remove a considerable sized energy wedge from somewhere else (in the case of Canadian Tar Sand, that somewhere being the Mackenzie Bay natural gas, long awaited in the U.S. and Canada, but now slated to go almost exclusively to the Tar Sand fields of Alberta.  Can it actually be done?  Technically, almost certainly, but the technology, economic and logistical challenges are staggering, given the need to build two complete "infra structural systems" at the same time, that being the natural gas supply and the tar sand/heavy oil facilities.  Overcoming the strain of providing technical staffing, workforce, steel, pumps, valves, cookers and boilers, and most of all, money, would be a monumental undertaking.  Given this, assuming anymore than the "low side" number of .25 TB for many years to come would be a case of hope over experience.

This means taking out another .50 TB, and this moves us backward to around year 2050 when we encounter confrontation with "peak".  

Now we come to the real dark art, estimating "Exploration".  This one could be the surprise in either direction, but it is very dangerous to assume that we will suddenly "luck" into a giant find.  That is not to say it cannot happen.  But, for our purposes, we will be fair, given the vast unknowns here, and take the middle path of .50 TB.  In the last three decades, this would be an extremely generous number.  The improvements in exploration technology have made the Earth a much more "explored" place, but we can pray for luck.

Now we return to the beginning, Production.  As the author of the report that began this strings says, the authors of the chart shown seem to take no interest in "depletion", although it is a historical fact in U.S. 48, Alaska, Kuwait, the North Sea, now seemingly Mexico, and for the moment Canada, plus a few dozen smaller nations.  Instead, the chart seems to hold steady at the 1 TB range, as each of the new "wedges" join in.  However, if we assume the new wedges are having to make up for, as many "peakers " project, a 35% drop in production between now and say 2030 or so, we see the full peaking point coming back into even a baby boomers lifetime, at 2040 or so, and easily in the middle age period for our children.
If there are major holdups of any geopolitical, economic, or technical kind, we see that become 2025 or 2030 rather easily.
If the world economy does what the optimists want it to, i.e., boom times, then consumption shoots further upward, and....(?), we see we would only have about the 20 window recommended by the Hirsch report to make the MAJOR CHANGES needed.  Somehow, with only a few changes at the margins of our projections, 100 years of oil becomes about 20 or 30 at most.  If the Reserve numbers or the Reserve growth numbers are too optimistic, or the production depletion moves as fast as it has in some historical cases (10% plus per year in the North Sea, something like that in Alaska) then time gets very short indeed.

We are leaving out ALL OTHER BIG ISSUES, (greenhouse gas and global warming, the fact that the remaining oil is almost all in hostile or simi-hostile hands, the depletion of natural gas, the logistical problems, investment, etc.)
and simply talking about a straight "no problems", no Murphy's law scenario.  That again is an example of hope over experience.

Still, it would not be as bad as some make it out:  The modified example I give of the projections indicated by the authors of the chart would be somewhat close to the IEA (International Energy Agency), EIA (Energy Information Agency) and Daniel Yergin's CERA (Cambridge Energy Research Associates) view....something along the lines of "o.k. to about 2015 to 2020, then, undulating plateau to peak around 2030", to paraphrase their rather involved arguments.

I do not find that to be completely unbelievable, but it leaves out two MAJOR ISSUES mentioned above in passing, so let's mention those:
(a) geopolitics, and (b) logistics and investment

This is why the words of Christophe de Margerie of  the the French energy multinational Total, in the prior topic on TOD UK ("120 million barrels per day will never be reached, never" by Chris Vernon)  were so important, and why I made a particular case of trying to understand the exact nature of his understanding of the exact "epistemology" of the "peak oil" idea, for lack of a better word...in other words, how did he know what he knew, and why he was sure of it (businessmen seldom use the word "never"), and what he thought the "peak oil" theorists knew.  I was not being argumentative for the sake of an argument.  It is not hard to accept as valid the idea that the real geological limit could be some 20 to 25 years away regarding Peak "oil" (conventional and non-conventional, and the broader category of "all liquids" further confuses the matter) in the geological sense, but we could be MUCH closer to a real crisis in the political/logistical/investment sense.

In the difference in perception between "imminent" peak oil true believers, and the theorists at the Royal Society Conference in London, we see the difference between a purely "geological/physical" view of peak oil (Royal Society) and the "Peak is now" group, logistical/geopolitical/economic view ( of which Christophe de Margerie and Matthew Simmons seem to be allied with)
As a passing note, it should be noted that de Margerie actually had some real suggestions as to how we should proceed given this type of crisis, and in another albeit very controversial way, so does the Bush/Chaney/Rumsfeld group!)

So where does this leave us?  It actually gives us a framework to build with:

(a)  The international strategic game becomes of extreme importance, with little room for clumsiness.
(b)  EXTREME careful examination of the "non-conventionals" should be undertaken.  If I am going to burn natural gas to make tar sand oil, would it be more efficient just to burn the natural gas in CNG cars?  Can we convert conservation in homes (better appliances, better insulation, solar hot water) into transportation fuel, by freeing up natural gas and propane to use as motor fuel?
(c)  Financial arrangements have to become fantastically creative and efficient, i.e., in what ways can investment be leveraged to maximum effect (should we perhaps let the Middle East keep it's natural gas for Asian pipeline use, and spend the money that would have gone to LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) tankers and terminals instead be used to produce more easily shippable propane, and encourage that as a motor fuel instead?  Should U.S. oil companies fund "oil worker/technician schools in India and China to create a smart strong young workforce for the demands of the world oil patch?  Management and Logistical arrangements are going to have to be PERFECT to avoid an emergency.
(d)  Alternatives.  Advanced batteries, hybrids, hydraulic hybrids, propane, CNG, some bio-fuels from waste, fast moving search for the most workable and applicable technology, and APPLIED SCIENCE as the new art form.  (Technical Design as THE STATUS ART, at MIT, at Cal Tech, in cooperative design studios internet connected from Stuttgart to L.A. to to Tokyo to China and India)

The difference between a imminent logistical structural peak that is at hand and a geological peak that is some 20 to 30 years (or if every projection turns out to be on the upside, 100 plus years away!)  may sound like a theoretical philosophical debate, but it is much more pressing than that:  It may be the difference between the life or death of nations and millions of people.
It is not an argument for arguments sake, but a spotlight to find the path on which we should already now be marching.

I am Roger Conner Jr., or known to you as ThatsItImout

Thank you for your interest.

It's like the UK government assuming that oil will be cheap and plentiful then on the back of that making all sorts of forecasts about aviation and airport expansion etc... The aviation analysis is of high quality - based on the assumption about oil. If that assumption is wrong then the analysis isn't worth the paper it's written on.

It's all about the assumptions and unfortunately hardly anybody assumes anything but continued access to reasonably prices oil for decades to come.

The RS is the heart of the scientific establishment in Britain. When I was a boy I used to dream about being there too, as a member, not an observer!

At times I wish I hadn't turned my back on that dream and become an 'artist' instead. However, I would never have 'made it' as I cannot keep my mouth shut. I never wanted to climb the 'greasy pole' I wanted to cut the damn thing down! or at least grab and shake it!

I think it's a problem that so many of our best scientists have become 'politicians' too. Rather than encouraging 'dissent' we are afraid of it. This is probably natural in all organisations. I think it's also unhealthy and dangerous. The role of the 'court jester' has a value far higher than most of us realize. Closed groups are subject to 'group-think' and they continually need to be 'challanged' by 'idiots' who seemingly 'know nothing'. Unfortunately, we've developed increasingly rigid and inflexible social structures that fear change or criticism.

Chemists find more efficient coal-to-diesel conversion

The small hydrocarbons, such as methane and propane, are useful as "natural gas." The larger hydrocarbons, containing 10 to 19 carbon atoms, are useful as diesel fuel.

But the Fischer-Tropsch process also creates a lot of molecules in between, containing four to nine carbon atoms, which are considered waste products of the reactions.

The new process, described in Friday's issue of the journal Science, uses two catalysts to convert these medium-weight hydrocarbons into useful products.

The first catalyst removes hydrogen from the molecules, converting them into olefins, highly reactive chemicals with carbon-carbon double bonds.

The second catalyst "scrambles" the carbon bonds through a process called olefin metathesis, causing the molecules to rearrange themselves. The discoverers of this reaction, a group of American and French chemists, received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2005.

The first catalyst then replaces the hydrogen atoms, converting the olefins back into usable hydrocarbons.

I suspect this paragraph is the most important, though:

However, they added that their research is still in the early stages, and improvements to their methods are needed before they can be put into practice.

Twilight, looking at Socolow's web page, linked-in by Chris, it would appear that he knows very little about conventional hydrocarbons.

Professor Socolow's current research focuses on global carbon management, the hydrogen economy, and fossil-carbon sequestration.

Other than Chris, no one in attendance appears to be conversant with peak oil issues. As for David King, he is excellent on climate change on the science side but apparently has paid little attention to IPCC scenarios regarding emissions. It is a pity that the climate change community and the peak oil community do not speak to each other. A few of us on TOD have attempted to intersect the two subjects but that's almost all there is on the web. The RealClimate guys are great but do not base their modeling on anything other than continuous emissions growth. Finding someone who is conversant with both subjects is hard and so is predicting the future. However, the peak of oil (and later, natural gas) takes us into the Coal, tar sands, heavy crude world--which is bad news. Unless you produce hydrogen with renewables (solar, wind), you are right back where you started.

If we do go down the standard "unconventional" hydrocarbons road, then sequestration of CO2 is very, very important. So, the whole conference appears predicated on that assumption. However, it does not address the peaking of conventional oil happening now or in 5 years or, even on the optimistic side, 10 years. When oil is $200/barrel sometime in that timeframe, the "unconventional" sources will kick in but can only ramp-up slowly.

Thanks for giving it the old college try, Chris.

best, Dave

Really this grows from the same folks who used to complain about "political correctness."  Now they want political correctness in science, surrounding global warming, evolution, and I'm sure a "no worries" position on peak oil.