The Oil Drum: Europe

One of the classic ecological modeling problems is the oscillating populations of predators and their prey in an ecosystem--as prey population rises, predator population follows suit until prey population begins to fall off, resulting in a subsequent drop in predator population (illustrated below). The same dynamic also applies, to some degree, to the relationship between oil price (prey) and marginal production/demand destruction/energy policy (predator). This post will explore that relationship and its ability to help us avoid poor energy policy choices.

This is a guest article by Dudley Stark, Reader in Mathematics and Probability in the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London.

Bentley introduced the following model of oil production on page 204 of Global oil & gas depletion:an overview, and it is dicussed in the book The Last Oil Shock by David Strahan. This posting is meant to explain his model and some results I obtained for it. Consider the following oil production curve:

It rises quickly to it's peak at time t=1 and decreases slowly until no oil is produced at time t=6. The idea is that the natural pressure of the oil field causes rapid production initially, after which decline is more gradual. Before and after the peak the curve is linear, so it looks like a triangle.

Yesterday, August 6, the EIA published new International Petroleum Monthly data. The new data revised downward previously published estimates, all the way back to 2002, with the biggest revisions in 2007 and 2008. With the revisions, the latest month, May 2008, shows new record-high oil production. Other recent months which had previously set records are now 67,000 barrels per day to 417,000 barrels per day lower than reported just a month ago. In this post, I offer a few thoughts on what the new data suggests.

Figure 1. World crude and condensate production, based on August 2008 EIA International Petroleum Monthly

Jonathan Callahan, a Ph.D. chemist who spent 12 years working for NOAA, has created a very useful databrowser for exploring the supply/demand situation in various countries around the world. Based on BP's 2007 Statistical Review, it provides a quick and easy way to see the trends for whether countries are consuming or producing, importing or exporting crude oil and natural gas. The tool may be found at Energy Export Databrowser.

How useful is this tool? It took me about 5 seconds to pull up the following graphic for crude oil trends in the U.S.:

I actually started on this post about a year ago, and forgot about it until recently. Here I provide 2007 numbers on the sources for oil and gasoline imports into the U.S., courtesy of the Energy Information Administration.

For 2007, the Top 10 exporters of finished gasoline to the U.S. in million barrels were:

Which countries are increasing in oil production? Which are decreasing? How is this changing? Can we expect that the increasing ones will continue to increase in 2008? Does the megaprojects data give any insight into the future increases of growing countries? These are some of the questions that Matt Mushalik and I explore in this post using what Matt calls "incremental production graphs".

On Thursday, January 17, the American Petroleum Institute (API) hosted another Blogger Conference Call. The purpose of this call was to talk about 2008 US statistical data regarding oil supply, and various related issues. In this post, I provide insights from API's bloggers call. Since most of the numbers are fairly similar to EIA data, I also look at longer trends using EIA data.

1. API Statistical Report: In 2007, total domestic petroleum deliveries were flat--marking the third year in a row for which they experienced only minimal growth or outright decline.

This is a guest article by Dudley Stark, Reader in Mathematics and Probability in the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London. It is a summary of his paper The limit of the statistic R/P in models of oil discovery and production, which has been accepted to appear in the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematical Sciences.

"2005 was a third consecutive year of rising energy prices. Tight capacity, extreme weather, continued conflict in the Middle East, civil strife elsewhere and growing interest in energy among financial investors led to rising prices", said Lord Browne, CEO of BP plc. "Although energy prices have increased, there has been no physical shortage of either oil or gas." According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, oil holds a reserves-to-production ratio of 40 years, gas of some 65 years and coal of 162 years. With the advancement of technology, more energy resources will also be discovered in the future."

Quote taken from the BP China Website. (Note: Lord Browne is no longer CEO of BP.)

http://www.prweb.com/releases/peak/oil/prweb635891.htm

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Last night, on ABC's Nightline, Terry Moran interviewed President Bush in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during his trip to the Middle East. When discussing what President Bush might say to the King of Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices, George Bush said:

If they don't have a lot of additional oil to put on the market, it is hard to ask somebody to do something they may not be able to do.

If Saudi Arabia doesn't have a much additional oil to put on the market, the veracity of what Saudi Arabia has been saying about extra capacity is brought into question. More importantly, it starts raising questions about Saudi Arabia's true long-term oil production capability. Can Saudi Arabia really ramp up oil production in the future? Are the high reserves posted by Saudi Arabia and other Middle-Eastern countries really indicative of high future production capability?

The interview with George W. Bush can be seen at this link. The above quote is about 1:55 into the interview.

This is a link to a Press Release we did with respect to this story. Feel free to link to it in your Blogs.