Global oil production: the Red Queen’s race
February 22nd, 2010The January 2010 Oilwatch Monthly is now available from Peakoil Nederland.
I fount the following charts particularly thought provoking.
First, here’s a history of all liquids production from 1938 through the 2008 peak.
You can’t really see a peak at that scale – and besides, the chart ends at 2008, so production after that year doesn’t show up. Here’s a closer look at the period before and after the July 2008 peak.
It looks pretty noisy, but except for the spike in 2008 production looks to have plateaued. Now take a look at the energy content of the fuels produced.
It’s clear that as far as energy content goes, we’ve been on a plateau since mid-2004. And increasingly, we’re relying on unconventional liquids (heavy and extra heavy oil, oil shale, oil sands, natural gas liquids, lease condensates, gas-to-liquids, coal-to-liquids,and biofuels) rather than crude oil to maintain both total production and energy content.
As the energy content of unconventional is less than that of crude, we’re running harder and harder just to keep in place. It’s the Red Queen’s race:
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”