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122 comments on MoveOn.org Prioritizes "Energy Independence"

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David JM on June 2, 2006 - 5:39pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
To our TOD technical people, we have all heard the Cornucopian/Optimist sorts bang the drum for "technological advances" that we defer PO for "decades".  We hear about use of horizontal drilling, CO2 injection, "bottle brushing", and water flooding as means to increase oil recovery.  Question: what is the crux of the disagreement concerning the efficacy of these techniques (and perhaps others) in delaying PO?  I have seen some posts on this but would someone be willing to provide a concise summary?  It would be much appreciated.  
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step back on June 2, 2006 - 7:52pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I am not a PO techno-guru, but let me try:

  1. Rational people understand that there is a finite amount of crude buried in the Earth's crust. We don't know the exact amount. We call it Q. We know it is basically a one-time collection that will not be replenished by magic pipleines coming out of the sky from alien space ships.

  2. People familiar with oil well discovery understand that the total amount of oil, Q is not all contained in one central pool like a creamy nogut filling of a donut. Instead it is distributed as a series of super-large reservoirs (call them Kings) and then progressively smaller and smaller pools (Queens, Nobles, Knights, ... peons, subpeons).

  3. Once you peak out the Kings and Queens, to make up for the shortfall in per-day-production (i.e. 85 mbbpd globally) you need to start drilling ever larger number of holes into the ever increasing numbers of far apart and smaller and smaller wells to make up for the lost production from the big wells. You start swimming out into the Gulf of Mexico to find these smaller wells. You run up to freezing ANWR. These are economically painful things to do.

  4. At some point, the next round of smaller wells are just not going to be worth the trouble of going after even if you have this new super duper extraction technology. It's not that all the oil in the world "ran out". Instead the problem is that all the big King and Queen pools ran out and it is too much of an economic pain to try to suck blood from the peons. This is what has been happening in East Texas. There is still oil there, but spread out among thousands of slow bleeding tiny wells. The world is shifting from having huge pulsing arteries of oil oozing out to having just slow dripping capillaries. Now matter how great your techno-fix is, you are not going to make capillaries behave like aortas. (Well, maybe that is too medical of an analogy ... and too bloody also).

  5. Also, the better your extraction rate is, the faster your depletion rate becomes on the down side of Hubbert's curve.
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