Thursday, June 12, 2014

the inevitable demise of the fossil fuel empire...,


guardian | The latest data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and other sources proves that the oil and gas majors are in deep trouble. 

Over the last decade, rising oil prices have been driven primarily by rising production costs. After the release of the IEA's World Energy Outlook last November, Deutsche Bank's former head of energy research Mark Lewis noted that massive levels of investment have corresponded to an ever declining rate of oil supply increase:
"Over the past decade, the oil and gas industry's upstream investments have registered an astronomical increase, but these ever higher levels of capital expenditure have yielded ever smaller increases in the global oil supply. Even these have only been made possible by record high oil prices. This should be a reality check for those now hyping a new age of global oil abundance."
Since 2000, the oil industry's investments have risen by 180% - a threefold increase - but this has translated into a global oil supply increase of just 14%. Two-thirds of this increase has been made-up by unconventional oil and gas. In other words, the primary driver of the cost explosion is the shift to expensive and difficult-to-extract unconventionals due to the peak and plateau in conventional oil production since 2005.

The increasingly dislocated economics of oil production

According to Lewis, who now heads up energy transition and climate change research at leading investment firm Kepler Cheuvreux:
"The most straightforward interpretation of this data is that the economics of oil have become completely dislocated from historic norms since 2000 (and especially since 2005), with the industry investing at exponentially higher rates for increasingly small incremental yields of energy."
The IEA's new World Energy Investment Outlook published last week revised the agency's estimates of future oil industry capital expenditures out to 2035 even higher, from $9.4 trillion to $11.3 trillion – an increase of 20%. 

Oil prices could in turn increase by $15 per barrel in 2025 if investment does not pick up. Most of the investment increase required would be devoted not to new sources of production, but "to replace lost production from depleting fields," said Lewis.
In the IEA's own words:
"More than 80% of this spending [of between $700 and $850 billion annually by the 2030s] is required just to keep production at today's levels, that is, to compensate for the effects of decline at existing fields. The figure is higher in the case of oil (at close to 90% of total capital expenditure)."
But as Lewis pointed out, the "risk of insufficient investment" is not a hypothetical matter that might occur a decade from now, but is "already today a clear and present danger" as most of the oil and gas majors have revised down their plans for capital expenditure in recent months.

21 comments:

BigDonOne said...

"We don’t have new fuel sources and never will... "

If all the resources uselessly squandered on cradle-to-grave support for OOW-breeding EBT-swiping parasites, including prosecution and incarceration, were instead devoted to solving Fusion Power, virtually unlimited energy could be available to synthesize as much of any fuel ever needed....

Dale Asberry said...

“There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kid’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs. (note: quote is not original to Raj Patel. It is by John Rogers and was accidentally not attributed, as Patel acknowledges in a Jan 21 2010 blog post)”
- Raj Patel

CNu said...

Madame Walsh like being on Teevee MSNBC and she's well and handsomely paid to be part of the media WWE spectacle, pretending that the matches are real, the drama is real, and that they're partisan commentators participating in all of that reality, rather than gatekeepers and hall-monitors ensuring strict compliance with permitted discourse within the bicameral political terrordome.

Thanks for calling out this piece where she has the nerve and audacity to fix her mouth to go in on Reed.

Vic78 said...

I can understand someone falling for Rand's bullshit. A person's supposed to outgrow it as an eventually. What kind of ethical system can one develop that states it's all about me getting mine?

Alan Greenspan was a brony. He said he didn't know that people would get away with what they could. And he said it with a straight face. Paul Ryan demanded that his staff be 100% brony. Clarence Thomas wanted his clerks to be bronies. We have to laugh at them. It's for their own good. If they carry on like they are, there's no telling how they'll harm themselves and others.

CNu said...

Momentarily suspending disbelief in the old gnurd fantasy of controlled fusion, if all the resources squandered in a single year on end-of-life old raisins was devoted to the exact same problem, it would get solved even sooner.

CNu said...

Let me tell you. At around the turn of the century, in my former life, I was summoned to Wichita by Koch Industries IT Security Manager because a chinese national employee had successfully hacked the bejesus out of a significant % of Koch's IT infrastructure, inclusive of the big man's own personal server sitting behind his personal firewall. They needed somebody to quietly and persuasively put together the evidence to take action against this young lady.

Long story short, the state of security on the Koch Industries network was abysmal due to the application of the big man's Randian bronie philosophy of making all business units compete with one another in a kind of zero sum fashion which made no exceptions for the infrastructural commons. IOW, each BU could run its own security as it saw fit, rather than adhere to a common corporate baseline.

General hilarity and fustercluckery inevitably ensued from this state of affairs. It gave me to understand in no uncertain terms the extent to which sincerely held, but ultimately wrong-headed principles and beliefs can be indistinguishable from malfeasance if they are applied often enough and on a large enough scale. (I suspect that in the aftermath of what I summed up above, an exception was finally made for the corporate commons, but I wouldn't bet any money on it)

BigDonOne said...

Actually, BD suspects that, behind the scenes, the oil industry is throwing every monkey wrench possible into the system, via their bought & paid-for CongressPeople, to see that fusion power never happens. If a bunch of the top physicists' and chemists' minds were put to work researching the processes and catalysts (with serious financial backing), a reasonable lower-temperature fusion might be developed. Scientific breakthroughs occur every day.....

CNu said...

Actually, CNu expects that the extractive resources industry IS NOT engaged in any such paranoid skullduggery, nor for that matter, is the government sitting on a cache of Tesla intellectual property that would contribute in any meaningful way to the solution of this, our species evolutionary cul de sac.

Such as it is, your hateful, shambling yeast monkey species will not be permitted the cosmic evolutionary leap of fusion power. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/search?q=kardashev

DD said...

This relates to the (boring) article on Whitlock I linked to. Makheru, you seem to be articulating a "the game is rigged don't play," philosophy, while Cnu at least toys with the "It's rigged but that means play harder," philosophy. Echoes of the Coates piece on reparations.


I think the second position is more strategically sound. "It's rigged I won't play," is sort of a spoiled child reaction--only privileged people have the luxury of staking this position.


Saying "It's not fair," may be true, but it doesn't advance your cause at all.


I think people here get frustrated with your position because this sewing circle has long ago acknowledged life's not fair. But these guys are always pumping out potential solutions, and you tend to revert back to "system of white supremacy, it's not fair, I quit."


I think generally everybody agrees with your diagnosis to some degree. So--what do you do about it?


To guns--having enough guns and resolve to force a mass, state-sponsored slaughter that will be well covered by the media is obviously, repeatedly, demonstrably proven to work. Why would anyone discard a proven strategy for small, fringe groups to exercise autonomy?!


Having guns is proven to be effective. Not having them is proven to get your ass run over, unless your protest is a factor of 10 larger. Guns are clearly a force multiplier even as a threat. No brainer to be well armed and have the resolve to stand for your beliefs. Proven effectiveness shouldn't be ignored. If it's a rigged game, get any edge you can, knowhatimsayin?

CNu said...

While it's an egregiously imperfect analogy, I just can't dislodge the image from my head of 800 ISIL/ISIS fighters running 30,000 Iraqi soldiers out of their positions. What happened in Nevada, in these United States IS generically extensible within these United States because governance knows that the day it brings full military force to bear on armed civilian dissenters, (not terrorists, mass murderers, etc.., but political dissenters) that it will have an armed insurrection on its hands numbering some not insignificant percentage of the 300 million or so guns in circulation in this country.

Dale Asberry said...

Cnu at least toys with the "It's rigged but that means play harder," philosophy.


I'd personally add, "meaner, dirtier, and sneakier."

umbrarchist said...

I just drove 1,600 miles since Friday. Passed a lot of construction too.

Just what we need. Another reason for the collapse of America! LOL

umbrarchist said...

That's it, robotic road repair. Why are bridges designed to last 50 years? Why not 100 or 200? No wait, weren't we all supposed to have helicopters by the 80s or 90s? Where is my jet pack and flying car?

The future ain't what it used to be. We ought to sue the science fiction writers.

BigDonOne said...

You must have missed this link to greater-than-lightspeed breakthru (on Drudge ths morning)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2655105/Engage-warp-drive-Nasa-reveals-latest-designs-Star-Trek-style-spacecraft-make-interstellar-travel-reality.html

umbrarchist said...

This is not civilization. It is techno-barbarity.

umbrarchist said...

Where did he get 445 ppm? Our peaks in April just went passed 400.

http://co2now.org/

makheru bradley said...

“governance knows that the day it brings full military force to bear on armed civilian dissenters, that it will have an armed insurrection on its hands…”

You should have added some qualifiers: Armed political dissenters who are not challenging white supremacy, or the military-industrial complex, or the Wall Street oligarchy. Because what you are saying clearly did not happen after 41st and Central.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuwCVLuYxU

If Cliven Bundy was Louis Farrakhan defending the same rights on the NOI farm in Georgia, they would have been wiped out, and none of these patriots who rushed to the defense of Bundy would have batted an eyelash.

http://www.noimoa.com/

http://bit.ly/1ojTItU

makheru bradley said...

DD, obviously, I have no control over how people process information, but I must admit “don’t play, I quit” is mind boggling, and antithetical to my raison d'ĂȘtre.


Please provide the specific comments which led you to reach that conclusion.

CNu said...

You should have added some qualifiers: Armed political dissenters who
are not challenging white supremacy, or the military-industrial complex,
or the Wall Street oligarchy.


The only qualifier required is "in 2014, now that America has become supersaturated with high-powered, high-capacity firearms" as opposed to 1970, when stuff was a whole lot more tame and subdued, and notwithstanding the turbulence of the 60's, folks simply did not - by and large - disbelieve in the omnipotence of the "the man".

lol, that shit would be hilarious if it wasn't so limp wristedly pathetic. Adu Bakr got out of jail 5 years ago and now he's taking over cities, running the Iraqi army into the ground, and hard-rolling on a takeover of 10% of "the man's" global oil supply that "the man" squandered HUGE blood and treasure to secure - and Dr. Ridgely Muhammad can't grow a goddamn carrot on a plot of land bigger than Central Park?!?!?!?! http://www.noimoa.com/muhammad-farms/

I bet you a dollar Dale has more going on on his permacultural plot than these excuse-making clowns have on their miles of acreage. The NOI needs to stop whining and get some hogs, set up a hog farm, and start smoking some ribs and moving some Georgia BBQ kits - instead of whining about the demise of the family farm and why they're incompetent to do shit or have shit.

CNu said...

I'ma take a first pass at this one Bro. Makheru. You have more going on on your little "each one-teach one" urban garden there in Charlotte, than the whole and entire "nation" of Islam has on its miles of acreage in Georgia. Yet here you turn up, like a consistently turned out bad penny, excuse-making for an FBI informant, Malcolm X assassinating, blow hard multi-millionaire pimp-in-a-pulpit in Chicago!!!

The conclusion is conspicuously obvious to the casual observer. Stop endlessly emoting about the bogey man of white supremacy, stop paying attention to pimps-in-the-pulpit who have made fortunes endlessly emoting about the bogey man of white supremacy. Hike up your big boy pants for the exclusive and laser-focused development of a self-sufficient local culture of competence - where you stand at this very moment. Do what you do without regard for what anybody else is doing or saying, and just double-down and do it all that much harder.

That's the only thing that matters. How hard you go, where you're at, and everything else can just be damned.., because when everything is said and done - we are all of us - on our own. You do that, without all of the trappings and gum flappings about "white supremacy" and black separatism, and open your efforts to mutualism and cooperation with like-minded others who have taken the lesson of Bacon's rebellion, and I bet you'd be surprised how many folks would turn out to get your back in the event that "the man" showed up at your doorstep overstepping his authority.

CNu said...

and before we hear a single whimper of Joan Walsh 3.0 about Cliven Bundy being a racist, separatist, supremacist, blah, blah, blah, etc..., it is important to recall the bald-faced lies promoted throughout the Babylon system trying to make him out as a domestic terrorist and failing that, a racist. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2014/04/babylon-system-cold-busted-using-bacons.html

Whole Babylon system got cold-busted on that moment of high-perpetration, but folks with short memories and profound biases can't keep track - blinded as they are by their deep investments in emotionalism and identity politics. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/search?q=cliven+bundy

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