Welcome to the ODAC Newsletter, a weekly roundup from the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, the UK registered charity dedicated to raising awareness of peak oil.
Another week, another ‘giant’ oil find, leading to predictable claims that ‘peak oil theory’ is toast. Shame nobody bothered to put the numbers in context, but then that’s what ODAC is for. BG Group’s discovery of up to 2bn barrels of oil equivalent in deepwater offshore Brazil amounts to less than a month’s global consumption.
What’s more, the underlying assumption in the press reporting is that such discoveries mean a genuine increase the world’s oil resource, whereas they actually represent a book-keeping exercise, in which resources are shifted from the “yet-to-find†category to the “reserves†category. Continuing oil discoveries are to be expected, but they do not increase the size of the global resource nor extend how long it is expected to last.
According to the IEA, global daily oil demand is showing signs of increase as government stimulus packages pump life back into economies around the world. While consumption is still down on 2008 the IEA is now predicting an increase of 500 million barrels per day over their previous estimate.
Meanwhile IHS CERA predicts global demand will top 2007 levels by 2012 with growth coming from the developing nations. OPEC left output unchanged and prices firmed to over $70/barrel.
In the UK this week the talk was less about oil finds and more about a potential new source of income from the depleted oil fields of the North Sea. The area is seen as an ideal storage reservoir for CO2 captured during carbon capture and storage, but the technology might not be commercially viable for decades. Perhaps more could be achieved more quickly if other companies followed the lead of Ramco Energy which announced this week that it is swapping oil exploration for off-shore wind.
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Another week, another ‘giant’ oil find, leading to predictable claims that ‘peak oil theory’ is toast. Shame nobody bothered to put the numbers in context, but then that’s what ODAC is for. BG Group’s discovery of up to 2bn barrels of oil equivalent in deepwater offshore Brazil amounts to less than a month’s global consumption.
What’s more, the underlying assumption in the press reporting is that such discoveries mean a genuine increase the world’s oil resource, whereas they actually represent a book-keeping exercise, in which resources are shifted from the “yet-to-find†category to the “reserves†category. Continuing oil discoveries are to be expected, but they do not increase the size of the global resource nor extend how long it is expected to last.
According to the IEA, global daily oil demand is showing signs of increase as government stimulus packages pump life back into economies around the world. While consumption is still down on 2008 the IEA is now predicting an increase of 500 million barrels per day over their previous estimate.
Meanwhile IHS CERA predicts global demand will top 2007 levels by 2012 with growth coming from the developing nations. OPEC left output unchanged and prices firmed to over $70/barrel.
In the UK this week the talk was less about oil finds and more about a potential new source of income from the depleted oil fields of the North Sea. The area is seen as an ideal storage reservoir for CO2 captured during carbon capture and storage, but the technology might not be commercially viable for decades. Perhaps more could be achieved more quickly if other companies followed the lead of Ramco Energy which announced this week that it is swapping oil exploration for off-shore wind.
.. snip ..
