Beyond Oil – The View from Hubbert’s Peak
By Kenneth S. Deffeyes
Hill and Wang, 2005, 202 pp.
The End of Oil
As recently as a few years ago, you could hold a gallon gasoline in one hand and a gallon of spring water in the other and still believe it was perfectly normal that you had just paid more for the gallon of water. We have already begun to look back on the era of cheap oil that made that stunning anomaly possible with a mixture of nostalgia and disbelief.
Gasoline and diesel oil are miraculous energy sources that power most of the nation’s transportation systems, provide a good deal of Maine’s winter heating needs and make Maine’s working waterfronts throb with economic activity. So it is important to understand what the future supply and price for these miracle liquids looks like from the perspective of, say, a petroleum geologist’s point of view. It is not a comforting picture.
Almost no one has heard of M. King Hubbert, who ran the Shell Oil Company’s research laboratory in Houston for many decades beginning in the 1950s. A few close readers of John McPhee may recall Ken Deffeyes’s name as McPhee sidekick and geological expert in his highly readable geological travels through the United States in Basin and Range.
Ken Deffeyes has published two highly readable and intensely illuminating books on the future of the world’s oil economy. Deffeyes worked with M. King Hubbert in the 1950s and took Hubbert’s predictions about the future prospects of oil production so much to heart that he changed professions. Deffeyes left Shell oil as an exploration geologist and became a professor of geology at Princeton.
In 1956, Hubbert published a prediction, based on a set of impenetrable calculations that U.S. oil prediction would peak in the early 1970s. Then in 1969, Hubbert predicted that world oil production would peak in the year 2000. On both occasions, Hubbert was roundly and soundly pilloried in both the academic and popular press as Chicken Little by influential “experts” that Deffeyes refers to dismissively as “cornucopians.” However in 1972, shortly after Hubbert published his second prediction, the American oil industry came to the reluctant conclusion that U.S. oil production had indeed peaked a few years earlier. How had Hubbert figured this out?
Hubbert’s reasoning is simple and elegant, even if his mathematical calculations are difficult to follow. Deffeyes explains Hubbert’s reasoning and untangles his calculations in vivid prose. Hubbert’s method of predicting future oil production is based on the simple premise that the future oil production rate depends linearly on the fraction of the total oil that remains to be produced. In other words, the rate of oil production that ultimately depends on discovering new deposits in the ground or in the oceans will decrease in a predictable, straight-line fashion until the last barrel has been found.
At first glance, this conclusion can seem almost self-evident. But you might also logically expect that the governing factor of discovering new oil is dependent on other factors such as technological innovation or price. New technology (such as horizontal drilling or hydro-fracturing) or rapidly increasing prices will mean we will find and produce more oil, right?
Wrong. As Deffeyes puts it, these things matter, “they just don’t matter very much.”
Instead, he argues, oil production rates are more analogous to population rates. In a newly bulldozed vacant lot, weeds begin populating the empty space like crazy. But as weeds begin to utilize more and more of the resources of a lot, new weeds begin to decrease and continue to do so at a linear or constant rate. Or in oil terms, you find new oil more easily in the early years of the oil era, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find new oil later on.
Or think of catching fish in a large, well stocked lake: you expect your production to go down with each fish you catch, and the last fish is the most difficult to catch.
Thus, Hubbert and his disciple Deffeyes start with data on the production rate since the beginning of the oil era. These figures are a matter of historical record in both the U.S. and for the world as a whole. Then by simple algebra, you can extrapolate what the total production will ultimately be – 228.4 billion barrels for the U.S. and 2.012 trillion barrels for the world as a whole. Finally by plotting all this information on a graph, you can figure out the year when half of it will have been produced – that is when oil will peak.
It helps to know that geologically speaking, the “oil window” underground begins at depths of 7500 feet where biological deposits break down into crude oil and ends at 15,000 feet when the earth’s interior heat breaks oil down into natural gas. And further, very few strata of rocks have the porosity to store oil, and even fewer have the permeability that can accommodate pumping it to the surface before it is trapped as unusable reserves underground. Thus, there are relatively small pools of useable oil in the world, most of which – 94 percent in Deffeyes’s calculation – has already been found.
If Hubbert hadn’t been so eerily precise on his prediction that oil production in the U.S. would peak in 1970, perhaps we would not take seriously his prediction that world oil would peak in 2000. Deffeyes, using Hubbert’s methods but better data sets, recalculated the peak and predicts that world oil will peak sometime in 2004 or 2005. Like right now. Part of the problem of determining the exact peak is that we will not know we are there until we have already passed it. But it should become increasingly obvious a year or two from now as China and India continue to ramp up their expanding economies and consume more of the global supply. If oil production has not peaked, then Saudi Arabia, as the world’s swing producer, will turn its taps up higher and prices will remain stable.
Deffeyes also poses this question: if oil consumption is continuing to increase and if oil companies are in the best position to estimate world oil supplies, then why are they not building more refineries and more oil tankers – both of which are operating at capacity? To him the answer is obvious.
So what does this all mean? Deffeyes is no eco-freak, although he does encourage increased conservation of oil and gas as a strategy to squeeze a little more time out of the oil era. He also suggests that we start learning to appreciate vegetables and fruits that come from close to home rather than having been flown here from South America. He believes that the hydrogen fuel cell is at least 20 years off as a viable way to power cars. He believes that in the meantime, oil and gas will need to be used primarily as a transportation fuel. For electric energy, he believes coal and nuclear power will necessarily become more attractive. He does believe that global warming is a real problem and that dealing with it will complicate our energy choices. But most of all, Deffeyes believes that we should as a nation and as individual citizens wake up and take notice: the world is about to change. Big time.