Vulture Capitalists  

Mobjectivist deconstructs a cornucopian energy fantasy - "Oil, Oil Everywhere" by Peter Huber and Mark Mills (embarrassingly, one is an Engineer and the other a Physicist).

I think blaming people from the middle east for pretty much any problem you can think of is a sure fire way to get published in the US these days.

One of the primary fantasies relied on by the article is the bountiful supply of tar sands that we can extract oil from (maybe Bondy should get these guys to write some independent analysis for the flood of prospectuses he is no doubt preparing for his Madagascan venture).

One commenter describes the tar sand potential as this:

Alberta: Wikipedia says "at most 315 billion barrels are considered recoverable by the oil companies given current technology", and this report says proven reserves are 174 billion barrels: http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/osd/docs/osgenbrf.pdf

Presently extraction costs are $15/barrel. That gives you an EROEI of >3, assuming all energy spent in the process is in the form of oil and included in the costs.

The Orinoco reserves are about equal to the Alberta reserves. So with EROEI=2, the proven reserves would give us 175 [billion] barrels, enough to last almost six years at the current rate. Is this accounted for in the ASPO model?

The ASPO's depletion model (PDF) has a "Heavy etc" component of 160 barrels, which is roughly equivalent to this 175 Gbarrel estimate (and many people have noted extracting this oil requires natural gas, which is already in decline in North America).