Oilfields MegaProject Update  

Energy Bulletin has an interesting article on determining the peak oil point by looking at how many new large projects will be coming online in the coming years.

Since its first appearance more than a year ago, UK Petroleum Review Editor Chris Skrebowski's Oilfield Megaprojects Report, has come to be regarded as a new and vital milepost on the way to Peak Oil. Julian Darley asks Chris to explain the complexities of global depletion and new supply, and why he thinks that this year may well be the year of Peak Oil.

As Richard Heinberg has pointed out, there are at least four ways of predicting the peak in global oil production, the results of which seem to be converging on dates within this decade.

One fairly crude method is to add about 40 years to the date of peak of discoveries, which country by country data tells us is a reasonable guess. Oil discoveries peaked in the mid 1960s.

One can also use M. King Hubbert's method of predicting oil peak as the point when we've used half of all the original available recoverable reserves. We're about at the halfway point now by most estimates.

The third method is like what ASPO does which is to graph regional, or country by country predictions and add these together to get an overall global peak. ASPO predict a peak for conventional oil in 2006 and all liquids in 2007.

Chris Skrebowski's laudable efforts at Petroleum Review represent a fourth, and high resolution, method which seems to confirm the troubling news.

For all the focus on a particular date, it's worth noting that we have probably already passed a more significant peak. If we had the accounting mechanisms to subtract the amount of oil consumed in the extraction and processing of oil, we may find we passed the net energy oil peak as far back as 1979/80. The bad news is that besides the symbolic punch, the now famous gross oil peak will accelerate this declining net energy trend.