Idle Chatter On Global Energy -- November 2, 2015

This is so incredibly cool.

I grew up in oil-rich North Dakota, but I did not know it at the time. It appears not many did, except guys like Harold Hamm who quietly bought up mineral acreage across the entire Williston Basin. And then wrote his ex-wife a check for one billion dollars. Billion with a "b" as they say.

My first encounter with global energy was watching the Alaskan pipeline being built and the Prudhoe Bay in Alaska being developed. I only saw it from the air and a short stay on the tarmac somewhere in the area. Then I kind of forgot about the oil and gas industry until the oil embargo in 1973, I think it was. I had just moved out to southern California and thought the world as we knew it was coming to an end. Long gas lines and a shortage of oil. Peak Oil was in the air.

For thirty years, the western world paid attention to what the Saudis were doing. There were photo ops of US presidents shaking hands with, and more recently, bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia who no one can name and no one seems to care.

And then it all changed. There is now a glut of natural gas and a glut of crude oil. And it looks like it's here for quite some time. I will never have to worry about "Peak Oil" again in my life time, nor will my daughters. It is unlikely that my granddaughters will have to worry about "Peak Oil." (They will have to worry about the $20 trillion debt the US has accumulated; a debt that is obviously impossible to pay off.)

Statoil says the price of crude oil won't "recover" until 2018. I don't know what they mean by "recover" any more. It's like tracking the number of rigs in North Dakota. Tracking the number of rigs is unhelpful when trying to predict overall production. The number of rigs is a barometer of activity in the oil and gas industry but no longer correlates with production. There are at least ten reasons why that is true but this is the biggest reason: there are now 1,000 wells in the Bakken on the fracklog: wells that are drilled to depth, and waiting for completion; waiting to be fracked. One thousand wells.

And when the Bakken had 750 wells on the fracklog, the Eagle Ford had already reached a thousand on their own fracklog. Don't quote me on that; I recall something to that effect. The point is this: if the Bakken has a thousand wells waiting to be completed, the Eagle Ford probably has as many, if not more.

So, I don't know what is meant by "recover" when they talk about oil prices. All that's important to the oil companies is staying in business, making a profit, and growing. Pretty much in that order.

All that's important to the SUV owner is affordable gasoline.

Reuters is now reporting that BP -- who seems to have the monopoly on forecasting future oil data -- is suggesting that:

The world is no longer at risk of running out of oil or gas for decades ahead with existing technology capable of unlocking so much that global reserves would almost double by 2050 despite booming consumption, oil major BP said on Monday.

When taking into account all accessible forms of energy including nuclear, wind and solar, there are enough resources to meet 20 times what the world will need over that period, David Eyton, BP Group Head of Technology said.

I've read only one book on energy that I can immediately recall, The Prize. I started a second, The Frackers but did not get very far. I love reading but I don't enjoy reading books on energy. There may be one exception.

A reader sent me a quote from an energy book -- looks like a college textbook. I don't like the cover -- it looks too much like a business book, but the inside looks interesting. I will probably end up ordering it from Amazon. The book: Energy for the 21st Century: A Comprehensive Guide to Conventional and Alternative Sources, Edition 2, Roy Nersesian, c. 2014. 

What intrigues me about the book is this: it appears that all the energy science projects -- wind, solar, biofuel, McDonald's used grease, Elonbatteries -- all had their roots in the fear that "we" were going to run out of crude oil and natural gas by 2015. Obviously that is not going to happen.

It takes a lot of time for trillion-dollar enterprises to turn around. It took twenty-five years to get where we are today with regard to those energy science projects and it will take about as much time, I suppose, to bring those to an end. The global warming scam was the bridge that some hoped would extend the turn-time -- or even abort the likely demise -- of these energy science projects. But even NASA says the Antarctic ice is thickening.

There are still going to be a lot of stories and a lot of activity in the intermittent energy industry, but in the big scheme of things, they won't amount to a hill of beans. There is a real chance that EVs will be the car of the future, but the cars will run off coal and/or natural gas. (By the way, our 12-year-old granddaughter mentioned that to me out of the blue yesterday that an EV running on coal makes no sense. She must have gotten that on her own reading because I never say a thing to her about energy and I still subscribe to The National Geographic for her, despite its biased journalism when it comes to energy.)

Just to repeat in case you missed it the first time, through 2050, there are enough resources to meet 20x over what the world will need. And Malthus rolls over in his grave, putting his hands to his ears.

The world is no longer at risk of running out of oil or gas for decades ahead with existing technology capable of unlocking so much that global reserves would almost double by 2050 despite booming consumption, oil major BP said on Monday.

When taking into account all accessible forms of energy including nuclear, wind and solar, there are enough resources to meet 20 times what the world will need over that period, David Eyton, BP Group Head of Technology said.