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Comments: 720 +- Hardware: Whistleblower Claims IEA Is Downplaying Peak Oil on Tuesday November 10, @03:25PM
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kdawson
on Tuesday November 10, @03:25PM
from the routine-denial dept.
from the routine-denial dept.
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Yesterday the Guardian ran a story based on two anonymous sources inside the International Energy Agency who claimed that the agency had distorted key figures on oil reserves. "The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the [IEA] who claims it has been deliberately
underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves." Today the IEA released its annual energy outlook and rejected the whistleblowers'
charges. The Guardian has an editorial claiming that the economic establishment is too fearful to come clean on the reality of oil suppplies, and makes an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
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On the plus side! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:On the plus side! (Score:5, Funny)
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If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Reality B: It's 20xx, suddenly there's no oil. Mass panic. People flip out. People die. Fuel shortages lead to water/food/heating shortages lead to war. Private industry doesn't have a chance to adjust. People aren't prepared to buy a new vehicle on the spot. Californians ride the nearest comet to Heaven's Gate. Crime increases, lawlessness arises, civilization breaks down, I'm forced into a Thunderdome with Cowboy Neal for my right to live.
If the IEA is capable of any logic at all, they are not cooking the books or withholding data. What's the motive of retaining data or fixing charts?
Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Funny)
People who bought oil future loose their shirts.
Why? Did they get too hot?
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Informative)
I like to call it the "Reverse Cassandra Effect" (stole the term from Simon). People *love* to listen to doomsayers, far more than people who tell you that things are going to be fine. The doomsayer can have the flimsiest of evidence and the dissenter a solid case, but the very notion of doom itself seems to make the audience more receptive to what they have to say.
A classic example is the Simon-Ehrlich Wager [wikipedia.org]. Julian Simon, a libertarian-leaning business professor, bet Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who had published a series of books about imminent resource scarcity in the 1970s, that the inflation-adjusted price of five commodity metals -- of Ehrlich's choosing -- would average dropping over the course of the 1990s. Simon won -- bigtime. All five metals dropped in price, some by huge amounts. The aftermath? Despite Ehrlich's loss and his similar forecasts of huge famines, resource wars, etc all failing to materialize, Simon remained in relative obscurity, while Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award for "greater public understanding of environmental problems" in his doom-preaching books.
And when I say this, note that I in general am *not* fond of libertarian ideals, and consider myself an environmentalist. But these doomer notions of secret imminent scarcity are just plain hokum.
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Reality B: It's 20xx, suddenly there's no oil. Mass panic. People flip out. People die. Fuel shortages lead to water/food/heating shortages lead to war. Private industry doesn't have a chance to adjust. People aren't prepared to buy a new vehicle on the spot. Californians ride the nearest comet to Heaven's Gate. Crime increases, lawlessness arises, civilization breaks down, I'm forced into a Thunderdome with Cowboy Neal for my right to live.
The only way Reality B can happen is if government artificially lower the price of oil through price caps or subsidies.
Oil producers have no motivation to lie about oil reserves. They need the price to rise as the supply falls so that they maximize their profits. This will inevitably lead to your Reality A, a slow increase in price as supply falls.
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil producers have no motivation to lie about oil reserves.
Oil producers have ample motivation to lie about oil reserves. Who has more geopolitical and economic clout:
a) A country with 50 billion barrels in proven reserves, who publicly state they have 50 billion barrels in proven reserves, or
b) A country with 50 billion barrels in proven reserves, who publicly state they have 125 billion barrels in proven reserves?
Who is better able to attract foreign investment in port facilities or refineries? Who has more influence over the large oil-consuming nations?
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
You must be new here to OPEC. Let me be your guide.
OPEC exists to maximise the profits of its member countries. To avoid countries from competing against each other and thus lowering the price, there are production quotas.
Quotas are determined for each country based on its reserves.
Reserves are, however, only a rough estimation, because no one can go kilometres underground and survey the oil fields. They only have a few holes, pressure vs. flow data, composition and little more.
As a result, a geologist from Whatsamatterstan is asked from his minister: how much oil reserves do we have? If you say X, we make Y. If you say 2*X, we make 2*Y, and I will be happier. If you say X/2, I will hire another geologist.
So, as a result, reserve estimates within OPEC have a strong incentive to be exaggerated. In order to maximise profits, a country has to put a straight face until oil is really not flowing any more: if they let out the news that they cheated about reserves, they cannot sell oil at the same rate any more, and (not sure about OPEC by-laws) may face fines. So they will always deny any exaggeration in estimates until the bitter end.
Saudi Arabia, in particular, has an enormous incentive to lie about their cheap oil: they have a leadership position in OPEC because they have the largest reservoirs and the cheapest oil (used to be $2/barrel at production), which means they can keep everybody else who may disobey them in line by flooding the market, thereby sinking price, thereby hitting their profits. If they were to hit peak oil, that country would suddenly be powerless, useless to the US as a strategic ally, and will lose its position of prominence (most likely) to Iran, which you may guess will start a long domino effect.
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
We will not "suddenly" run out of oil. What will happen, is that prices will become high, and stay high - even in the face of things which would previously send them into the cellar, such as, I don't know, a global recession.
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Informative)
You are thinking only in economic terms. At some point there is an absolute economic limit when you are using as much energy to extract and process the oil as the energy you actually get out of it.
So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
Keep in mind that already now extracting only 50% of the oil of a reservoir is not considered that bad (and that's secondary recovery already, when you flush with water to get more oil out).
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Interesting)
> So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
As one witty peak oiler explained it: If I want an apple, I may pay a dollar for it. If I really want and apple, I might pay a thousand dollars for it. But no matter how much I like apples, there's one price I will never pay for one, and that is twoapples.
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the problem is too complex/expensive, but that doesn't mean you should prevent people from even trying to solve it if they want.
I'm confused how they're being prevented. Many oil companies have setups in Utah and Colorado mining shale oil, it's just not economically feasible now for them to develop the process further. That's the free market at work.
Real shame we can't pass legislation to force the oil companies to dump billions into oil shale research, but I guess that'd be socialism.
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Informative)
Here is what you probably don't know: Ronald Reagan stopped funding research on coal to liquids and extraction from oil shale by abolishing the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Program in the 80s.
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there's plenty of oil, and there always will be, because we'll end up leaving most of it in the ground.
Those oil shales you mentioned, and the Bakken oil formations a bit farther north, have more oil in them than all of Saudi Arabia, and might as well be on Alpha Centauri, for all the good it'll ever do us.
The problem is this. Regardless of what available technology you choose, the majority of this stuff is neither energy positive, nor economical to produce. It's in *shale.* You know, rock. It's not some nice big pool of spongy liquid you can put a straw in like the Ghawar fields in Saudi. You have to dig the rock, grind the rock, and *heat* the rock to get the oil out. Depending on how much oil is in the rock and how finely you ground it, you may, or more often not, get as much oil energy out of the rock as you put into it.
Which is why all those new finds so breathlessly reported by those with journalism degrees don't mean squat.
A deep water find that only yields sulfur-laden, heavy crude (i.e. tar) in multiple scattered reservoirs is NOT equivalent to some nice little civilized shallow well in porous rock that yields light sweet crude. The first is cheap to get, cheap to process, cheap to ship and it all can be done quickly. The latter is NOTHING like that. The latter is a decade from well to the tank in your car, if then.
Bottom line? Cheap oil is a thing of the past. Our expanding economy depended on an ever expanding supply of cheap, portable energy. That goes away when oil goes away. We will transition, no doubt, but a few, maybe more than a few will starve to death before we do and more than a few governments may fall.
Cheers!
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:If True, Fascinatingly Bizarre Logic (Score:5, Interesting)
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peak oil clarification (Score:4, Informative)
World population is continually increasing, China and India are rapidly industrializing so demand for oil is going up and up, but the flow rate isn't. This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators. It's all supply and demand, but in this case the supply is limited. No amount oil shale or tar sands or deepwater deposits will do us much good because we can't achieve the same flow rate with these deposits as the traditional ones.
Re:peak oil clarification (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why we had $147/barrel oil a few years ago, not speculators.
If the world population were the only factor, oil would still be at $147/bbl, because the world population hasn't gone down.
I suspect that there was rampant speculation going on, and that a great many speculators lost their shirts when the bubble they'd created burst. But I don't know who the winners and losers were.
If you "smooth out" the spike, the price of oil is still going up pretty fast [wtrg.com] since its trough in the late 90s, even if not quite as fast as the speculation-fueled spike. That would suggest that you're correct: we are looking at a price rise, possibly just based on the supply and demand, and the current dip is just the spike evening itself out.
If that's the case, we'd expect to see oil continue a gradual rise of roughly 5% per year over inflation. But the spikes make it tricky to observe that with anything less than a five-year window.
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Re:peak oil clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all supply and demand
It's really not. OPEC deliberately (and publicly) slows production to keep prices high. They've gotten used to the profits that $70+/bbl oil brings. We're never going back to pre-Katrina oil prices. In the long run, though, this is good - it merely ensures the rise of much more fuel efficient vehicles.
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Re:peak oil clarification (Score:4, Informative)
Oil is a strange good. The wealthiest economies are those which consume the most of it. Under present conditions, each unit of oil consumed generates wealth. It's extremely hard to argue that oil is not significantly underpriced, to the greater benefit of those who monopolize its consumption.
If the price of oil doubles or triples, the western world would grouse so loudly, the internet might collapse under the collective groan, but in other respects, life would go on. We'd finally have to rationalize our consumption, a project long overdue on any number of other grounds.
I have trouble grasping Chicken Little squawking out of one beak "we're running out of oil, we're all going to freeze" while simultaneously squawking out of the other beak "we've already burned too much, we're all going to roast". Even if the GHG scenario fails to unfold with the anticipated drama, there's still the issue that we are potentially damaging ocean chemistry and wiping out global shellfish ecosystems.
My own position is that we already have more carbon at hand than we can prudently burn and release into the atmosphere, so peak oil is mostly about traders hoping to pump and dump amid a global stock panic.
My sceptic says: I'll believe the world is suffering a major food shortage when nobody grows tobacco. I'll believe the world is suffering a major energy shortage when we can no longer afford to throw a cell phone away because it's so yesterday.
The Afterlife of Cellphones [nytimes.com]
Regardless, recyclers say that from their vantage point it's obvious that most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence. "There's some fashion driving all of this and, by its nature, fashion is not eternal," says Mark Donovan of M:Metrics, which tracks the wireless industry.
This is a dead giveaway that our society is not yet anywhere close to energy stress, as much as the masters of markets in chaos wish us to fear this.
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Not a good argument (Score:5, Insightful)
an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
Great. This argument boils down to "Someone who we were told was wrong turned out to be right. Therefore, this other person who we are told is wrong (and by extension everyone who we are told is wrong) must also be right." I have no idea whether or not these whistleblowers are correct or not, but this "argument" by analogy is worse than useless, because it encourages fuzzy thinking.
Give it a rest, will you? (Score:4, Insightful)
These popular conspiracy theories about group X holding back product/information Y are all debunked by a single thought: IF these people are truly smart enough to rule the world (or an aspect of it), they know better than to try to control every single individual in it.
What does this mean? That they are smart enough to follow free markets. They are smart enough to know that they can't predict the future of the stock market, even if they can control an aspect of it. This assumes that these groups do have a level of involvement high enough to control the government, financial and religious institutions WITHOUT being exposed. You really think that a large group of people is capable of holding a secret so large for so long? A president gets a blowjob from an intern and the whole world hears about it. I doubt an army of engineers, scientists and politicians would be quiet about what really goes on in Area 51, killing people with vaccines, peak oil conspiracies or whatever bullshit is popular that day.
So give your conspiracy theories a rest and please report some real news.
Re:Give it a rest, will you? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's one thing classic conspiracy theory conspiracies very, very rarely have, and we're looking at it right now: Whistleblowers. It's not the first time either, that insiders have complained about political pressure.
So we're not exactly talking chemtrails-style conspiracies here, rather the kind of modest conspiracy that happens from time to time - such as a conspiracy to deny a link between smoking and cancer, or a conspiracy to deny that there's anything wrong with Iceland's economic situation. Not generation-spanning, all-encompassing conspiracies, just a couple of interest groups getting together and see if the can postpone inconvenient revelations (or their impact) a couple of more years.
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Re:Give it a rest, will you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. The only thing more annoying then a Conspiracy Theorist is someone who believes conspiracies don't exist.
Just because its not a huge, elaborate ploy, doesn't mean that there isn't SOMETHING underhanded going on, even if its just 1 individual.
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Probably overblown (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't "known reserves" all fucked up? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure OPEC allocates allowed production levels by each country's "known reserves", giving the rulers of those countries all kinds of incentive to exaggerate their reserves.
The medieval Saudi despots and thugs like Hugo Chavez want to grab all the money they can while THEY'RE alive.
Not worried (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not worried (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you don't realise, but the price of "gas" is factored in in pretty much everything else you buy... That video game, how do you reckon it's transported to the store? That dinner, how do you think its ingredients are harvested, and possible, with what it is cooked?
Price of oil/gas rises --> price of all manufactured goods & services rises --> cost of living rises... This effect is far, far bigger than the "very small part of your recurring bills" that is you directly buying gas...
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Missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
America, with 5% of the world's population, consumes about 25% of its resources. Reason? Single Use Zoning. The silly settlement pattern that puts housing neatly in one area, shopping in another, office space in another, and industry in another, and then forces people to drive between all these areas throughout the course of the day. Okay, it makes sense to zone off industry in certain cases where noise and pollution is an issue. But making it illegal to open a corner store in a residential area? No wonder so many journeys are made by car in the USA, bus journeys in that kind of sprawl take forever and mass transit gets a bad reputation (deservedly so). Induced traffic is another symptom of this problem - roads get wider, developers develop farther out to allow people to take advantage of the faster commute and lower property prices, roads get filled with cars belonging to these new commuters, and we're back to square one again with people demanding that the road gets widened even more!
As long as American settlement patterns are so screwed up, the problem will exist even if we aren't in a state of world peak oil. The problem is a hopeless addiction to petroleum that no magic wand nuclear power solution (mentioned by someone above) will be able to fix.
Re:Dont believe it. (Score:5, Informative)
Certainly the Saudi's will get much richer, but 'Big Oil' business is mostly a middleman these days. They make a good profit, but the vast bulk of the cost is for the crude from producers.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if there is more or not. The total determines the price. THe more simply means we'll be the last to fall, assuming an equal rate of use. However we use a lot more oil than other similar countries so that oil is a mitigating factor and if you think it's going to be sold at a discount to those in the US w/o some sort of government intervention then you are going to be in for a rude surprise.
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Re:Bah! (Score:4, Insightful)
By the time that happens we won't have any money left to exploit them with and it will be the Saudi's pumping oil out of the Midwest.....
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Re:Bah! (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand it's possible the EU and China might get mad, and decide to just declare war and take the oil by force.
How exactly do you invade a country with thousands of nuclear warheads and enough firearms to arm every adult citizen, should the need arise?
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Offer its industry leaders cheap labour, thus tempting them into moving their manufacturing capacity to your country, letting your enemy run up a debt it has no hope of ever repaying, use threats of not giving more credit to force it to devote more and more of its remaining manufacturing capacity to paying you while driving up taxes and weakening social services until the brightest young minds leave it. When it has been bled dry, cut the supply of goods, discard the hollow husk of your enemy, and keep the manufacturing plants they so graciously gave you.
It's working rather splendidly, judging by the financial crisis.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
You ignore the fact that China must purchase US dollars to keep its currency pegged and maintain the advantage of cheap labor. Their wealth is therefore built upon the value of the paper the US gives it. Make that paper worthless and the value of those holdings dissolves. Further, many of those shiny manfuacturing plants will be left idle and the value of goods made depreciates since the chief purchaser can no longer afford them.
The massive foreign holdings of the dollar has made the United States into the equivalent of a "bank too big to let fail." Just like the corporate fat cats cashing in millions while the economy around crumbled, the US continues to happily give pieces of paper to enjoy cheap goods, finance it's wars, and feed its appetite for oil.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Informative)
Peak oil is not about "running out" of oil. Yes there's plenty under the ground of the Dakotas, but that's not the issue.
Peak oil is about when the consumption exceeds the discovery of new fields, which means the "warehouse" of oil is emptying out instead of filling. Initially nobody will notice, but soon they will and there will be a drive-up in prices due to the rapidly-dwindling reserve. It's similar to what has happened with Gamecube games. It's still possible to buy brand-new copies of, for example, Mario Sunshine but because no new copies are being made, the price has risen from $30 upto $80 (or more).
Rising scarcity resulted in rising prices, and the same will happen with oil in the very-near future (2011 or 2012). If you've got money to spare, buy oil stock NOW.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
You say "environmental extremeists" as though it's one word.
Environmentalism has a long grey scale that you might be unfamiliar with. And like both current political leanings, there are a lot of other vectors to understand, too.
FWIW, I firmly believe that there's far more oil, pumpable at low cost, than we even know about. The problem isn't exporting oil dollars. The problem isn't exploiting domestic sources. The problem is that burning it blows carbon-oxygen atoms out tailpipes, where they pollute, and ultimately cause atmospheric damage. You can't tell me all of that soot is a good thing.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, until we have a viable alternative, why not use our domestic resources?
From a strategic standpoint, wouldn't it be better to wait till we've exhausted the oil supplies from everyone else before we start using our own?
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Re:Bah! (Score:4, Funny)
What soot? Are you blind, man?
And you think that catalytic converters all are in fine condition, and none of the trucks and trains and airliners in this country exhaust rosewater?
For a moment, let's just say that all of that CO2 and water are healthy emissions. We'll ignore using coal to generate electricity. The long term effects are here.
Would nuclear generation of power be useful? Yes, save we haven't figured out how to deal with the waste products, contamination, and safety issues. I invite a cogent redesign of nuclear power. I'd love it. I'd enjoy better hydro generation. Better and more efficient batteries.
The soot issue isn't solved. Just because you can't see the particulate matter doesn't mean it's not there, and that's only in the case of passenger autos fueled in the North American and Brazilian market by gasoline and ethanol (a better but weaker choice). Diesel autos fuel the EU and Asia, as well as much of Africa. Yes, they're improving, but on the whole, not by very much.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Would nuclear generation of power be useful? Yes, save we haven't figured out how to deal with the waste products, contamination, and safety issues.
You lost me at "safety issues". The worst accident in the history of American nuclear power resulted in zero fatalities. You'll forgive me if I don't see safety issues as a reason to abandon nuclear power.
The waste issue is a real one, but one that can be mitigated by nuclear reprocessing. In any case, if global warming is actually being driven by mankind's emissions of CO2 then I should think that the choice between a few thousand tons of low-level nuclear waste (the only kind that requires long term storage, high-level waste decays on much shorter timescales) and a few billion tons of CO2 should be an obvious one.
Thanks for demonstrating my original point though. As an environmentalist you find every single option that's currently on the table to be unacceptable. That makes for great politicking but horrible engineering.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually those construction methods have nothing to do with any evil greenies impinging on some poor picked on corporation's profitable endeavors. Construction on top of permafrost presents unique challenges to the long term viability of any project be it roads or buildings. What you are describing are hard earned engineering techniques that were preceeded by many construction failures on Alaska's permafrost and have zilch to do with greenies or environmental protection.
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Re:Bah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether it will run out in 20 years, or in 100 years, Oil WILL run out eventually. Whether we make the investment to retool our entire civilization now or in 100 years, we WILL have to do so.
I'd rather we rush ahead right now and find out we had decades of leeway than sit on our asses right now and wake up tomorrow to find out we didn't have as much time as we thought we had.
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Re:Bah! (Score:4, Insightful)
My understanding of Godwin's law is not that referencing Nazis is bad (after all, they were a part of history). He just observed that eventually, if a fight goes on long enough, someone will make reference to them. He did not opine if that was bad or good.
Personally I think it's rather silly we can't talk about tyrants or their tyrannical governments. Even if I invoke a different tyrant to make my point, like Communist Dictator Nicholae Ceasescu, I still get accused of Godwining myself. It's like a blatant censorship of history, and the willful decision to put blinders over your eyes and deny that governments can, from time to time, be destructive to their own citizens.
Foolishness.
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Re:Bah! (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, the fact that "enviro-nazi" is a meme certainly applies here. The original post could have said "enviro-droids", "envirotards" or "envirobabies [youtube.com]" and the argument would have held all the same. Does replacing one meme with a different one change the Godwin status of a statement?
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From Peak to Asymptote (Score:5, Insightful)
Once we have reached the "peak", how long will it take to actually "run out"?
Forever.
We don't "run out." What happens is that the production decreases, and the price increases, so production heads asymptotically toward (but never reaching) zero production rate. As the price rises it becomes economically feasible to extract harder and harder to recover oil, and production never stops.
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Re:wind (Score:4, Informative)
Uh...the IEA is saying that everything is fine and dandy and it's some random person in the IEA who is saying the sky is falling...not sure what you're driving at, I'm sure claiming things are fine as they are is a massive conspiracy to bring about a big scary bad world government.
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