Oil: The Decline is Near

By John Miller

Peak oil is back. In the 2000s, the idea that oil production would soon peak before declining shook the energy world. The shale oil boom in the united states seemed to invalidate this forecast, offering a reprieve to a world still addicted to oil. But this boom reveals its weaknesses, and the countdown continues. Without sufficient reserves, world production is likely to decline in the coming years. Based on hitherto confidential geological and industrial data, the authors raise the alarm about a largely ignored threat… except from the oil companies themselves! The era of plenty is coming to an end. If the economy does not anticipate this weaning, the consequences promise to be severe. In addition, warns this solidly documented work, the decline of the oil windfall risks causing major geopolitical upheavals. There is a solution: take our climate commitments seriously, and finally get out of dependence on oil. This book sounds like an urgent wake-up call.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215292402

Book preview

Warning

What do we mean by a near decline?

If crude consumption does not slow, the current state of oil reserves makes a decline in global production inevitable before the end of the 2030s, according to all benchmark sources. In the absence of sufficient discoveries, the risk of a decline beginning by 2025 has been highlighted on several occasions by the International Energy Agency. Since 2020, the investment freeze caused by the Covid crisis has made even the management of the French group Total doubt the ability of the world oil industry to compensate over the next few years for the depletion of many oil-producing regions.

2040, 2025, 2019? Even at the most distant plausible horizon, the possibility of the beginning of a sudden decline in world production of liquid fuels can be said to be close, and even very close, if we observe the inertia of the major technical systems, of these vital organs of society whose functioning today depends in whole or in part on oil.

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Problems must also appear before the onset of this decline, from the foothills of peak oil. We propose here the hypothesis according to which the limits of crude reserves are among the primary causes of at least two of the most serious economic and political crises of this beginning of the century.

We are not aiming here to make a prediction, but to qualify a risk, to draw the consequence: this risk is a second inexorable reason to organize the exit of oil, urgently.

1. Peak oil, the symptoms of an inexorable evil

Conventional oil reached an absolute peak in production in 2008. This record can never be beaten again, the International Energy Agency has since confirmed on several occasions . This fateful point has been passed not because of decarbonization climate policies, but because of the geological limits of the planet. In 2019, this production of conventional oil – the conventional liquid oil, the black gold which still provides more than three quarters of the world's production of all liquid fuels – was 4% below the historical peak of 2008 2 . Because of the decline in discoveries, which has been going on for decades, and given the state of the remaining reserves, the production of conventional oil is destined to decline little by little, inexorably. Such is the danger of peak oil; this danger increases with each refueling, as long as humanity is slow to organize itself to get out of fossil fuels in order to save our climate.

Fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, coal, still provide four-fifths of the energy consumed in the world. Oil is the main one, still providing in 2019 a third of all the energy needed to run the economy 3 . By having recourse without measure to these carbonaceous and drying up energies, we have so far only slipped along a slope of weaker resistance leading to the climatic catastrophe, but also to a Mad Max world, where we compete for the ultimate abundant resources of crude (this has already started, in Iraq, in 2003).

The output of oil and other fossil fuels is a high mountain pass whose path has not yet been traced. The peak of oil production threatens to crush nations that fail to drastically reduce the consumption of this energy which has allowed the rise of the modern world.

Since the peak of 2008, oil companies have never invested so many hundreds of billions of dollars each year in the search for oil, thanks to equipment of incredible sophistication. Nothing worked. Oil companies are discovering less and less of the conventional oil that has fueled the fires of growth for a century. So-called unconventional oils have taken over since 2008 to ensure the continued growth of world liquid fuel production capacities, in order to satisfy a still gigantic demand, which continues to grow strongly in developing countries.

How long will unconventional oils be able to compensate for the decline of conventional oil?

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To understand the causes and implications of the conventional oil peak crossing in 2008, we must begin by recalling what oil is.

Petroleum belongs to a vast family of hydrogen and carbon molecules with a particular structure: hydrocarbons. Whether they are in gaseous (notably natural gas), liquid (petroleum, derived from the Latin petraoleum rock oil) or solid (bitumen) form, hydrocarbons are among the most common molecules in creation.

The oil that we exploit today has been formed for a billion years, that is to say since there exists on this planet organic matter from living beings. It mainly comes from the degradation of plankton and bacteria, at the bottom of lagoons and archaic seas. Since then, the vagaries of geographical and climatic developments have endowed particularly well with black gold the regions of the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, the South Atlantic, the Gulf of Guinea, the southern Mediterranean, the Insulindia, the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and on either side of the Rocky Mountains and the Urals.

1. FORMATION OF CONVENTIONAL OIL

Just like coal, the other great source of so-called fossil energy, hydrocarbons form a fantastic stock of solar energy metabolized by the grace of photosynthesis, then stored underground for millions of years. Unlike the vast majority of living organisms which degrade by oxidation after their death, the microscopic organisms which formed most of the hydrocarbons were deposited at the bottom of oxygen-poor seas, before being covered by successive layers of sediments. , until it is several hundred meters deep.

This very slow steaming under high pressure results in the formation of source rocks, which contain a small portion of organic matter called kerogen, crushed down to a molecular scale to form hydrocarbons.

The interplay of pressures then causes some of the hydrocarbons to rise to the surface, sometimes until they evaporate in the form of methane or accumulate on the ground in the form of bitumen. Since Antiquity, these natural sources of inflammable materials have been venerated, notably in Persia by the followers of Zoroaster, in fire temples. The Bible tells that the bitumen of Mesopotamia was used as mortar to erect the tower of Babel, and that the mother of Moses coated with bitumen the papyrus basket in which she hid her son, to let it be carried by the Nile.

Sometimes, the hydrocarbons are stopped in their ascent to the surface by layers of impermeable clay rock. They are then trapped in what geologists call reservoirs. It is in these deposits that oil companies go to look for conventional hydrocarbons, whether oil or natural gas. The more intense the thermal cracking of the kerogen, the smaller the molecules of hydrocarbons formed: beyond five carbon atoms per molecule, oil is produced, below, gas (methane or natural gas, ethane , propane, butane).

In the early days after drilling, oil and gas often rise from the well under the effect of their own pressure. As the reservoir depletes and the internal pressure decreases, it becomes increasingly necessary to pump and inject fluids to force the hydrocarbons back up. These techniques always end up meeting absolute physical limits. In the vast majority of cases, only about a third of the oil in the ground can be recovered. In the few most favorable deposits, up to half of the oil in place in the reservoir can be extracted. In the language of oil companies, we call resources all the oil present in the reservoir, and reserves the technically and economically recoverable oil.

Conventional oil, the queen form of hydrocarbons, is drawn from porous and permeable rocks known as reservoirs, sealed in the depths of the earth under a layer of impermeable rock. Among the non-conventional oils (which alone ensure the growth of production since 2008), we find above all shale oil, whose exploitation by hydraulic fracturing experienced a spectacular boom after 2008, and on the other hand heavy oils that are excavated on the surface or thinned by injecting steam at depth, in particular