Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Weekly EIA Data
The Weekly Status Report from the U.S. Dept. of Energy' EIA is in, and in no surprise the decline in the volume of imported Oil into the U.S continues to accelerate with year over year imports down 9.6%. With 10 months of data, and given the last 2 year's import decline, I think you can start to draw your own conclusions.
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23 comments:
Imports are declining, and our fearless leaders in D.C. are doing absolutely nothing to replace it. What a bunch of buttheads. It doesn't have to be this bad.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Replace it with what?
Government Guy :)
Bur,
Good point!
Coal guy,
Better point!!
Peace
Bur,
Mish did a great piece on your area today. Should make you proud.
Peace
Mish doesn't live in Chicago, like some people. I know all about the tax escape strategies. ;)
..the elephant in the room is stirring.
What I am not sure about though is if exports are down so much from KSA due to the export land model, or due to the US just not having need for the imports?
Bur,
Offshore drilling, ANWR.
Replace fixed applications of coal, oil, gas with nuclear, solar, wind.
Coal, NG to liquids.
Oil Shale (800,000,000,000 barrels).
Need increased electrical capacity for plug-in cars.
I don't know which will be most practical or cost effective, but more effort at any of these today will help 5 years from now. The longer we wait the worse it will get.
None is happening in magnitude or urgency that this situation demands. The Obama administration is authorizing just enough to say they are doing something. In fact, there is not enough going on to make a bit of difference.
When transportation and conversion from oil heat start to make demands on the electric grid, there won't be enough capacity there either.
Then, there is public transportation, electric rail, etc. Not much happening.
But, they are repaving I95, and digging up RT1 and every other highway around here, so that I'll have a nice smooth surfaces to push my car down when I can't buy gas. Where's the change I can believe in? Where's the hope? I see economic collapse. Round two will make today's recession look like day at the beach. Not that the Republicans have done much better.
Regards,
Coal Guy
oOOo
The world is in a bidding war for a diminishing supply of oil. This is all we can afford at $80/bbl. At $100/bbl, it will be less. The is how it is in Import Land. Our economy will shrink to fit the supply. The export land model is rolling out full force
Regards,
Coal Guy
Thanks Coal guy.
But could it not also be possible, supply is shrinking to fit the economy? And a large part of the price runup is due to specualtors? We all know by now the gs story, short sqeezing and other games going on in the market.
I tend to think its the way you put it with the export land model coming into play, but what data can we look at to know a more certain answer to this?
oOOo,
Speculators can mess in the market only for a certain amount of time. If they push prices artificially high for too long, all the storage tanks will fill up with the extra production that high prices encourage. Of course, the producers could be withholding production, but they have never been too disciplined in the past.
Prices have been creeping up recently while stocks in the US are shrinking slightly. Prices have been pretty stable for the last few months also. Many people have been expecting one last drop in prices before oil gets REALLY short, but it hasn't happened, at least in $US terms. As time goes on, one final dip gets less and less likely. My guess is that the $70 to $80 range is near equilibrium.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Markets aren't rational, but production and consumption figures don't like.
If we are consuming less energy, for whatever reason, that will mean that our living standards are lower (at least according to mainstream metrics that don't include things like life satisfaction - the Amish, in my book have high living standards, but they would be considered poverty stricken by Mainstream Economics).
Coal (or can I call you carbon?) :),
I have both personal experience and done research on all the alternatives to gasoline and diesel, and they are all lesser fuels, nowhere near packing the punch of 100-130,000 BTU per gallon of gasoline & diesel. I won't bore you with a list of where every single alternative falls down, from unprofitable at best to unworkable at worst. We don't even know if there is ANY oil at ANWR -- it is against the law to drill there (there probably is, but don't know for sure). The problem with electric vehicles has ALWAYS been the batteries. They just can't hold a charge long enough -- even the lithium ones. If any alternative were viable, it would have replaced oil by now. There is no substitute for gas & diesel that won't require a BIG compromise in our lifestyle. Gasoline & diesel are here to stay -- life will just get more expensive.
Bureaucrat
Coal and NG can be made into liquid fuel -- diesel fuel for example. Nazi Germany ran its war machine on it. Driven by heat from nuclear power, it does not have to be any more polluting than present liquid fuel. There are also in-situ recovery methods under development for oil shale (put on hold by Obama), also producing liquid hydrocarbon fuel. No lesser fuels. However, gub'ment has regulatory control over all of it, and rather than promote development, they have both feet on the brake.
Nothing started today can provide a bit of relief in less than 5 years. I've worked on big-system electronics for over 20 years, and one thing is glaringly clear. The thing that most determines the ending date of a project is the starting date.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Coal guy,
The idea of a five year minimum is scary, considering that falls in the severe crunch time as pointed out on this blog earlier. Imagine if we wait a couple of years more. Any guess as to what that looks like, that is $5 gal. gas or more. There really is no need to further theorize then the cost of fuel.
Peace
To Bur:
November 5, 2009 12:38 PM
I can't believe it but I'm actually agreeing with you. Damn right nothing can operate this civilization on a scale and at speed it is going except oil. No amount of substitutes amount to diddly squat compared to the BTU's/per ubiquity/price/safety/portability/versatility as feedstock for chemicals/insecticides/herbicides/medicines and yes even it's relatively low environmental impact. Not one thing.
That means that our lifestyle will get greatly constrained by shortages of everything. Including and especially food. So please stop wishing for innovation to pull your ass out of this. We have already failed to innovate our way out of this because we are out of time. So lets get planning on how to deal with reality.
Have a nice decent,
Chuck H.
.....there again, I always get depressed at this time of year!
I don't disagree either about liquid hydrocarbon fuels being the best. The question is where will they come from? At $80/bbl alternatives become economically feasible.
We can't do anything about a asteroid impact, but things can be done about this. We ARE going to have a bad 5 to 10 years, no matter what. Longer if we keep this bunch of Marxist buttheads in power. Among the other things on their agenda is to have all of us in the world ( except our Elite Masters, of course ) at the same standard of living. It works out to about 70% of the per-capita income in China.
We, all, should be living at about 150 sq ft of living space per person, and eat lots of rice and beans or potatoes and cabbage, depending on your latitude. If your standard of living is better than this, you are a racist, imperialist murderer. Do you think that people with that background agenda really want us to recover? I tend to think that the present administration's negligence of this crisis is part of the plan. As Bur says, they may be dumb, but they aren't stupid.
The liquid fuels issue is the single largest issue that the United States faces. It completely dwarfs everything else. What are the major issues in Washington? Cap and Tax, citizenship for illegal aliens and healthcare reform.
Regards,
Coal Guy
Thoughtful and reasonable points all.
Chuck H. and oOOo - its good to hear from you again.
CTL and GTL (coal and natgas to liquids) is way more expensive to produce than oil, even at an elevated oil cost rate. They are also hugely expensive and polluting. Oil Shale is wildly expensive. Shell has been trying to make it at a profit for 30+ years, and hasn't figured it out yet. These are not workable. (P.S. Nazi Germany did fuel half its war machine with CTL oil, but then again, they had lots of free slave labor to draw from).
They are building two CTL plants along the Ohio river. They expect it to cost $53 to $56 per barrel. Quite a good return. Nuclear power is equivalent to about $40/barrel. If oil shale is impossible to extract, why did Obama have to stop it?
Regards,
Coal Guy.
The big thing that has been holding development of alternate fuels back (besides the federal government) is the fear in the investment community that they'd sink 20 billion in something, only to have oil drop back to $10 per barrel. Those fears are subsiding.
Regards,
Coal Guy
The big thing that has held alternative fuels back is the HUGE head start oil had. No other energy form on Earth was created from massive ponds of "algae-filled sunlight," compressed under high temperature for millions of years into long-chain hydrocarbons, which cannot be easily substituted. I mean, that is a head start and use of a super-long time span that no substitute to oil and natural gas can possibly equal. Oil was a godsend. It wasn't a fair fight. :)
I guess as a reply to this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency
IEA Special Release:
With respect to recent discussion about oil decline rates, we are exceptionally making available the respective chapter of last year's WEO 2008.
10 November 2009
FIELD-BY-FIELD ANALYSIS OF OIL PRODUCTION
Is decline accelerating?
Our field-by-field analysis of decline rates allows us to obtain a reasonable estimate
of the average decline rates for all the fields in the world, weighted by production. All
the decline rates presented so far in this chapter are based on field-by-field production
data from our database, covering 798 fields. The average size of these fields —
predominantly super-giants and giants — is significantly larger than the average size of
all the fields in the world. The 580 fields included in our analysis of post-peak decline
rates produced 40.5 mb/d of crude oil in 2007 — equal to 58% of world production.
...we estimate that the average observed decline rate worldwide is 6.7%. Were
that rate to be applied to 2007 crude oil production, the annual loss of output would
be 4.7 mb/d.
http://www.iea.org/index_info.asp?id=855
Seems to me the whistleblowers in the first article are genuine.
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