Preface. One of the many items I found of interest in this book “The Power Worshippers” was that it wasn’t until 1979, six years after Roe v Wade, that conservative activists seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a way to deny President Jimmy Carter because he was threatening to tax religious segregated (racist) schools.
Preface. This is a book review that has key excerpts of “Foxocracy”, by Tobin Smith, who worked at Fox for 14 years and was friends with Roger Ailes as well as the staff that decided what the propaganda of the day would be. He learned all about the psychology behind the show, including using techniques of Nazi propaganda.
What’s most alarming is that millions of families have been torn apart when members have gone down the Foxhole. It is addictive, because like World Wrestling Entertainment, the right-wing newscasters win every time against purposefully chosen much weaker liberal punching-bags. It’s a good feeling for the majority of fox viewers, many of them among the 54% of America’s working poor who are barely getting by.
The Trump WWE fans don’t care if the game is rigged, they know WWE is rigged, but are addicted to the fuzzy warm feelings they get when their team wins. So they don’t mind being fooled by Fox. Top that off with a large percentage of Fox viewers being evangelists who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Who could possibly be easier to fool? They don’t want facts. They don’t care about facts, they are cult members who will likely never snap out of it because they don’t want to.
Preface. This is a book review of Joe Bageant’s 2008 Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Joe Bageant grew up in poor, conservative Winchester Virginia, which is like tens of thousands of other small towns in America. He is one of the few who escaped and got a college education. When he retired there in 1999, he knew hundreds of people, and gives readers a visceral, gut-level understanding of what life is like in Republican bible-belt territory. He paints vivid portraits of the locals he knows and cares about, the feudal economics that keep them poor, how Christian fundamentalism is woven into their lives, and why they vote against their own interests. And he is quite funny.
Preface. Duh! This is a no brainer. The 140 million people born every year will all want a car, house, TV, refrigerator, travel abroad, stove, air conditioning, bicycle, tools, and more. Meanwhile businesses and governments build every more roads, skyscrapers, bridges and more, garbage landfills fill up, all of it brought to you by fossil fuels, and their decline is the only thing that will lead to fewer births. NOT VOLUNTARILY. Because it is not okay to talk about birth control, abortion, population and immigration as factors in the ecological and overshoot crisis the earth is facing. To do so is to shake the foundations of capitalism, which is a gigantic Ponzi scheme that depends on more population growth to keep going, to keep businesses and religions in business, provide a safety net and more.
In the 70s and first half of the 80s population and immigration were on the platforms of ALL environmental groups. Today in mainstream media and most environmental groups, only nasty, racist people who hate black and brown people are mentioned. Never an interview with an ecologist, or discussion of limits to growth. Certainly the IPCC has no models of how less population would affect climate change, though it obviously would, since the reason for deforestation, wetland and biodiversity loss and all the other existential crises occur is to feed ever more people driving ever more cars burning ever more fossils to growth food, refrigeration, cooking, heating, cooling, and manufacture ever more goods for ever more people.
The Sierra Club was instrumental in making the topic of population and immigration taboo and politically incorrect because David Gelbaum gave them over $100 million dollars in exchange for not taking a position on these issues anymore (Weiss KR (2004) The Man Behind the Land. Los Angeles Times). And $100 million more since then according to Wikipedia.
I did a google search on population growth and climate change and looked at hundreds of results. I found three, only one of them mainstream. You have to go back to 2009 to start seeing articles on their connection. The dozen or so mainstream articles that do mention these two topics deny there is a connection, how dare anyone suggest such a racist thing. Kind of like the argument pro-gun advocates use to deny the need for gun control by saying “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.
Meanwhile, without free contraception and abortion world-wide through family planning, taxing more than one child, and other measures that are not harsh and voluntary, we come ever closer to Mother Nature solving the problem for us with drought, heat waves, and more — which has been the death of many civilizations in the past. With peak production of both conventional and unconventional oil in 2018, declining oil in the future will be the coup de grace, since for now we can buy our way out of it and stay alive with help from fossil fuels, such as to get the last fish in the ocean with giant ships and spotter planes in the Antarctic, air-conditioning in heat waves, refrigeration, industrially grow food for 8 billion people with gigantic tractors and combines and so on.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
***
Population growth is the increase in the number of humans on Earth. For most of human history our population size was relatively stable. But with innovation and industrialization, energy, food, water, and medical care became more available and reliable. Consequently, global human population rapidly increased, and continues to do so, with dramatic impacts on global climate and ecosystems. We will need technological and social innovation to help us support the world’s population as we adapt to and mitigate climate and environmental changes.
Human population growth impacts the Earth system in a variety of ways, including:
***
Global population surpassed 8 billion this week, a shocking milestone because back in the 1990s this threshold was not expected to be breached until 2050. Whether you’re a dour Malthusian or a technological optimist, one thing is undeniable: The 2.7 billion people added to global population since 1990 makes the task of averting a climate catastrophe vastly more challenging than it was when global warming first arose as a mainstream concern.
Getting to zero net emissions in 1990—when fossil fuels were putting 22.4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) into the atmosphere—was hard enough. Now, we have to eliminate those emissions along with roughly 14 billion tons of annual GHG emissions resulting from population growth.
One of actions to take is family planning, which until now has been largely absent from the conversation around global warming. Most of the expected 2 billion people will be born in the poorer nations. These nations burn fewer fossil fuels, but all aspire to raise their standard of living, which, given today’s energy mix, means more GHG emissions per capita. Even without economic growth, that population increase would mean roughly four billion additional metric tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere each year. That’s about a 10% increase, and, as of today, the world has never been able to voluntarily reduce annual emissions.
Population should be part of climate discussions, but I cannot remember a time when family planning has been featured in international efforts. Yes, it’s a hot button topic in many of the emerging nations, many of which take affront when the rich nations ask them to stabilize their numbers. But its absence from the agenda from last week’s COP27 is a tell that the Congress of Parties process is not a serious effort to really tackle the risk of climate change.
Population growth is the elephant in the room for climate change, but it is also the elephant in the room for ecological issues such as tropical deforestation, desertification, the extinction crisis, the destabilizing of earth’s life support systems on land and in the oceans; demographic issues such as involuntary migration, fresh water, and food insecurity; and political issues such as civil unrest and state failure. Slowing population growth will reduce pressures on all of these issues and threats.
Population growth is a fraught issue. In the last few decades, a major driver to limit family size has been the demographic shift towards urban areas. In cities, additional kids become a liability because of the higher costs of housing and food. This shows that people can change attitudes towards family size quite rapidly, given incentives and access to family planning. For governments, the incentive should be the prospect of a climate Hell if population continues to increase by several hundred million people every decade. Many emerging nations have made great strides in lowering infant mortality, but, all too often efforts on maternal and infant health are not coupled with access to family planning, which is one reason why human numbers surpassed 8 billion two decades ahead of schedule.
Laubichler M (2022) Population growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine’ that’s changing the planet. Salon.com
Behind a paywall for me, but I found this summary: “”Human population growth is the root cause of climate change” is a 2021 letter and comment in The BMJ by Jonathan Austen. The letter argues that population growth and increased consumption are the main causes of climate change. It suggests that population growth could be addressed through financial incentives for smaller families and free access to contraception. The letter also claims that population stability would lead to less deforestation and construction, which would have a significant impact on climate change”.
CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — South Carolina is growing, but not all growth is good. At least that is what Leon Kolankiewicz, an environmental scientist with NumbersUSA and lead author of “From Sea to Sprawling Sea,” an environmental impact study that explores how U.S. population growth has driven rural land loss across four decades, said.
“You are making it very difficult to achieve your climate goals by increasing the number of energy consumers, it just doesn’t work”. From 1982 to 2017, 35 years, South Carolina lost 2,126 square miles to what Kolankiewicz described as urban sprawl – the loss of rural land to urbanized development. “This pace of development, rural land loss, is accelerating,” Kolankiewicz said. “So that, quite understandably, has a lot of South Carolinians concerned or even upset.
Though politicians, including Gov. Henry McMaster, have praised South Carolina’s population growth, and paraded it around as proof of a “booming” economy, environmentalists like Kolankiewicz are concerned that urban sprawl, brought about by an increase in population, can steer areas like the Palmetto State – and the United States – into an existential crisis. “We face an issue of how human beings are going to live when there are 330 million of us in this country,” Kolankiewicz said. “We can’t keep doing that. It is unsustainable. You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. Losing rural lands to urban sprawl can cripple the environment. Wildlife loses natural grazing land, farmers lose farmland and deforestation only adds to dramatic drops in air quality,” Kolankiewicz explained.
In his study, he contends that even if the loss of habitat and farmland continues at the lower rate of the 2002 to 2017 period, the average destruction of 1,200 square miles per year across the United States would be unsustainable for a country that desires the continued capability of food independence and stewardship of the animal and plant life currently living within its borders. “You can’t have growth in any object or entity in a finite system,” Kolankiewicz said. “Neither the United States, the biosphere, nor the world as a whole was growing in terms of resources to accommodate ever-increasing human demands.”
Kolankiwicz, who also wrote:
***
No doubt human population growth is a major contributor to global warming, given that humans use fossil fuels to power their increasingly mechanized lifestyles. More people means more demand for oil, gas, coal and other fuels mined or drilled from below the Earth’s surface that, when burned, spew enough carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere to trap warm air inside like a greenhouse.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, human population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people during the course of the 20th century. (Think about it: It took all of time for population to reach 1.6 billion; then it shot to 6.1 billion over just 100 years.) During that time emissions of CO2, the leading greenhouse gas, grew 12-fold. And with worldwide population expected to surpass nine billion over the next 50 years, environmentalists and others are worried about the ability of the planet to withstand the added load of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and wreaking havoc on ecosystems down below.
Developed countries consume the lion’s share of fossil fuels. The United States, for example, contains just five percent of world population, yet contributes a quarter of total CO2 output. But while population growth is stagnant or dropping in most developed countries (except for the U.S., due to immigration), it is rising rapidly in quickly industrializing developing nations. According to the United Nations Population Fund, fast-growing developing countries (like China and India) will contribute more than half of global CO2 emissions by 2050, leading some to wonder if all of the efforts being made to curb U.S. emissions will be erased by other countries’ adoption of our long held over-consumptive ways.
“Population, global warming and consumption patterns are inextricably linked in their collective global environmental impact,” reports the Global Population and Environment Program at the non-profit Sierra Club. “As developing countries’ contribution to global emissions grows, population size and growth rates will become significant factors in magnifying the impacts of global warming.”
According to the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank, the overriding challenges facing our global civilization are to curtail climate change and slow population growth. “Success on these two fronts would make other challenges, such as reversing the deforestation of Earth, stabilizing water tables, and protecting plant and animal diversity, much more manageable,” reports the group. “If we cannot stabilize climate and we cannot stabilize population, there is not an ecosystem on Earth that we can save.”
CONTACTS: United Nations Population Fund, www.unfpa.org; Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program, www.sierraclub.org/population; Worldwatch Institute, www.worldwatch.org.
Preface. I can’t do justice to this book in a book review (so buy it), especially the history of how the right-wing libertarians came to be so powerful, their huge influence on congress, the judiciary, and laws enacted, and how this was done with great stealth. At the heart of what they want to do is change the U.S. Constitution, in ways that would benefit the super rich and harm everyone else. They’d do this by putting even more locks and bolts on it to any change.
As it is, the Constitution already has a lot of locks. It restrains what the people can do to a degree not seen in any other democratic nation. It has too many checks and balances, veto power, and vast power is given to rural states, which tend to be conservative, by giving them more votes to them than populous states. For instance, consider that Wyoming and California both have 2 senators, but California is 70 times more populated, so a vote in California has 70 times less weight than a Wyoming resident’s vote.
The remaining oil is poor quality, and the energy to get this often remote oil so great that more and more energy (blue) goes into oil production itself, leaving far less — the grey area — available to fuel the rest of civilization. Source: 22 June 2009. David Murphy. The Net Hubbert Curve: What Does It Mean? theoildrum.One of the reasons the actual amount of oil drops off so fast is that the EROI is so low. A huge amount of the oil has to go back into getting more oil rather than being delivered to society as it once was on the upside. I just found this really good, short, well written, & illustrated explanation of EROI that you should read first if you aren’t familiar with EROI, or even if you are as a reminder:
Diminishing returns: understanding ‘net energy’ and ‘EROEI’
Oil is the master resource that makes all other activities and goods possible, including coal, natural, gas, transportation, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and 500,000 products made OUT OF petroleum, often using oil as the energy source as well. Or natural gas. Think PLASTICS (especially with fracked shale oil, which is superlight with maybe gasoline but not much kerosene or diesel).
This is the scariest chart I’ve ever seen. It shows civilization is likely to crash within the next 20-30 years. I thought the oil depletion curve would be symmetric (blue), but this chart reveals it’s more likely to be a cliff (gray) when you factor in Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). And ironically, do you know what saved us? FRACKED OIL & NATURAL GAS. Since 2005. But the last oil basin, the Permian, shows signs of slowing down, and fracked wells decline by 80% in three years (versus 6% for the 500 giant oil fields we get half of all oil from, most of them in the Middle East). Fracked oil accounted for 96% of the oil that slightly raised oil product a little since world conventional oil peaked in 2008. And don’t forget, world peak conventional AND unconventional peaked in 2018.
The gray represents the actual (net) energy after you subtract out the much higher amount of energy (blue) needed to get and process the remaining nasty, distant, low-quality, and difficult to get at oil. We’ve already gotten the high-quality, easy oil.
Before peaking in 2006, the world production of conventional petroleum grew exponentially at 6.6% per year between 1880 and 1970. Although Hubbert drew symmetric rising and falling production curves, the declining side may be steeper than a bell curve, because the heroic measures we’re taking now to keep production high (i.e. infill drilling, horizontal wells, enhanced oil recovery methods, etc.), may arrest decline for a while, but once decline begins, it will be more precipitous (Patzek 2007).
Clearly you can’t “grow” the economy without increasing supplies of energy. You can print all the money or create all the credit you want, but try stuffing those down your gas tank and see how far you go. Our financial system depends on endless growth to pay back debt, so when it crashes, there’s less credit available to finance new exploration and drilling, which guarantees an oil crisis further down the line.
Besides financial limits, there are political limits, such as wars over remaining resources.
For a little while you can fix broken infrastructure and still plant, harvest, and distribute food, maintain and operate drinking water and sewage treatment plants, pump water from running-dry aquifers like the Ogallala which grows 1/4 of our food, but at some point it will be hard to provide energy to all food and infrastructure.
The entire world is competing for the steep grey area of oil that’s left, most of which is in the Middle East.
Hubbert thought nuclear energy would fill in for fossil fuels
Gail Tverberg at ourfiniteworld writes “Hubbert only made his forecast of a symmetric downslope in the context of another energy source fully replacing oil or fossil fuels, even before the start of the decline. For example, looking at his 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, we see nuclear taking over before the fossil fuel decline”.
Another way of looking at this is what systems ecologists call Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). In the USA in 1930 an “investment” of the energy in 1 barrel of oil produced another 100 barrels of oil, or an EROEI of 100:1. That left 99 other barrels to use to build roads, bridges, factories, homes, libraries, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, railroads, cars, buses, trucks, computers, toys, refrigerators – any object you can think of, and 500,000 products use petroleum as a feedstock (see point #6). By 1970 EROEI was down to 30:1 and in 2000 it was 11:1 in the United States.
Charles A. S. Hall, who has studied EROEI for most of his career and published in Science and other top peer-reviewed journals, believes that society needs an EROEI of at least 12 or 13:1 to maintain our current level of civilization.
Because we got the easy oil first, we have used up 73% of the net energy that will ever be available, since the remaining half of the reserves require so much energy to extract.
Nearly all of the good, high quality, cheap sweet oil is in the Middle East. Most of the remaining oil will need vast amounts of fresh water to get it out, but there is very limited fresh water in these countries. The refineries and other extraction infrastructure are easy targets to damage or destroy by terrorists or in wars as well.
Oil producing countries are using more and more of their own (declining) oil as population and industry grows within their own nation, and they too need to use more and more energy to get at their difficult oil. This results in a similar chart to the net energy cliff — suddenly there will hardly be any oil to buy on the world markets. See Jeffrey Brown’s article “The Export Capacity Index” (one of his statistics is that at the current rate of increasing imports of oil in India and China, these 2 countries alone would be importing 100% of available oil within 18 years).
As we improve our technology to get at the remaining oil, we make the cliff on the other side even steeper as we get oil now that would have been available to future generations.
Since what remains is increasingly difficult and expensive to find, develop and extract, investment payback periods lengthen, eventually to impossibly long periods, or to periods that approach the useful life of the capital investment (effectively the same limit in the financial dimension as is an EROEI of 1). Which means it doesn’t matter how much might theoretically be underground, the only thing that matters is how much is actually going to be economically feasible to recover, and that is going to be considerably less than 100% of what might be theoretically and technically possible to recover.
Energy is becoming impossibly expensive, as you can see in these photos of The Tallest structure ever moved by Mankind, a Norwegian natural gas offshore platform.
This makes whatever oil we have left last even less long.
Projects maximize a return on investment over a return of every last drop of possible oil. Making money is so important that a lot of offshore Gulf oil that could have been obtained if extracted more slowly remains in the ground to wastefully get it out as fast as possible to make a profit because that’s how our financial system operates: short-term gratification. But hey! That’s less carbon dioxide and global warming, so in a totally unintended orgy of insatiable greed the “there are no limits to growth” billionaires have ironically helped save the planet.
According to the IEA, the world decline rate is 8.5% offset 4% by Enhanced Oil Recovery (which takes energy). Hook says oil will decline by 0.015 a year when all oil is decline for the giant oil fields, but at higher rates for smaller fields. Especially fracked oil at 80% over 3 years. That’s too fast for civilization to cope with.
Welcome to net zero! Great news since so many think that climate change is the ONLY problem.
And the problem isn’t just geological. There are several critical areas of the world where the flow of oil could be stopped by war or terrorism.
By 2024, if not sooner, the unequal distribution of the remaining oil, starvation generated riots and pillaging, and collapsing economies have triggered war(s), massive migrations, and social chaos.
Shale oil and natural gas can not prevent the cliff. Martin Payne explains: “shale oil plays give us a temporary reprieve from what Bob Hirsch called the severe consequences of not taking enough action proactively with respect to peak oil. Without unconventional oil, what we wind up with is essentially Hubbert’s cliff instead of a Hubbert’s rounded peak”. But this won’t last: “Conventional oil–which was found in huge quantities, in giant fields in the 40’s and 50’s – well those giant fields had huge reserves and high porosities and permeabilities – meaning they would flow at very high rates for decades. This is in contrast to a relative few shale oil plays which have very low porosity and perm and which must be hydraulically fractured to flow. Conventional oil is just a different animal than unconventional oil; some unconventional oil wells have high initial rates of production, but all of these wells have high decline rates. Hubbert anticipated a lot of incremental efforts by the industry to make the right-hand or decline side of his curve a more gradual curve rather than a sharp drop (Andrews)
If any of these wars involve nuclear bombs, then at least a billion people will die.
The unrest has certainly curtailed the ability of oil companies to drill.
Even farmers may stop growing crops once city residents and roaming militias harvest whatever is grown (i.e. Africa as described in Parenti’s “Tropic of Chaos: Climate change and the new geography of violence).
Cyberattacks from China, Russia, and elsewhere have brought the electric grid down in the USA to prevent US military forces for trying to grab the remaining Saudi and Iraqi oil –the armed forces will be too busy trying to maintain order in the USA to venture abroad — nor could they go even if they wanted to, because Chinese and Russian drone attacks will have destroyed all of the United State oil refineries, and we have retaliated against them, so they won’t be able to refine oil either). We’ve also cyberattacked their electric grids. Most major cities have no sewage treatment or clean water. Nuclear power plants are melting down.
Coal — why it can’t easily subsitute for oil
“Peak is dead” and the future of oil supply:
Steve andrews (ASPO): You mention in your paper that natural gas liquids can’t fully substitute for crude oil because they contain about a third less energy per unit volume and only one-third of that volume can be blended into transportation fuel. In terms of the dominant use of crude oil—in the transportation sector—how significant is the ongoing increase in NGLs vs. the plateau in crude oil?
Richard G. Miller: The role of NGLs is a bit curious. You can run a car on it if you want, but it’s not a drop-in substitute for liquid oil. You can convert vehicle engines in fleets to run on liquefied gas; it’s probably better thought of as a fleet fuel. But it’s not a substitute for oil for my car. By and large, raising NGL production is not a substitution to making up a loss of liquid crude.
The only way I can see this being prevented or the end of oil delayed a few years, is if a government has already developed effective bio-weapons and doesn’t care if their own population suffers as well.
I feel crazy to have just written this very dire paragraph with just a few of the potential consequences, but the “shark-fin” curve made me do it!
Even though I’ve been reading and writing about peak everything since 2001, and the rise and fall of civilizations for 40 years, it is hard for me to believe a crash could happen so fast. It is hard to believe there could ever be a time that isn’t just like now. That there could ever be a time when I can’t hop into my car and drive 10,000 miles.
I can imagine the future all too well, but it is so hard to believe it.
Believe it.
References
Andrews, Steve. 29 July 2013. Interview with Martin Payne—Is Peak Oil Dead? ASPO-USA Peak Oil Review.
Patzek, T. 2007 How can we outlive our way of life? 20th round table on sustainable development of fuels, OECD headquarters.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report
Preface. Of the roughly 47,500 oil fields in the world, 507 of them, about 1%, are giant oil fields holding nearly two-thirds of all the oil that has ever been, or ever will be produced, with the largest 100 giants, the “elephants,” providing nearly half of all oil today. Since the 1960s, the world has consumed more oil than what has been discovered, and the average size of new oil fields has declined, leaving us heavily dependent on the original giant oil fields discovered over 50 years ago(Aleklett et al. 2012).
Since giant oil fields dominate oil production, the rate they decline at is a good predictor of future world decline rates. In 2007, the 261 giants past their plateau phase were declining at an average rate of 6 % a year. Their decline rate will continue to increase by 0.15 % a year, to 6.15, 6.3, 6.45 % and so on. By 2030 these giants, and the other giants joining them, will be declining at an average rate of over 9 % a year (Hook 2009; IEA 2010). At this exponentially increasing rate, it will take just 16 years to have just 10% of the oil that existed at peak production.
Dittmar (2016) estimates an annual production decline of 6 ± 1% which implies that after ten years, production will be only 54 ± 6% of what it was at the beginning of those ten years.
Sooner or later, this math dictates supply shortages Hallock et al. (2014).
World peak crude oil production happened in November 2018. It won’t be long until decline rates reach 6% and exponentially increase by 0.015 a year. That’s great news for climate change, because oil is the master resource that makes all others possible, including coal and natural gas. Hip Hip Hooray, we’re on the way to net zero.
The first post is not only a summary of remaining reserves, but the New World Order of Russia, Iran, Iraq, and China that control a quarter of the remaining conventional oil. And the Russian attack on Ukraine the first major resource war. If you look at Art Berman’s post online, you’ll see that Venezuela has 18% of world reserves and Canada 10%. but these are heavy oil and tar sands respectively. They have an EROI of 4 to 6 at best, so if an EROI if at least 7 or 10 or even 14 is required, will fall off the net energy cliff and remain unexploited. While they still can be obtained, the flow rate is very slow since they’re nasty, gunky, abd energy intense to refine.
By the way, if you’re curious about what oil looks like, see 14 photos here.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report
***
U.S. oil reserves in 2022 exceeded 48 billion barrels, with tight oil 27 billion barrels of it (56%). U.S. reserves are about half of Russia’s, one-third of Iraq’s, & about one-fifth of Iran’s & Saudi Arabia’s (Figure 2). It holds roughly 3% of the world’s reserves compared to Iraq’s 9%, Iran’s 12% and Saudi Arabia’s 15%. Countries in the Persian Gulf have almost half of the world’s oil, and 42% of the worlds remaining proved reserves are in just four countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates. Iraq is now a vassal state of Iran—an enemy of the U.S.—and, together, they have more than 20% of the oil that’s left. Add Russia and our principal enemies control a quarter of the world’s oil.
Those are terrible odds. U.S. foreign policy after World War II was founded on oil security from the Middle East. The last four energy-blind U.S. presidents managed to undo that. One of those two will be the next president of the United States. Most people know that the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East are serious but think of them in parochial terms—that they developed out of long-standing feuds between people who have always been at each other’s throats.
Russia and China are aligned with Iran. Iran and China have signed 20 agreements covering various areas including trade, transportation, and information technology. China buys almost all of the oil that Iran is able to export. Iran has been supplying drones and other military equipment to Russia in its war on Ukraine.
Iran is an oil super power. Combined with its vassal state Iraq, it holds 21% of the world’s oil reserves, more than Saudi Arabia or Venezuela (Figure 2 above). Its Houthi allies attacked Saudi Arabia’s main refinery complex in 2019, and have been disrupting trade in the Red Sea and Suez Canal since November 2023. Almost 9 million barrels of oil per day (mmb/d) pass through the Canal and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. As I wrote in a recent post, almost everything in the Middle East is about oil. The Houthis recently expanded their range attacking shipping in the Indian Ocean.
Energy lies at the heart of global power struggles and the downward arc of economic prosperity. The West remains largely energy-blind but those pushing for a new world order are not. In this high-stakes game, Iran, Russia, and China stand as formidable players, acutely aware of the pivotal role oil plays in shaping the future landscape of power and influence.
Iran’s ambitions in the Middle East, Russia’s maneuvers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and
China’s ascent in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond—all hinge on their dominance of energy resources and production capabilities. Their strategic calculus revolves around securing access to vital energy reservoirs and asserting control over critical supply routes.
We are at the beginning of the end of the Oil Age. Europe’s energy crisis, the war in Ukraine, and rise of Iran as the dominant power in the Middle East are all part of a struggle to dominate remaining fossil resources as well as new energy sources.
Many Americans including some of its leaders have the peculiar idea that the United States dominates world energy and that its military might is as formidable in global events as it was 75 years ago. I don’t think so. While some celebrate a new high in U.S. oil reserves, I worry that its 3% of remaining world supply is a drop in the bucket.
The nations working toward a new world order have a plan. What is ours?
Figure 7. The decline rate of existing oil production within total world oil production will increase with time. This is because more fields go into decline as time goes on. To illustrate, consider three identical oil fields that start to decline at three different times, each with a 12% decline rate, similar to the average 13% found typical for Norway. In this example, the overall decline rate starts at zero and progressively increases.
Analysis of our 331 giant field dataset going back in time showed that the world average decline rate was near 0% until roughly 1960, when overall decline began to increase, as more and more giant oil fields left the plateau phase. Thereafter, production from new giants failed to compensate for the declines of existing giant production. The average decline rate of the giant oilfields was found to increase by around 0.15% per year. Extrapolating the 1960-2005 trend yielded an average decline rate of nearly 10% by 2030 (Figure 10). This giant field trend should have a strong influence on the future global decline rate in oil production.
Non-OPEC decline rate in 2030 is likely to be 11%, OPEC decline rate only 8% for reasons further explained below.
The production-weighted decline rate has been behaving somewhat differently, especially since 1985, compared to the average decline rate. The reason for this change is the introduction of new technologies, most notably horizontal drilling and fracturing techniques, in many major fields in former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Using new technologies, it was possible to halt the decline in many giants and keep production stable for some time. Eventually the average and the production-weighted declines must follow each other. The currently stable production weighted decline cannot be expected to continue far into the future, once technology-enhanced fields reach the final onset of decline. The world has had a false sense of security, temporarily created by decline-delaying technology introduction in underdeveloped fields.
Figure 10: The decline rate of the world’s giant oilfields. The trend toward an increasing average decline rate is very clear and explained by an ever decreasing volumes of newly discovered and declining production from new giant fields. The time period 1973-1982 was disregarded since production was deliberately reduced during that period by OPEC. The divergence between the two decline rates after 1985 is caused by the introduction of new technology and the revival of giant fields in primarily Middle East and Russia.
As more giant fields go into decline in the future, the average decline rates for all giants will increase. Since the 1970s, the share of giant oilfields in decline has increased, showing the overall maturity and lack of new fields brought into production. Many giants have been in production for many decades without reaching the onset of decline, but sooner or later they will eventually do so. By 2030 one can expect 80% of total giant oilfield production to come from fields in decline, if one extrapolates the trend since 1985. The share could be even higher when important OPEC “super giants”, such as Ghawar or Safaniyah, leave the plateau phase in the intervening years.
The most important contributors to the world’s total oil production are the giant oil fields. Using a comprehensive database of giant oil field production, the average decline rates of the world’s giant oil fields are estimated. Separating subclasses was necessary, since there are large differences between land and offshore fields, as well as between non-OPEC and OPEC fields. The evolution of decline rates over past decades includes the impact of new technologies and production techniques and clearly shows that the average decline rate for individual giant fields is increasing with time. These factors have significant implications for the future, since the most important world oil production base– giant fields – will decline more rapidly in the future, according to our findings. Our conclusion is that the world faces an increasing oil supply challenge, as the decline in existing production is not only high now but will be increasing in the future.
It is well known that oil production from many oil fields worldwide is in decline and that more fields transition into decline each year. In roughly mid 2004, total world oil production ceased to expand. Instead, new production has only succeeded in keeping world oil production relatively flat (Figure 1).
Figure 1: World liquid fuels production from January 2001 to November 2008. Since mid-2004, production has stayed within a 4% fluctuation band, which indicates that new production has only been able to offset the decline in existing production. Source: EIA (2009)
A recent analysis by Cambridge Energy Research Associates estimated that the weighted decline of production from all existing world oil fields was roughly 4.5% in 2006 (CERA, 2007), which is in line with the 4-6% range estimated by ExxonMobil (2004). However, Andrew Gould, CEO of Schlumberger, stated that an accurate average decline rate is hard to estimate, but an overall figure of 8% is not an unreasonable assumption (Schlumberger, 2005). T. Boone Pickens (2008), agreed with Gould in recent testimony before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Duroc-Danner (2009) gives a blended average decline rate for oil and gas today of about 6%. The International Energy Agency (IEA) came to the conclusion that the average production-weighted decline rate worldwide was 6.7% for post-peak fields (IEA, 2008), which means that the overall decline rate would be less, since many fields are not yet in decline.
Giant oil fields are the world’s largest. There are two ways to define a giant oil field. One is based on ultimately recoverable resources (URR), and the second is based on maximum oil production level. The URR definition considers giants to have more than 0.5 Gb of ultimately recoverable resources.
The production definition assumes a production of more than 100,000 barrels per day (b/d) for more than one year (Simmons, 2002). In this analysis we consider the worlds conventional oil fields, regardless of location, e.g. shallow or deep water, the Arctic, etc. Conventional oil fields refer to reservoirs that dominantly allow oil to be recovered as a free flowing dark to light-colored liquid (Speight, 2007). Consequently, heavier crude oils that require special production methods are excluded.
Using our definition of giant oil fields, we find that roughly 500 (about 1% of the total number of world oil fields) are classified as giants. Their contribution to world oil production was over 60% in 2005, with the 20 largest fields alone responsible for nearly 25% (Figure 2). Giant fields represent roughly 65% of the global ultimate recoverable conventional oil resources (Robelius, 2007). Many studies have pointed out the importance of giant oil fields, for instance Campbell (1991), Hirsch (2008), Meng and Bentley (2008).
Figure 2: World crude oil production from 1925 to 2005. The dominance of the giant oil fields can clearly be seen. Modified from Robelius (2007)
The overall production from giant fields is declining, because a majority of the largest giant fields are over 50 years old, and fewer and fewer new giants have been discovered since the decade of the 1960s (Figure 3). The average contribution from an individual giant oilfield to world production is less than 1%. Thus, with few exceptions, e.g., Ghawar, the contribution from a single field is generally small compared to the total. On this basis, our approach is to estimate collective behaviors.
Figure 3: Discovery trends for giant oil fields in both number and annual discovered volume, based on the most optimistic, backdated URR values. Modified from Robelius (2007)
Fields with production over 100,000 b/d were included in our analysis, but they numbered only 20 fields in our total. Production profiles of giant fields generally have a long plateau phase, rather than the sharp “peak” often seen in smaller fields. The end of the plateau phase is the point where production enters the decline phase. We adopted the end-of-plateau as the point where production lastingly leaves a 4% fluctuation band.
Fields with production over 100,000 b/d were included in our analysis, but they numbered only 20 fields in our total. Production profiles of giant fields generally have a long plateau phase, rather than the sharp “peak” often seen in smaller fields. The end of the plateau phase is the point where production enters the decline phase. We adopted the end-of- plateau as the point where production lastingly leaves a 4% fluctuation band.
Each field is assumed to have a constant decline rate, and the production for an individual oil field fluctuates around some average value over time. Examples of how well this approximation agrees with actual production in a few cases are shown in Figures 4 and 5.
Figure 4: The production curves of the land-based US giant Prudhoe Bay and the giant UK Thistle offshore field. The approximately exponential average decline rate is clearly seen in these two well-behaved fields.
In some cases, wars, sabotage and politically motivated shut downs are evident, making these fields more difficult to describe in a simple manner. Many OPEC fields have been on a plateau for a very long time, and some were even mothballed for various periods. Nonconforming fields, such as Eldfisk, Ekofisk and some fields in Nigeria, were treated separately, and production disturbances such as guerrilla attacks or accidents were disregarded (Figure 5 not shown).
Decline curves can be made much more detailed and complicated (hyperbolic etc.), so the simple exponential model used here should be seen as a simplified model for future outlooks. One disadvantage of the exponential decline curve is that it tends to underestimate tail production, which usually flattens out to a harmonic decline. However, the production levels far out in the tail region are generally very low compared to the plateau level, so this approximation is a minor problem for the model. In the near and medium term future the exponential decline curve is a suitable tool for realistic outlooks.
Some fields can also show complex behavior with several exponential decline phases or even production collapses, where the decline can be doubled in the end stage of the field life. In other cases introduction of new technology can revive the field and significantly dampen the decline temporarily. This is the case in some Russian fields, which were reworked after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, Höök et al. (2009) found that such events are likely to result in higher decline rates later on, compensating the temporal decrease in decline rate.
Average decline rate
The Uppsala giant field database includes 331 giant oil fields with a combined estimated URR of over 1130 Gb, using estimates adopted by Robelius (2007). 214 fields are land-based (about 65% of the total), while 117 are offshore installations (about 35%). To calculate the decline rate of giants that were in decline as of the end of 2005, we considered only the 261 fields classified as post-plateau and in decline. Of these, 170 were land-based and 91 offshore. IEA (2008) gives an average depletion factor, defined as cumulative production divided by initial 2P reserves, of 48% for their super-giants and giants. Höök et al. (2009) found that most giant fields leave the plateau phase and reach the onset of decline when around 40% of the URR has been produced, and combined with IEA’s average depletion factor, it is not surprising that the majority of the fields are categorized as in decline.
An average annual decline rate for the world’s giant oil fields is seen to be roughly -6.5%, which is in line with the average observed decline rate worldwide of -6.5% and the -5.8% production-weighted average annual decline rate obtained by IEA (2008). The agreement with the 5.8% production-weighted annual decline for large fields obtained by CERA (2007) is good.
Land-based fields decline much slower than offshore fields, as expected and in agreement with both IEA (2008) and CERA (2007). The reason for this difference is generally the higher production capabilities built into offshore installations in order to repay expensive investments as soon as possible. Also, a significant number of land-based fields started to decline far back in time, before the introduction of modern production techniques such as water injection and other pressure managing methods. In comparison, there were virtually no deepwater offshore fields before 1970. The offshore group can be even further divided into shelf and deepwater fields, where deepwater fields tend to decline faster and shelf fields somewhat slower.
OPEC Fields
NON-OPEC Fields
The average decline of all non-OPEC giant fields is above 7%, indicating that non-OPEC production is dropping relatively rapidly.
The OPEC quota system appears to have been quite efficient at moderating production and maintaining the longevity of fields, instead of extracting oil rapidly with an accompanying high decline rate.
Many of the low decline rates can be found in fields in the US that peaked prior to 1970s. In fact most of the non-OPEC land group is dominated by the US giant fields. The non-OPEC offshore group is dominated by giant fields in the North Sea. Many fields, both giant fields and smaller ones, in the North Sea, show a high decline rate, for instance in Norway and the UK (Zittel, 2001; Höök and Aleklett, 2008).
In comparison to the non-OPEC group, the OPEC group generally displays lower decline rates. One quite intriguing detail is that OPEC fields tend to exit the plateau phase at a lower percentage of their URR volumes. This is an explanation for the lower decline rate. Instead of a prolonged plateau, a longer decline phase with less annual decrease has generally been favored as a production strategy compared to non-OPEC. This is examined in greater detail in another study (Höök et al, 2009). An alternative explanation is that OPEC URR estimates are exaggerated, as claimed by former Aramco vice-president Sadad al Husseini (2007).
Evolution of decline rate in time
It is useful to consider the historical evolution of field decline rates, since many giant fields are old and passed into decline before much of modern oil field technology was developed and implemented. The year that fields left plateau production was used to form subgroups, e.g., if a field started to decline in 1950-1959, it is included in the 1950s group and so on. We believe that the year of the onset of production decline is of greater importance because it better reflects the impacts of improved technology and alternate production strategies.
From this data, it is evident that average decline rates for giant oil fields as a group are increasing with time, even though individual field decline rates are essentially constant once a field has reached the onset of decline.
An important conclusion is that higher decline rates must be applied to giant fields that enter decline in the future. Prolonged plateau levels and increased depletion made possible by new and improved technology result in a generally higher decline rates.
Detailed case studies of giant oilfields suggest that technology can extend the plateau phase, but at the expense of more pronounced declines in later years (Gowdy and Juliá, 2007). Our findings verify their conclusion.
Since a large number of important giants are subject to enhanced production methods, such as water flooding, gas injection, fracturing or other measures, it is reasonable to expect relatively higher declines after those fields depart their plateau phase.
Comprehensive discussion on development of mature oilfields and a few examples of utilization in giant fields can be found in Babadagli (2007). The collapse of production from the Cantarell field in Mexico, which was extensively subjected to technologies aimed at increasing production, meant that the field declined even faster than the government’s pessimistic scenarios (Luhnow, 2007).
For all offshore fields, a clear trend towards higher decline rates over time was found. For all land-based fields, the trend is not as clear but is directionally similar. Separating OPEC and non-OPEC fields reveals larger differences. Data for the decade of the 2000s are limited because less declining field data was available as of the end of 2005.
The non-OPEC land group shows an inclination towards somewhat higher decline rates. The increasing decline rate trend for non-OPEC offshore giant oil fields is much clearer. The trends for the land-based fields deviate in the 1970s and 1980s, which is probably due to the twin oil crises that occurred during those decades. For the OPEC group, a tendency towards lower decline rates is observed and can be explained by the fact that fields were taken from their plateau phase for political reasons, resulting in subsequent less steep decline rates.
| LAND | Decade | # fields | Mean % | Median % | Prd weight % |
| OPEC | pre 1960 | 10 | -4.3 | -4.7 | -4 |
| non-OPEC | pre 1960 | 13 | -4.2 | -3.8 | -4.3 |
| OPEC | 1960 | 8 | -4.9 | -5.5 | -5.9 |
| non-OPEC | 1960 | 10 | -5.3 | -5.4 | -6 |
| OPEC | 1970 | 36 | -2.9 | -3 | -2.2 |
| non-OPEC | 1970 | 36 | -5.5 | -4.7 | -4.9 |
| OPEC | 1980 | 5 | -2.8 | -3 | -1.9 |
| non-OPEC | 1980 | 20 | -4.8 | -4.1 | -4.6 |
| OPEC | 1990 | 12 | -5.1 | -5.1 | -4 |
| non-OPEC | 1990 | 16 | -8.2 | -6.3 | -6.5 |
| OPEC | 2000 | 2 | -9.8 | -9.8 | -10.2 |
| non-OPEC | 2000 | 2 | -11.5 | -11.5 | -9.9 |
| Offshore | Decade | # fields | Mean % | Median % | Prd weight % |
| OPEC | pre 1960 | 0 | – | – | |
| non-OPEC | pre 1960 | 0 | – | – | – |
| OPEC | 1960 | 0 | – | – | – |
| non-OPEC | 1960 | 2 | -2.8 | -2.8 | -3.7 |
| OPEC | 1970 | 7 | -4.7 | -3.9 | -4.3 |
| non-OPEC | 1970 | 10 | -6.8 | -6.5 | -7.9 |
| OPEC | 1980 | 3 | -5.2 | -6.3 | -6.2 |
| non-OPEC | 1980 | 13 | -8.5 | -7.5 | -9.3 |
| OPEC | 1990 | 12 | -8.2 | -7 | -7.9 |
| non-OPEC | 1990 | 24 | -11.5 | -12.1 | -11.5 |
| OPEC | 2000 | 2 | -19.6 | -19.6 | -20.8 |
| non-OPEC | 2000 | 18 | -11.7 | -11.8 | -10.3 |
Without good data on a large fraction of the world’s oil fields, an accurate estimate of future global oil production cannot be developed. While various databases exist, all include approximations and estimates, so none are fully definitive. Nevertheless, a number of factors can provide insights into what might evolve. First, the world’s giant oil fields are the dominating contributors to total world oil production. Second, it is found that the decline of smaller fields is equal to or greater than those of the giants (see for instance IEA, 2008; CERA, 2007). A detailed study of Norwegian fields showed that giants declined at an average of 13%, while the small fields, condensate, and NGL declined at 20% or more (Höök and Aleklett, 2008).
A small field requires fewer wells to fully develop; hence it is more easily depleted. A large field requires many more wells, often widely separated, so it is typically depleted more slowly. High depletion rates, which are common in small fields, have been shown to strongly correlate with high decline rates (Höök et al., 2009). Thus, giant oil field decline rates are useful for estimating the likely average world decline. Accordingly, we believe that the decline in existing production, both for giants and other fields, will be at least 6.5% or 5.5% if production-weighted.
The findings of Höök et al. (2009) indicate that the decline rates are only significant in the first digit. Consequently, we use 6% for our production outlook to reflect uncertainty. A comparison, in a field-by-field study of predominantly giant fields, IEA (2008) derived an average decline rate worldwide for all oil fields of 6.7%. IEA (2008) stated that field size was a large determinant of field decline behavior, noting that large fields decline relatively slower than small fields. This reasoning also supports their expected increases in future decline rates, as the world moves towards generally smaller oilfields.
The exact annual increase in world average decline rate is difficult to estimate and requires a more comprehensive database than was available to us. Accordingly, the value of 0.15% per year derived here should be taken as a rough estimate. The important point, however, is that the average decline rate in existing production is clearly increasing with time. Also, the contribution from declining fields is increasing. Consequently, “we must run faster and faster just to stand still.
Using our 6% production-weighted average decline and extrapolation of the contribution from declining fields, one can create a future outlook for world crude oil production. By incorporating the increasing average decline, another possible future can be envisioned. The difference between using a constant decline rate and a growing decline is as much as 7 Mb/d by 2030 (Figure 13).
Figure 13: The historical world oil production along with a crude oil forecast using the reference scenario from IEA World Energy Outlook 2008. A constant decline rate of existing production of 6%, combined with an increasing share of fields in decline, is displayed as one possibility. Our other scenario is a case with increasing average decline. The IEA WEO 2008 forecast for fields in production (FIP) is compared to our own estimates of reasonable decline rates and the contribution from declining fields. The IEA forecast is reasonable in the near-term, but towards 2030, it seems optimistically biased. Using a constant decline rate compared to an increasing rate can mean as much as 7 Mb/d of production capacity by 2030.
Based on a comprehensive database of giant oil field production data, we estimated the average decline rates of the world’s giant oil fields that are beyond their plateau phase. Since there are large differences between land and offshore fields and non-OPEC and OPEC fields, separation into different subclasses was necessary. In order to obtain a realistic forecast of future giant field decline rates, the subclasses were treated separately to better reflect their different behaviours. Thus, our average total decline rate for post-plateau giant fields of 6.5% and CERA’s overall 6.3% are in good agreement, and our 5.5% production-weighted giant field decline rate compares reasonably with IEA’s 6.5% and CERA’s 5.8%. Offshore fields decline faster than land fields, and OPEC fields decline slower than non-OPEC fields. There are small differences in the data sets and definitions between the studies, but the results from these three studies can be considered approximately equivalent.
The evolution of decline rates over time includes the impact of new technologies and production techniques and clearly shows that average decline rates are increasing. This verifies the results of Gowdy and Julia (2007). Furthermore, prolonged plateau levels come at the cost of higher subsequent decline rates. This conclusion is in line with the findings of IEA (2008) regarding trends in average decline. The trends in average decline rate and production-weighted decline rate indicate that technology transfer, primarily to the Middle East, was able to dampen the decline in many highly productive fields (Figures 10, 11 and 12). This cannot continue, and ultimately, production-weighted decline must approach the average decline rate, as in the case of Norway (Figure 9). How the production-weighted decline will behave in the future is difficult to estimate, but an increase appears inevitable. Future decline rates of giant fields that have not yet left the plateau phase can be expected to be higher than those that are now in decline. This is in line with a recent statement about a decline of 10% in mature fields from Petrobras downstream director Paulo Roberto Costa (2008). The crash of the Cantarell field in Mexico and the experiences of the North Sea giants are a vivid example of what can happen to other giant oilfields in the future.
These findings have large implications for the future, since the most important world oil production base – giant oilfields – will decline more rapidly. In the extreme, a potential 10% annual decline in Ghawar would be very challenging to compensate and would create severe problems for Saudi-Arabia and the world. The future behaviour of the remaining giants, especially in OPEC, will be a key factor in future oil supply. Based on the decline behaviour of giants, decline rate estimates for world oil production are possible because of the large influence of the giants. Many studies have shown that smaller fields, condensate, and NGL will decline at least as fast or faster than giant oilfields, once the onset of decline is reached (CERA, 2007; Höök and Aleklett, 2008; IEA, 2008). Consequently, we believe that there is a strong basis for believing that giant oilfields can be used to set a floor for future decline rate assumptions. In conclusion, this analysis shows that the average decline rate of the giant oil fields have been increasing with time, reflecting the fact that more and more fields enter the decline phase and fewer and fewer new giant fields are being found. The increase is in part due to new technologies that have been able to temporarily maintain production at the expense of subsequent more rapid decline. Growing average decline rates have also been noted by IEA (2008). The difference between using a constant decline in existing production and an increasing decline rate is significant and could mean as much of a difference of 7 Mb/d by 2030 (Figure 13). By 2030 the production from fields currently on stream could have decreased by over 50% in agreement with IEA (2008). The struggle to maintain production and compensate for the decline in existing production will become harder and harder. Our conclusion is that the world will face an increasing oil supply challenge, as the decline in existing production is not only high but also increasing.
More details about the above
IEA (2008) uses a similar classification in their study. IEA classify “super-giants” as fields with more than 5 Gb of initial 2P reserves, “giants” contain more than 500 million barrels of initial 2P reserves, and “large fields” contain initial reserves of more than 100 million barrels. In IEA (2008), super-giants are treated as a subclass, while this study includes them in the giant category. In total, IEA covers 317 super-giant and giant fields, which makes their data set similar to ours. Their production-weighting is done by using the cumulative production of each field in the averaging.
CERA (2007) did not treat giant oil fields in the same way as this study. Instead their study was performed on a set of “large fields”, classified as fields with more than 300 million barrels of originally present 2P reserves of oil and condensate. In total, their dataset represent 1,155 billion barrels of original 2P reserves in place, accounting for approximately half the current annual global production. Consequently, their dataset is deemed approximately equal to the data set used in this study. When it comes to production-weighting, CERA (2007) takes each field’s latest oil and condensate production into account for the averaging.
Because of financial and practical differences between land-based and offshore fields, a division is needed to establish a comprehensive picture of how each subclass behaves. A further division into OPEC-fields and non-OPEC fields was also made to better reflect the potentially different behaviors of giants managed with no political restrictions on production and those sometimes limited by quota systems.
OPEC controls or formerly controlled 143 of the fields in our database. Gabon is no longer a part of OPEC, but used to be a member; consequently, their fields were classified as OPEC-fields because they were previously subjected to the quota system. Ecuador suspended their OPEC-membership, but recently rejoined the organization. In total, OPEC has 104 land and 39 offshore fields in our database.
Outside of OPEC, 190 fields were considered with 110 fields onshore and 78 offshore. The North Sea, Russia and the US were the most important regions within the non-OPEC group.
The decline rate of a field is affected by introduction of new technology, investments, changes in strategies and other factors affecting production. The statistical uncertainty is difficult to estimate, since production data contains political influences, differences in definitions, reporting practice and many other parameters, making conventional statistical error estimate hard to apply. Traditional statistical analysis was based on the assumption that production data measures approximately the same thing, and results in standard deviations of around 5% and may be seen as a rough attempt to put a number on the inaccuracy (Höök et al., 2009). In comparison, neither IEA (2008) nor CERA (2007) provides any uncertainty estimates and hence it is hard to judge the statistical variations in their results.
Because the number of fields is so large, our approach provided reasonable statistics and reasonable mean, median and production weighted values for the giant oil fields as a group. The production weighted values were created by weighting the decline rate against the peak or plateau production level for each field, thus giving greater importance to fields with high production. The production weighted decline is lower than the mean value, because fields with high production levels often tend to be larger and decline slower than the rest.
Aleklett, K., et al. 2012. Peeking at peak oil. Berlin: Springer
al-Husseini, S.I., 2007, Long-Term Oil Supply Outlook: Constraints on Increasing Production Capacity, presentation held at Oil and Money Conference, London, 30 October 2007, see also: http://www.boell-meo.org/download_en/saudi_peak_oil.pdf
Arps, J.J, (1945); Analysis of Decline Curves, Transactions of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers, 1945, 160, 228-247.
AAPG (1970); Geology of giant petroleum fields, Memoir 14, 1970
AAPG (1980); Giant oil and gas fields of the decade 1968-1978, Memoir 30 / 1980
AAPG (1992); Giant oil and gas fields of the decade 1978-1988, Memoir 54 / 1992
AAPG (2003); Giant oil and gas fields of the decade 1990-1999, Memoir 78 / 2003
AAPG (2005); Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar Field – The Elephant of All Elephants, AAPG Explorer, Jan 2005
Aleklett, K. (2006); Oil production limits mean opportunities, conservation. Oil & Gas Journal, Volume 104, Issue 31, 21 Aug 2006
23
Babadagli, T. (2007); Development of mature oil fields — A review, Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, Volume 57, Issues 3-4, June 2007, Pages 221-246
Barnes, R.J, Linke, P., Kokossis, A. (2002); Optimisation of oilfield development production capacity, Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, Volume 10, 2002, Pages 631-636
Doublet, L.E, Pande, P.K, McCollom, T.J, Blasingame, T.A. (1994); Decline Curve Analysis Using Type Curves–Analysis of Oil Well Production Data Using Material Balance Time: Application to Field Cases, Society of Petroleum Engineers paper presented at the International Petroleum Conference and Exhibition of Mexico, 10-13 October 1994, Veracruz, Mexico, SPE paper 28688-MS, 24 p.
Duroc-Danner, B.J., 2009, Game-Changing Technology: The Key to Tapping Mature Reservoirs, World Energy. Vol. 5, Issue 1, February 9, 2009.
CERA (2007); Finding the Critical Numbers: What Are the Real Decline Rates for Global Oil Production? Private report written by Peter M. Jackson and Keith M. Eastwood
Campbell, C., (1991); The Golden Century of Oil, 1950-2050: The Depletion of a Resource, first edition, Springer, 29 October 1991, 368 p.
Costa, Paulo Roberto (2008): Statement in an interview in Valor Economico on 27 October 2008, available from: http://rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=68365
Dittmar, M. 2016. Regional Oil Extraction and Consumption: A Simple Production Model for the Next 35 years Part I. Biophysical Econ Resource Quality.
EIA, 2009, January 2009 International Petroleum Monthly, see also: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/ipsr/supply.html
ExxonMobil (2004); A Report on Energy Trends, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, and Alternative Energy, information to share holders, February 2004
Gowdy, J., Juliá, R. (2007); Technology and petroleum exhaustion: Evidence from two mega-oilfields, Energy, Volume 32, Issue 8, August 2007, Pages 1448-1454
Hallock, J. L., Jr, et al. 2014. Forecasting the limits to the availability and diversity of global conventional oil supply: validation. Energy 64:130–153.
Hirsch, Robert (2008); Mitigation of maximum world oil production: Shortage scenarios, Energy Policy, Volume 36, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 881-889
Höök, M., Aleklett, K. (2008); A decline rate study of Norwegian Oil Production, Energy Policy, Volume 36, Issue 11, November 2008, Pages 4262-4271
Höök, M., Söderbergh, B., Jakobsson, K., Aleklett, K. (2009); The evolution of giant oil field production behaviour, Natural Resources Research, Volume 18, Number 1, March 2009, Pages 39-56
IEA (2008); World Energy Outlook 2008, available from: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/
IEA. 2010. World energy outlook 2010, 116. International Energy Agency.
Luhnow, D. (2007); Mexico’s Oil Output Cools, Wall Street Journal, Monday 29 January 2007. Available from: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=40538
Meng, Q.A, Bentley, R.W. (2008); Global oil peaking: Responding to the case for ‘abundant supplies of oil’, Energy, Volume 33, Issue 8, August 2008, Pages 1179-1184
Nehring, R., (1978); Giant Oil Fields and World Oil Resources, Report prepared by the RAND Corporation for the Central Intelligence Agency, June 1978.
Ortíz-Gómez, A. Rico-Ramirez, V., Hernández-Castro, S. (2002); Mixed-integer multiperiod model for the planning of oilfield production, Computers & Chemical Engineering, Volume 26, Issues 4-5, 15 May 2002, Pages 703-714
Palsson, B. Davies, D.R. Todd A.C. and Somerville, J.M. (2003); The Water Injection Process A Technical and Economic Integrated Approach, Chemical Engineering Research and Design, Volume 81, Issue 3, March 2003, Pages 333-341
Pickens, T. Boone (2008); testimony to the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural resources, 17 June 2008, see also: http://energy.senate.gov/public/_files/PickensTestimony061708.doc
Robelius, F., (2007); Giant Oil Fields – The Highway to Oil: Giant Oil Fields and their Importance for Future Oil Production. Doctoral thesis from Uppsala University
Simmons, M., (2002); The World’s Giant Oilfields, white paper from January 9, 2002, available from: http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/giantoilfields.pdf
Schlumberger (2005); Schlumberger Chairman and CEO Andrew Gould addressed the oil and gas investment community at the 33rd Annual Howard Weil Energy Conference on April 4, 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Available from: http://www.slb.com/content/news/presentations/2005/20050404_agould_neworleans.asp
Speight, J., 2008, Synthetic Fuels Handbook: Properties, Process, and Performance, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2008, 422 p
Zittel, W., (2001); Analysis of the UK Oil Production, a contribution to ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas), 22 February 2001, available online from: http://www.peakoil.net/Publications/06_Analysis_of_UK_oil_production.pdf
Preface. China hopes to nip rebellion in the bud before a revolution takes place by excessive monitoring and then respond quickly with improvements to prevent one. And show the world their system is better than democracy.
But then there is the dark side. It has enabled China to oppress the Uyghurs with their “all-seeing” surveillance of over 15 million people.
And so creepy: The volume of personal data theoretically available to the Party strains comprehension. By the start of 2020, close to 350 million cameras recorded the comings and goings in Chinese streets, in public squares, in subway stations, and around commercial buildings. More than 840 million smartphones bounced around in the purses and pockets of Chinese pedestrians, sending a steady stream of location data to telecom operators. Mobile payment systems logged millions of transactions a day in databases that offered searchable, ever-evolving portraits of human activity rendered in breathtaking detail.
Government officials can scrutinize your private chat history, reading and viewing habits, internet purchases, and travel history and can crunch the data to judge how likely you are to help or harm public order; in which artificial intelligence companies work hand in glove with police to track down fugitives, find abducted children, and publicly shame jaywalkers; and in which public services, rewards for good deeds, and punishments for misbehavior are all delivered with mathematical precision and efficiency.
The history of surveillance goes way back. Nations have inventoried their people and resources for millennia (for taxation and more). The extent that China can monitor people and how they use the information is scary though. Perhaps a glimpse of our own future. By 2019, Chinese surveillance systems had expanded across the globe. Huawei had installed Safe City systems in 700 cities across more than 100 countries and regions. ZTE in 160 cities spread across 45 countries.
In 1984, Pat Robertson’s evangelical Christian show the”700 Cub” raised $248 million
This is a book review is of “The Gospel of self: How Jesus Joined the GOP.” It was written by an evangelical Christian for evangelical Christians to show them how he, as the senior producer of Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club” duped them out of their morals and money.
Pat Robertson played a key role in shifting the GOP to the far right. He established the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) in 1960, eight years before Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show, and 16 years before Fox “News”. Pat Robertson is in many ways to blame for Trumpism today.
Preface. This post originally appeared in Skeptic Magazine in 2008 as “The Hydrogen Economy. Savior of Humanity or an Economic Black Hole?” I’ve updated it quite a bit since then.
Hydrogen is the dumbest, most ridiculous energy alternative. It is insanely far from being renewable because it has no energy at all, energy has to be forced into it like a battery, and you lose even more energy when converting it back to electricity. It has the highest negative energy return of any alternative, because far more energy is used than you ever get back. Think about it — first you have to split hydrogen from natural gas or use many times more energy than that to electrolyze it from water, compress or liquefy H, construct incredibly expensive and short-lived steel containers and pipelines because hydrogen degrades and embrittles them. Then finally deliver hydrogen to non-existent hydrogen vehicles. Fuel cell technology is far from commercial.
It’s also highly explosive. Hydrogen requires 12 times less energy to ignite than gasoline vapor, so heat sources or the smallest of sparks can turn hydrogen into a bomb.
Nor can hydrogen replace fossil fuels in manufacturing (see Chapter 9 Manufacturing Uses Over Half of All Fossil Energy in “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy“). There are no commercial ways to use hydrogen — or electricity — to replace fossil fuels in manufacturing, so with peak oil likely having happened in 2018 there’s not much time left to invent them, and many years to scale them up to becoming commercial — and trillions of dollars if it can be done. But it probably can’t, because the carbon in coal or charcoal is essential. So although hydrogen direct reduction can take pre-heated iron ore and convert it into direct reduced iron (H2 DRI), also known as sponge iron, it still needs carbon from coal or charcoal to create steel, even if done in an electric arc furnace plant. If just half of China’s steel was produced this way, the electricity required just to produce the H2 would be over 200 TWh, requiring over 150 GW of solar capacity dedicated to only this process, a capacity that is nearly equal to the total installed capacity of solar in Europe today.
Much of this article was in skeptic magazine in 2008, since then I’ve added quite a bit more information.
Even more reasons why H is dumb (the cost, EROI and more): Lesser JA (2024) Green Hydrogen: A Multibillion-Dollar Energy Boondoggle. Manhattan Institute.
The heavily subsidized eight hydrogen production centers funded by the Inflation Reduction act and other government funds are having a hard time finding customers for the hydrogen they plan to make. The only customers that might exist are the ones already using hydrogen for refining petroleum, chemicals, and fertilizer. But convincing them to make a switch to clean H is not an easy sell. It will cost them money to do that. Buyers need to be sure that the amount needed will be produced and delivered, which will require non-existent as yet infrastructure of pipelines and storage facility and break up existing long-standing contracts. And the subsidies to make the three-times or more expensive hydrogen would need to last for decades. At least a quarter is made onsite as a byproduct and will be used onsite, so no reason to buy that hydrogen elsewhere. And difficult for man other complex economic reasons: St. John J (2024) Clean hydrogen has a serious demand problem. Experts worry that U.S. policies to make clean hydrogen cheaper aren’t enough to convince today’s dirty hydrogen users to make the switch. Canary media
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
* * *
Skeptics scoff at perpetual motion, free energy, and cold fusion, but what about energy from hydrogen? Before we invest trillions of dollars in a hydrogen economy, we should examine the science and pseudoscience behind the hydrogen hype. Let’s begin by taking a hydrogen car out for a spin.
Although the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) in your car can burn hydrogen, the hope is that someday fuel cells, which are based on electrochemical processes rather than combustion (which converts heat to mechanical work), will become more efficient and less polluting than ICEs.1 Fuel cells were invented before combustion engines in 1839 by William Grove. But the ICE won the race by using abundant and inexpensive gasoline, which is easy to transport and pour, and very high in energy content.2
Unlike gasoline, hydrogen isn’t an energy source — it’s an energy carrier, like a battery. You have to make hydrogen and put energy into it, both of which take energy. Hydrogen has been used commercially for decades, so we already know how to do this. There are two main ways to make hydrogen: using natural gas as both the source and the energy to split hydrogen from the carbon in natural gas (CH4), or using water as the source and renewable energy to split the hydrogen from the oxygen in water (H2O).
1) Making Hydrogen from Fossil Fuels. Currently, 99.9 % of hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, mainly for oil refining, ammonia (fertilizer), and partially hydrogenated oil (IEA 2019,3). In the United States, 90 % is made from natural gas, with an efficiency of 72 %,4 which means you lose 28 % of the energy contained in the natural gas to make it (and that doesn’t count the energy it took to extract and deliver the natural gas to the hydrogen plant).
Hydrogen from water using electrolysis is 12 times more costly than natural gas, so no wonder “renewable” hydrogen from water is only made when an especially pure hydrogen is required, mainly by NASA for rocket fuel.
The best element for electrolytic production is iridium, which is extremely expensive and rarer than even platinum. No other element comes close to being an alternative. Iridium is a byproduct of mining for platinum and palladium, it is never mined for its own sake, and it’s supply is not growing (Böhm et al 2019, Hobson 2021).
One of the main arguments made for switching to a “hydrogen economy” is to prevent global warming that has been attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. When hydrogen is made from natural gas, however, nitrogen oxides are released, which are 58 times more effective in trapping heat than carbon dioxide.5 Coal releases large amounts of CO2 and mercury. Oil is too powerful and useful to waste on hydrogen — it is concentrated sunshine brewed over hundreds of millions of years. A gallon of gas represents about 196,000 pounds of fossil plants, the amount in 40 acres of wheat.6
Natural gas as a source for hydrogen is too valuable. In the U.S. about 34% is used to generate electricity and balance wind and solar, 30% is used in manufacturing, 30% to heat homes and buildings, and another 3-5% to create fertilizer as both a feedstock and energy source. This has led to a many-fold increase in crop production, allowing 4+ billion more people to be alive.7,8
We simply don’t have enough natural gas left to make a hydrogen economy happen from this nonrenewable, finite source. Extraction of natural gas is declining in North America.9 Although fracked natural gas has temporarily been a stopgap for the decline of conventional natural gas, the International Energy Agency estimates that fracked gas production will peak as soon as 2023 (IEA 2018). Alternatively we could import Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), but it would take at least a decade to set up LNG ships and shoreline facilities at a cost of many billions of dollars. Making LNG is so energy intensive that it would be economically and environmentally insane to use it as a source of hydrogen.10
2) Making Hydrogen from Water. Only 4% of hydrogen is made from water via electrolysis. It is done when the hydrogen must be extremely pure. Since most electricity comes from fossil fuels in electricity generating plants that are 30 % efficient, and electrolysis is 70 % efficient, you end up using four units of energy to create one unit of hydrogen energy: 70% * 30% = 21% efficiency.11
Fresh water hydrogen competes with agriculture and drinking water, so ideally hydrogen would be made from more abundant sea water. But that would require expensive purification and desalination, since electrolysis turns chloride ions into toxic chlorine gas and degrades the equipment. New technology, such as membranes, catalysts, and electrode materials need to be invented (Tong 2020).
Sure, renewables could generate the electricity, but only about 6.6% of power comes from wind, and 1.6% from solar (EIA 2019).
Producing hydrogen by using fossil fuels as a feedstock or an energy source defeats the purpose, since the whole point is to get away from fossil fuels. The goal is to use renewable energy to make hydrogen from water via electrolysis. When the wind is blowing, current wind turbines can perform at 30–40 percent efficiency, producing hydrogen at an overall rate of 25 percent efficiency — 3 units of wind energy to get 1 unit of hydrogen energy. The best solar cells available on a large scale have an efficiency of ten percent, or 9 units of energy to get 1 hydrogen unit of energy. If you use algae making hydrogen as a byproduct, the efficiency is about .1 percent.12 No matter how you look at it, producing hydrogen from water is an energy sink. If you want a more dramatic demonstration, please mail me ten dollars and I’ll send you back a dollar.
Hydrogen can be made from biomass, but there are numerous problems:
No matter how it’s been made, hydrogen has no energy in it. It is the lowest energy dense fuel on earth.14 At room temperature and pressure, hydrogen takes up three thousand times more space than gasoline containing an equivalent amount of energy.15 To put energy into hydrogen, it must be compressed or liquefied. To compress hydrogen to the necessary 10,000 psi is a multi-stage process that costs an additional 15 percent of the energy contained in the hydrogen.
If you liquefy it, you will be able to get more hydrogen energy into a smaller container, but you will lose 30–40 percent of the energy in the process. Handling it requires extreme precautions because it is so cold — minus 423 F. Fueling is typically done mechanically with a robot arm.16
BloombergNEF estimates that to generate enough green hydrogen to meet just 25% of our energy requires more electricity than the world generates today from all sources combined, and an investment of $11 trillion in production, storage and transportation infrastructure (Petrova 2020).
You may stumble on stories about storing hydrogen in underground salt caverns. This is how the single Compressed Air Energy Storage electricity generation facility stores compressed air. But only 3 gulf states and a tiny part of Utah have these salt caverns containing very large underground caverns at a depth of 1650–4250 feet. CAES has yet to be deployed in rock salt, aquifers, or abandoned rock mines because these formations are less likely to be airtight, and hydrogen, being the smallest element, even more likely than air to escape.
For the storage and transportation of liquid hydrogen, you need a heavy cryogenic support system. The tank is cold enough to cause plugged valves and other problems. If you add insulation to prevent this, you will increase the weight of an already very heavy storage tank, adding additional costs to the system.17
Let’s assume that a hydrogen car can go 55 miles per kg.18 A tank that can hold 3 kg of compressed gas will go 165 miles and weigh 400 kg (882 lbs).19 Compare that with a Honda Accord fuel tank that weighs 11 kg (25 lbs), costs $100, and holds 17 gallons of gas. The overall weight is 73 kg (161 lbs, or 8 lbs per gallon). The driving range is 493 miles at 29 mpg. Here is how a hydrogen tank stacks up against a gas tank in a Honda Accord (last column is cost):
| Amount of fuel | Tank weight with fuel | Driving Range | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hydrogen | 55 kg @3000 psi | 400 kg | 165 miles13 | $200021 |
| Gasoline | 17 gallons | 73 kg | 493 miles | $100 |
According to the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA), “Vehicle weight reduction is probably the most powerful technique for improving fuel economy. Each 10 percent reduction in weight improves the fuel economy of a new vehicle design by approximately eight percent.”
The more you compress hydrogen, the smaller the tank can be. But as you increase the pressure, you also have to increase the thickness of the steel wall, and hence the weight of the tank. Cost increases with pressure. At 2000 psi, it is $400 per kg. At 8000 psi, it is $2100 per kg.20 And the tank will be huge — at 5000 psi, the tank could take up ten times the volume of a gasoline tank containing the same energy content.
Fuel cells are heavy. According to Rosa Young, a physicist and vice president of advanced materials development at Energy Conversion Devices in Troy, Michigan: “A metal hydride storage system that can hold 5 kg of hydrogen, including the alloy, container, and heat exchangers, would weigh approximately 300 kg (661 lbs), which would lower the fuel efficiency of the vehicle.”21
Fuel cells are also expensive. In 2003, they cost $1 million or more. At this stage, they have low reliability, need a much less expensive catalyst than platinum, can clog and lose power if there are impurities in the hydrogen, don’t last more than 1000 hours, have yet to achieve a driving range of more than 100 miles, and can’t compete with electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius, which is already more energy efficient and low in CO2 generation than projected fuel cells.22
Hydrogen fuel cells need a lot of platinum — far more than can be obtained if they were to become commercial (41).
Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as you’ve gotten it into a container, it wants to get out, and since it is the lightest of all gases, it takes a lot of effort to keep it from escaping. Storage devices need a complex set of seals, gaskets, and valves. Liquid hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil off at 3–4 percent per day.23
Hydrogen also tends to make metal brittle.24 Embrittled metal can create leaks. In a pipeline, it can cause cracking or fissuring, which can result in potentially catastrophic failure.25 Making metal strong enough to withstand hydrogen adds weight and cost.
Leaks also become more likely as the pressure grows higher. It can leak from un-welded connections, fuel lines, and non-metal seals such as gaskets, O-rings, pipe thread compounds, and packings. A heavy-duty fuel cell engine may have thousands of seals.26 Hydrogen has the lowest ignition point of any fuel, 20 times less than gasoline. So if there’s a leak, it can be ignited by any number of sources.27 And an odorant can’t be added because of hydrogen’s small molecular size (SBC).
Worse, leaks are invisible — sometimes the only way to know there’s a leak is poor performance.
New reports show that hydrogen leaks have warming effects 11 times worse than those of CO2 over a 100-year timespan from extending the life of methane, increasing tropospheric ozone, and greater amounts of water vapor. Leaks occur at all stages, up to 10% overall during electrolysis, compression or liquefaction, pipelines, and storage (Warwick 2022, FNC 2022)
Hydrogen emissions from the individual elements as a percentage of the hydrogen produced, transported or used within that element. Source FNC (2022)
And hydrogen can be bad for your health. Burning hydrogen in power plants can produce lung-damaging nitrogen oxides as a byproduct (Chediak 2022).
One barrier to hydrogen is pipelines. There are currently 700 miles of hydrogen pipelines in operation—that is in comparison to 1 million miles of natural gas pipelines. To move to a nationwide use of hydrogen, safe and effective pipelines have to be developed. Tests have to be developed to test for the degradation that is likely to occur to the metals that can be caused by hydrogen weakening the pipeline.
According to former secretary of energy Steven Chu (39), hydrogen seeps into metal and embrittles it, and is a materials problem that has not been solved for decades and may never be solved.
Nor can hydrogen piggyback on natural gas pipelines at less dangerous concentrations of 5 to 15% — it can’t be extracted at the other end until pressure swing adsorption membranes are invented, and all impurities taken out so that fuel cells aren’t damaged. Even if invented, renewable wind or solar would only be able to create excess electricity to make hydrogen for just part of the year. Pipeline operators won’t want to install and remove expensive extraction equipment seasonally (40).
If added to natural gas pipelines, existing compressor stations don’t work well with it, and home gas appliances can only handle a mix of 80% natural gas / 20% hydrogen at best. Blending hydrogen into gas pipelines for use in buildings and power generation would increase customer costs, increase air pollution and cause safety risks from explosions and fires from leaks, while minimally reducing greenhouse gases. Hydrogen also produces less energy than natural gas, so a 20% hydrogen blend would provide only a 6% to 7% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions at a much higher cost (Chediak 2022).
And get this — no matter how little hydrogen is mixed with natural gas in pipelines, it will degrade the “mechanical properties of most metals. Fatigue is accelerated over 30 times. There is no threshold below which hydrogen effects can be ignored. Even small amounts of hydrogen have large effects (Ronevich and San Marchi 2019).
One of the challenges in the use of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is the seemingly trivial matter of measuring fuel consumption. Refueling with hydrogen is a problem because there are currently no mechanisms to ensure accuracy at the pump. Hydrogen is dispensed at a very high pressure, at varying degrees of temperature and with mixtures of other gases (S.HRG. 110-1199)
At some point along the chain of making, putting energy in, storing, and delivering the hydrogen, we will have used more energy than we can get back, and this doesn’t count the energy used to make fuel cells, storage tanks, delivery systems, and vehicles.32 When fusion can make cheap hydrogen, when reliable long-lasting nanotube fuel cells exist, and when light-weight leak-proof carbon-fiber polymer-lined storage tanks and pipelines can be made inexpensively, then we can consider building the hydrogen economy infrastructure. Until then, it’s vaporware. All of these technical obstacles must be overcome for any of this to happen.33 Meanwhile, the United States government should stop funding the Freedom CAR program, which gives millions of tax dollars to the big three automakers to work on hydrogen fuel cells. Instead, automakers ought to be required to raise the average overall mileage their vehicles get — the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard.34
At some time in the future the price of oil and natural gas will increase significantly due to geological depletion and political crises in extracting countries. Since the hydrogen infrastructure will be built using the existing oil-based infrastructure (i.e. internal combustion engine vehicles, power plants and factories, plastics, etc.), the price of hydrogen will go up as well — it will never be cheaper than fossil fuels. As depletion continues, factories will be driven out of business by high fuel costs35,36,37 and the parts necessary to build the extremely complex storage tanks and fuel cells might become unavailable.
The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy will always be an energy sink. Hydrogen’s properties require you to spend more energy than you can earn, because in order to do so you must overcome waters’ hydrogen-oxygen bond, move heavy cars, prevent leaks and brittle metals, and transport hydrogen to the destination. It doesn’t matter if all of these problems are solved, or how much money is spent. You will use more energy to create, store, and transport hydrogen than you will ever get out of it.
Any diversion of declining fossil fuels to a hydrogen economy subtracts that energy from other possible uses, such as planting, harvesting, delivering, and cooking food, heating homes, and other essential activities. According to Joseph Romm, a Department of Energy official who oversaw research on hydrogen and transportation fuel cell research during the Clinton Administration: “The energy and environmental problems facing the nation and the world, especially global warming, are far too serious to risk making major policy mistakes that misallocate scarce resources.38
Related articles
See posts in categories hydrogen, manufacturing, electric trucks, batteries (vehicles also need an electric battery), and When trucks stop running.
Heavy-duty hydrogen fuel cell trucks a waste of energy and money
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a waste of time and money, and explosive
References added after publication in Skeptic Magazine
Blain L (2021) Powerpaste packs clean hydrogen energy in a safe, convenient gray goop. New Atlas.
Böhm D, Beetz M, Maximilian Schuster M et al (2019) Efficient OER Catalyst with Low Ir Volume Density Obtained by Homogeneous Deposition of Iridium Oxide Nanoparticles on Macroporous Antimony-Doped Tin Oxide Support. Advanced Functional Materials, 2019; 1906670 DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201906670
Chediak M (2022) Hydrogen is every U.S. gas utility’s favorite future savior. Bloomberg.
DOE. 2011. Advanced technologies for high efficiency clean vehicles. Vehicle Technologies Program. Washington DC: United States Department of Energy.
EIA. 2019. Table 7.2a Electricity net generation total (all sectors). U.S. Energy Information Administration.
FNC (2022) Fugitive hydrogen emissions in a future hydrogen economy. Frazer-Nash consultancy.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1067137/fugitive-hydrogen-emissions-future-hydrogen-economy.pdf
Hobson P (2021) Tight supply and hydrogen hopes drive iridium up 160%. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-precious-iridium/tight-supply-and-hydrogen-hopes-drive-iridium-up-160-idUSKBN2AC1DG
Huang, E. 2019. A hydrogen fueling station explosion in Norway has left fuel-cell cars nowhere to charge. Quartz.
IEA. 2018. World Energy Outlook. International Energy Agency.
IEA (2019) The future of hydrogen. International Energy Agency.
Kane, M. 2019. Hydrogen fueling station explodes: Toyota & Hyundai halt fuel cell car sales. insideevs.com.
Pena, L. 2019. Hydrogen explosion shakes Santa Clara neighborhood. ABC News.
Petrova M (2020) Green hydrogen is gaining traction, but still has massive hurdles to overcome. CNBC
Post, W. March 6, 2017. The Hydrogen Economy Will Be Highly Unlikely. energycollective.com
Ronevich J, San Marchi C (2019) Hydrogen effects on pipeline steels and blending into natural gas. Sandia National Laboratories, H2FC hydrogen and fuel cells program, American Gas association sustainable growth commitee, November 5th, 2019
Saul J (2021) Too Cold to Handle? Race is on to pioneer shipping of hydrogen. Reuters.
SBC. February 2014. Hydrogen-based energy conversion. SBC Energy Institute.
S.HRG. 110-1199. June 24, 2008. Climate change impacts on the transportation sector. Senate Hearing.
Tong W, et al. 2020. Electrolysis of low-grade and saline surface water. Nature Energy.
Warwick N et al (2022) Atmospheric implications of increased hydrogen use. www.gov.uk
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1067144/atmospheric-implications-of-increased-hydrogen-use.pdf
Woodrow, M. 2019. Bay Area experiences hydrogen shortage after explosion. ABC News.
