Published in Magazine

Over the past decade, a fierce debate has emerged amongst energy experts about whether global oil production was about to reach a peak, followed by an irreversible decline.

This event, commonly known as “Peak Oil” far outreaches the sole discipline of geology. From transportation to modern agriculture, petrochemicals and even the pharmaceutical industry all of them rely on one commodity: cheap and abundant oil. In order to sustain the needs of an ever globalized world, oil demand should double by 2050 [3].

Nonetheless, geological limitations will disrupt this improbable scenario. In fact, a growing proportion of energy experts argue that Peak Oil is impending and warn about the extraordinary scale of the crisis...

Published in: Seeking Alpha, 9 August 2009
Available from: Seeking Alpha

A new, multicyclic approach to modeling future global production of natural gas reaffirms an outlook for growing dependence of Western nations on the Middle East and Russia for their supply as global conventional gas output peaks in the next decade. This multicyclic Hubbert model avoids some of the pitfalls seen with earlier Hubbert-style models of future production peak and decline for oil and gas. However, a lack of country data and questions over the future contribution of unconventional gas resources mean that a completely accurate picture of future global gas supply through even this improved model is not yet available.

Published in: Oil and Gas Journal, Volume 102, Issue 31, 16 August 2004
Available from: Energyjustice.net

Government agencies have estimated that there is about 850 billion to 998 billion tons of coal in the ground that can be economically recoverable.

Not so, says David Rutledge, the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Engineering at Caltech, who has done his own estimates and showed them off this week at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Rutledge estimates that the Earth had only 662 billion tons of recoverable coal in the first place and around 59 percent of the total remains. Thus, the real estimate of existing reserves is closer to 400 billion tons. (The earth, he added, contained the equivalent of 1 trillion tons of oil before the industrial age began.) He came to the conclusion by analyzing production data, similar to how M. King Hubbert in 1956 predicted U.S. oil production would peak in 1970. It peaked in 1971.

That number, to some degree, is good news for the renewable power industry. Nearly 400 tons of coal would be enough to provide electricity for decades. It would also add huge amounts of pollution to the atmosphere. Still, it makes a peak for coal more tangible and realistic and thus can prompt policy makers and investors to take even more interest in things like solar thermal power or nuclear...

Published in: Seeking Alpha, 19 December 2008
Available from: Seeking Alpha

Do we need to worry about Peak Oil? Are oil supplies in decline? Kjell Akelett and Mike Lynch beg to differ in this written debate.

Published in: Science & Public Affairs, December 2008
Available from: the British Association for the Advancement of Science

Oil company explorationists and government planners concerned with future oil and gas supplies need realistic numbers on the sizes and distribution of known fields to help compare regions and estimate what sizes of fields may still be expected in any nation or oil province.

Clearly regional summaries ate not substitutes for details on individual countries or basins when evaluating the local prospectivity of any area or oil province, each of which must be appraised on its own merits. For example, Latin American prospectivity ranges from that of superoily Venezuela to still nonoily Paraguay.

The authors hope that publication of these regional summaries will encourage others to release similar and more detailed data on individual nations and basins.

The world had about 41,164 known oil fields as of Dec. 31, 1989, of which 31,385 were located in the U.S. and 9,779 in the rest of the world.

Oil fields are not created equal. There are many tiny fields and few big ones. The large fields are by far the more important for global oil supplies...

Published in: Oil and Gas Journal, Volume 91, Issue 7, 16 Feb 1993
Available from: Oil & Gas Journal

In the worst days of the Battle of Britain, military commanders had to balance the need to commit fighter planes to defend the capital against having enough in reserve for later attacks. They had to have accurate information on the resources available, but it was easily obtained by a count that could be checked and double checked.

It is equally important that the world should know what its reserves of oil are because its economy depends heavily on oil-based energy, especially for transport and agriculture, which means food. It also needs to know where the reserves are. But unlike in the Battle of Britain, no one can go out to count the reserves because they lie far underground in geological traps whose precise nature can only be estimated.

The exact size of the reserves of a field will be known only on the day when it is finally abandoned; until then, some measure of uncertainty will always surround the number. We need to understand that uncertainty better, in the same way as we assess the probability of a hurricane striking a particular place at a given time.

For more than 60 years, the Oil & Gas Journal has put out an annual report of the world's reserves based on information provided to it by governments and industry. It has been a valiant effort, having the great merit of consistency. The numbers are widely accepted as a firm basis of what the reserve position is, being reproduced, for example, by British Petroleum Co. plc in its Statistical Review of World Energy...

Published in: Oil and Gas Journal, Volume 95, Issue 14, 7 Apr 1997
Available from: Oil & Gas Journal

A few weeks ago, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to William Vickrey, an 82-year-old professor at Columbia, and James Mirrlees, a 60-year-old professor at Cambridge. As is often the case with this annual ritual, the newspapers had some difficulty explaining the prize-winning work, which the Nobel committee referred to as "the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information."...

Published in: The New Yorker, December 2, 1996, p. 50
Available from: see below

t 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), oil from Mexico comprises about 11% of U.S. imports. As a top-three supplier to the U.S., Mexico has been a consistent and reliable source of oil for years. In the first half of this decade, that role increased even further as growing U.S. demand was met
with rising Mexican production.

Since 2005, however, it has been increasingly apparent that Mexico’s largest oil field – Cantarell – is in irreversible decline. Cantarell accounts for 26% of Mexico’s proven reserves and provides more than half of the nation’s oil output. But the field peaked in 2005 at 2.1 million bpd and by 2008 has fallen to only 1.46 million bpd – a decline of 31%...

Published in: Pipeline & Gas Journal, August 2008
Available: See attachment

Energy Security In Mexico: Problems and Implications In contemporary societies, energy security has become the cornerstone of national security. Access to reliable and affordable energy supplies is fundamental not only to national defense, but also economic growth and political stability. Thus, threats to a nation’s energy infrastructure have far reaching implications for the entire socioeconomic system.
Mexico provides an important example of how threats to the energy security of a major oil producer not only have broad ramifications for the nation itself, but for the United States and the rest of the world as well...

Published in: Energy Pulse, 10 October 2008
Available from: EnergyPulse