A correction to a mistake in my book "The end of global net oil exports"
(this blogpost can very well be read to the beautiful sound of Björk's song "Unison", which is most beautiful in the end, the end is very melancholic and bittersweet)
I have discovered a mistake in my book "The end of global net oil exports" (2023). This is the most important mistake I have found (I haven't found any other mistakes lately):
It is that I forgot that the 30 mbd of conventional global net oil exports that oil geologist Jeffrey J. Brown thought we had in the end of 2021 (October 14, 2021), was during the middle of the pandemic, when global oil production had fallen by 10 % during the spring 2020, and that the global oil production has risen since then substantially. Maybe with 2, mostly 3 mbd, since the end of 2021, if we only count conventional crude oil, minus condensate (see this graph for confirmation, but this shows "All Liquids"). This has to be accounted for in my calculations, which I didn't do. I think then that we have, at most, 29 mbd of global net oil exports left this year (I thought it was 30 mbd in the end of last year, so this is a conservative guess, we lose so much oil exports every year nowadays). I come to this conclusion by accounting for those 2-3 mbd in oil production growth, over 2,4 years (since October 2021). And if one calculates that we have also lost a lot of global oil exports, to the natural decline, since the end of 2021, the sum of it is that we still have mostly 29 mbd of oil exports today (overall conventional crude minus condensate has declined somewhat since the post-pandemic peak). This is just an educated guess.
At most 2,4 years of oil exports has to be added to my calculations (since the end of 2021). And we have here a decline of oil exports spanning over 22 years, beginning in 2005 and ending in 2027, which is the end point in my best calculations, my best guess about when we lose our last conventional global net oil exports. How big part is 2,4 of 22? Answer: about 10 %. So we have to add 10 % to our results. So if our average year for the end of global net oil exports is 2025, then 10 % more (of 22 years) is 2,2 years, which is also a good number for what we gained in the post-pandemic peak of oil production and oil exports, during the time October 2021- March 2024.
If we add 2,2 years to the average year for the end of global oil exports, 2025, then we come to the beginning of 2027, exactly the year that was the result of my best calculations in my book above.
So again I find my thesis in my book confirmed.
I should also have added to my book that oil exports behave like conventional oil production, that when we lose conventional oil exports, we also lose unconventionals. We will never be able to export only unconventionals, so expensive these are. I wrote something about this phenomenon, pertaining to conventional oil, in this recent blogpost.
