Some corrections to my global oil reserve math
(This is an important update for those who have read my blogpost "Global oil reserve mathematics. How many years of conventional oil do we have left?" that I posted in this space on May 13, 2023:)
I have to correct the blogpost above, where I only subtracted 17 % from the 36,4 billion barrels of yearly use. In reality, I should subtract 17 % more, because this year not 17 % but about 34 % of the "All Liquids" global oil volume was unconventional oil (I have difficulties wrapping my head around this being such an incredibly big volume of the total). And I forgot that the "Crude + Condensate" label contains a lot of unconventional oil, i.e. for example shale oil and heavy oil. This was really a bad mistake by me. This year conventional crude oil production (minus condensates) has been somewhere at 68 million barrels per day (mbd), and "All Liquids" oil production have been close to the all time peak, at about 101 mbd. (Check out the volume of conventional oil this year, here). This is a difference of about 34 %. The conventional crude oil peak was in 2016 at ~74,2 mbd. Back then the "All Liquids" was at 97 mbd.
So if we add 17% to the 20 years that I got as the time of oil reserves we have left, we have to add 3,4 years, because 17% of 20 is 3,4. So if we add 3,4 year to 2045 we come to 2048. This gives us 25 years of oil, only 3-5 more years than I thought before (3 years is not much. Think how fast 3 years goes in your life). This year 2048 is very special to me, for reasons I have described here. The result is also in broad accordance with professor Charles A.S. Hall's calculations mentioned in note (1) in the first blogpost above. Others have come to even more radical conclusions than my miscalculation above, see this blogpost of mine. Because of these, I did not rewrite the first blogpost I linked to above, it was an interesting thought experiment, that I shall let be as it is. It is the result I get if Jefferson's oil reserves were Crude + Condensate (this label is often confused with "conventional oil"). But I don't think they are.
This is also an important reminder: One should also try to calculate (but this is almost impossible) that not every year, into the future, will give us 36,4 billion barrels of oil, but that this volume will shrink successively, very abruptly in the end, giving us more oil reserve time. But this goes too far for my abilities.
I will also add one correction to the calculations of oil exports in the May 13 blogpost:
I would estimate that we in 2023 have about 26 mbd of oil exports left, globally. 26 mbd is ~30 % of the Crude + Condensate volume we have today. So if we still think we have half of the global oil production volume that we have today, in 2035, which is 12 years into the future, then 30 % of 12 is 4 years. So this gets us to 2027. This is almost the same result I got from my previous calculations. If we postpone the half way mark to half the way between 2023 and 2048, we get to 12,5 years into the future, and it does not make a big difference. If we then think that the half way mark of our remaining oil production linger a little bit longer, say to 2038, then we get 15 years, and 30 % of 15 is 5 years. It makes the oil export go in 5 years, in 2028. Not a big difference.
If we have to calculate that the oil export years are 30 % of all the 25 years, then we arrive at 7,5 years into the future, which is in the end of 2030. It does not give us much more time. And the Available Net Exports (world oil exports minus China and India) will probably stop a couple of years before that, in 2028.
