I väntan på Jesus

 

 

In this comment on the blog "Peak Oil Barrel", RESERVEGROWTHRULZ gave the following critique of my work on oil exports:

 

 

 

 

 

RESERVEGROWTHRULZ, it is not true that Brown predicted a major export oil crisis to begin in 2006. He said back then that the end of global net oil exports would come in the thirties, more exactly 2030-2032, depending on which articles by him you read. 

 

Remember that Brown's calculations was about conventional oil exports, or "crude+condensate" exports (I'm not so sure what the difference is between these two). Global conventional oil production has been on an undulating plateau since 2005 (see the charts in this blogpost). This is common knowledge among the more pessimistic peakoilers. 

 

But even if we calculate with "All Liquids" data, instead of conventional oil/crude+condensate data, the results do not differ much, perhaps only by a few years (see section 2 in this blogpost). When I calculated the end of global net "All Liquids" oil exports, beginning with 55 mbd (EIA data), I landed on 2030-2033, whereas when I began with the 30 mbd for 2021 (Jeffrey Brown's data), I landed at around 2027. So the difference was only 3-6 years, which is a very small one in the grand scheme of things. This should alarm policy makers deeply. It is the rate of decline, not the amount we begin with, that is the really important thing here. 

 

Peakoilers like Kurt Cobb and Art Berman have talked about a "stealth peak oil", because one has begun to count all sorts of strange unconventional and very expensive "oils" as "oil", making it seem like everything is fine and global oil production is growing, just like before. But the situation isn't the same any more. Something big has changed. Just watch oil geologist Art Berman's videos (the interviews with him), and you will understand. 

 

The same can be said about oil exports. There is a "stealth peak oil exports" and a "stealth decline of oil exports", because of corrupt and meaningless oil news reporting and false, deceiving calculations, hiding the reality, just like the US government is so good at doing in other fields of the economy, with things like the inflation numbers and the like. Conventional oil exports, which is what really matters here, which is what one can build a high-tech civilization with (this cannot be said of many unconventional oils, so low EROEI they have, neither of "renewables"), the oil where most of the diesel lies (diesel is the most important oil product in the world, it's what make trucks running, the hemoglobine of civilization), peaked in 2005, when conventional oil peaked (which is pretty logical, I cannot understand how EIA can have it peaking in 2016, see the charts in this blogpost), at 45-46 mbd. This is reasonable, because still in 2012 there was about 30 oil exporting countries. Today there is even fewer such, and as much as about 97 oil producing countries, if the data in that Wikipedia-article is not very old. Remember that according to Brown we have about 30 mbd of conventional oil export today, out of about 80 mbd of crude+condensate oil. 

 

If conventional oil and conventional oil exports peaked in 2005, it has to have declined ever since. It is a mathematical certainty. Why? Well, oil exports always decline much faster than overall oil production declines, and it declines even when oil production is flat. It is because not only the oil importing countries, but also the oil exporting countries grow their own oil consumption, usually exponentially. If they do it exponentially, then the decline of oil exports has to be exponential, i.e. at an accelerated rate of decline (I use the term "exponential decline" thus here). Let's see what the growth rates of the world economy is, on average. This article says: "Between the years 1900 and 2000 world GDP at constant prices has increased about 19-fold, corresponding to an average annual rate of growth of 3 percent."

 

This growth pace has continued since the year 2000, just look at this article and this article. I would say that since 2005 the average growth of GDP has been between 3 and 4 %. 

 

What about the growth since 2005, not of conventional oil production, but of "All Liquids" production? Has it followed that pace? 

 

No. Not at all. The rise in "All Liquids" since 2005 has been at most 18 mbd (see the charts in this blogpost). I.e. it has risen 21,4 % in 18 years, which is on average a rise of 1,19 % per year. Compare this to the average 3-4 % of world GDP growth since 2005.

 

There is not a direct symmetry beween the amount of GDP growth and the amount of oil production/consumption growth. They are not equal. Because GDP does not actually measure how big the real economy of materials and tangible things is, or how much energy it consumes (although "energy is the economy"), but it only measures the amount of transactions that take place in it. I think that if the economy grows at 3 % per year, the actual economy of tangible things (not just the financial economy of speculative bubbles and the movements of money) and tangible energy consumption maybe grows at half that pace, at 1,5 % per year. I remember reading something like that (I'm not sure, but I can't find where I read it) on ecological economist Dr. Tim Morgan's blog writings (see these charts by him), and it makes sense to me. 

 

So we can say that if oil consumption ("All Liquids") has grown globally with 1,5 - 2 % per year since 2005 (this is half of the 3-4 %), and global oil production has grown only with 1,19 % per year, then it is a mathematical certainty that "All Liquids" exports has had to decline since 2005, and this with an accelerated rate. This make me distrusting oil export data from energy institutes like "Statistical Review of World Energy", EIA and OPEC, and makes me give credit to professional, licensed oil geologist Jeffrey J. Brown, the most educated oil export mathematician out there, who have understood these things, and made a lot of calculations based upon them. The more I calculate, the more my calculations line up with his, albeit I often come to even more radical conclusions. 

 

And then to the question if there has been an oil export crisis. Sure it has! Where else does the slowdown of the world economy come from, if not from the decline of oil production or oil exports? Some parts of the world economy are even downright collapsing, in slow-motion (even the center of it, the US, has for a long time been in the process of beginning to slowly collapse)! Are you unaware of this fact, RESERVEGROWTHRULZ? We would have needed at least one new Saudi Arabia in oil to avoid this, since 2005, and it has not materialized. In fact, we got a new Saudi Arabia, in oil, and that was the shale oil boom, albeit very expensive oil, not like Saudi oil. The problem was only that we had needed two Saudi Arabias, one of them cheap to produce, to avoid a debt crisis. In the future we will need even more of those things, because of the high natural decline in our existing oil fields. 

 

But there are powers who profit from us being unaware of the "stealth collapse", so we stay obedient consumers, putting our hopes in the infinite growth paradigm, which only the rich part of the world can afford to hope for and practice. The others try to "save and survive", and become more and more collapse aware for every passing year. I can almost see the blinders on the people of the rich world. And the blinders are made of dollar bills, the silly logic of money and consumerism.