And article entitled Alliances sought to develop deep-water fields, published in The Herald (Wire services, El Universal, Jueves 22 de marzo de 2007) gives an excellent description of the rate of decline of oil production from the world’s third largest oil field, Cantarell (Ghawar in Saudi Arabia is first, and Burgan in Kuwait is second). An excerpt from the article:

Cantarell, which accounted for 55 percent of Pemex´s crude production last year, declined 12 percent in 2006 to 1.79 million barrels per day. The company forecasts it will decline 15 percent this year. Ghawar in Saudi Arabia is the world´s largest oil field, followed by Burgan in Kuwait.

Cantarell´s daily production in February was 1.567 million barrels, an 18 percent drop from 1.912 million barrels in February 2006 and a 1.5 percent slide from 1.591 million barrels in January, according to the Energy Secretariat´s web site.

In February, Pemex´s daily crude production fell almost 5 percent to 3.15 million barrels a day from 3.31 million barrels a year ago. Crude exports dropped 10 percent to 1.77 million barrels a day from a year ago. Pemex sells about 80 percent of its oil exports to the United States.

The Oil Drum has posted an article titled Saudi Arabian oil declines 8% in 2006 regarding what looks like a permanent production decline in Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar oil field. It’s looking more and more likely that Ken Deffeyes’ bet that the peak of world oil production would be sooner rather than later — sooner being last year, and later being five to ten years hence. Given the relative inelasticity of the price of oil, we could be in for an interesting few years.

On a more hopeful note, UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab is one of two nationally to be participating in a biofuels initiative, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle here and here.

Fascinating article in the Asia Times, entitled: “The New World Oil Order, Part 2: Russia tips the balance.”

The net effect of the (now former) global dominance and control of the West’s oil majors over the lion’s share of global energy resources was to ensure that those resources were irreversibly captured into the US-led market, thereby perpetuating the global dominance of that very order.

As such, the hemorrhaging of the dominance of West’s oil majors to the current pitiful state that only 9% or 10% of global reserves are controlled by them represents a sea change. Where, that is, into which model, the lion’s share of global energy resources will now be captured is no longer up to the West. That determination has already been forfeited to the rising East and the increasingly East-friendly producing regimes around the world, led by Russia. And nowadays the US depends on the market for nearly 60% of its energy needs.

In effect, the world is seeing the globe’s energy resources increasingly divided between two rival, incompatible energy markets, one suffering loss of global support and becoming ever more slanted toward serving the energy needs only of the West, and the other enjoying mounting global support and fully serving the energy needs of all the rest.

I continue to be interested in James Howard Kunstler’s take on the American scene, particularly in the society’s more delusional aspects. I do need to add the standard caveat that I don’t think his thesis — that the imminent peak of oil production spells doom especially for what he calls ‘easy motoring utopia’ — will play out as he predicts. Long before some sort of apocalypse plays out on US soil as industrial civilization devolves, I think the US will turn to only reasonable substitute for oil: coal. And in that regard, given the dire consequences for the environment such a development portends, Kunstler compared to me is an optimist. Nevertheless, I do think that his description of the United States’ polity’s detachment from the realities of production and resources, and its profligate, rapacious mis-allocation of capital to a suburban fantasy, is dead-on.

Kunstler, in an interview with Robert Birnbaum of The Morning News elaborates:

JHK: I made that reference in a different context in the book. That was in the discussion of alternative energy. There is a lot of delusional thinking about how we are going to get out of this pickle. In fact, I like to think of it this way. There are two gigantic mental obstructions that’s preventing us from thinking coherently about where we are. One of them I call the Jiminy Cricket syndrome–the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. There is a lot of wishful thinking in this culture. The other one is the Las Vegas-i-zation of the American mind, which is based on the idea that it is possible to get something for nothing. You combine those two ideas and you get a lot of delusional thinking.

RB: I wouldn’t call that thinking at all. These notions might be, if they obtain, subsumed values. If you asked people, they might affirm those things as their beliefs.

JHK: Yes, but you could also say it translates into forms of behavior, including doing things that bring extremely short-term benefits and a lot of long-term destruction.

RB: Yes, what I am searching for here? I was telling a friend about The Long Emergency and his response was that at our age we wouldn’t have to worry about it, and then he noted, But you have a kid. And so that adds a level greater than self-interest. So, there is a need to understand the emotional content of the response–not simply the analysis of the objective conditions. You state there is all this cognitive dissonance and you want to connect it to the Jiminy Cricket and Las Vegas-i-zation and on top of that you want to say that you have an upbeat view of…

JHK: I said I am a cheerful person. And I generally am.

RB: Hard to be cheerful after reading your book.

Of course, I have all of this in mind as I am about to resume bicycling to school each day — across the suburban landscape of southwestern San Francisco. I’m envisioning the enraged motorists already as I take ‘their’ lanes (to prevent myself from being ‘doored,’ and to strategically slow down the motorists where their haste and selfishness endangers my life, and those around them. It’s just outrageous that it should be so difficult to ride a bike, but this is the landscape that we’ve engineered, one devoted almost solely to the care and feeding of the auto, out of ‘necessity’. It is truly an insane, deluded society, and nowhere is this more evident then in the daily throng of autos that chokes the streets, and makes walking not merely perilous, but rare.

That’s my perception of the landscape that I live in. Kunstler points to a path of reform that we’ll be shunted onto by resource and energy crises (he surmises):

JHK: I am. I am a card-carrying new urbanist who signed the charter in Charleston and pays his dues every year. It’s going to be terribly important if we are going to have a different kind of social arrangement in America in terms of how we live and where we live–and we are going to have that–it is very important for us to retrieve that lost body of culture and principle and methodology and skill for how to arrange the human habitat on the landscape. We threw all that knowledge in the dumpster in 1960 and decided from that point on we would only use traffic engineering and statistical analysis to produce our everyday environment, and the result is there for everybody to see–miserable suburban strip malls and the power centers and subdivisions and all the crap that we have smeared across the landscape.

Again, I’m not so optimistic. I think that, when confronted with the looming stilling of economic life as oil runs out, Americans won’t reform, they’ll simply convert the 17 or 18 or 19 or so refineries that we have to coal liquefaction plants, and the motoring ‘utopia’ will chug along. It’s only when the rest of the world rises in arms (or in the bourses) against the staggering consumption of resources the American ‘way of life (non-negotiable),’ with its noxious effluvia, that there will be change. I hope that things will turn out differently, truly, but I just don’t see that level of awareness. Americans are just too insulated from the consequences of their actions to feel the need for change. See, I told you Kunstler was an optimist compared to me.

As oil prices top $70/barrel, ignorance amongst its consumers rears its head once more. To wit, from today’s San Francisco Chronicle, in an article entitled Gas prices push drivers off road
Transit agencies see more riders as reports show traffic leveling off, demand for fuel falling (And many kudos for the SF Chronicle for having content that is not cost-walled behind a registration barrier — meaning, that they gain readership by actually having useful content. Why is this so difficult for so many organizations to grasp?):

Some recovering drivers have turned to mass transit. McTyre commutes on the San Francisco Municipal Railway. He takes the L-Taraval from his Sunset District home to the Forest Hill stop, then catches a bus to his job just north of the Golden Gate Park panhandle. Instead of pouring $38 each week into the gas tank, he buys a $45 monthly Fast Pass.

“Muni’s the way,” said McTyre, 53, a chief examiner at City College of San Francisco. “It’s my personal protest against the gouging price for gasoline. I’m even considering selling the car.”

With due respect, Mr. McTyre, the price of oil is rising because of political instability, increased demand, new ethanol requirements, hurricane refinery damage — but not because of greed by oil companies, comforting though that answer may seem.

But more disturbing than this sort of periodic complaining by the motoring public is the underlying ignorance that it reveals. I strongly advise familiarization with Hubbert’s peak, U.S. oil discovery and production trends, the relative inelasticity of the price of oil, and the long-term consequences of suburban-style land use, and the like. $3.00 a gallon for gas is so cheap as to be fantastic. Ask yourself: could you survive if gas were $12 a gallon? Or $40? Because this could happen overnight. Really. Trust me.

For balance, here’s a pretty good countervailing argument thread to Kunstler.

Today’s cheery reading: more Kunstler, that delightful curmudgeon of the peak oil crowd. He visits an auto-show, in New York, and reports on the delusions of Homo sapiens homer simpsonus.

Kunstler describes the propaganda environment:

Each brand of car had its little area with half a dozen models on view. Many of them had giant wall-sized plasma TV screens that played what amounted to extended TV commercials of the kind with which we have been so constantly bombarded over the decades that they barely register anymore. But it is interesting to actually pay attention, because they uniformly send a bizarre message: You are all alone in your car in a beautiful environment.

The cars on screen are generally depicted as swooshing along gorgeous winding rural roads, with no others in sight — just you and the open road! This is obviously an old and alluring archetypal dream, and it is also obviously at odds with the more common reality of creeping down Route 17 in Hackensack, or some ghastly highway like it, with traffic backed up at the frequent stoplights and vistas of the entropic horror of American hyper-retail amid wastelands of free parking at every compass point.

And, fed as they are on a hallucinatory diet of television, it should be no surprise that the comments Kunstler elicits demonstrate a degree of ignorance bordering on dementia. But first, background, as given by Kunstler:

The facts, sadly, belie that notion. United States oil reserves stand at about 28 billion barrels (if you include natural gas condensates). I am not speaking here of the government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which is a tiny fraction of this, but of the total amount of crude oil left underground anywhere in the fifty states: 28 billion barrels. Now, Americans use more than 20 million barrels of oil a day. That’s 100 million every five days. That’s a billion (1,000 million) every fifty days. That’s — give or take — seven billion barrels of oil a year. If for some reason our oil imports were cut off and we had to depend solely on our own oil, our total reserves would last four measly years. Actually a bit less if you figure that a portion of that oil will never be pumped out for practical and economic reasons.

And now, the hallucinations, again as reported by Kunstler in the same article:

“The car companies know they can get seventy-five miles per gallon but the gas companies won’t allow that because their stock might drop,” said Jimmy Koutsoubis of Clinton, New Jersey. “We have all this excess oil — we’re just not using it.”

And:

Ed Picerno of Staten Island said, “The oil companies manipulate the price. There’s plenty of supply in the world if we’d just start drilling in Alaska and elsewhere.”

One more:

I asked one middle-aged gentleman, who didn’t want to give his name, what he thought about America’s dependence on foreign oil. “It’s not because we’re relying on imports,” he said, “except it’s cheaper to get from other nations, like buying pineapples from Costa Rica.”