Oil Expert Maugeri: 21st Century Will See Increased Crude Oil Supplies
Leonardo Maugeri. (image: extramuseum.it)
The theory of peak oil, developed in the 1950s by Dr. M. King Hubbert, a geoscientist at the Shell Corporation, can be explained like this: what goes up must come down. According to Hubbert, global oil production will someday reach an apex, after which oil wells will yield less crude than before. As with empires, oil’s reign is a matter of rise and decline, something that Hubbert describes with a simple bell curve. When exactly we will reach peak oil—whether it is today or ten years from now—is up for debate, but since the emergence of the theory, most people have agreed that if the industrial world is not to fall along with oil production, something must be done.
Here to dismiss that notion is Leonardo Maugeri, senior executive vice president of the Italian oil company Eni and author of The Age of Oil (2006). In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal, Maugeri argues that peak oil is a mere fantasy, a tale told only by doom-sayers and the ill-informed. In fact, Maugeri says there is more than enough oil to go around for a long, long time, even if that idea “offends conventional wisdom.” For this hopeful proclamation he offers three good reasons.
First, no one knows how much oil there really is. According to the US Geological Survey, there are at least seven to eight trillion barrels of oil trapped underground. More than two trillion of these have been deemed “recoverable,” while “proven” reserves are around 1.2 trillion barrels. However, Maugeri argues that these data are unreliable, as current estimates don’t take into account unconventional oil resources (like ultra-heavy oils, tar sands, shale oils, etc), which would double the overall figure. To Maugeri, it’s simple: if you don’t know how much oil you have, it’s impossible to calculate the curve of future supply.
(image: 4.bp.blogspot.com)
Second, new technologies will enable us to extract much more oil than Hubbert (and other doom-sayers) assumed. If this seems like a bit of cheery science-fiction, just look at the past thirty years: Today, we are able to recover 35 percent of the oil contained in known reserves, up from 20 percent in 1980. As oil-retrieving technologies improve, that figure is sure to go up. Maugeri is quick to point out that such technologies already exist. Generally known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies, they entail injecting an oil reservoir with chemicals, heat, steam, and heavy gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen. EORs have produced fantastic results, leading to the revival of many oil fields that had been considered exhausted.
Third, only one third of our planet has been sufficiently explored for new oil deposits. This means that there might be quite a bit more oil out there than we think. Maugeri argues that until recently it has not been “economical or technically feasible to undertake big and sophisticated exploration campaigns when oil was abundant and cheap, as it was for most of the past century.” In other words, before everyone started clamoring about peak oil, the big oil producers had no reason to develop the technology needed to thoroughly search the globe for oil. As these technologies become affordable, oil companies will begin to plumb new depths in search of crude.
When more oil reserves are found, and new ways to reach them are acquired, “today’s difficult oil will turn into tomorrow’s easy oil.” That is, what seems impossible now will be tenable soon. Again, Maugeri uses a historical example: in the 1970s, North Sea oil was considered all but impossible to reach, and drilling for it was almost prohibitively expensive. Yet a mere decade after initial production began, the cost of extracting the oil had been cut in half.
With these reasons in mind, Maugeri makes a few daring predictions. “By 2030, more than 50% of the known oil will be recoverable. At the same time, the amount of known oil will have significantly grown…and a larger portion of unconventional oils will be commonly produced, bringing the total amount of recoverable oil reserves to something between 4.5-5 trillion barrels.” That is, Maugeri thinks that in the next twenty years, we will more than double our available oil reserves.
Of course, whether or not Maugeri’s optimism is attributable to his professional stake in the Eni oil corporation is—like peak oil theory itself—up for debate.
API President: Obama Admin Is Standing in the Way of Jobs and Affordable Energy | HeatingOil.com says: says:
[...] puts him in step with other chief executives of the oil industry. Recall that in November of 2009, Leonardo Maugeri, senior executive vice president of the Italian oil company Eni and author of The Age of Oil [...]
Fling says: says:
We need to adapt. Take a look at this article The Great Transition: http://www.scribd.com/doc/21656220/The-Great-Transition-Navigating-Social-Economic-Ecological-Change-in-Turbulent-Times
Josh Garrett says: says:
Thanks Gale for your honest, if somewhat alarming, view of oil’s future. If and when Peak Oil does occur, I hope that we as a global society will have sufficiently prepared for the event by finding adequate alternative energy sources that will slowly take the place of fossil fuels as they become more difficult and expensive to find and dig out. If that goal is accomplished, we can avoid the dire consequences you have predicted.
Josh Garrett says: says:
A very good question, Mike. It seems to me that Maugeri is one of many (most of whom work in the oil industry) oil “hawks” who put their faith in technological advancements and future discoveries to keep fossil fuels readily available and relatively cheap. By definition, such faith is only partially based on facts, which makes it hard to prove but also hard to disprove. I think it’s safe to assume that, as a responsible and ambitious executive at on oil company, Maugeri is simply fulfilling his duty to convince anyone who will listen that crude oil is the fuel that powers today’s and will power tomorrow’s global society–no matter what conventional wisdom says.
The question that Maugeri and many other proponents of plentiful oil theories omit form their arguments is this: even if fossil fuels are not running out, should we continue to rely on them when cleaner and safer energy sources already exist?
Mike O'Brien says: says:
How does it make sense to say that, because the total size of oil reserves is unknown, there must be plenty of oil? Especially when there is evidence that some countries purposely inflate their reserves?
Gale Whitaker says: says:
EOR Will insure that when peak oil occurs productivity will fall like a rock. This will guranty that shortages will be particularly dramatic. Some folks are liable to freeze to death, others won’t be able to make it to work to earn their daily bread. At any rate folks are going to be really ticked off when they can’t fill the old Yukon with gasoline. It will all come out fine in the end, there are way too many folks on this planet anyway.
Steve in Hungary says: says:
Another couple of points:
“Only one third of our planet has been sufficiently explored for new oil deposits” Could that possibly be because the other two thirds is under such a depth of ocean as to be beyond the capabilities of human kind and the materials we have available to us to explore?
Secondly, it is absolutely outrageous to characterise Hubbert as a doomer! As I recall he was a geologist working for Shell, and the oil industry did not like what he had to say in 1956. He was right though. He predicted that the US Lower 48 would peak within the time scale that it did in fact peak. He also predicted that the world would peak in the late 1990s. OK he got that wrong, but there were the oil shocks of the 70s and 80s that severely cut back consumption that he could not have foreseen.
Thirdly, it matters not if world resources are 100,000 Trillian barrels. If they can only be extracted at 3,000,000 barrels a day total then we have a serious problem. Any Peak Oiler will tell you that it is not about the size of the tank, it is about the size of the tap! As for oil sands the expectation is a maximum extraction rate of 3.5 mbpd. And as for oil from so called oil shale (it’s not oil - it’s kerogen) forget it! They have been playing with it for fifty years. It is simply uneconomical to extract. As Carl said, it is all about EROI.
Josh Garrett says: says:
Carl-
Thanks for your comment, it calls attention to a glaring omission in Maugeri’s forecast.
As is addressed in our coverage of a recent report from the Congressional Research Service (just posted moments ago), the vast majority of potential oil resources (especially those in North America) are far too difficult and expensive to be worth extracting now or even in 10 years. While I agree that moving toward renewable energy is the logical and responsible solution global energy issues, we will have to continue to rely on oil and other fossil fuels for our energy until renewable technologies are capable of supporting an ever-expanding world population.
It is my hope, for the sake of all humankind, that renewable energy reaches that point sooner rather than later.
Carl says: says:
Enhanced oil recovery is only justifiable if the amount of energy used to create and inject steam or chemicals, etc. is less than the amount of energy contained in the recovered oil.
This concept is known as energy returned on energy invested (EROI), interesting that Leonardo chose not to address EROI while championing EOR.
EOR and EROI aside, what is the good of increased oil reserves when we must cap and reduce carbon emissions to address global warming? Investing in increased reserves we can’t burn makes no sense, unless you are an oil magnate like Mr. Maugeri.