Bentley & Zittel on Limits to Global Energy Flows

At the recent ASPO 2013 conference, Roger Bentley and Werner Zittel gave a joint presentation on the limits to global energy flows mainly from oil, gas and coal.

Their findings are nothing new to those who have followed the PO debate for the past years, but bare repeating:

• Global conventional oil peak is now (will continue for some years)
• Global natural gas peak in c. 10-15 years
• Global (hard) coal peak perhaps within a few years
• Alternatives have much lower energy densities and returns
• Prices will keep going up, may go down in the short term (due to economic hiccups)
• Move to alternatives will put a stress in form of a  growth slowdown to the economy
• Official & Industry sources (IEA, EIA, BP, OPEC) have been systematically wrong in their oil production estimates
• We have plenty of reserves under ground, but we can't get to them fast
• If we consume everything, we will create a lot of environmental risks & damage

And oh yes, official policy is still mostly in denial about all this in most countries. Apparently people believed the fracking fairy tales and the future of 1:1 substitution of oil with natural gas (over night). 

Ah well.

What came/comes out of the Shale/Tight gas/oil Miracle/Mirage?

A lot of hot air has been blown into the bubble called shale oil (often actually tight oil) miracle. The basic argument has been that soon the US will surpass that of Saudi Arabia as oil produces (and perhaps even exporter) due to non-conventional oil reserves and "advances in oil recovery technology".
Well, most of that is of course pure poppycock. Bakken and other US tight oil / shale formations are estimated to peak at around 2017:

The fracking miracle whis has greated the natural gas boom in United States is real, but with devastating environmental costs and unsustainable resource base. That is, it destroys groundwater resources, pollutes land and uses up more land these days in the active states than is used for wheat or corn production.

Further, unconventional resources always peak faster and once peaked, will decline extremely rapidly year-by-year, much faster than the old conventional resource bases that we got used to. This will create a frantic and increasing rate of drilling - a marathon to the death in order to just basically stand still (i.e. to stay even at the current level of production, not to say meet growing demand). That is not a miracle nor is it a future anybody in the fossil fuel industry hopes for. It's a race to the bottom.

Good resources on this issue is a fairly recent write up by Randy Udall titled 'The shale phenomenon: fabulous miracle with a fatal flaw' (2013), the Tullett Prebon report 'The Perfect Storm' (2012) and Chris Nelder's recent post on Smart Planet blog (2013).