Article on the Volt, Cruze, and gas prices

Your idea of what peak oil community does or doesn't obviously doesn't match with reality. They obsessively pour over all production data, as you can see below.

The Oil Drum | Stories tagged with "oilwatch"

Isn't it amazing that people whose oil price prediction consistently fails are considered "experts" ?

The Oil Drum | Holding Daniel Yergin and CERA Accountable



ps : Speaking of economics, Jeff Rubin I quoted in my earlier post was the chief economist at CIBC for 2 decades.

 

I was responding to a post that said that some in peak oil say we hit it in 2005. I explained why this was clearly wrong.

If you are going to defend that position with some that don't subscribe to your little newsletter get price and volume figures wrong, well ok. If you obsesively pour over documents to make a point, but don't look at other factors you are likely to be wrong whether you are a true peak oil believer or not. A better position is oil production has not peaked, and we will not know when it has peaked until production starts declining because of reserves.

The problem with peak oil idea is not that there will be a peak in production, that much is agreed upon. The problem is there are extremist ideas of what will happen when this peak occurs. Better analysis comes from looking at supply and demand in the face of a monopoly. In the oil embargo the monopoly decided to reduce supply for political reasons. In the latest oil run up, venezuala fired the competent managers and production dropped, production also dropped in iraq because of the war. A higher spike resulted from market manipulation of speculators thinking the price would keep going up along with a week dollar pushing all comodities up. Short covering made the price dive. See no magic is needed.

I would say those are bad analysts that have gotten things wrong. There is also no reason someone that subscribes to peak oil can't be a good analyst. I briefly looked up Jeff Rubin. It looks like he was fanning the speculative flames with his predictions 2 years ago that we would be seeing $150 oil in 2010, and $200 oil in 2012 with 10% drop in cars in the us and canada. That seems a little alarmist to me. Let's check back in 2012 and see if he is right. without hyper inflation, some politics in Opec countries or natural disasters, I would expect oil to be $100/barrel or less in 2012.

 

Clearly wrong? 2008 seems to be approximately the same as 2005 for total oil production, I haven't seen definitive numbers for 2009 yet but my understanding was the recession & low prices reduced production. Conventional sources almost certainly peaked in 2005 as unconventional oil (oil sands of Canada, extra-heavy crudes, etc.) start to take their place. But these are more expensive sources.

You're right though, we can only see this after the fact, so we'll have to wait until well after the fact to be sure economic variations haven't affected the results.

The Oil Drum | World Oil Production Forecast - Update November 2009

"World crude oil, condensate and oil sands production peaked in 2005 at an annual average of 73.72 million barrels per day (mbd) according to recent EIA production data. 2008 production was slightly less than 2005 creating a peak plateau from 2005 to 2008 as shown in the chart below. Production is expected to decline further as non OPEC annual oil production peaked in 2004 and is forecast to decline at a faster rate in 2010 and beyond due mainly to big declines from Russia, Norway, the UK and Mexico. Saudi Arabia's crude oil production peaked in 2005. By 2011, OPEC will not have the ability to offset cumulative non OPEC declines and world oil production is forecast to stay below its 2005 peak." ​

Table 11.5 World Crude Oil Production, 1960-2008 (Million Barrels per Day) - A more user-friendly chart from the EIA, than the 4-part one referenced above. This shows 2008 as slightly edging out 2005. Unclear when it was published, but definitely after 2008

 

The depth and speed of the financial meltdown took a lot of people by surprise, the peak oil "alarmists" among them. Had we kept going near or at the previous pace, I think those numbers would be quite likely.

For the second part - car sales are down compared to 2008: 2009 was down 21%, and while 2010 recovered most of those losses (year-over-year so far), we're still not at 2008 numbers. That was mostly due to the recession however, not high gas prices, but you can make the argument the recession was a result of high gas prices.

Miles driven is still down compared to the peak in 2007. Interesting chart here: Figure 1 - April 2010 - TVT - Travel Monitoring - Policy Information - FHWA

 

That's optomistic. The other just-as-likely scenerio is the cap works only partly (as it is now) from here on out, and the Gulf turns into a toxic wasteland ... and people still continue driving Escalades, Tahoes, Armadas and the like. We are, after all, a land of stupid people, slow to change unless it nearly too late, to a large extent.
I just got asked a question by a reasonably smart person,

"Don't you think all these environmental regulations being forced on us, is causing a complete loss of freedom?" The very way that the question was framed says volumes ... as in "loss of freedom" ... as in being allowed to squander resources ... as in "forced" to be environmental, because no one really wants it, etc.

 

You should ask them how all those fishermen, restaurants, beach resorts, residents, fish, birds, turtles, dolphins in the gulf feel about the lack of regulations which has either kill them or their way of life, and then see what he says about his potential "loss of freedom".

Here's a quote for him:

"Your freedom ends where mine begins".

 

Where did you explain ? I see no "explanation" ... just some factually incorrect statement about 2009 production.

Just because I proved your ignorance you don't need to adopt this tone.

Did you also see that he was the first to predict $50 and then $100 - which everyone said was alarmist at that time ?

ps : A lot of people have done deep analysis on Peak oil and what it means. You can read and get informed and then make up your mind. The real danger is in not preparing for the post peak oil - just like the danger of doing nothing about global warming.

Also you may want to read Hirch report.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report"]Hirsch report - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

 

No. Just like all other laws & regulations, this defines the boundaries of an individual's actions that the society will accept. Say like cleaning your house and dumping the trash in your nieghbour's backyard.

 

I was talking production capacity since we live in a world driven by manipulators of oil supply, but the theory talks about actual production. Here are the latest eia revised estimates of production in average thousand barrels a day.

2003 79,583
2004 83,088
2005 84,578
2006 84,636
2007 84,500
2008 85,429
2009 84,243

To be fair you can choose a different basket of items and call it oil production, and sweet crude is in decline for more expensive items. EIA includes petroleum gasses and non-conventional heavy oils and crude. Contrary to the oil drum prediction, opec cut production in 2009 as non-Opec production increased and world wide oil production capacity increased. I believe in oil platau, then decline. I disagree with the peak oil idea that production will decline as fast as it increased. The plateu is much more likely as price increases substitution, use of more expensive techniques including refining of oil sands and use of wind energy increase. If you get rid of heavy oil, oil sands, and liquefied petroleum gasses you may have a case for a plateau of that production, but no peak and great decline. Only history can tell if 2008 is a peak, but I doubt it. A peak in 2005 should have us bellow 2003 levels by now according to the peak oil theory. It did take us until 1993 to produce as much oil as 1979, the relative peak before then.

Definitely some analysts doing their best to pump up the value of mortgages and oil. There were also people in the legitimate press writing about it. It was hard to know when the bubble would burst. You know there is an oil bubble when cracked products like gasoline are selling for less than crude futures. It is hard to tell when prices will come back to reality.

Interesting information.

I doubt I can prove anything to you. I try to look at real world prices and production levels and production capacity. I said your analyst was alarmist because he was predicting alarmist things like people abandoning there cars and global trade dying because of high oil prices. I do not know about his older performance, and like every prospectus will tell you past performance is no guarantee of future results. The other problem with the alarmistst prediction from peak and other oil analysts is the price manipulation that happened.

 

Nobody knows where oil is going. I have a guy at work who's positive it will hit $5 within a few years. If he's so sure why doesn't he pile into as many shares of OIL as he can? And that goes for anybody else who is so sure.

I suspect, and I base this on historical prices of oil and knowing that the demand continues to increase, that prices will stay similar to where they are now for the next few years, give or take some crashes/bubbles (remember in 2008 we saw $140/barrel and sub $40/barrel in the same year!). When I was looking into buying my Prius I used prices that we had in March and they're what we have now give or take a little.

Back in 2008 you could not get your hands on a Prius, remember that? And now they are thrown in for free with a Big Mac meal at Toyota dealerships all over the country.

I think there is a great chance the economy will hit another recession soon or, best case, it moves along slowly for the next several years. You can forget about a V recovery, so there's really no great pressure to increase oil demand.

 

The recession officially began in Dec/07. This was not officially stated until quite recently, but the high of 14k DOW down to 11k only the most ridiculous of people didn't realize a recession was coming. I remember making fun of Bernanke in March/08 when he thought a recession could still be avoided (a position he maintained for a couple of months beyond that).

I was positive the oil rush up was a farce.

I don't think we've hit peak oil. We are growing in demand faster than supply overall but there are still a great many reserves around not tapped.

 

we pay $7-00 per US gallon for fuel in the uk. This makes the Prius and other vehicles more attractive.
We also pay tax on our company cars and typically you can save £1000-00 in tax by changing from a thirsty to a fuel efficient car. We also pay yet another tax for what we call a road tax disc. This can be as much as $650 per year for a big gas guzzler but free for a Prius (encouraging people to buy energy efficient cars)

 

Friar, Why do you think that you pay almost 3 times more for "go juice" than we do here in the good ol'e US of A. Doesn't BP cut you some slack!

 

The government tax fuel really highly to generate income.

I think over 70% of the pump price is taken by the government. Presumably as an environmental means of reducing energy use.

If every nation had to pay that much, then we all would probably look more carefully at what cars we drive and how we heat and cool our buildings.

We have no choice. Prices are similar in France (a few % less)