This Op-Ed was refused publication by the New York Times.
by Charles Hall and Nate Gagnon
EROEI.com (March 23 2007)
Op-Ed Editor, New York Times:
The recent front page article "Oil innovations pump new life into old
wells" by Jad Mouawad (March 5 page 1) is dangerously misleading. The
author would have us believe that technological innovations will
increase the proportion of oil recoverable from known fields
sufficiently to compensate for the dearth of new discoveries. It gives
a false sense of security about our difficult oil situation based on a
very selective interpretation of data. For example, the graph used to
support the article undermines the author's main thesis. It shows that
steam injection is not new but has been used in the Kern River field
since 1965 and also that oil production in this field peaked in 1984 and
has been declining sharply since about 1997. In fact most of the "oil
innovations" mentioned in the article, including the injection of steam
and various gases, are old technologies, first implemented in the 1920s.
Innovations have always been occurring in the oil industry. The
important question is whether these technologies are increasing
production more rapidly than depletion is decreasing it.
Considerable information indicates that depletion is a more important
force in petroleum extraction than is technological development. The
increases in production from the Kern River and Duri fields that the
article mentions, and indeed even from the much larger Alberta and
Orinoco Tar sands deposits, are small relative to the far larger
production declines from many of the world's most important oil fields,
including the North Sea, Cantarell in Mexico (recently the world's
second largest producer), America's largest fields including Prudhoe
Bay, East Texas and Yates, Samotlor in Russia, Yibal in Oman,
Rabi-Kounga in Gabon, probably Burgan in Kuwait and so on. All of these
fields have been subject to the kind of technologies mentioned in the
Mouawad article, sometimes for many decades, and all except possibly
Burgan are clearly in steep decline or have virtually ceased production.
The best oil field technology in the world has not stopped the US
production from declining by fifty percent since its peak in 1970.
Likewise clear peaks in oil production have occurred in such important
producers as Argentina, China, Egypt, Indonesia (a founding member of
OPEC), Mexico, Norway and the United Kingdom, even while prices were
increasing. It is not clear yet whether modern technologies such as
horizontal drilling will principally increase total yields or simply
increase rates of extraction.
Furthermore, many of the technologies mentioned in the article tend to
be extremely expensive. This is so not only in dollars but also in
energy. The importance of the increasing energy cost has been documented
in reports, published in quality journals, that show that the energy
return on investment (EROI) for US domestic oil production has dropped
from greater than 100 Btu returned per Btu invested in the 1930s to
about thirty to one in the 1970s to perhaps fifteen to one in 2000. Our
research indicates a similar declining trend for world oil. Making
steam and pumping it into the ground, or moving gases from their source
points to dispersed oil-field sites, requires enormous investments of
energy. Thus while increasing prices can indeed make more low-quality
resources economically available they generally also mean that more
energy is being expended relative to production returns. Eventually we
may reach the energy break even point. Thus much of the oil cited as
"probable" or "contingent" reserves is unlikely to be worth exploiting
regardless of price.
The article's dismissive comments about peak oil theory and its
advocates are ill informed and ignore the importance of the message
coming from a sophisticated and growing community that includes many
hundreds of geologists, other scientists, environmentalists, financiers
and citizens who see a serious situation ahead of us for oil and,
especially in North America, natural gas. Whether peak oil production
(or as has been suggested an "undulating plateau") has occurred, is
occurring now or will not occur for several years or possibly decades
makes little difference from the perspective of the life times of our
children. Hiding our heads in the sand and putting our faith in
technological developments that so far have been unable to compensate
for most depletion seems to us to be a very bad idea.
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