Ah yes, peak oil, and the chore of communicating an urgent but horribly inconvenient truth to consumers and voters who most decidedly do not want to hear it or anything even remotely like it. Sound like any other topic that I have been known to write about until my fingers bleed?

Anyway, check out the video below. In a little over 12 minutes it does a terrific job of explaining the key feeds and speeds of peak oil.

A few notes, if I may:

If the IEA, as establishment as groups come, is saying so plainly that conventional crude oil has peaked in 2006, there’s an extremely good chance that either they’re right or any ensuing production above the 2006 level will be only marginally higher and likely very short lived. In other words, leave the champagne corked for the day we finally get around to doing something meaningful about transitioning away from oil.

The issue of how quickly we can produce oil from unconventional sources (most notably ultra deep water reserves and tar sands) is indeed the big question. Having to cook it out of the ground, or drill to oil that’s about 5 miles beneath the ocean’s surface in some offshore sites mean the oil will be more expensive even at an optimal extraction rates, let alone the much higher rates we would prefer. As just about everyone has pointed out a billion or so times with regard to peak oil, it’s a stock vs. flow issue. I you found an oil field with an immense amount of very high quality oil, say a trillion barrels, but for whatever reason you could extract it at no more than a million barrels per day, it would do almost nothing to delay peak oil or lessen the overall decline rate once we start down the post-peak slope. (As the video points out, we currently consume nearly 90 million barrels of oil every day, so your paltry one million barrels every 24 hours isn’t within 3 time zones of being a game changer.)

My reading of the situation agrees with that of the non-IEA experts in the video: The production rates for those unconventional sources are somewhere between wishful thinking and blatant spin. I’ve long said that I found it both fascinating and suggestive that the IEA’s pronouncements over the years are gradually approaching the hardcore peak oil assessment of our situation. (Notice the detail in the video that fairly recently the IEA was projecting that world oil production would rise to roughly 120 million barrels per day, which has now been revised to “only” 96 millions barrels per day.) I strongly suspect that the next place for the IEA to backtrack will be unconventional production.

As I was typing the above paragraph, an ExxonMobil ad ran on The Food network touting their new technology for producing oil from tar sands with no more emissions than conventional oil production. First, I don’t believe this for a second. And second, the emissions from conventional oil production and use are so hideously bad (remember climate change?), it’s hardly an accomplishment worth bragging about.

One big unknown is biofuels. There’s a tremendous amount of R&D looking for economical ways to let you fill up your SUV of Boeing 757 with something made from switchgrass or willow or algae or multi-decade old Twinkies. (We’re quickly maxing out our production capability for things like corn ethanol; the US is now turning something like 35% of its corn crop into ethanol that constitutes about 10% of our motor vehicle fuel. Do the math.) Plus, there’s the nasty interaction of some (but not all) biofuels with food production. Eventually we’ll be hitting international food prices much higher even than what we’re seeing now, which will put a lot of diplomatic and economic pressure on countries like the US to use their farmland for producing food for human beings and not motor fuel. My hunch is that we’re pretty close to that point. All we need is another year where Russia exports zero grain (like 2010) coupled with one in which harvests are hindered by drought (France and Germany this year) and/or flood (US this year), and we could be off to the races. The bottom line is that unless our friends the genetic engineers pull off a major miracle in the algae fuel department, the most likely future for biofuels is for production to rise a bit more only to be curtailed.

There are always wild cards, like the efforts to suck CO2 out of the air and convert it into motor fuel. But once again, trying to make something like that work in the lab is one thing while making it work at an “affordable” price, on a scale large enough to make a meaningful difference, and soon enough (given that we’re almost certainly on the doorstep of the overall world oil peak), is a very tall order, indeed. And don’t forget that any such deus ex machina wunderfuel has to be backward compatible with the many hundreds of millions of vehicles already on the world’s roads.

So, that’s where we stand, oil-(un)wise. Please spread a link to this video (or this post, if you prefer) to your friends and relatives.

Photo by ilco.