Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The end of oil is closer than you think (The Guardian)

Siamo alla frutta. Dopo che c'e' il dessert?
Am.
The end of oil is closer than you think 
 Oil production could peak next year, reports John Vidal. Just kiss your 
lifestyle goodbye 
  Thursday April 21, 2005
The Guardian 
  The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that 
the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a 
group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English 
petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning 
of the end of the oil age.
They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil 
Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and 
through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the 
front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief 
geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, 
Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.
"Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," the 
Oxford PhD told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to 
businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in 
Edinburgh next week. "The issue is the long downward slope that opens on 
the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and 
their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways," 
he says.
Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil - the kind 
associated with gushing oil wells - is approaching fast, perhaps even 
next year. His calculations are based on historical and present 
production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and 
governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the US Securities and 
Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how 
the industry works.
"About 944bn barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764bn 
remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142bn of 
reserves are classed as 'yet-to-find', meaning what oil is expected to 
be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next 
year," he says.
If he is correct, then global oil production can be expected to decline 
steadily at about 2-3% a year, the cost of everything from travel, 
heating, agriculture, trade, and anything made of plastic rises. And the 
scramble to control oil resources intensifies. As one US analyst said 
this week: "Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye."
But the Campbell analysis is way off the much more optimistic official 
figures. The US Geological Survey (USGS) states that reserves in 2000 
(its latest figures) of recoverable oil were about three trillion 
barrels and that peak production will not come for about 30 years. The 
International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that oil will peak between 
"2013 and 2037" and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, four countries 
with much of the world's known reserves, report little if any depletion 
of reserves. Meanwhile, the oil companies - which do not make public 
estimates of their own "peak oil" - say there is no shortage of oil and 
gas for the long term. "The world holds enough proved reserves for 40 
years of supply and at least 60 years of gas supply at current 
consumption rates," said BP this week.
Indeed, almost every year for 150 years, the oil industry has produced 
more than it did the year before, and predictions of oil running out or 
peaking have always been proved wrong. Today, the industry is producing 
about 83m barrels a day, with big new fields in Azerbaijan, Angola, 
Algeria, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere soon 
expected on stream.
But the business of estimating oil reserves is contentious and 
political. According to Campbell, companies seldom report their true 
findings for commercial reasons, and governments - which own 90% of the 
reserves - often lie. Most official figures, he says, are grossly 
unreliable: "Estimating reserves is a scientific business. There is a 
range of uncertainty but it is not impossible to get a good idea of what 
a field contains. Reporting [reserves], however, is a political act."
According to Campbell and other oil industry sources, the two most 
widely used estimates of world oil reserves, drawn up by the Oil and Gas 
Journal and the BP Statistical Review, both rely on reserve estimates 
provided to them by governments and industry and do not question their 
accuracy.
Companies, says Campbell, "under-report their new discoveries to comply 
with strict US stock exchange rules, but then revise them upwards over 
time", partly to boost their share prices with "good news" results. "I 
do not think that I ever told the truth about the size of a prospect. 
That was not the game we were in," he says. "As we were competing for 
funds with other subsidiaries around the world, we had to exaggerate."
Most serious of all, he and other oil depletion analysts and petroleum 
geologists, most of whom have been in the industry for years, accuse the 
US of using questionable statistical probability models to calculate 
global reserves and Opec countries of drastically revising upwards their 
reserves in the 1980s.
"The estimates for the Opec countries were systematically exaggerated in 
the late 1980s to win a greater slice of the allocation cake. Middle 
East official reserves jumped 43% in just three years despite no new 
major finds," he says.
The study of "peak oil" - the point at which half the total oil known to 
have existed in a field or a country has been consumed, beyond which 
extraction goes into irreversible decline - used to be back-of-the 
envelope guesswork. It was not taken seriously by business or 
governments, mainly because oil has always been cheap and plentiful.
In the wake of the Iraq war, the rapid economic rise of China, global 
warming and recent record oil prices, the debate has shifted from "if" 
there is a global peak to "when".
The US government knows that conventional oil is running out fast. 
According to a report on oil shales and unconventional oil supplies 
prepared by the US office of petroleum reserves last year, "world oil 
reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being 
discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but the 
re?serves are not being fully replaced. Remaining oil reserves of 
individual oil companies must continue to shrink. The disparity between 
increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one 
outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to 
meet conventional oil demand will not be available."
It continues: "Although there is no agreement about the date that world 
oil production will peak, forecasts presented by USGS geologist Les 
Magoon, the Oil and Gas Journal, and others expect the peak will occur 
between 2003 and 2020. What is notable ... is that none extend beyond 
the year 2020, suggesting that the world may be facing shortfalls much 
sooner than expected."
According to Bill Powers, editor of the Canadian Energy Viewpoint 
investment journal, there is a growing belief among geologists who study 
world oil supply that production "is soon headed into an irreversible 
decline ... The US government does not want to admit the reality of the 
situation. Dr Campbell's thesis, and those of others like him, are 
becoming the mainstream."
In the absence of reliable official figures, geologists and analysts are 
turning to the grandfather of oil depletion analysis, M King Hubbert, a 
Shell geologist who in 1956 showed mathematically that exploitation of 
any oilfield follows a predictable "bell curve" trend, which is slow to 
take off, rises steeply, flattens and then descends again steeply. The 
biggest and easiest exploited oilfields were always found early in the 
history of exploration, while smaller ones were developed as production 
from the big fields declined. He accurately predicted that US domestic 
oil production would peak around 1970, 40 years after the period of peak 
discovery around 1930.
Many oil analysts now take the "Hubbert peak" model seriously, and the 
USGS, national and oil company figures with a large dose of salt. 
Similar patterns of peak discovery and production have been found 
throughout all the world's main oilfields. The first North Sea discovery 
was in 1969, discoveries peaked in 1973 and the UK passed its production 
peak in 1999. The British portion of the basin is now in serious decline 
and the Norwegian sector has levelled off.
Other analysts are also questioning afresh the oil companies' data. US 
Wall street energy group Herold last month compared the stated reserves 
of the world's leading oil companies with their quoted discoveries, and 
production levels. Herold predicts that the seven largest will all begin 
seeing production declines within four years. Deutsche Bank analysts 
report that global oil production will peak in 2014.
According to Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, a monthly 
magazine published by the Energy Institute in London, conventional oil 
reserves are now declining about 4-6% a year worldwide. He says 18 large 
oil-producing countries, including Britain, and 32 smaller ones, have 
declining production; and he expects Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, 
Mexico and India all to reach their peak in the next few years.
"We should be worried. Time is short and we are not even at the point 
where we admit we have a problem," Skrebowski says. "Governments are 
always excessively optimistic. The problem is that the peak, which I 
think is 2008, is tomorrow in planning terms."
On the other hand, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome, Chad and Angola are are 
all expected to grow strongly.
What is agreed is that world oil demand is surging. The International 
Energy Agency, which collates national figures and predicts demand, says 
developing countries could push demand up 47% to 121m barrels a day by 
2030, and that oil companies and oil-producing nations must spend about 
$100bn a year to develop new supplies to keep pace.
According to the IEA, demand rose faster in 2004 than in any year since 
1976. China's oil consumption, which accounted for a third of extra 
global demand last year, grew 17% and is expected to double over 15 
years to more than 10m barrels a day - half the US's present demand. 
India's consumption is expected to rise by nearly 30% in the next five 
years. If world demand continues to grow at 2% a year, then almost 160m 
barrels a day will need to be extracted in 2035, twice as much as today.
That, say most geologists is almost inconceivable. According to industry 
consultants IHS Energy, 90% of all known reserves are now in production, 
suggesting that few major discoveries remain to be made. Shell says its 
reserves fell last year because it only found enough oil to replace 
15-25 % of what the company produced. BP told the US stock exchange that 
it replaced only 89% of its production in 2004.
Moreover, oil supply is increasingly limited to a few giant fields, with 
10% of all production coming from just four fields and 80% from fields 
discovered before 1970. Even finding a field the size of Ghawar in Saudi 
Arabia, by far the world's largest and said to have another 125bn 
barrels, would only meet world demand for about 10 years.
"All the major discoveries were in the 1960s, since when they have been 
declining gradually over time, give or take the occasional spike and 
trough," says Campbell. "The whole world has now been seismically 
searched and picked over. Geological knowledge has improved enormously 
in the past 30 years and it is almost inconceivable now that major 
fields remain to be found."
He accepts there may be a big field or two left in Russia, and more in 
Africa, but these would have little bearing on world supplies. 
Unconventional deposits like tar sands and shale may only slow the 
production decline.
"The first half of the oil age now closes," says Campbell. "It lasted 
150 years and saw the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade, 
agriculture and financial capital, allowing the population to expand 
six-fold. The second half now dawns, and will be marked by the decline 
of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital."
So did the Swiss bankers comprehend the seriousness of the situation 
when he talked to them? "There is no company on the stock exchange that 
doesn't make a tacit assumption about the availability of energy," says 
Campbell. "It is almost impossible for bankers to accept it. It is so 
out of their mindset."
Crude alternatives
"Unconventional" petroleum reserves, which are not included in some 
totals of reserves, include:
Heavy oils
These can be pumped just like conventional petroleum except that they 
are much thicker, more polluting, and require more extensive refining. 
They are found in more than 30 countries, but about 90% of estimated 
reserves are in the Orinoco "heavy oil belt" of Venezuela, which has an 
estimated 1.2 trillion barrels. About one third of the oil is 
potentially recoverable using current technology.
Tar sands
These are found in sedimentary rocks and must be dug out and crushed in 
giant opencast mines. But it takes five to 10 times the energy, area and 
water to mine, process and upgrade the tars that it does to process 
conventional oil. The Athabasca deposits in Alberta, Canada are the 
world's largest resource, with estimated reserves of 1.8 trillion 
barrels, of which about 280-300bn barrels may be recoverable. Production 
now accounts for about 20% of Canada's oil supply.
Oil shales
These are seen as the US government's energy stopgap. They exist in 
large quantities in ecologically sensitive parts of Colorado, Wyoming 
and Utah at varying depths, but the industrial process needed to extract 
the oil demands hot water, making it much more expensive and less 
energy-efficient than conventional oil. The mining operation is 
extremely damaging to the environment. Shell, Exxon, ChevronTexaco and 
other oil companies are investing billions of dollars in this expensive 
oil production method.

STRONZATE!!! Il petrolio c'e' ancora per decenni! L'unico motivo per
cui ora c'e' carenza e' che non ci sono abbastanza raffinerie.
Voi profeti del malaugurio finora avete sempre toppato.

 wrote:

Mi viene il dubbio che tu non sappia, o non voglia, leggere in inglese.
Am.

 Am.
#_E`meglio squagliarcela prima che arrivi il conto! :))
Giano