Whenever I look at a bell curve, I think of a roller coaster; a short start followed by a long, arduous climb toward the sky, a moment of questioning at the top, then nothing but screams and terror in the hurtling descent.

When I first came across a bell curve plotted by the late M. King Hubbert, I again imagined the roller coaster. However, this time the implications of the terror filled descent took on new meaning.

Hubbert, a geophysicist, was a world authority on the estimation of energy resources and the prediction of their patterns of discovery and depletion. It was his findings concerning these that he, in 1956, graphed into a bell curve showing U.S. oil production peaking in 1970 and sharply declining thereafter. His graphs and predictions brought many scoffs at the time but have since proved exceedingly accurate.

In 1996, several analysts began applying Hubbert’s analytical methods to worldwide oil production. Their results show world oil production peaking somewhere between 2004 and 2008, never to rise again.

If these predictions are accurate – and the experts swear by them – one can easily imagine the resulting chaos that will erupt.

As dire as this may sound, there are some, particularly those in the oil industry and OPEC countries, who want to assure the world that there is plenty of reserve waiting to be tapped and pumped.

Reliable estimates of oil reserves are a vital ingredient in Hubbert’s analysis, and this leads to the chief difficulty in using the method to predict the peak of world oil production: How reliable are the estimates of oil reserves?

Although a quick and simple answer is nearly impossible, the following illustrates the tip of the complexity.

In the late 1980s, OPEC changed its rules: They assigned each member nation a share of the oil market based not just on the country’s annual production capacity but also on its oil reserves. Most OPEC countries promptly reported huge, abrupt increases in their oil reserves.

This could explain OPEC’s reason for substantially raising the price per barrel of oil over the past years. If they can dribble it out to us now, when the crisis hits they will have plenty left to sell at terrifically increased prices.

Even if the promise of increased reserves is not wishful thinking, it is, at the least, distorted. It is a fatal mistake to assume that oil is pumped from the ground at a constant rate and price. In reality, the rate at which any well produces oil rises to maximum and then slips back to zero. As the reserves are depleted, recovery becomes more difficult and expensive until, as Hubbert pointed out, it is necessary to expend more energy to recover a barrel of oil than is contained in that barrel. The oil remains in the reserve unable to be economically or efficiently recovered.

If we assume that the warnings from the geophysicists are correct, (they have been painstaking in their gathering and assessment of data) perhaps there are ways of slowing the precipitous plunge into the abyss or of maximizing the amount of time we are able to spend at the top of the curve. Many theories exist as to how this might be achieved.

New drilling: The expectation of finding huge deposits of oil in some hitherto unexplored area is not well founded. Extremely deep water and polar regions may remain to be explored and tested, but even their prospects are reasonably well understood.

For example, much of the deep water areas have been shown to be non-prospective for geologic reasons. In the Arctic, if exploration were to begin tomorrow, it would still take a minimum of 10 years to extract and get the first barrels of oil to market.

Make better use of new extraction technology: Kenneth Deffeyes, the son of a petroleum engineer, was born in Oklahoma, “grew up in the oil patch,” became a geologist and worked for Shell Oil before becoming a professor at Princeton University.

In his article, “Another Wolf At the Door,” which appeared in the Oct. 22, 2001, issue of the American Prospect, Deffeyes states, “Before 1995 (when the dot-com era began), the oil industry’s rate of return on invested capital was higher than any other industry’s. When the oil companies discovered that everything else they tried to diversify into was less profitable, they came home and poured billions of investment dollars into the development of petroleum technology. Much of the work was successful. That makes it difficult to ask today for new technology. Most of those wheels have already been invented.”

Drill deeper: The depths at which oil is found – the “oil window”- extends from around 7,000 feet to around 15,000 feet. Temperatures closer to the Earth’s surface are not high enough to produce oil and below 15,000 feet, the molecules become natural gas. Rigs have been drilling to the bottom of the “oil window” since 1938.

Develop unconventional oil sources: In their March 1998 article in Scientific American entitled, “The End of Cheap Oil,” Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere point out, “The Orinoco oil belt in Venezuela has been assessed to contain a staggering 1.2 trillion barrels of the sludge known as heavy oil. Tar sands and shale deposits in Canada and the former Soviet Union may contain the equivalent of more than 300 billion barrels of oil.” However, the question to be asked is: Will the oil industry be able to come up with the heavy capital investments and time needed to put such production into high gear before it is too late?

Campbell and Laherrere would also have us consider the high environmental price. “Tar sands typically emerge from strip mines. Extracting oil from these sands and shales creates air pollution. The Orinoco sludge contains heavy metals and sulfur that must be removed. So governments may restrict these industries from growing as fast as they could.”

We are at present at the extreme top of the oil production bell curve. “Nothing we initiate now can substantially postpone the world production peak: No Caspian Sea exploration, no drilling in the South China Sea, no SUV replacement, no renewable energy projects can bring results quickly enough to avoid a bidding war for the remaining oil. And we can only hope that the war is waged with cash instead of far worse weapons,” writes Deffeyes.

The war Mr. Deffeyes spoke of has begun. Yes, cash is being expended in huge amounts, but other, “far worse weapons,” are also being employed.

God forgive us.

Guy Bourrie has been hauling on the highways for 20 years. He lives in Washington, Maine, and can be reached at redhaven@pivot.net.

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