Tag Archives: Art Berman

What’s Happening Offshore & What We Can Do Here

October 7, 2015 Richard Ha

We have to be aware of what’s going on offshore and how it affects us. Check out Energy specialist Art Berman’s presentation The Shale Revolution & The Current Oil Price Collapse.

Because energy and agriculture – fuel and food – are inextricably tied together, we need solutions that utilize everybody’s contributions.

The rising cost of producing petroleum energy products impacts everything we do. It takes energy to do work and especially to get food onto our plates. Sure technology extends energy, but technology is not energy in itself.

As for food production, we need help in every way we can get it, and certainly not hindrances. As an example, banning GMOs and Roundup raises the cost of food production without alleviating any proven danger. This impacts the people who can least afford the resulting increase in food prices.

In every single thing we do, the pluses have to exceed the minuses. How can we achieve this? We can form a business model that helps us maximize value to our people. Our Hawaii Island Energy Cooperative model, with its local control, helps us adapt the quickest to future situations that we cannot anticipate now. The co-op model can also help us become more competitive with the rest of the world without leaving anyone behind.

We have a lot of positives here on the Big Island. We’ll be over the geothermal “hot spot” for 500,000 to a million years. We have great wind resources and, like everybody else, we have sunlight. Thanks to our gentle climate, we don’t need artificial heating and cooling. The Big Island is especially blessed.

The sooner we can focus on taking care of all of us, and not just a few of us, the sooner we can start preparing for the future.

We CAN do this. We must.

Big Island, Food Security, Geothermal, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability

Shale Oil & Gas: The Overhype

February 26, 2015 Richard Ha 1 Comment

Richard Ha writes:

Art Berman says we don’t have as much shale oil and gas as we think we do. He feels that the shale oil and gas sector is largely uneconomic.

The first time I heard Art Berman speak was on a panel discussion at a 2009 Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference. He studied four thousand Barnett shale wells in Texas and found that the average well gave up 72 percent of its production in the first year.

He definitely had a different perspective than an oil company executive panel member, who said that according to his hyperbolic curve calculations, the average well would produce for 22 years.

I knew someone was wrong. I thought that the oil company executive was just blowing smoke, to sell stocks. I imagined that by the end of the 22^nd year, the amount of gas production from his gas well would fill a balloon an hour.

Many thousand of wells later, several credible studies from other sources, such as by this Post Carbon Institutes study by David Hughes, support Art Berman’s initial observations.

We need to pay attention to this because we rely on oil for seventy percent of our energy, and this makes Hawai‘i especially vulnerable. It’s much better to be safe than sorry.

The Big Island is lucky to have an alternative to oil and natural gas to make our base power electricity: Geothermal.

As time goes on, and as oil and natural gas prices rise, future generations will have a competitive advantage over the rest of the world. We will be over our geothermal “hot spot” for 500,000 to a million years.

It takes energy to do work. No energy, no work done. But it is the net energy left over from getting the energy that society uses to grow the economy. And since two-thirds of our economy is made up of consumer spending, it boils down to how much extra money the rubbah slippah folks have that will determine the health of our economy.

So Kumu Lehua was right. He asked me: “What about the rest?”

That is the key question. What about our kupuna on fixed income? The single moms? The working homeless? If they had extra money, they could spend it and everyone would benefit. Farmers are price takers, not price makers, and they would benefit. If the farmers made money, the farmers would farm.

Asking what about the rest will help us with food security. It all boils down to cost. That is to say, what are the combination of things that gives us the best net energy profile? This is more about common sense than rocket science. If we take our time to look for two solutions for every problem and one more just in case, we will find the solutions that make us competitive with the rest of the world.

This, in the final analysis, is about survival and adaptation. And it is about all of us; not just a few of us.

Peak Oil

Why LNG is Such a Bad Risk

December 29, 2014 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

We are getting ready to make huge liquified natural gas (LNG) decisions, and LNG is a big risk. We need to understand the risk and who’s going to be left paying the price.

The first time I heard about shale oil and gas was at an Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference. I attended five of those conferences, the only person from Hawai‘i to do so. Hawai‘i County paid for the trip to the 2010 ASPO conference, held in Washington D.C., and is still benefitting from that small investment.

That discussion about shale oil and gas though was at the 2009 ASPO conference, in Denver, and it turned into a sharp discussion between the geologist Art Berman and a drilling company executive.

Art said he had studied data from 4,000 wells in the Barnett Shale and found that the average well gave off 72 percent of its production in the first year.

The executive countered that his figures showed a hyperbolic curve indicating that production lasts for 22 years.

Somebody was wrong. Later I learned that hyperbolic curves only mean that the following year is less than the one previous.

I didn’t know the definition then, but common sense told me that at the end of 22 years, maybe just a gallon might be coming out per hour. I felt like the executive was just trying to sell stock.

Later, a study of 19,000 wells showed that the average well gave more than ninety percent of its production in its first five years. This was not rocket science – even a banana farmer could tell that you would need to replace one-fifth of the wells each year just to stay even. More if production is higher in the first few years.

As of 2010, it was common knowledge that the average shale oil and gas well depleted in a short time, and it was a subject of intense discussion among those of us who attended the ASPO conferences.

In the meantime, some of the folks out there trying to sell stocks were using the terms “resource” and “reserves” interchangeably in describing what was available. The phrase “Saudi America” started to be thrown around.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) finally estimated that the U.S. had an economically accessible shale oil supply of about 100 more years.

But David Hughes, a Canadian geologist, challenged the availability of the Monterey Shale oil due to its geological characteristics. Instead of being flat, the resource rock was wavy and squished. It was hard to access via horizontal drilling.

And then this March, the EIA quietly changed its estimate. In a low-key announcement, it readjusted its estimate of Monterey Shale oil availability – which was two-thirds of our national recoverable supply – downward by an amazing 96 percent.

I saw the announcement and realized its significance immediately. Readjusting the estimate of the US supply of oil downward by two-thirds was a huge, huge deal. But the news kind of just slipped by.

Shale gas has the same characteristics of shale oil – it depletes rapidly. If you ask me who I believe about shale oil and gas? Based on his track record, I believe the data and conclusions of David Hughes.

He based his studies on the same historical data and information the U.S. EIA used, but analyzed it in a more meticulous and targeted way. His data shows natural gas declining much, much faster than does the EIA. A recent University of Texas study agrees more with David Hughes than with the EIA.

This Peak Prosperity podcast features an interview with David Hughes talking about shale production and how he did his analysis. It’s a good interview (47:24). Alternately, you can read the transcript here.

On p. 300 of his report, in figure 3-116, Hughes shows an interesting graph of the EIA’s forecast for shale gas projections and how, in the long term, they are greatly overestimated.

At the end of Hughes’ study on natural gas, he cautions (click to enlarge) :

Here on the Big Island, based on the precautionary principle, I would rely on geothermal rather than liquid natural gas for our electricity generation. A faster decline probably means a faster rise in natural gas price. If we rely on LNG, the rate payer will assume that risk.

And in Hawai‘i we do not have methane underground. So the bad effects of fracking does not apply to us at all. We have drilled 85,000 wells by now. It’s a mature industry that deals with H2S routinely.

In the future, geothermal could also help us solve our transportation problem by providing hydrogen for fuel-celled vehicles. The cost of hydrogen comes from either natural gas or from passing electricity through water. Eventually, the cost of making hydrogen from natural gas will pass the cost of making hydrogen from electricity from geothermal. Then we will have a permanent advantage over the rest of the world. That’s what we want!

Geothermal is climate change-friendly and as infinite as we can get—we will sit for 500,000 to a million years over the “hot spot.” And we are one of the few places in the world with these circumstances and this opportunity.

We have truly come to a crossroads in our history. We must put our personal agendas behind us and do the right thing for ourselves and future generations.

Articles, Eating Locally, Geothermal, Peak Oil

Agreed: Local Products Shouldn’t Be More Expensive

May 7, 2013 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

Over the weekend, Scott Bosshardt of Kea‘au had an important letter to the editor of the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

His point was that products produced and purchased locally shouldn’t be more expensive than the same product purchased abroad.

One extremely important fact that the “Think Local, Buy Local” proponents shouldn’t overlook is that local businesses need to “price local.”

Products produced and purchased locally shouldn’t be more expensive than the same product purchased abroad.

He also wrote:

“Price local” instead of as if our Big Island-grown tomatoes and coconuts were imported from half way around the world or some other planet, then people will be much more inclined to “buy local.” This holds true for everything we produce here. Think about it. When you live in Columbia, you don’t pay more for coffee than you do in San Francisco.

He’s right: Prices are higher here, and we need to lower them. It’s what I keep talking about. We need to find a way that we can lower our costs.

I first noticed our farm costs rising steadily back in 2005 and 2006. Rising costs affect every aspect of our farm, and it was very worrisome. Looking into it, I realized that the rise in price was due to the price of oil increasing.

Here in Hawai‘i, we are being squeezed extra hard. More than 70 percent of our electricity comes from oil. Compare this to the U.S. mainland – Hawaii’s primary competitor in many produce and food manufacturing categories – which relies on oil for only about two percent of its electricity generation.

As the price of oil rises, you can see how our local farmers and food manufacturers become less and less competitive with the mainland.

Farming is very energy intensive, and farmers’ refrigeration and water pumping costs have steadily gotten more expensive. Wholesalers’ and retailer refrigeration costs have gone up, too. This means food costs more.

Oil prices have quadrupled in the last 10 years, and this has put the economy into a continuous recession. Everything has been squeezed. Government workers’ pay has been cut. Electricity costs have gone up steadily. School budgets have been squeezed. Medical costs have risen.

I have so far attended five annual Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conferences trying to figure out how to protect our farm from the rising price of oil. I don’t have a degree in chemistry or the sciences – but I am a farmer with common sense. So I spent my time figuring out who I can trust for good information

I determined that the folks at ASPO can be trusted because they have no other agenda than to produce good information. It is up to me to decide if their studies are valid or not, or whether I agree with their conclusion. On the other hand, I thought that people whose livelihood depends on putting on a happy face would probably just put on a happy face.

I have learned that the world has been using two to three times as much oil as it has been finding, a trend that continues. I’ve learned that the oil being produced now is much more expensive than what they found 50 years ago. It takes more energy now to get the energy. The cost of producing oil from shale and oil sands was $92 per barrel in 2011, and the floor price of oil is probably not much lower than that.

The era of cheap oil is over. And the stuff produced in the future will be even more costly, setting a higher floor as time goes by. Unless we do something, it will squeeze us all even more.

Look around: It is happening right now, even with a banner tourism year. Imagine what it will be like if we have a significant downturn.

Also important to note is that the rubbah slippah folks have less and less discretionary income. Consumer spending makes up two-thirds of our economy. Our consumers will have more spending money when we can lower the cost of our electricity.

What about the happy news that the U.S. will become the largest producer of oil and gas in the future? In 2009, Art Berman, a petroleum geologist, showed that in a study of 4,000 gas wells in the Barnett Shale, most of the production came out in the first year. Sixteen-thousand wells later, we see that 90 percent of shale gas and shale oil wells were more than 90 percent depleted within five years. And the decline rate for all the wells is more than 30 percent. We will need to drill one third as many we have now just to keep production steady.

One can reasonably conclude that the shale gas and shale oil phenomenon may not be a game changer. It probably won’t make a large dent in world oil production.

Meanwhile, the overall trend continues. Most of the world’s oil is produced by giant and supergiant oil fields, and lots of them are declining. Folks who study this estimate that the decline rate is around 4 to 6 percent annually. That is about 3 million barrels a year. This is going on all day, every day, no matter what the stock market does.

What can we do on the Big Island to lower electricity costs, and the cost of locally produced food? Biomass and geothermal can do that today. There may be other choices maturing in the next few years, too.

Producing electricity from geothermal here costs half as much as producing it from oil. And the Big Island will be over the hot spot that provides us with geothermal for 500,000 to a million years.

Iceland is pulling itself out of the largest financial crash in history because it has cheap electricity from geothermal and can export fish.

Let’s say that one wanted to payoff an oil-fired plant that produces 60MW today. That difference in price would save $6,600/hour and $158,400 /day. This is more than $50 million per year. Seems like we could be creative with writing off stranded assets.

We are very lucky to have these options here.

Are Shale Gas & Shale Oil Hope or Hype?

February 22, 2013 Richard Ha

Richard Ha writes:

This video is well worth watching.

It’s called “Shale Promises or Shale Spin? The Economics
Behind Hydrofracking. A Conversation with Deborah Rogers.” If you are following this subject at all, you should watch it.

Deborah Rogers began her financial career in London working
in Corporate Finance, specifically venture capital.

Upon her return to the U.S., she worked as a financial consultant for nearly a decade for several major Wall Street firms, including Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney.

She has also served on the Advisory Council for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and on a task force for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

She currently serves on a regional steering committee for the Oil and Gas Accountability Project (OGAP) and has the responsibility of addressing economic questions.

An entrepreneur herself, she founded Deborah’s Farmstead, an
artisanal cheese-making operation, now one of the premier artisanal cheese dairies in the U.S.

She was featured in a lengthy NY Times article by Ian Urbina on June 26, 2011 entitled Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush.

Shale gas and shale oil: Are they hype, or hope? We farmers want to know.

Nitrogen fertilizers, chemicals, plastics and other farm supplies are made from natural gas as long as it is cheap. Do we really have a hundred years’ worth of supply, and will it be cheap?

At the 2009 Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference in Denver, the petroleum geologist and consultant Art Berman described his analysis of 4,000 wells in the Barnett Shale. He showed that the average gas well produces 70 percent of its total production in the first year.

Also on the panel, though, was an oil/gas company executive, who said their calculations show that gas wells will produce for 22 years.

Now, three years later, we see that there are wells generating $120/day and they are still in production. What does that mean in
the whole scheme of things? Who is right?

There is more data now, and it still, consistently, shows that shale gas – and, by the way, shale oil – depletes really quickly, like 90 plus percent in the first five years.

And it costs $4 million or so to drill each well. Now that there is so much more data, the math on this is easy.

Farmers do not care who is right. Farmers only care about what is right. So while we do appreciate the low, below-break-even costs of nitrogen fertilizer, chemicals, plastics and other farm supplies today, we are also calculating what our costs might be if the price of natural gas rises to $5, $6, $8/mcf (thousand cubic feet).

If we cannot control the price of oil or natural gas, what do we do?

We must pivot to what is cheap and stable and actually works.

The petroleum age is barely 150 years old and already we are worrying that it will not last another 50 years; it might last even fewer years than that.

On the other hand, the Big Island will be over the geothermal hot spot for 500,000 to a million years.

The rubbah slippah folks get it. This not rocket science!