Tag Archives: Oil Drum

Peak Oil, Sustainability

Next 40 Years Will Not Be As Easy

Richard Ha writes:

Nate Hagens, who is a well-known authority on global resource depletion, dropped by the farm yesterday.

Nate hagens

Nate used to work on Wall Street as a vice president at Lehman Brothers. He left that job feeling something was not right and that he needed to connect with the real world. He is extremely smart and has an abundance of common sense.  

He was until recently the lead editor of The Oil Drum, which was one of the most highly respected, and popular, websites for analysis and discussion of global energy supplies, and the future implications of energy decline. He has a master’s degree in finance and a PhD in natural resources.

This short, 5 minute video shows Nate talking about why things are not going to be as easy over the next 40 years.

One thing I like about him is that he’s not on the fringe. He doesn’t proclaim that the world’s ending, but he also knows we cannot go on as before. Though he doesn’t profess to know what the future holds, he knows that our expectations have got to change because we don’t have the same amount of energy we’ve had in order to keep our same lifestyle going.

From his bio:

Nate's presentations address the opportunities and constraints we face in the transition away from fossil fuels. On the supply side, Nate focuses on biophysical economics (net energy) and the interrelationship between debt-based financial markets and natural resources. On the demand side, Nate addresses the evolution-derived underpinnings to conspicuous consumption, valuation of the present over the future, and habituation to resource overconsumption, and offers suggestions on how individuals and society can better adapt and mitigate to what's ahead.

Nate has appeared on PBS, BBC, and NPR, and has lectured around the world. He holds a Masters Degree in Finance from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. Previously Nate was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers.

I showed him our tomato growing operation, which he was very excited about, and took him to see the hydroelectric headworks, and to see the turbine that generates our electricity. He was really attracted to the resources we have here on the Big Island.

I wrote and asked him four questions about our local resources and what he thinks about each. When he replies, I’ll share his thoughts here.

Peak Oil

How Do We Know The Oil Field is Depleting?

How do we know that the mega-giant oil field in Saudi Arabia is depleting?

Do we need to know beyond the shadow of a doubt? Even small kids know that when you are in a pasture and you hear hooves, it’s time to run.

An article at the Oil Drum presents a movie on the drilling of Uthmaniyah.

Using a set of wells in a productive (but now rather depleted) slice of this part of the Saudi oil field of Ghawar, it is possible to deduce to drilling sequence of these wells using the identifiers assigned to the wells as they are drilled. Given a few known dates for well placement, a timeline for overall development can be constructed and displayed as an animation. 

The Making of the Movie

Until the early 1990s, all wells (oil, water injectors, gas, etc.) in Saudi Arabia were assigned a numerical ID with the same sequence of numbers for a given field or area. The Ghawar areas are all numbered independently, such that the discovery well in Uthmaniyah is UTMN-1 and the tenth well in ‘Ain Dar is ANDR-10, etc. Under this assumption, a map showing both the locations and IDs of the various wells also gives the drilling sequence. Furthermore, if the drilling of a given well (by ID) can be independently attributed to a specific date, the drilling sequence can be anchored at that date. For example, the first well was placed in Uthmaniyah in around 1951 — thus providing the lower anchor for the sequence. Of course, this depends on the wells used being representative of the entire Uthmaniyah area. Fortunately, this appears to be true in this case. I will discuss below the sources of information and the assumptions made when assigning dates for the various wells.

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