Don’t Shoot the Statistician

Introduction

Our energy supplies allow us to lead a creative and comfortable way of life. We are however using a non-renewable resource for most of our energy needs. The major reserves are in a single area of the world. Can we avoid the path that the Polynesian people followed on Easter Island?

Part I – Easter Island

Paradise Island?

Easter Island is more than 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile and 1,400 miles from even the nearest habitable island (Pitcairn). The 64 square mile, triangular island is volcanic in origin with three extinct volcanic peaks. It is as far south of the equator as the Canary Islands are to the north and has similar sub-tropical climate and fertile volcanic soil. (The Canaries are however less than 700 miles off the coast of Africa.) Studies of pollen samples by John Flenley, now at Massey University in New Zealand, and Sarah King of the University of Hull in England showed what vegetation grew there. This included the rope-yielding hauhau tree, and the toromiro tree, which provides a dense firewood. The most numerous tree was the Easter Island palm, which was closely related to the still-surviving Chilean wine palm, which grows up to 82 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter. The palm would have been a valuable food source, since its Chilean relative yields edible nuts as well as sap from which Chileans make sugar, syrup, honey, and wine. Easter Island had at least one stream and lakes in the craters of the volcanoes. It was one of the richest seabird breeding sites in the Pacific with at least 25 nesting species. David Steadman, of the New York State Museum at Albany has also identified the bones of at least six species of land birds. Energy supply, building materials, a variety of food sources, water and a sub-tropical climate. – what more could settlers want?

Arrival of Polynesians

In around 400AD a group of voyagers from central or eastern Polynesia arrived on this paradise island in double hulled canoes bringing with them chickens, edible rats, trees and plants. They may have followed the sea birds returning to their nesting sites after fishing trips. Their language is based on Polynesian with variations demonstrating isolation since that time. Radio carbon dating confirms the date and DNA analysis their origins. The native name for the island is Rapa Nui, which seems more appropriate for pre-Christian times.

Initial Way of Life

The abundance of energy supplies and resources allowed the Polynesians to lead a comfortable and creative way of life. There was ample wood for cooking food and building shelters. Polynesians in Samoa use palm leaves for many household items from mats and blinds to baskets and roofing materials. Palm trunks also could be used to build robust canoes, suitable for fishing in open seas. The people of Rapa Nui would have been able to observe huge groups of common dolphin leaping from the sea and could have easily set out in their canoes to catch them. One-third of all bones in the archaeological excavations on Rapa Nui came from porpoises. Nesting seabirds provided protein too, as did the people’s rats and chickens.

The rich volcanic soil in parts of the island sheltered from the winds allowed for the cultivation of vegetable crops. The people had brought with them bananas, kava roots, sweet potatoes, sugar cane and the paper mulberry tree which was used for both cloth and fishing nets in other parts of Polynesia.

Once established the new community thrived. So much so that they had time to develop a religion. Ancestor worship was important to them and they observed the positions that the sun rose and set. Clans developed as the population rose, reaching a maximum of at least 7,000. Each clan made platforms of stone aligned to certain positions of the sun. A script language developed, the only one in Polynesia..

Someone discovered hard obsidian that could be used to carve the volcanic tufa rock. Statues or Moai were erected on the stone platforms in some celebration of the power of the ancestors of each clan. They carved more and more elaborate statues as rivalry developed between the clans. Scientists are still arguing about how they moved and raised the statues but ropes made from tree fibres, wooden levers and rollers all featured. The clans all needed trees to erect new statues. Moai carving and transport were in full swing from 1400 to 1600

Descent into Primitive State

No-one is sure how the final decline happened. Certainly the island became barren. In 1722 the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen commented that “its wasted appearance could give no other impression than of a singular poverty and barrenness.". As the forest disappeared, the islanders ran out of timber and rope to move and erect their statues. Flimsy reed boats were all that was available for fishing. Van Tilburg cautiously asserts, "The archaeological evidence for cannibalism is present on a few sites.” People lived in caves.

Perhaps war broke out when someone realised there was insufficient ropes and poles to move the statues that still remain in the quarry. I wonder whether someone spoke out when they saw that they were running out of wood for fuel and shelter, palm trunks to make canoes for fishing or even looking for new lands. If they did, we know that they were ignored or worse. It seems that human kind are able to blind themselves to their basic needs when religious fervour or clan rivalry takes hold. Or perhaps feelings do not have to be that strong, the feeling that “this is what we have to do to live out our lives” is enough to keep people stuck in a pattern of living that leads to the destruction of that very way of life. It would probably have seemed impossible to give up building moai and yet that was what was necessary to save their civilisation.

Part I - References

“The Lessons of Easter Island” Clive Ponting

“Easter's End” by Jared Diamond from Discover Issue 08/95

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Easter Island Home Page http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rapanui.html

Thor Heyerdahl

www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/ (NOVA Online is produced for PBS by the WGBH Science Unit)

“The Settlement of Polynesia” Dennis Kawaharada at http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/pvs/migrationspart1.html

Margaret Mead “Coming of Age in Samoa”

Cliff Wassmann’s http://mysteriousplaces.com/Easter_Island/

Part II – The End of Cheap Oil?

Getting The Perspective On Oil

Looking at a world-wide picture, human kind did not discover an island, it discovered fossil fuels. Look around you. Much of what you see around you was manufactured directly from oil products or else used the power from fossil fuels in its manufacture. Your shelter, heating when it is cold and illumination when it is dark mostly come from fossil fuels. The abundance they offer gives many of us a life of ease and potential creativity. Transport systems almost exclusively use oil.

If however we zoom out and take the long view on human history the consumption of oil becomes a very small blip.

The Hubbert Curve

Oil is a finite resource. Dr M. King Hubbert became famous for predicting, in 1956, that American oil wells (excluding Alaska) would peak in 1969. He was only a year out.

Hubbert said,

"This complete cycle has only the following essential properties: The production rate begins at zero, increases exponentially during the early period of development, and then slows down, passes through one or more principal maxima, and finally declines negative exponentially to zero. There is no necessity that the curve … has a single maximum or that it be symmetrical. In fact, the smaller the region, the more irregular in shape is the curve likely to be. On the other hand, for large areas such as the United States or the world, the annual production curve results from the superposition of the production from thousands of separate fields. In such cases, the irregularities of small areas tend to cancel one another and the composite curve becomes a smooth curve with only a single practical maximum. However, there is no theoretical necessity that this curve by symmetrical. Whether it is or is not will have to be determined by the data themselves."

It seems that the growth side of the curve is driven by demand and the falling side by production. The resource becomes more and more popular until everyone wants their share. Oil has been cheap to produce and we have come to rely on it. The resource is finite and at some point, known as the rollover, it becomes impossible to continue to increase production as demanded by the consumers. In the case of the USA, discoveries in Alaska and the possibility of importing oil from elsewhere allowed continued consumption of oil.

Hubbert died in 1989. A group of men, geologists who have retired from employment in the oil industry and other scientists who have applied Hubbert’s theory to the global oil situation.

The data up to the present day is easily available. The points marked on this graph are derived from the BP data which can be downloaded in a spreadsheet from their website www.bp.com.. The 1973 production fall was caused by the Yom Kippur War and the Arab Oil Embargo. In 1979 the Iranian revolution and the Iran/Iraq war resulted in another loss of production and consequent price increase. From 1965 to 1973 oil production was unrestricted and rose exponentially, increasing by an average of 8% pa. After 1973 the production was restricted due to political and price constraints. The total area under the curve is the total oil available. The figure of 2300Gb above is much more optimistic than most estimates and, I confess, the result of my drawing rather than any mathematics! It does however serve to give a feel for the possible future production of oil.

Total oil available is made up of that already produced plus the known reserves plus that which is still to be found. We know well what we have already produced. Known reserves are disputed – there are political and financial gains to be made when countries and companies are overly optimistic about their reserves. BP give the amount produced as about 800Gb and the proves reserves as 1050Gb. The oil still to be discovered is an unknown but is unlikely to exceed 200Gb.

Controlling the Production of Oil

We are not running out of oil, we are running out of oil at current costs. Our global economy and oil supply are strongly connected together. If the price of oil rises too fast recession threatens. When recession has other causes the price of oil falls and those OPEC countries whose main trade is oil worry about their balance of payments.

In an attempt to stabilize this situation, OPEC has introduced a price band system. Their aim is to keep the price of OPEC oil within the band $22 to $28 per barrel. When the price rises above $28 they increase production and when it falls below $22 production is slowed. They consider that the effects of the World Trade Centre attack are not normal and have decided not to reduce production during the current price drop.

A Developing World Demands More Oil

Generally the demand for oil is still rising. Populations are increasing. Developing nations consume more energy just because they are still developing. The more cars, air transport and electrical goods we have it seems the more we want. A high level of heating during cold winters is seen as a civilised necessity for everyone.

The Great Rollover

The men who have extended Hubbert’s work emphasise that it is not the tail end of the curve that is important but the peak, the ‘Great Rollover’ for world oil.

To some extent this is fortunate as intervention in various forms will affect (and have affected) the shape of the curve. Hubbert himself pointed out that the curve was not necessarily symmetrical. Note however that only production that is ‘saved’ at some point can be ‘added’ later. The total area under the curve is constant given the total oil resource. On the way up the curve is driven by consumption, there is no problem producing what the customers want. On the way up it’s a buyers’ market and President Bush is quite reasonable to say “Buy more” when faced with energy shortages. (Except for CO₂ and global warming but that is another issue.)

Year of the Big Roll Over	Forecaster & Year of Forecast
2003	Campbell, 1998
2004	Bartlett, 1997 & 2000
2007	Duncan & Youngquist, 1999
2020	Edwards, 1997
2010 to 2020	International Energy Agency, 1998

However after the Big Rollover it’s different. It becomes impossible to produce enough oil to match the demand at current prices. It becomes a seller’s market. Prices can only rise and economic growth slow down.

How can we solve this problem?

The first thing that problem-solver human thinks is that there must be a way out! The obvious solution is to find more oil.

Unfortunately all the signs are that there are no more major oil fields left to be found. The mechanisms whereby oil is formed and the type of geology that collects the oil is well understood. No substantial finds have been made since the 1970s. Both the rate at which new wells are discovered and the amount of oil in those wells are steadily decreasing. Oil discoveries peaked in 1962 and, except for an increase after the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, have declined ever since. The North Sea oil field only contained 3 year’s supply for the world. Even the smaller oil deposits that are untapped are in inaccessible or politically unstable places. And those conditions inevitably increase the costs. We are running out of cheap oil.

Method	Increased Recovery	Increased Cost
3-D seismic analysis	20%	5-10%
4-D analysis and monitoring	10 to 15%	10 to 25%
Steam and Carbon Dioxide Injection	10 to 15%	50 to 100%
Directional Drilling	Variable	Variable
Deep Water Wells	New wells	“Enormously expensive”

There are methods to extract more oil from existing wells and create new wells in formerly impossible conditions. Again the problem is that most of these methods add to the costs of recovery. They do however provide us with a bridge over to the time when the world can be fuelled by other resources.

Next, what about unconventional oil? There is plenty of that. The Athabasca oil sands of Alberta, Canada make a contribution (about 0.18Gb/a in Oct 2000 – observe where that appears on the graphs)) but the sands have to be mined and processed or heated with steam to extract oil with increased costs. Athabasca is a swamp in Summer and frozen hard in Winter. There are also environmental clean-up issues with around 17% of capital budget being spent in this area. There could however be a total volume of 300 Gb of oil here in Athabasca. There could be another 1500 Gb of oil to be recovered from oil sands and shale found in Australia, Estonia, Brazil, Sweden, USA and China. Oil shale has similar considerations.

95% of the oil we have used so far is conventional oil which flows easily from the ground and does not require a large energy input either to process it or to recover from environmental damage. Unconventional oil will be expensive and production rates will never be as great as with conventional oil. We are running out of easily-obtained, cheap oil but unconventional oil may become a major source of energy over this century

What does the future hold?

UK Oil Crisis 2000

Remember the “oil crisis” of September 2000 in the UK? Strikes over high petrol and diesel prices led to panic buying and fights at petrol stations. A Derby taxi driver illegally stored patrol in his home and faced a jail sentence. Food deliveries, emergency services, schools and postal deliveries were affected. How dependent on oil are we?

OPEC and EIA Predictions

Dr Shokri Ghanem, the Director of the OPEC Research, spoke in Austria in March 2001. He puts himself amongst the optimists rather than the pessimists His prediction was that total world oil demand would exceed 37.7 Gb/a by 2020. The prediction of the EIA is 42.7 Gb/a by 2020. These projections put OPEC crude oil production in the range of 20.0 to 23.7 Gb/a compared to their current level of just less than 10Gb/a and for the rest of the world to stay steady at just under 18Gb/a. I cannot see how these predictions could fit on the oil production graph. However the USA’s Energy Information Administration predicts that growth in world oil demand in 2002 is now estimated at 330Mb/a, down from 510Mb/a in EIA's previous Outlook, since Sept 11th 2001.. That is growth on about 27Gb down from 1.9% to 1.2% compared to the average since 1983 of 1.4%. According to theory, at some point in the next 20 years, oil consumption will need to start falling, year on year.

The Scientists’ Predictions

Amongst the geologists there seem to be optimists and pessimists. The optimists amongst them see the benefits of burning less oil in the reduction of CO₂ emissions (provided we don’t just switch to coal) and hope for alternative fuels for transport, warmth and electricity. The pessimists, like Dr Richard Duncan, however seem to see that collapse into another dark age is almost unavoidable.

Future Oil Production

OPEC countries are the main oil producers as this chart clearly shows. The six counties with the highest proved reserves are all in OPEC and have, between them, 70% of proved reserves. The total is 1050Gb.

The OPEC oil fields are also important because, by the estimate of Dr Colin Campbell in 1998, the midpoint for their reserves is around 2020 or beyond, unlike the rest of the world who are all well past it.

But can OPEC alone produce enough oil to satisfy the growing world demand even until 2020? Is it economically in their interests to do so? And will they have the political will to maintain that supply?

Conclusion

Deffeyes writes:

"Fossil fuels are a one-time gift that lifted us up from subsistence agriculture and eventually should lead us to a future based on renewable resources,"

This is a gentle and pleasant prediction but are we able to reduce our reliance on oil? It seems impossible to give up or reduce the use of oil-driven vehicles for transport and yet it seems that is what is necessary to save our civilisation.

About 3060 words.

The cast of characters

The late Dr. M. King Hubbert, (October 5th, 1903 -- October 11th, 1989) geophysicist, is well known as a world authority on the estimation of energy resources and on the prediction of their patterns of discovery and depletion. His prediction in 1956 that U.S. oil production would peak in about 1970 and decline thereafter was scoffed at then but his analysis has since proved to be remarkably accurate.

Dr Colin Campbell In a 45-year career as an exploration geologist, working for BP, Texaco, Amoco and Fina, he has looked for oil all over the world. author of "The Golden Century of Oil" and the "Coming Oil Crisis". After being awarded a Ph.D at Oxford in 1957, Dr Campbell joined the oil industry as an exploration geologist. His career took him to Borneo, Trinidad, Colombia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the USA, Ecuador, United Kingdom, Ireland, and Norway.

He is now an associate of freelance consultant, advising governments and industry. He has published extensively, and his recent articles have stimulated lively debate. His views are provocative yet carry the weight of a wide international experience.

Dr Jean Laherrere with Dr Campbell currently working with Petroconsultants, who owns one of the most authoritative databases on oil production and reserves, in Geneva. Jean Laherrère worked for TOTAL for thirty-seven years in a variety of successively more responsible roles encompassing exploration activities in the Sahara, Australia, Canada and Paris. Since retiring from TOTAL, Mr. Laherrère has consulted worldwide on oil and gas potential and production.

L. F. (Buz) Ivanhoe is Founder of the M. King Hubbert Centre for Petroleum Supply Studies at the Colorado School of Mines whose mission is to assemble, study, and disseminate global petroleum supply data. He is a registered geologist, geophysicist, engineer and oceanographer with 50 years domestic and international experience in petroleum exploration with various private and government oil companies. He was associated with Occidental Petroleum from 1968 to 1980 where he was senior advisor of worldwide evaluations of petroleum basins from 1974-80. Mr. Ivanhoe is the author of numerous papers on various technical subjects, including some 50 on the evaluation of foreign prospective basins and projections of future global oil supplies. See http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/v97n1/mkh-new2.html

Retired Professor of Geology at the University of Oregon, Dr. Walter Youngquist is the author of GeoDestinies: The inevitable control of Earth resources over nations and individuals. Dr. Youngquist has collaborated with Richard Duncan in developing scenarios of future oil production.

Dr. Richard Duncan has developed an extensive model of the coming Global Hubbert Peak, Heuristic Oil Forecasting Method, using modelling software. Based on his investigations, he has proposed The Olduvai Theory of Industrial Civilization.

Over the years, few people have contributed as much to physics education as Albert Bartlett [Professor Emeritus, Physics Department, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO]. Readers of The Physics Teacher regularly use snippets from his "et cetera..." column in their classes, and his celebrated lecture on exponential growth has fascinated well over 1000 audiences.

Richard Hardman CBE is Vice President Exploration for Amerada Hess International Limited based in London, he has worked in the upstream oil and gas industry as a geologist in Libya, Kuwait, Colombia, Norway; and in London where his career encompasses almost the whole of the exploration history of the North Sea - 1969 to the present. He spoke on the ‘Last Oil Shock’ Money Programme and said that oil experts have cried wolf before but now the wolf really is at the door. In the same programme Dr Richard Bentley of the University of Reading also agreed with Dr Campbell’s analysis.

References

The Money Programme “The Last Oil Shock” broadcast 8.11.2000

Scientific American Special report “The End of Cheap Oil” March 1998

http://dieoff.org for population graph from CCN, Spring, 1992

Oil & Gas Journal Online http://ogj.pennnet.com/home.cfm

Speech by Dr Shokri Ghanem, Director, Research Division, OPEC to the Austrian Society for Petroleum Sciences, Vienna, Austria, March 21, 2001 at www.opec.org

http://news.bbc.co.uk

www.msnbc.com/news

www.bp.com

World Oil at www.WorldOil.com

www.hubbertpeak.com

www.oilcrisis.com

“Energy Information Administration” at http://eia.doe.gov/