The Future of Fossil Fuels: A Century of Abundance or a Century of Decline?
Abstract
Horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and other advanced technologies have spawned a host of new euphoric forecasts of hydrocarbon abundance. Yet although the world's remaining oil and gas resources are enormous, most of them are destined to stay in the ground due to real-world constraints on price, flow rates, investor appetite, supply chain security, resource quality, and global economic conditions. While laboring under the mistaken belief that it sits atop a 100-year supply of natural gas, the U.S. is contemplating exporting nearly all of its shale gas production even as that production is already flattening due to poor economics. Instead of bringing "energy independence" to the U.S. and making it the top oil exporter, unrestricted drilling for tight oil and in the federal outer continental shelf would cut the lifespan of U.S. oil production in half and make it the world's most desperate oil importer by mid-century. And current forecasts for Canadian tar sands production are as unrealistic as their failed predecessors. Over the past century, world energy production has moved progressively from high quality resources with high production rates and low costs to lower quality resources with lower production rates and higher costs, and that progression is accelerating. Soon we will discover the limits of practical extraction, as production costs exceed consumer price tolerance. Oil and gas from tight formations, shale, bitumen, kerogen, coalbeds, deepwater, and the Arctic are not the stuff of new abundance, but the oil junkie's last dirty fix. This session will highlight the gap between the story the industry tells about our energy future, and the story the data tells about resource size, production rates, costs, and consumer price tolerance. It will show why it's time to put aside unrealistic visions of continued dependence on fossil fuels, face up to a century of decline, and commit ourselves to energy and transportation transition.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFM.U42A..03N
- Keywords:
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- 1922 INFORMATICS / Forecasting;
- 6349 POLICY SCIENCES / General or miscellaneous