I was taking a short break from Peak Oil by reading stuff people are putting up on the other side of the fence. One of the most popular has to be Peak Oil Debunked (peakoildebunked.blogspot.com) by JD. At the time of this writing, JD has some 309 breathtaking (read: long) articles. While I’m still going through some of JD’s claims, here’s a sample of the kind of rebuttal that he’s coming up with:
Consider GTL. Shell is investing $5 billion in a GTL facility in Qatar which will produce 140,000bbl/d of diesel when it is completed in 2011. A barrel of crude, on the average, is 20% diesel. So, in terms of diesel, the Shell GTL plant will be the equivalent of an ordinary crude source producing about 700,000bbl/d. That’s quite large — roughly the same as the oil production of an entire country like Egypt, Australia, India etc. For reference those countries have current oil reserves of about 4 Gb. So, from the standpoint of the diesel market, we could say that the Shell plant is the equivalent of the discovery of an oil field about 4Gb in size. Assuming the entire $20 billion of scheduled investment goes through, GTL in Qatar will be the equivalent of a 15Gb super-giant oil field discovery. That would definitely put a big out-of-trend spike on Cambell’s curve.
So, as you can see, a 140,000b/d diesel GTL setup is 1) inflated 5x too 700,000b/d of crude (which the plant will not produce), 2) compared without reference to the production rates of some countries, 3) pulled a fictitious relationship to some reserve number – 4Gb, 4) inflated the original investment by Shell by 400% and finally, derive a totally out-of-whacked 15Gb super-giant oil field comparison to the original GTL plant.
I think there’s a real use to PeakOilDebunked, and that is, the next time I come across an objection to Peak Oil, I’ll look it up there and if I find it, it’s a debunkable debunk.
