Oil

04/11/2023 [email protected] 1

OILRyan Carlyle, BSChE, engineer at an oil

company(with comments from Kim Fai Kok and Jay

Bazzinotti)

http://www.quora.com/Ryan-Carlyle

http://www.quora.com/Ryan-Carlyle


1) Oil is shockingly important

• The world economy has been developing with oil as its lifeblood for over a hundred years.

• Oil is directly responsible for about 2.5% of world GDP, but accounts for 1/3rd of our primary energy supply (5 terawatts out of 15 terawatts total). It's over half if you include natural gas.


World Energy Consumption by Source, in Terawatts Per Day



1) Oil is shockingly important

• Oil/gas powers 100% of all transportation, which, in turn, directly accounted for 1/6th of world GDP in 1997.

• Except for a minuscule number of electric-powered vehicles, you can't move anything anywhere faster than about 25 mph without oil.

• You can't operate a modern military, and you can't run a modern economy.

• Modern civilization would collapse in a matter of months if oil stopped flowing.

• Oil is about as important to the developed world as agriculture.


2) You have no idea how big oil is

• A globe-spanning spider web of pipelines and shipping routes.

• The natural gas distribution pipelines in the US alone could stretch from Earth to the Moon 7-8 times.

• There are millions upon millions of miles of pipe on the planet to distribute crude oil, refined products, and natural gas (mostly gas).

• Your house is directly connected to the Pliocene era -- by the world's oil & gas infrastructure.



• About 40% of all seaborne cargo is oil, and there is literally more seaborne cargo at any given time (by weight) than there are fish in the sea.

• Think about what that means for a minute. The ocean isn't full of fish, it's full of oil cargoes.



• There is no reason whatsoever to think any feasible amount of renewables growth can displace fossil fuels in a couple generations.

• Wind and solar are growing exponentially, yes, but from such a small base that it doesn't even make a dent.

• The use of renewables as a percentage of total world energy consumption only increased by 0.07% from 1973 to 2009.



• World oil production was 82 million barrels per day in 2010. At roughly 6 gigajoules per barrel, that's about 5.7 Terawatts of power production per day.

• World wind-power production in 2010 was 0.3 petawatt-hours. Averaged over a year, that's about 34 gigawatts.

• World solar-power production in 2010 was 0.03 petawatt-hours. Averaged over a year, that's about 3.4 gigawatts.


3) Oil is wealth – wealth for producers, and wealth for everyone who uses it

• And oil is indeed high-quality energy. It is liquid, which makes it easily to move and store. It's stable, and it releases a huge amount of energy. It's also much, much cleaner than coal. If it weren't for CO2 emissions, oil & gas would be a nearly-perfect energy source. Look at what their growth has done to the world's wealth:



• Energy efficiency is powerful and highly desirable, but it can't compete (as a “solution”) with increasing the primary energy supply.

• Increased energy efficiency actually (usually) results in increased energy consumption, because of cheaper costs (per unit output) and faster economic growth. (This is called Jevon's Paradox ).

• Highly-developed nations can use advanced technology to increase quality of life while using less energy, but less-developed nations cannot. Getting to developed-nation status requires a lot of high-quality energy.






Real GDPPer Capita – 20th Century



• The parallel trend of each of those two charts (world per capita energy consumption and real GDP) is not accidental.

• Every transition to a cleaner, cheaper, more-concentrated energy source causes dramatic improvements in real global wealth (and quality of life). – Electrification caused the growth from 1900 –1950.– Oil enabled the post-war boom from 1950 – 1970. – Natural gas contributed to the growth from 1970 – 1995.– The growth since 2000 is due to increased coal consumption in

Asia.


Country Human Development

Index

Energy Consumption (kgoe/person)

CO2 Emissions (Tonnes

CO2/Person)Top 12 HDI

Iceland 0.968 11718 7.6Norway 0.968 5933.6 19.1Australia 0.962 5723.3 16.2Canada 0.961 8300.7 20Ireland 0.959 3761.3 10.5Sweden 0.956 5764.8 5.9

Switzerland 0.955 3718.6 5.4Japan 0.953 4040.4 9.9

Netherlands 0.953 5012.2 8.7Finland 0.952 7218.1 12.6France 0.952 4518.4 6

United States 0.951 7794.8 20.6


Country Human Development

Index

Energy Consumption (kgoe/person)

CO2 Emissions (Tonnes

CO2/Person)Bottom 12 HDI

Togo 0.512 445.3 0.4Yemen 0.508 294.8 1Senegal 0.499 233.2 0.4Eritrea 0.483 199.3 0.2Nigeria 0.47 776.9 0.9

Tanzania 0.467 464.9 0.1Angola 0.446 606.1 0.7Benin 0.437 301.4 0.3

Zambia 0.434 600.6 0.2Congo 0.411 296.2 0.1

Ethiopia 0.406 277.9 0.1Mozambique 0.384 435.8 0.1


• Sure, the biggest energy consuming nations could reduce per capita consumption a lot, and still have high quality of life.

• The US could learn a lot from Denmark. And current trends show that they are steadily moving in that direction

• Energy consumption per capita and per dollar of GDP is steadily dropping in the developed world. That's a good thing.



• But the energy required to lift 3 billion people out of poverty is far, far more than the potential energy savings from eliminating energy waste in the developed world.

• This would entail refrigeration for vaccines, irrigation for agriculture, and fuel for school buses.

• The planet cannot support 7 billion people at a low-energy agrarian level of existence

• We have long since passed the point where we can revert back to a low-tech, low-energy form of civilization without billions of people dying of starvation.



4) The oil industry is a really safe place to work

• Working on an oil rig used to be pretty dangerous, but the industry has made huge strides in safety improvements over the past few decades by increasing automation, providing comprehensive safety training, and changing the work culture.

• Jobs that are actually dangerous include truck-driving, logging, fishing, and nursing.


5) Oil companies don't make that much money

• Contrary to popular belief, the Oil "Majors" -- ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Total, ConocoPhillips, and Shell -- don't actually make all that much money.

• Yes, it's a lot in absolute terms because the companies are so large, but the profit margins are pretty sad in a good year.

• Bad years (like most of the 1990s) cause crippling contractions and mass layoffs.


Minimum5.31%(Q209)

Average8.2%

Maximum12.49%(Q212)

Minimum14.36%(Q208)

Average22.17%

Maximum29.66%(Q112)

Minimum-2.72%(Q212)

Average27.69%

Maximum35.02%(Q409)

EXXON/MOBIL

APPLE

MICROSOFT

Profit Margins



• Oil profits have beaten the S&P500 lately, and oil prices are very high right now, but exploration / development costs are rising faster than the price of oil.

• Net revenue per barrel is running about $20/bbl even though oil went from $40/bbl to $100/bbl.

• What happens when China's big recession hits, and oil demand drops significantly?

• This is an incredibly capital-intensive industry, in which projects take longer than the business cycle. That's fundamentally difficult to manage.



• Oil is a widely-traded, high-competitive commodity market.

• In this case, 8-10% profit margin is the minimum risk premium you can offer a company to convince it to continue doing business in: – A market where your product is almost completely

interchangeable with the next guy's product– A business where each $100 million exploration well

has a 50-90% chance of being a failure


• Frankly, it's a miracle anyone wants to be in this business at all.

• The major oil companies are underpaid. The risk-adjusted returns are lower than most sectors.

• The only way oil companies survive this kind of business environment is by consolidating, so that the risks are spread out over a wider base.

• That's why oil companies are some of the largest publicly-traded companies in the world -- they have to be huge to survive.



• So where does all the oil money actually go? To foreign national oil companies -- mostly OPEC.

• They have control of all the cheap oil that's easy to get out of the ground, so they have a combination of high net revenue per barrel and some semblance of cartel pricing power.

• There's lots to know about the oil industry -- but if more people understood the facts, we would have much more productive public discourse about the world's energy systems.



Statistics

• A gigawatt is 10 to the 9th watts (1,000,000,000) or a billion watts

• A terawatt is 10 to the 12th watts (1,000,000,000,000) or a trillion watts

• A petawatt is 10 to the 15th watts (1,000,000,000,000,000) OR a thousand terawatts


Statistics• World oil production was 82 million barrels per day in 2010. At

roughly 6 gigajoules per barrel, that's about 5.7 terawatts of power production.

• World wind power production in 2010 was 0.3 petawatt-hours. Averaged over a year, that's about 34 gigawatts.

• World solar power production in 2010 was.03 petawatt-hours. Averaged over a year, that's about 3.4 gigawatts.*

* [Update: I am greatly simplifying the solar issue to illustrate the point that oil is big, which lots of people have objected to in the comments. 50-200 years is a realistic time range for solar to hit 5TW generation. I think it'll take 100 years, and many people think it'll be a lot faster.]




Major Trade Movements of Oil

• According to BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2010, the previous cell shows the major trade movements.

• China and the US are very dependent on the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, for oil. Both countries are aware of this unhealthy symbiosis, and in 2006 China started to invest heavily in Africa, and the US and China established a “Strategic Economic Dialogue.”

• The Chinese were not too fond to speak about their energy consumptions at that point. Though, in 2007 they agreed that China would let the US assist them on energy saving.


The Commodity Exchange

• Oil is the most traded commodity in the world. • Oil is not only traded between companies, but also in

the commodity exchange. • These commodity exchanges exists to reduce the price

risk for oil companies. Investors buy a certain amount of oil that will be produced in a near future. This kind of trading has created speculations on the oil price as banks and funds encourage investors to invest in future commodities like oil, resulting the skyrocketing oil price in 2004-2008.


Rising Prices

• China entering the World Trade Organization in 2001 has been seen as one of the reasons the oil price went up, as lowering tariffs and opening up the economy for foreign countries encouraged heavy foreign direct Investment in China, resulting in a mass demand for oil.

• The Iraq War and the weakening dollar also affected the rise of the oil price, because crude oil is quoted in U.S. dollars and cents and reacts positively to a cheaper dollar.


Bazzinotti’s Notes

• A barrel of oil holds 42 gallons of crude. There are different types of crude. “Light sweet" means low sulphur and easy to refine. “Tar sands" like the XL pipeline stuff, which is like tar or mud, is hard to move and hard to refine and very dirty.

• A barrel of oil renders about 24 gallons of gasoline. The rest is made into diesel, wax, kerosene, benzene, tar and other chemicals which are used for fertilizers and plastics. Oil is an amazing thing and it really makes our modern lives possible.



• Of the roughly 1 million wells pumping oil in the world, more than half are in the US. So when people say, let's just put in more wells, they don't really know what they are talking about.

• Putting in more wells does not create more oil -- it just pulls out the oil that is there faster, like sucking down a chocolate shake near the end.



• Nothing in the world makes power or heat like oil. Not wind, solar, nuclear, coal, wood – nothing. That is why as long as oil exists we will be using it.

• A single barrel of oil creates almost 6 million BTUs. The average American house uses about 15,000 BTUs per hour.

• So you see how valuable oil is just from what it can do.



• By any measure, oil is getting harder and more expensive to get.

• In the 1930s, we were getting about 33 barrels of oil for every barrel used to drill it, bring it up, refine it, transport it, etc. That number today is 15.

• The tar sands that are used by the XL pipeline sometimes produce as little as 3 barrels for every barrel consumed -- just an absolutely terrible return on investment.



• The XL pipeline oil is filthy and dangerous. It is not oil as we think of oil, but tar. It requires great heat to melt it to make it flow, and lots of water to move it through the pipelines.

• The used water is ruined, and so deadly that a massive lake of it in Canada kills all life that touches it.



• The XL pipeline would create a similar lake in Texas or Louisiana of permanently polluted water so large it could be seen from outer space.

• And TransCanada has not told the truth about the leaks and millions of gallons that have already spilled in Canada .

• The only good thing we can say about the pipeline is that it would remove about 6,000 train cars of oil from the railroad tracks.


http://www.quora.com/Oil-Exploration

Business

Oil