Oil Producing Countries That Have Peaked

Country	Peak Prod.	2008 Prod.	% Off Peak	Peak Year
United States	11297	7337	-35%	1970
Venezuela	3754	2566	-32%	1970
Libya	3357	1846	-45%	1970
Other Middle East	79	33	-58%	1970
Kuwait	3339	2784	-17%	1972
Iran	6060	4325	-29%	1974
Indonesia	1685	1004	-41%	1977
Romania	313	99	-68%	1977
Trinidad & Tobago	230	149	-35%	1978
Iraq	3489	2423	-31%	1979
Brunei	261	175	-33%	1979
Tunisia	118	89	-25%	1980
Peru	196	120	-39%	1982
Cameroon	181	84	-54%	1985
Other Europe & Eurasia	762	427	-44%	1986
Russian Federation	11484	9886	-14%	1987*
Egypt	941	722	-23%	1993
Other Asia Pacific	276	237	-14%	1993
India	774	766	-1%	1995*
Syria	596	398	-33%	1995
Gabon	365	235	-36%	1996
Argentina	890	682	-23%	1998
Colombia	838	618	-26%	1999
United Kingdom	2909	1544	-47%	1999
Rep. of Congo (Brazzaville)	266	249	-6%	1999*
Uzbekistan	191	111	-42%	1999
Australia	809	556	-31%	2000
Norway	3418	2455	-28%	2001
Oman	961	728	-24%	2001
Yemen	457	305	-33%	2002
Other S. & Cent. America	153	138	-10%	2003*
Mexico	3824	3157	-17%	2004
Malaysia	793	754	-5%	2004*
Vietnam	427	317	-26%	2004
Denmark	390	287	-26%	2004
Other Africa	75	54	-28%	2004*
Nigeria	2580	2170	-16%	2005*
Chad	173	127	-27%	2005*
Italy	127	108	-15%	2005*
Ecuador	545	514	-6%	2006*
Saudi Arabia	11114	10846	-2%	2005 / Growing
Canada	3320	3238	-2%	2007 / Growing
Algeria	2016	1993	-1%	2007 / Growing
Equatorial Guinea	368	361	-2%	2007 / Growing
China	3795	3795	-	Growing
United Arab Emirates	2980	2980	-	Growing
Brazil	1899	1899	-	Growing
Angola	1875	1875	-	Growing
Kazakhstan	1554	1554	-	Growing
Qatar	1378	1378	-	Growing
Azerbaijan	914	914	-	Growing
Sudan	480	480	-	Growing
Thailand	325	325	-	Growing
Turkmenistan	205	205	-	Growing
Peaked / Flat Countries Total	-	49597	-	60.6% of world oil production
Growing Countries Total	-	32223	-	39.4% of world oil production

Peak Oil as the Least Talked About Mega-Issue.

Apart from Climate Change, the prospect of resource depletion is the biggest whammy nature could subject humanity to. The two are related, of course, and neither are understood well by most people. It's hard to find anybody on the street who has ever heard of Peak Oil but it's not hard to figure out why: It isn't the most glamorous liquid to own, it's kept largely hidden except when we have to smell it as we fill our tanks, and it's so basic to our lives that it's easy to forget about. It's just there, sort of like nature is there. Occasionally we have to pay attention to it, like when the price rises, but beyond that we can pretty much let others take care of it and pay them to do so.

It's the fact that it is so basic we rarely think about oil. Only when it is absent do we appreciate what it enables us to do. And the list of things that it does or provides for us is innumerable and would take a gigabyte just to list everything. But a couple of facts will illustrate the magnitude of our dependency on the stuff.

Oil is almost pure energy. Energy literally does work for us. In fact, it can be measured in human terms: A gallon of gas does the equivalent of 120 human work hours, or 3 work weeks. One can feel this whenever you have to push your car. If you were to push a car the same number of miles it gets from a single gallon, then you would know in your bones and muscles the amount of work it does. And it isn't only the cars movement that the gas is good for. Every component of the car, from the iron for the frame and the body, the copper for the electronics, the rubber for the tires, the glass for the windshield, and the petrochemical fibers to produce the new car smell has an oil energy input. Anything that comes from a mine or from far away has oil somewhere in it's economic life.

In the U.S., modern industrial agriculture uses massive amounts of oil energy to produce food. For every calorie of food energy produced, ten calories of oil energy are expended. This ratio has steadily risen since the early 20th century, when most of the work was done by animals and farmers. In the 1950's the ratio was 1:1. This has been the true driving force behind the destruction of the American family farm, which could not compete with the more labor efficient industrial processes and corporate capital funding. As the enterprise grows, the more dependent on oil it becomes, for everything from transportation to chemical fertilizers and pesticides derived from oil and natural gas. What would happen to food prices if oil production begins to decline, as it inevitably will, if we continue on the path we're on? What would happen to crop yields if chemical pesticides and fertilizers could not be applied in the quantities needed?

There is nothing controversial about the peaking of oil production. It is a process that is observed in every oil field over it's productive life. Production begins slowly at first, rises to a peak as more wells are added, and then declines as the pressure from the ground drops. Eventually it has to be pumped in order to draw out the oil. As one oil field goes, so do collections of oil fields. A production profile of the United States exhibits the same pattern. The peak came in 1970 at around 11 million barrels a day. Now it produces over half that amount. The U.S. was once the biggest exporter of oil. Now it is the biggest importer, importing over 2/3rd of all the oil it consumes.

Eventually, total global oil production will peak. It is only a matter of time, if it hasn't occurred already.. From 2005 to 2008, global oil production was flat (see chart above), even as prices rose to levels never seen before. Exporting countries had every incentive to increase production but were unable to do so. The reason is simple: Most oil-producing countries have surpassed the peak production. Furthermore, and as a bit of an aside, annual oil consumption is 4 to 6 times greater than new discoveries. In fact, the most oil ever discovered in a single year happened in 1964. We are 45 years later and finding smaller and smaller fields each passing year. So it is only a matter of time before supply levels off and starts to decline. It would appear the leveling has begun.

It's hard to tell what is discussed in the board rooms of oil companies, or communications in the Department of Energy, or what advisors are telling the President of the United States, but it is a subject the public doesn't consider on a daily basis. Like Climate Change, it is a creeping crisis, easy to push out of your mind and ignore until directly confronted with it. But the impact of these two crises are profound and pervasive, and will reveal themselves in both subtle and dramatic ways. But probably the most obvious way peak oil will be seen is in it's impact on the economy. A less obvious way is in it's effect on social complexity. These will be considered in a later post.

Above is a list of oil producing nations relative to peak production.

Explanation of Dark, Green, and Reality

Dark Green Reality came about by fiddling around with available user names without resorting to numbers, hyphens, dashes, or any other cumbersome marks. The term "dark green" I learned about no more than a week ago and it felt descriptive enough as a label I could apply to myself that I took it and put it with all the other labels I've tried on.

It is an ideological label, a species of environmentalism with it's own characteristics and intellectual foundation. What's more, it has barely been used, no one seems to call themselves a Dark Green, and I can feel free to attach or detach whatever I want to it. Dark Green is counter distinct to Bright Green. Primarily, the difference lies in the realm of what is possible in terms of economic growth, industrial civilization, and the throughput of material resources drawn from the Earth needed to maintain our current economic lives. In a nutshell, it is in regards to the capacity of the Earth to support the kind of material comforts and standards of living we in the West (especially American standards) have grown accustomed to over the last several generations and the prospect that these standards can be replicated throughout the rest of the world. My view is that they cannot be replicated and that if we try to do so as a matter of policy, we will not just simply fail, but fail tragically.

But this isn't just some classic doom saying in the tradition of the Book of Revelations , or the end of the Mayan calender, or some other supernatural force that feels it necessary to destroy people. Instead, it is what is known, hypothesized, theorized and projected about the natural world through science and reason. This is human knowledge about the human condition. On that basis, it must be taken seriously and not treated as a variant of the above fictions purporting to foretell the end times. What a dark green understanding shares with the fictions described above is the possibility that human civilization (global, industrial) could conceivably end or be severely truncated as an ongoing concern due to the nature of the problems I will describe in this blog.

Any understanding of what we collectively face as a species must include an appreciation of certain conditions that will force a change on us in the way we inhabit the planet. There is a crossroads between Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the size of the human population living at present and it's projected growth over the coming decades. These are all deeply interrelated subjects, and all will interact in ways that are broadly predictable but difficult to set a specific time frame on. What's more, however these problems manifest themselves in reality, we will see the impact through our social systems, such as community, government, the economy, and through relations between people, classes, and countries.

These events will not be pretty. You might say that some changes could be better, must be better, but that we ourselves and future generations might well wonder what we were thinking as we got into such a fix. The fix, as I see it, is this: There are too many people using too many resources, overtaxing the planet's rate of regeneration, and too few who realize this. What this inevitably means is that the scale of human life on the planet must be and will be reduced. It means either we do it voluntarily in a managed, fair, and humane way, or it will occur involuntarily, unfairly, and inhumanely. The crucial difference between those I am calling dark and bright greens comes down to that. It is one part level of urgency and another part level of pain that is unavoidable in adapting to the condition we find ourselves entering.

I will describe what is generally understood and not understood about peak oil/resource depletion, climate change/global warming, and the population issue over the next several posts. I'll describe them separately and then move to a description of there interactions. But lastly I will now say a few words about reality. I'll just say that whenever I use the word I see imaginary quotes around it in my head. Though I believe there is a reality out there that is perceivable and comprehensible, the rub comes at the perceiving and comprehending stages. Always the big question of philosophy, it has been answered to some degree by science. It is the single most effective way we can discern what we commonly might think of as "objective reality". The reality of the material world, the world of the senses, of measurement, of testing and retesting, of reproducing the results of those testings, in order to find a statement that cannot be made false.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what is meant by the word "theory". In common parlance, what is usually meant is "hypothesis", that I hypothesize something is the case, rather than theorize because a theory is something much more elaborate, something that has withstood a measure of testing. A hypothesis is what you have without much evidence. The most well-known theories are ones that have been tested rigorously over many decades and have yet to be made false. The power of a theory is in it's ability to explain natural phenomena. Once a discovery has been made that lies outside the explanatory power of the theory, the theory is scrapped. Or it is reformed. Either way, it is no longer useful as a tool, or a framework, in which the processes of the natural world can be understood. This means that the older the theory, the longer and more frequently it has been tested, the better it represents reality.

We must accept that science is a critically important way to understand reality. There may be other ways for a person engage the world, to heighten or expand the individual experience of life, whether it is spiritual or meditative. But I don't think it is possible to overstate what a mistake it would be to ignore what we learn from science.

To close this post, I will lay out some statements I will demonstrate to be true in the weeks and months ahead. Primarily I will show why a gloomier forecast is warranted. Why green energy, new technology, old technology, and traditional economics will not be enough to spare us from some rough times ahead. However, because true skepticism requires that the skeptic be willing to be proven wrong, I will survey counter arguments and the evidence used to support those arguments that point to a happier outcome for humanity. Lastly, just to be clear about what I mean, I am not forecasting the end of the world, the destruction of all life on the planet, or anything like the aforementioned end times scenarios. I am saying that life in the twenty-first century will be inhabited by people with very different expectations, lifestyles, beliefs, and mythos than those who occupied the people of the twentieth century industrial civilizations.

Thought Experiment.

Is there a period of history that you've ever been especially drawn to? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in some period of history, say Medieval Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire? Most people would probably choose to live in a time in which people were generally thriving, and not just getting by, like the heyday of Rome itself, during the reign of Emperor Augustus in the first century A.D, let's say. But whatever period you like, pick one and then imagine how a person of that time lived on a day to day basis. What sort of job did that person have? What sort of dwelling did he/she live in? To help facilitate this process, it helps to narrow your choices. For most of recorded human history, save the last century and a half roughly, the number of choices are few. So get five or six six-sided dice and roll them. If you roll five or six ones, depending on how many dice you have, then you are one of the nobility in your chosen era. For every other result, you are a peasant.

Let's say you rolled something other than straight ones and you are a member of the peasantry. You will now be able to choose from a variety of occupations; farmer, baker, cobbler, blacksmith, or cartwright, just to name a few. Now think a little bit about your chosen field. What are some of the most important things you need in order to do your job? Say you are a baker. Where do you get the grain to make the bread? What do you use to heat the oven you bake the bread in? Where do you get that from? Where do you sell the bread? Who are your customers? How do you transport the things you need and how far do you need to go? Follow this line of thinking for a while until you have a decent sense of what it must have been like.

Once you've done that ask yourself if you would still like to live in that time and place and do the things they did to get by. Then ask yourself what are the crucial differences between then and now. Why do we have cars and trucks and they didn't? Why are there very few farmers and bakers and even fewer blacksmiths, cobblers, and cartwrights today? What makes contemporary society possible and why have the changes occurred that made this happen?

Inaugural post

I will have a post sometime next week once I have figured out the magic of blogspot.