Interesting Ken Deffeyes Interview With The Oregonian

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What's the basic math behind your forecast that world oil production peaked Dec. 16?

Hubbert's theory says that the ease of finding oil depends on the fraction of oil that hasn't been found yet. It's a simple hypothesis that explained U.S. oil production, where we've already gone over the peak and we're halfway down the other side. A corollary that comes out of the math is that the peak occurs when half the oil has been produced. In Chapter 3 of "Beyond Oil," I take the date these oil fields were first discovered, the first wells, and it turns out that the whole world is mature. We've found 94 percent of all the oil we're ever going to find. It's easy to extend that line down to the zero level and say that there are 2.013 trillion barrels that we're on track to discover, and we've already discovered 94 percent of that. So there's not much guesswork in that number. So I divide that number by 2 and I get just over 1 trillion barrels. Then I add up the world oil production from the beginning and figure out when we're halfway, and that's where the Dec. 16 number comes from.

Doesn't a lot depend on the level of oil reserves the Saudis are sitting on?

Matt Simmons has this wonderful book called "Twilight in the Desert." It's a very detailed analysis of the Saudi fields based on papers that the Saudi Aramco petroleum engineers have published in the Journal of Petroleum Geography. He says they're struggling to keep up. In the supergiant oil fields in Saudi Arabia, the water content is going up. It's called the water cut, the percentage of fluid produced that's water. It was 30 percent when Simmons' book came out. There are rumors now that it's 55 percent. When it gets to 80, things are largely over.

What is the highest estimate of reserves out there?

Reserves are hard to estimate, but if we talk about discoveries, the biggest estimate comes from the U.S. Geological Survey, at just over 3 trillion barrels. If you take their number, we have another 2 trillion barrels to produce and you get a peak in the year 2036. I could give a 15 minute lecture on the flaws in the USGS survey, and I think they're beginning to back off a little bit. In order to make the USGS or things like it correct, we've got to find another Middle East plus another North Sea on top of that. I don't think there's another Middle East lurking out there.

What would drilling in the Arctic Refuge do to the estimate ?

Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in the United States, kicked in when they got the pipeline finished in 1976, and it wasn't big enough to raise us back to our 1970 level of production. It put a little shoulder on the downside of the production curve, but that was it. My guess is that in our wildest dream, ANWAR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) will prove half as big as Prudhoe Bay. I'd have to work out the number, but if that's the case, it probably postpones the world situation for two weeks.

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http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/1140854437306230.xml&coll=7