Reading the Energy Information Administration's oil production figures

I feel like I shouldn't even bother with this. At this stage, commenting on peak oil and its implications seems so, well, five years ago. The world outside my window looks almost exactly like we would expect to see in the early stages of the global production plateau. Economic stagnation? Check. Confusion and denial? Check. Ominous sabre-rattling over and in oil-producing parts of the world? Check. Climate change suddenly going back to being a non-issue among Very Serious People? Double check.

So it seems almost redundant to comment here.

On the other hand, I am a huge nerd who likes to play with spreadsheets and was trying to learn how to do double-axis charts in Excel 2010. So, for the record, here are three charts illustrating U.S. Energy Information Administration's monthly oil production figures. (You can get the source data here... ya krelborn.)

This chart shows the total volume of crude oil, lease condensate, natural gas liquids, "other liquids" (generally ethanol and biodiesel), plus something called "refinery processing gain."




Things have certainly flattened out since 2004-2005. But the highest monthly production so far was in January of 2011, at over 88 million barrels per day.

Here's the same data, with the production disaggregated into (a) crude oil, and (b) everything else.


Here, the break in trend becomes a lot clearer. The actual oil production (the black bars) pretty clearly flattened out around 2005. The seeming increase in total production since 2009 basically comes entirely from natural gas liquids and the other stuff counted as part of the "total oil" figure.

But different fuels have different energy contents. Ultimately it's the energy that matters. A barrel of natural gas liquids has, on average, about 71% the gross heat content of a barrel of oil. So counting NGL's as if they were equivalent to oil tends to understate the degree to which the production of liquid fossil energy has stagnated.

Ditto with "other liquids." Ethanol has a much lower energy content than petroleum.

But the most misleading number comes from "refinery processing gain." Processing gain is what happens when you take a barrel of crude oil and refine it into a number of distillates (like gasoline, diesel fuel, kerosene, etc.), some of which have a lower density than the crude. So what happens is you put in a barrel of crude oil and you get out something like 1.1 barrels. You haven't gotten any more energy out of the process, it's just the volume that's swelled. But the EIA's figures count volumetric increases due to "refinery processing gain" as if if it were actual fuel.

So I adjusted the various figures to reflect their energy content. I counted a barrel of crude as a barrel of crude. A barrel of NGL's counts as 0.71 BOE (barrels of oil equivalent,) which is the world average I got from the EIA's heat content figures. Since EIA doesn't tell us what "other liquids" are composed of, I assumed it's ethanol and biodiesel, and on that basis assumed that one barrel of "other liquids" equals 0.75 BOE in energy terms. (Ethanol is about two-thirds as energy-dense than crude, and biodiesel about equal. If these "other liquids" made up a significant amount of total supply I would have made more of an effort to figure out what they represent in actual energy terms. As it is--more than two-thirds BOE, less than one.)

And I treated refinery processing gain as zero, since that increase in volume doesn't add to the energy supply at all.

And here's what I got:


As I said, this is increasingly beside the point. You don't need a spreadsheet to see that the world is in a fundamentally different place than it was in 2004, 1994 or even 1934.

But if climate change is any indication, people have a remarkable ability to ignore clear trends in favour of whatever the toob is telling them is important.