Will the decline of large fields lead to dieoff?

One of the often quoted "truths" spouted by the dieoff doomers is that the decline rate post peak will depend on the world's giant fields and by proxy when the world's giant fields go into decline the world has effectively hit hard depletion. This comes from Ivanhoe L.F., & Leckie G.G's piece in 1993 titled "
Global oil, gas fields, sizes tallied, analyzed" which effectively says that 94% of the world's oil and gas lies in 1500 large fields.

I question this received "wisdom".
For a start, the distribution of virtually every other size plot in the natural world shows a power law.
Take lakes for example: there are only a few dozen giant lakes in the world but there are millions of small lakes. As wikipedia states:
"Small lakes are also much more numerous than big lakes: in terms of area, one third of the world's standing water is represented by lakes and ponds of 10 hectares (25 acres) or less.[citation needed] However, large lakes contribute disproportionately to the area of standing water with 122 large lakes of 1,000 square kilometres (390 sq mi, 100,000 ha, 247,000 acres) or more representing about 29% of the total global area of standing inland water."

If wikipedia is correct about the distribution of lakes (and we have no reason to doubt it) is it possible that the distribution of oil fields is somehow different than the distribution of lakes given that both were formed by natural processes?

I doubt it. There's something clearly wrong with the analysis. I do not believe that 94% of the world's oil lies in large fields when only 29% of the world's fresh water lies in large lakes. It doesn't make sense. I also note that there has been no update to the 1993 piece and this is the crucial piece on which many of the forecasts of depletion are relying on. If there is nothing to offset the decline from large fields then world depletion EQUALS large field depletion.

One point however: it IS likely that the distribution of the EASY TO DRILL oil fields are disproportionately skewed towards large oil fields simply because of cost vs profit. Large fields are easier to find and compare favorably to the sunk costs and overheads of the majors. Majors simply cannot develop the small fields because their costs do not permit. This is true in every business: a small niche market is not worth doing for the likes of giant corporations like Coca Cola, Lever Brothers etc If this is true (and there's no reason to suspect it isn't), it suggests that small oil fields are disproproportionately likely to not have already been developed compared to the giant fields. If this is true combined with the distribution of lakes being possibly similar to that of oil fields we could deduce that we still likely have the same amount of oil as in the large fields but in smaller fields still remaining to be developed. If this is the case, it's a strong argument that the depletion rate of the large fields will be tempered by the development of the smaller fields to some extent but at much greater cost. It can be argued of course that cost is indeed the issue. It's not. The issue is not greater cost, it's continually increasing cost which cannot be adapted to in a reasonable time frame. If the next tranch of oil fields to be developed are all smaller but more or less of the same cost and similarly for the subsequent tranch there what we are likely to see is a step change in the price of oil rather than a smooth and continous price upwards till the world economy explodes. And if we see step upwards and a plateau at a particular price, the question will be asked: have we yet reached the price at which it's cheaper to move to electric power for most applications that are currently powered by oil? Time will tell.

What is dieoff?

What is dieoff?

Dieoff is a biology term. It comes from the study of populations of fast growing pond scum or algae as they are most commonly known. It is a provable and demonstrable fact that algae placed into a petri dish will eat up all the nutrients in the dish, the population will correspondingly increase exponentially and then all of a sudden all the nutrients will be all gone. The population then crashes. The same type of thing happens with for example reindeer inroduced to an isolated island with no natural predators. The population rises dramatically, hit a limit called the carrying capacity then plummets. The following is an example of this.




Why do we care?

Well there is a theory floating around called "peak oil" theory which states that basically the world's oil supplies will gradually build up production to a high level and due to technical and geological constraints will reach a maximum of production. After that maximum level of production is reached, production will subsequently fall off. This theory has a lot of data to back it up and it appears to be validated by what we're seeing in the real world. The following is an idealized version of this curve.


Some people believe that human population is linked to this growth and subsequent depletion curve in oil.
They base their theory on the fact that human population has exhibited almost exponential growth in the last 100 years and given that we are animals living in an ecology at some point we must hit the finite limits (called "carrying capacity") of the earth and the population must crash. The two theories link together via the observation that the population growth curve seems to correspond more or less in time to the increased use in oil.

Is this valid science?
It could be, but in order to show a correlation, we need to prove that it's the only viable correlation.
In addition to increased use of oil, there is also increased wealth, decreased mortality rate and vastly increased knowledge.
So up to this point we have seen that, in aggregate, yes we cannot deny it: we have as a species being growing exponentially.




It is important to note, however that there is a further population growth curve called an S-curve that looks like the following:



And here is the population of england, which seems to have followed an s-curve rather than a boom and bust:



Thus first of all, unlike the position of dieoff, in the science of ecology we have two possible options: Boom and Bust or Boom and Level off.
According to the dieoff theory we have only one choice: population will rise along with oil production and then crash. In England it has indeed risen along with oil production but then partway it stopped rising. Perhaps the correlation is not with oil?

So....?
While it's true that we certainly are animals in an ecology, it's also true that we are the only animal capable of adapting to entirely new environments simply by examining them and figuring out what to do to survive in them.
Likewise, we have already gone through a carrying capacity bottleneck thirty thousand years ago when our hunter gatherer ancestors were too successful and due to over hunting started to run out of food. The solution was that they invented agriculture. Prior to that our apelike ancestors who split off from the very successful great apes were forced due to their success in breeding out into the savannah where they were forced to develop large brains in order to compete against the much more ferocious predators out there. This led to the development of fire and from then on we have been evolving along with technology. I will thus in this blog argue that we are not limited to being animals in an ecology ever since we invented fire and are unlike both algae and reindeer on an island since we are able to understand our predicament and look for alternatives and that while peak oil is true I will debunk the theory that we are doomed to dieoff like some algae in a petridish and we cannot fight this because we are as stupid as algae.