40 % of all US oil is not derived from oil
Famous oil geologist and peakoiler Arthur Berman (he is one of the most serious and educated peakoilers out there) says in this youtubeinterview, Arthur Berman: "Peak Oil - The Hedonic Adjustment" | The Great Simplification #54 (18.1.2023), that 40 % of all US oil is not derived from oil. 40.51 minutes into the video Art shows a chart where he says that one third of world "oil" consumption is not oil.
What is it then? Well, a mixture of natural gas liquids (NGL), biofuels, refinery gains, condensates and the like. They all contain very little diesel, therefore this is really serious stuff. Diesel is the motor, the very life blood of the global economy.
Bear in mind that of the remaining US oil production, 7 million barrels per day (mbd) of its 12,3 mbd is tight oil, shale oil, fracking oil. It makes almost 57 % of all US "oil" production. Tight oil also contain much less diesel than conventional oil, it has to be blended with heavy oil to become useful in the refineries *.
These insights by Art Berman is in full accordance with the numbers that I calculated with in my book "The end of global net oil exports. What really matters in the Peak Oil debate" (2022).
"Petrol just isn't what it used to be", economist and peakoiler Tim Watkins says in the following text on his blog:
"Since the 2008 crash, we’ve all had to get used to “shrinkflation” – where, at least until recently, manufacturers kept prices down by shrinking the content. A 150 gram bar of chocolate, for example, would become a 125 gram bar but would sell at the same price. Okay, that’s easy enough to understand when it comes to packaged food or cleaning products, but how is it possible to have shrinkflation at a petrol station? After all, we continue to buy petrol by the litre… and a litre of petrol is a litre of petrol, right?
Wrong! Petrol just isn’t what it used to be. Indeed, in Britain since September 2021, a litre of petrol has five percent less petrol in it."
(Tim Watkins: "Shrinkflation at the pumps is just depressing", on the blog "The Consciousness of sheep", 22.1.2023)
What Art and Tim are saying, and the fact that almost only they say it, shows how desperate the world leaders are to hide the beginning collapse of industrial civilization.
This is called "Stealth Peak Oil". See also this article by Art Berman on his homepage, January 18, 2023.
It could have been otherwise, if we had politicians who were less interested in power and fame, and would risk their reputation in order to warn people, in order to make the collapse of civilization more smooth, not so steep and cruel. Without being worried of being called "alarmists" or "doomsday prophets".
But the whole thing is a little like a proud fat man, whose food is running out, who begins to starve, and pretends everything is fine, until his body has eaten up all his fat, and he is forced to confess that he has run out of food, because he is dying.
We are eating of our fat now, as a society, and the collapse is creeping slowly upon us, but we are like the frog in slowly boiling water, who does not jump out of the water, because we become accustomed to the new normal every time our baseline is shifting.
Maybe reality today after all is too gloomy to grasp for someone. But for us Christians this should not be doom-and-gloom, but good news, of the imminency of the Second Coming. Atheists/materialists must have a hard time acknowledging these things, these facts are so cruel if you are an atheist/materialist.
I have nothing to lose, therefore I can seek out and present these facts to you. I have already lost my reputation.
* "U.S. tight oil plays produce ultra-light oil. Almost all of it is too light for refinery specifications. That means that it must be blended with heavy oil in order to be refined and that is why there is demand for Canadian heavy oil." (from this article by Art Berman from 2017, on his homepage)
" “Our thesis is that the U.S. refining system is close to being maxed-out on the amount of shale oil it can process,” a Morgan Stanley research note concluded this month, citing shale oil’s light hue, which makes it ill-suited to make high octane gas, as well as jet fuel and diesel." (from this article by Sharon Kelly on Resilience.org, 2018)
