The end of the oil era: The fall of civilization, or just a bump in the road?

Great Debates
1

I’m opening this new thread to continue the discussion in this thread, in which the OP was about something else.
We’ve heard it before. Oil will run out, and we will have to find other resources and methods to fuel our cars and our industry. Currently, oil makes up for 40% of the worlds energy usage (oil is mainly used in motor vehicles/aeroplanes (ca. 65%) and in the industry (ca. 25%)).

The truth is we will never run out of oil, there will always be some oil left. However, the key in this equation is when oil production starts to decline - peak - the turning point when an increasing demand for oil is higher than what is actually produced. This may lead to an increase in oil prices, and maybe even a worldwide recession. Or not.

Recently new data has been compiled which suggests that oil production will indeed peak sometime soon, possible during the next 5 - 15 years.

Available crude oil worldwide
"Taken together, the great majority of these studies reflect a consensus among oil experts that EUR oil reserves lie within the range of 1,800 to 2,200 billion barrels. As of the end of 1999, the world had consumed about 857 billion barrels of these ultimately recoverable reserves.

Given these estimates of recoverable oil, and plausible assumptions of moderate growth in demand (about 2 percent per year), we can use a simple model to calculate when world oil production might begin to decline, driven by resource constraints.

  • at the low end, for EUR oil equal to 1,800 billion barrels, peaking could occur as early as 2007;
  • at the high end (2,200 billion barrels), peaking could occur around 2013. (An implausibly high 2,600 billion barrels for EUR oil would postpone peaking only another six years – to 2019.) "

US domestic oil:
"In the case of the coterminous 48 states (the “lower-48” states in oil-industry language), imported oil turned out to be the cheapest and most convenient replacement source when production began its decline [peaked] in 1970.

  • Ultimately, these curves suggest, recoverable crude oil in the lower-48 will total about 190 billion barrels (bbl).
  • Of this amount, 166 billion (87 percent of the total) had been produced by December 1999. "

In addition to this, the US has the strategic oil reserves and an estimated 3-4 billion barrels in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, less than a years worth of domestic oil usage.

Note: These numbers above, the estimates of available recoverable oil worldwide (including already extracted oil), has not varied much since 1979, averaging around 2,000 billion barrels.
Some important points

  • Most experts today believes that all huge oil fields have been found. The importance of huge oil fields should be clear: Huge oil fields make up for less than 1% of total oil fields, but 75% of the worlds’ total recoverable oil resources. No new huge oil fields have been found after 1980. Given that huge (wide) oil fields “will be found first”, experts has little hope of finding new huge hidden fields. One of the last prospectives, the Caspian area, recently has proven a disappointment.

  • In a market-driven economy, oil fields that are cheapest to access, and with the highest quality of oil, are extracted first. Thus, remaing oil will be more costly to extract than what has already been extracted. This could lead to an increase in prices on its own.

  • While energy conservation may delay a peak for quite some time, the problem is that the greatest burden will fall on the oil-producing countries themselves. Noboy are using more energy than the oil-producing countries. The idea that the population of these countries should restrain its energy use in order to supply the rest of the world with energy might be hard to sell domestically.

http://www.wri.org/climate/jm_oil_000.html

So, what do you dopers think?
Will oil peak?
Will it be a major blow to civilization?
Or will the transition stretch over a period so long that it will hardly be noticeable?

2

Some additional data on alternative energy resources:

I have always said that there is a crucial difference between recoverable resources and available resources. Even though there are many liquids which could be used as energy, that doesn’t mean it will be economically viable to extract those resources. You can’t just put tar sands oil in your car, just as you can’t put ordinary car gas in an aeroplane. And, even if it’s economically viable to recover alternative resources, we will still have to replace or modify the current crude oil processing infrastructure.
Hydrogen fuel:
There is a live thread here about hydrogen. I have posted in this one as well. Bottom line, IMO it’s a long road ahead before hydrogen could replace oil, if ever.
Oil shales:
Note: Oil shales is not crude oil. Shale oil could in fact better be classed as part of the coal domain. Two thirds of the world’s oil shale reserves are located in the United States. The largest known reserves are the Green River shale deposits in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.

These reserves are estimated to be 270 billion tons. At 20 gallons per ton of shale, this translates into 130 billion barrels of oil. It is reported that deposits yielding more than 10 gallons per ton are potentially commercially exploitable.

However, all attempts to get this “oil” out of shale have failed economically. Furthermore, the “oil” (and, it is not oil as is crude oil) may be recoverable but the net energy recovered may not equal the energy used to recover it. If oil is “recovered” but at a net energy loss, the operation is a failure. Also, the environmental impacts of developing shale oil, especially related to the available water supply (the headwaters of the already over used Colorado river), and the disposal of wastes, do not seem manageable, at least a the present time, and perhaps not all.
Tar sands:
Tar sands oil is crude oil. The estimated world-wide resources of tar sands are about three times the known petroleum reserves. The world’s largest deposit of tar sands is in Canada, the former Soviet Union, and Venezuela. In the US, small deposits of tar sands are found in Utah.

It is likely that only a relatively small amount of that total can be economically recovered. Tar sands oil cannot be recovered by conventional well drilling. Almost all of it is now recovered by strip mining, but much of the oilsand is too deep to be reached by strip mining.

Other methods are being tried to recover this deeper oil, but the economics are marginal. With the strip mining and refining process now in use, it takes the energy equivalent of two barrels of oil to produce one barrel. To expand the strip mining operation to the extent which could, for example, produce the 18 million barrels of oil used each day in the United States would involve the world’s biggest mining operation, on a scale which is simply not possible in the foreseeable future, if ever.


http://dieoff.com/page132.htm
http://dieoff.com/page143.htm

3

Just think how pissed off the Arab countries will be when they lose their only way to make money. If the loss of oil doesn’t end the world maybe the pissed off, poverty striken, western culture hating Arabs will.

4

I don’t think it will be the end of civilization. I think we will eventually come up with alternatives. For example, is there any reason we couldn’t transition to fuel made from renewable plant resources? What’s a crime, though, in my opinion, is that it seems like we’re just going to sit on our hands until the oil runs out. We should have ditched oil a long time ago. It’s not going to happen overnight; we can’t just wait until we run out and then start trying to do something about it. Imagine if all the money used for military action in the Middle East were instead used to develop alternative energy sources.

5

Glad you started this thread. I’ve wondered about this myself too.

My bet is that market economy will have the effect that there will be a relative gradual move away from oil, when prices will rise and people will slowly be forced to seek for alternatives, or use less. Furthermore, rising prices will fuel (no pun intended) the search for alternatives. We’ve seen this with North Sea oil and gas, which AFAIK only became economically feasible for exploration after Middle Eastern oil became much more expensive.

I don’t think plant derived oil could provide a complete alternative. Could it provide sufficient fuel for commercial airplanes? Maybe I’m wrong; I’d love to see some hard figures for the possibilities here.

My guess is that commercial airflight and widespread private car ownership would significantly decrease when oil runs out or becomes prohibitively expensive. Alternatives would probably work in the way of providing electricity, which is a good alternative for heating and light, but not for flying, and less so for long-distance driving. AFAIK coal and nuclear power, even though having serious drawbacks, would help us forward for quite a while.

6

From the website of James Howard Kunstler (author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, and The City in Mind), at http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary7.html:

7

My question then becomes, given this, what would happen to small isolated places that thus require large amounts of imports and for whom tourism is a significant part of the economy, like Hawaii and many Carribean islands? Certainly, business imports/exports could be given higher priority than commercial flights, but what happens when those too become unprofitable? Will there be a mass exodus, leaving behind only those hardy enough to try an agricultural lifestyle? Would these places regress to pre-Western civilization levels (the stereotypical island culture that existed when explorers first found these places)?

I’m particularly fascinated in the case of Hawaii, seeing as how it’s a state, and I can’t imagine the federal government wanting to leave it twisting in the wind, although I can easily imagine them putting the state on a permanent back burner when it stops making tax dollars. There are quite a few native Hawaiians who want the state to secede. Would it take something like this for it to actually happen? Whaddya think?

8

To answer the - probably rhetorical - question: There is no reason. Right now it’s not being done, because it is cheaper to simply buy oil and burn that.

9

Well, there are a couple reasons. First, it takes lots of energy to grow, fertilize, transport and then convert the crops to other energy. In fact, it takes more energy to do these things than you will get out of the crop (at least that is true with corn-to-ethanol currently). The second problem is that the energy in the plant comes from the sun which puts an upper limit on the amount of energy you can get from plants. Right now, the US uses far more energy in the form of oil than falls on the whole US from the sun (and plants are far from 100% converters of sunlight to chemical energy).

Really, we already know what society that lives from renewable plant resources looks like. That is how Europeans lived before the Industrial Revolution, or how many rural people in the Third World currently live. The population has to be lower, we have to expect lower and uneven living standards, and we have to be careful not to cut down plants beyond their replacement level.

10

Not civilization, technobarbarism

The speed bump will turn the car over.

We have built suburbs that are nearly unlivable without cars, at what point would rising fuel prices cause people to not want to live in the suburbs. What would that do to real estate prices. The trouble with an interdependent economy is side effects cannot be predicted.

11

I love this site.
http://www.hubbertpeak.com

Some quotes from it:

“1,750 Gb, the estimate of all the conventional oil that there ever was or ever will be, is less than the amount of sunlight that hits the earth in one 24 hour day.”

“The USA population consumes its entire weight in oil every week!”

As you were…

12

A few things to point out.

Alien’s figures from the WRI.

Despite the heading ‘Available crude oil worldwide’ the WRI report doesn’t actually discuss any such thing. The scenario predicting a 2007 or 2019 peak is based entirely on ‘EUR oil reserves’. This is very important t note. In technical papers such as this one the term reserve has a very specific meaning. This definition, as applied by the World Petroleum Council and the Society of Petrochemical Engineers is “those quantities of petroleum which are anticipated to be commercially recovered from known accumulations from a given date forward”.

So although the WRI scenario starts with “Estimated Ultimately Recoverable (EUR) global oil. ……the total amount of oil that will eventually be pumped from the earth” it doesn’t in fact use those figures in its scenario. It only uses those quantities of the Estimated Ultimately Recoverable (EUR) global oil that are anticipated to be commercially recovered from known accumulations from 1999 onwards.

“Reserves grow as technology changes and new resources are discovered through ongoing exploration. It is therefore a fallacy to predict oil shortages by dividing reserves by current consumption rates” (http://geology.ou.edu/library/aapg_oil.pdf). And yet this is exactly what the WRI has done.

Needless to say the WRI scenario is a gross underestimate, since it ignores all the oil outside known accumulation, and all the oil that it isn’t economical to extract in 1999. This is no small contribution to error. “Over the last 50 years estimates of the size of the world’s conventional crude oil resources have increased faster than cumulative production. The estimated size of the ultimate resource base will continue to increase in the future as unconventional fossil fuels come on line” (http://geology.ou.edu/library/aapg_oil.pdf)

The next massive problem with the WRI figures is that it totally ignores any oil outside of actual liquid oil. By its own admission the scenario totally ignores the “enormous amounts of coal, tar sands, heavy oil, and oil shales worldwide that could be used to produce liquid or gaseous substitutes for crude oil” (http://www.wri.org/wri/climate/jm_oil_007.html ).
This is by far the biggest problem since these alternative sources are far larger than all the liquid oil resources ever discovered. “Worldwide, Meyer and
Schenk (1985) estimated world heavy crude oil and bitumen resources to be 6,200 billion barrels with 890 billion barrels being “recoverable”. These numbers are equivalent to 1033 and 148 years of 1998 US crude oil consumption, respectively……
Smith (1981) estimated that the Green River Formation in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming contains 1,500 billion barrels of oil, equivalent to 250 years of 1998 US consumption. Duncan and Swanson (1965) estimated that if all oil shale in the US is considered, the size of the potential resource is 160,000 billion barrels, or 26,667 years of US consumption… “(http://geology.ou.edu/library/aapg_oil.pdf).

Most of today’s experts don’t believe any such thing. The World Energy Council states the opinion is fairly evenly divided amongst pessimists and optimists. As the WEC points out there are huge untapped oil fields still to be find. “it is now both feasible and profitable to exploit fields at water depths exceeding 1 000 metres, which was still thought to be impossible 15 years ago…. Today, the potential represented by deep offshore resources has not yet been clearly determined.” In the 1990s alone “29 giant fields were discovered, including 7 at water depths greater than 1 000 metres. In Africa, 15 accumulations representing over 500 million boe were found, including 6 at water depths in excess of 1 000 m. In Latin America, there were 4 discoveries of this type.”

There is no majority of experts stating that all huge fields have been found.

That aside, it is well worth noting again that no attempt has been made by the WRI to address the issue of the world’s largest oil sources: tar sands, oil shales and the like. “As production of unconventional oil resources in the form of tar sands has already begun, it becomes increasingly difficult to define the size of the world’s oil and gas resource base. Unconventional oil resources such as tar sands and oil shales are sufficient in size to supply the world’s petroleum needs for about 100 to 1000 years.

The 2019 figure produced by the WI is doubtless accurate enough within its own constraints, but it is almost useless in predicting when oil production will peak.

13

Yes. Note the term reserve, not resource. Very important distinction when talking about minerals. There are huge resources of oil shale in the middle east, Australia and even Antarctica that are larger in combined volume the US resources.

They have failed because lobbying by environmental groups has pressured buyers into rejecting oil shale, as well as causing the withdrawal of investment capital. http://archive.greenpeace.org/campaign_achievements.shtml

This doesn’t tell us anything about whether it is economically viable.

But we know this isn’t the case. I don’t know why you insist on using may. It has long been established that there is a net energy yield to current oil shale processing technology.

The Stuart project proves otherwise.

Again due to direct pressure designed to minimise sales and remove investment capital. So again this tells us nothing about the actual economics involved.

No it doesn’t “Oil from Canadian tar sands has an EPR of 1.5, Youngquist (1999).” (http://www.stcwa.org.au/papers/data/Energy_Quality.pdf.). That’s not real flash, but it certainly isn’t “two barrels of oil to produce one barrel” and it’s not too bad for a developing industry.

14

<Hijack>
WMDS
WMDs
WMDs
WMDs
WMDs
must invade Iraq…

Anyone who bought that crap and anyone still defending that crap should read this thread very carefully.

15

http://greenwood.cr.usgs.gov/energy/WorldEnergy/DDS-60/ESpt5.html#Figure1

Gives an interesting view on the amount of oil undiscovered, in proven reserves, the rate of growth of new reserves and cumulative production to date.

Far from suggesting that reserves just aren’t growing, reserves are growing considerably faster than production.

“The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) World Petroleum Assessment 2000 provides estimates of the quantities of conventional oil, gas, and natural gas liquids outside the United States that have the potential to be added to reserves in the next 30 years (1995 to 2025). Excluding the U.S., the mean (expected) volumes of undiscovered resources are 649 billion barrels of oil (BBO), 4,669 trillion cubic feet of gas (TCFG), and 207 billion barrels of natural gas liquids (BBNGL). The estimated mean additions to reserves from discovered fields (potential reserve growth) are 612 BBO, 3,305 TCFG.”
Again, it must be noted that these undiscovered resources are not inclusive of oil shales and tar sands.
http://greenwood.cr.usgs.gov/energy/WorldEnergy/DDS-60/ESpt6.html#Figure2

Shows how the amount of oil thought to be left undiscovered is growing rapidly with new exploration efforts and technology.

Not really in keeping with a claim that recoverable oil is not varying much.

16

Bolding and italics added.

17

There’s a bush bashing thread two doors to the left. Buh-bye.

Anyway… there won’t be any disaster. We know lots of ways to produce energy. They just cost more than oil. Once the world hits the peak of production, the price will slowly begin to rise. As it hits the threshold prices of various alternative sources, they will come on line and reduce the demand for oil, slowing the depletion. Prices will rise at a slower rate until they hit the next threshold.

This will have a long downwards pressure on economic growth, making real economic growth slow down to a new rate. At least until technologies mature and materials improve, at which point things like wind and solar power will drop in price. Eventually, oil will cease to be used for energy production (although there might be plenty of nuclear power), and oil for other industrial uses will be somewhat more expensive. Life goes on.

There won’t be any catastrophes.

18

What Sam Stone said. Good post.

I tend to be even more optimistic though. I would replace “We know lots of ways to produce energy. They just cost more than oil.” with "We know lots of ways to produce energy. They just cost more than oil at the moment.

Coal was developed as an alternative to using wood in industry, and although it was never cheap to start with it was a forced decision due to supply restrictions. Very soon the inductry became more efficient and coal was much cheaper than wood had been.

Synthetic oils were developed to replace whale oils, and although it was never cheap to start with it was a forced decision due to supply restrictions. Very soon the industry became more efficient and mineral oils were much cheaper than whale oil had been.

This example has been repeated throughout history. I can’t see any reason why the same won’t be true with oil replacement technologies. I believe my grandchildren will wonder what Grandad was thinking when he used smelly, inefficient, expensive oil in his car.

I doubt there will be any pining for the old days of oil and high economic growth any more than we pine for the old days of charcoal or the old days of steam engines.

19

Every day the Sun puts out a trillion times the energy requirements of today’s world population-
If we really want a high energy society we can no doubt find a way of tapping a tiny fraction of this.
And there is deuterium in the sea which could be used in fusion (when available- heh heh)

Incidentally, it might be worth looking into ultra-high speed tube tailways to partially replace air travel, by the way-
the tube can be evacuated ofair to cut down on resistance, and these vehicles can run on electricity unlike airplanes. I expect these trains could replace domestic flights eventually.

Don’t despair- the future of humanity need not be medievalism.

SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html

20

Any excuse to post this.
http://www.enviromission.com.au/index1.htm

By 2006, the worlds tallest man made structure will be built in outback NSW. A 1 km high chimney will act as a 200MW solar thermal power station will provide enough electricity to power around 200,000 homes. It will cost $563US million.

Ya gotta love that.

But remember Sam Stone, we are talking about fuel for automobiles. I dont think wind powered cars or nuculer planes or solar helicopters will fill much of the market.

We have heaps of natural gas around, perhaps in 60 years gas powered hybrid vehicles will be common.

And cheap international air travel?