How bad do you think peak oil will be

Great Debates
1

While looking up info on peak oil I found this website.

http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/

Which has this chart.

In the year 2000 about 70% of oil in the US was used for cars, heavy trucks, raw materials for plastics/chemicals and for passenger airlines. So if we are using 20 million barrels a day as of 2010, about 14/15 million goes to those.

The argument from some worried about peak oil is that civilization will more or less fall apart as peak oil hits. However, in those 4 areas it seems there is a lot of ‘waste’, or at the very least inefficiency.

As for personal transportation, what is to stop more public transit, car pooling, alternative fuels (hydrogen, compressed air, ethanol/biodiesel, PHEVs) to use less oil? If you have 4 people living in the suburbs and they all take a 50 mile round trip to work in cars that each get 25mpg, then you have them carpool in one car that gets 60mpg (tack on an extra 10 miles a day to pick up and drop everyone off) you’ve reduce the oil transportation to get to/from work from 8 gallons/day to 1 gallon a day w/o really affecting lifestyle.

Don’t 80% of people in the US live in or near large metro areas with public transit, or where things like scooters and car pools can be used by some? Advances in public transit, alternative fuels, scooters and car pools seem like they could compensate. They wouldn’t be as convenient, but its not like the system would fall apart.

Barges can transmit a ton of cargo for something like 1/9 the oil of a truck. Rail uses 1/4.

http://www.tulsaweb.com/PORT/facts.htm

The mississippi, missouri, ohio & colorado river as well as the ocean can be used to ship barges. So what is to stop us from using barges and rail as much as possible instead of trucks?

Can’t coal be used as a raw material for plastics and chemicals rather than oil? We aren’t running out of coal anytime soon.

As far as air travel, how much of that is business or recreation? Couldn’t video conferencing replace that? Or possibly rail? High speed rail will take until the 2020s to really be developed and even then it won’t be nationwide, it’ll just be hubs (San Francisco to LA or Chicago to St. Louis, that kind of thing). I don’t think there will be a high speed rail system from LA to NYC anytime soon.

Anyway, it seems like in those 4 areas that account for 70% of our oil usage (personal cars, shipping trucks, raw materials and passenger air) that there is a lot of room for higher efficiency (car pools, public transit, scooters), bypassing those uses (using barges and rail instead of semis, using coal instead of oil for manufacturing) and alternative fuels (hydrogen, compressed air, natural gas, plug in hybrids, ethanol, etc).

I get the impression domestic life under peak oil might be more like WW2 (which had a variety of natural resources) than Mad Max. It’ll be inconvenient and unpleasant, but not really terrible.

2

It’ll be as devastating as peak fire wood, or peak horse transportation, or peak peat. The idea that there is a “cliif” we will fall off of is moronic. Without political manipulation or cartels, oil will gradually become more expensive to the point that it will be replaced by alternative fuels and/or more conservation.

3

I agree with DanBlather. It isn’t like there are a certain number of gallons left in a big gas tank in the earth; it doesn’t work like that.

Rather, there are lots and lots of deposits of various grades and ease of recovery. When the easy ones are gone, we’ll go after the somewhat harder ones. Then the much harder ones. Then the REALLY hard ones. The prices will of course go up correspondingly. The higher the price goes, the more attractive the alternatives will become. The alternatives will eventually be adopted as they become economically attractive.

All the political BS about “renewable energy research” is just grandstanding. All these technologies already exist. They just aren’t winning the economic contest right now. They will get cheaper as more research is pursued; and as oil gets more expensive, eventually the lines will cross…TRM

4

While I do believe in peak oil (i.e. that there will come a time, *relatively *soon, when petroleum will no longer be economical to extract in quantity), I don’t believe it will have a major impact on quality of life for most of the world. Car/airline culture will probably suffer the most, but then, that’s a, what, 80 year-old thing? Hardli indispensable.

5

Wesley, there have been a ton of Peak Oil™ thread on this board in the past…you could go and look them up to answer every question you asked here. Pretty much summed up by what DanBlather said though. The oil isn’t going to simply run out at some future time…it’s going to simply get increasingly scarce. As that happens, the price will rise…as it’s been rising for the past few decades. At some point, the price will rise high enough that viable alternatives will come into play…alternatives that are already out there, but simply aren’t economically viable at the current price of oil (or that ARE currently economically viable, but haven’t been scaled up yet due to the current price of oil).

In a hundred years, people will look back on the Great Peak Oil Crisis(arr) in the same way we look at the Great Peak Whale Oil Crisis and with their collective hands reaching out to an unfeeling sky, shout with one voice a great cry of ‘MEH!’…then go back to driving their cars and planning vacations to Disneyland…

-XT

6

We’re obviously not going to run out of oil. There is a finite amount of oil in the world but at some point the oil that’s left will become too expensive to extract.

And that’s the real issue. It’s not a question of running out of oil, it’s a question of running out of cheap oil.

Oil right now is still a cheap and easy-to-use source of energy. Some people say that when it stops being cheap, we’ll develop an alternative source of energy that’s equally cheap and easy-to-use.

People talk about whale oil or horses. Those were big industries back around 1900. And then what happened? We discovered oil was an easy cheap source of energy. And we had the twentieth century. Now subtract the cheap easy oil - maybe we go back to 1900 technology.

Obviously not the exact same technology, we’ve developed things that are not dependant on oil. But there are still a lot of major sectors of our economy that use oil.

So I don’t see the end of the world, or humanity, or civilization on the horizon. But I think it is possible that the world will, as a whole, become a lot poorer.

7

Peak oil doesn’t exist. You can tell, because the UN IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) didn’t factor Peak Oil into any of their global warming predictions. And since it’s impossible for the IPCC to be wrong, there can be no peak oil. QED.

8

Who are these people? Nobody is predicting that we’ll develop other sources of energy that are as cheap as gasoline. If there were other sources of energy that were as cheap as gasoline, we’d be using them already.

What people are predicting is that we’ll develop other sources of energy that will be cheaper than, say $10/gallon gasoline. This is why there won’t be a cliff. Transportation costs will increase but they’ll only increase so far. Fuel costs are only a portion of total transportation costs, albeit a large portion. So if your fuel cost doubles, your transportation cost doesn’t double.

Right now, today, you can buy an electric car that uses zero oil. That electric car is more expensive to purchase and run than a gasoline or diesel car, but it’s only about twice as expensive. And every person that buys an electric car so they don’t have to buy expensive gasoline means one less person using gasoline, which means reduced upward pressure on gasoline prices. And that’s what prevents the “fall over the cliff” effect that alarmists predict.

9

I see a future where there are new industries created to exploit different energy sources. Maybe we choose electric power as the common means for powering cars and heating houses and improve the electrical grid. We bury transmission lines so that we are less vulnerable to storm damage. At the same time we take the opportunity to lay more fiber for data traffic, and increase coverage of wireless communication so that it is completely ubiquitous. All devices become connected to the internet so that they can decide when to use power based on the cost of the electricity at the moment. Business trips become less common as the technology for teleconferencing gets better and people telecommute more. This saves companies money and frees up time once used for travel to do more productive activities. Books, catalogs, and other paper-based materials are replaced with electronic media and save energy once used to produce, ship, and discard them. The environment becomes cleaner and people are healthier because we have cleaner sources of energy and we can more easily reduce pollution of centrally located hydrocarbon burners.

Like usual, I think we will progress when we switch technology.

10

Which is a point I’ve tried to make in the past. If there’s a substitute for oil that costs the same as oil, why haven’t we started using it in the last thirty years?

People rarely come out and say “oil will stay cheap” or “We’ll develop a substitute for oil that is as cheap as oil”. Because those statements are hard to defend. But plenty of people will say that we’ll figure something out and there won’t be any significant problems or economic downturn. They’re just vague on the details.

But the one necessarily follows from the other. If oil becomes expensive and we don’t find a cheap substitute, then energy costs more. And if energy costs more than the things we use energy to make will cost more.

11

Sure, 80% live near some form of public transportation, but that doesn’t mean that it’s remotely convenient, pleasant or even reasonable.

I’m a good example- I work 8.9 miles from my house. On a good morning, it takes me 15 minutes to get to work and about 25 to get home. (7 am - 5 pm).

There’s a bus route that picks up about 200 yards from my door, and drops off literally across the street from my office. It takes 1 HOUR 15 MINUTES to traverse that 8.9 miles. I may be a selfish, eco-unfriendly prick, but I’m not about to waste an extra 30-45 minutes riding the bus with a bunch of stinky, loud and annoying people at roughly the same price as buying my own gas and driving myself in 1/5th the time.
Also… I’m pretty sure that lots of stuff get transported by rail and barge. I’m not sure if it’s the optimal amount, but I’m sure that there’s not huge amounts of unused rail or barge capacity out there.

Also, like others have said, it’s not like the gauge is going to hit “E” and we’ll be without any sort of oil-ish energy; what will happen is that as prices get higher, other things will become economic - coal-to-gas, coal-to-liquid, tar sands, oil shale, etc… We won’t so much run out, as the prices will change, which will have wide ranging economic effects, but civilization certainly won’t collapse.

I’d suspect we’ll have bigger issues from lack of potable water, or irrigation water, before we’ll have major oil-related issues.

12

Natural gas is a good alternative and a contender for a cheap gasoline replacement, and according to a single TV show on IIRC the discovery channel about this very issue, reserves of nat. gas will last far longer then reserves of oil, to the point that they predicted that supertankers will carry compressed or cryogenic gas across the oceans instead of oil. It is already cheaper in $/gal equivalent today.

13

I realize oil won’t ‘run out’, however our way of life and economy is built on cheap oil and cheap oil will run out. And when it is $200+ a barrel it is going to require lifestyle changes. People will not be able to life exactly as they live now when gasoline is $11 a gallon. You won’t be able to have everyone driving to/from work in a car that gets 25mpg anymore. Shipping or making plastics and chemicals will change.

Our transportation (both privately and for freight) as well as our ability to make raw materials depends on cheap fuel. When fuel costs triple, it is going to change how we do business. And I don’t know how long it’ll take to implement alternatives. The average lifespan of a car is about 17 years, so the market is flooded with over a trillion dollars worth of SUVs and cars that get less than 30mpg on a gallon of gasoline.

Plug in hybrids are ok, but I don’t know if there are enough rare earth metals to make them.

So I really don’t know if we have the technology to shift a billion cars to a different fuel source w/o it taking decades. Plus we have to rebuild our infrastructure if we have a different fuel source.

Either way, I think it’ll be more like WW2. Tons of efforts to work as a community, and to implement alternatives on a large scale. But not ‘that’ terrible. I think a good deal of the peak oil field has been taken over by anarcho-primitivists who on some level want society to collapse because they don’t like it.

14

No biggie, just convert coal to oil. I’m sure by the time that’s used up we’ll have algae oil or…something.

15

Several reasons. One is that it wouldn’t be as cheap, certainly not initially. The second relates to the first. We have about a century currently invested in the infrastructure to exploit oil, and basically nothing to exploit whatever we’ll eventually be going to. As the price of oil rises there will be increased pressure (and competition) to find alternatives to augment or replace the current technology. At some point oil will cross over a price threshold that will make several alternatives much more attractive. We’re already seeing this process in fact, as various companies are doing research on several different alternative strategies and technologies. Will it be hydrogen or methane fuel cells? All electric vehicles? Some kind of bio-fuel? A hybrid solution? No one knows…yet. But any of those COULD be a viable alternative, and most of them are pretty much ready to roll today…let alone 10 years from now. Or 20. Or 50. And, of course, as the price of oil rises then reserves currently not being exploited (or fully exploited) will be much more attractive. Tar sands. Shale oil. Deeper exploration. Or coal synthetics or other hydrocarbon synthetics.

Because no one (except the Peak Oil folks) has a crystal ball, or knows where the price threshold is…or just what technologies will end up winning out in the market place. That there will BE such a technology is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point, however, as there are multiple contending technologies that continue to be refined and advanced every year. Companies are pouring big dollars into research and development in a quest to figure out what the next big thing will be.

Sure…but how much more? No one knows. But we know for a fact that we can survive and even thrive on higher energy costs…our Euro buddies after all pay a hell of a lot more for energy than we do, and THEY haven’t descended into some Mad Max hell.

And based on the amount of screeching going on when our own gas prices topped $4/gallon, I’d say that somewhere between $4-$5/gallon (as a base price, not as a peaking price) is a good ball park for when several alternatives out there will really start to be in demand, not from a niche perspective, but from a general consumers one.

-XT

16

So we can make a cheap oil substitute out of natural gas or coal or algae.

Why aren’t we doing it now? Because we love Hugo Chavez and the House of Said so much?

All the people who claim there’s another source of cheap energy out there waiting to be discovered, need to explain why we haven’t discovered it in three decades of searching.

17

Even with no further technological development on any of the alternatives, it’s my understanding that gasoline made from coal would only cost about $5 per gallon, and we’ve got plenty of coal for the foreseeable future, so that effectively puts an upper limit on how expensive gasoline can get. It got pretty close to that in the last few years, and while it wasn’t a picnic, it wasn’t the end of the world, either.

The other factor is that, if gasoline does get up to $5 per gallon and stays there indefinitely, then we’re going to see technological and economic changes in response to that. More effort will be put into developing hybrid or electric cars, people will prefer to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, more people will choose to take public transportation, or to walk or bike, etc. Certainly transportation costs would go up in the short term, but it’s not out of the question for them to come back down eventually, possibly even to as low or lower than they are today.

18

Don’t confuse the price of oil with the price of gasoline. Oil sells on the world market and everyone pays pretty much the same price for it.

19

And even turkey guts. The thing though is that it costs capital to build large scale plants to do it, and if the process ends producing a product that breaks even at $5-6/gallon, then it’s not really worth doing right now, ehe? Especially since gas prices at the pump, at least in my neck of the woods, are running something like $2.55/gallon right now.

No, they don’t. What they need to do is figure out a way to make the folks who think Peak Oil is a-comin round the mountain understand basic economics and market economies. The alternatives are ALREADY HERE. But even if you could build one today that made a product priced at $2.50 a gallon you STILL would have trouble selling the process, since there would be a huge initial capital outlay of money to get it up and running.

-XT

20

One big reason is no infrastructure is developed for nat. gas cars, or at least it is very limited. Also there is the issue of how much you can currently store and how, though some cars and buses do run on nat. gas. Also I was talking about using nat gas as a direct fuel, not converting it to a liquid gasoline direct replacement, which the other 2 (coal, algae) would be.