I’ve been following the discourses on Peak Oil for years, reading everything I could get my hands on, from cited academics to tin-foil-hat-wearing woo-peddlers. Most people agree that if the oil effectively ‘runs out’ (defined by most as the point where extracting oil becomes more expensive than the value of the yield), then the proverbial shit will hit the fan. War, famine, pestilence — the Four Horsemen will be putting in overtime.
Is it possible to head these horsemen off at the pass? Can we avoid a post-peak Malthusian catastrophe?
Right now alternate fuel sources are not big because oil is (relatively) cheap.
As oil becomes more scarce its price will rise and other fuel sources become viable. As they ramp up production, get past sunk costs and so on their prices will lower.
IIRC there is an algae that can be grown using sea water (so no need to access scarce fresh water). It will produce a bio-oil which can be refined as a fuel for all sorts of stuff.
Setup a massive plant in Death Valley where there is lots of sun, build pipes to bring in sea water and you’re off.
It is not done now because building all that is terribly expensive and can’t compete with oil today. Someday however it can.
Might be a decade where things are dicey as the switch over happens. Depends on how aggressive governments are in helping fund such things. Have them in place prior to profitability at huge cost to ease transition or let the shit hit the fan awhile and sort itself out.
If that is what you believe then you haven’t been reading everything you can get your hands on. You have rather obviously been reading onlymaterial that promote speak oil fruit cakery.
Most people in the real world, and about 99.9% of actual economists and geologists, agree that eventually the liquid crude oil “runs out”, and at that point we switch over to coal oil, tar oil, oil shale and coal liquefaction and coal gasification. There won’t even be a blip in the world’s potential oil output. The only change will be where we are getting the oil from.
Now there are lots of reasons why those other sources of oil aren’t good, most prominently being environmental concerns and an increase of up to 100% in price. However there absolutely no reason why we can;t sustain current oil production rates for at least the next 400 years using alternative sources of oil. This is all proven technology.
No, there won’t be any wars. For the cost of waging a war for 6 hours a nation like Israel build coal liquefaction/gasification plants and enough oil to replace all its current oil use, both military and civilian, for 3 weeks. IOW for a nation to go to war over oil it would need to spend orders of magnitude more than the oil is worth. So definitely no wars.
No, there won’t be any disease. There is effectively a limitless supply of oil, which will increase the price of drugs by at most 50%.
No, there won’t be any famine. Fertiliser is only at worst 10% of the cost of food production and oil at worst 20% of the cost of fertiliser production. So even if the cost of oil doubles, the absolute worst case scenario, food prices can’t increase by more than 2% as a result. Transport at worst 10% of the cost of food production, so if oil prices double food prices might increase by 20% as a result of transport costs. That’s a grand total 22% increase in food prices. Given that the world produces 33% more food than we can possibly eat, and can produce 200% more than we need by adopting some very basic efficiency measures, an increase in price of 22% can;t really result in famine, now can it?
So put your mind at rest. Read some publications by non-fruitcakes like the World Energy Council and the USGS and stop worrying about psuedo-religious doomsayers.
A big problem is that people assume our lifestyle is based on an extremely efficient use of oil. It is not. Barely 2% goes to running agricultural machinery. We spend about 50% on passenger cars. And we can carpool, use busses or switch to alt energy cars.
Maybe 10-20% is used on manufacturing, and coal can replace that.
The fact that not everyone is going to be able to drive a 20mpg SUV to work by themselves everyday and will instead be forced to carpool, or that certain manufactured goods might cost 30% more is a far cry from the apocolypse.
IMO, the worst that will happen is a mild lifestyle switch, probably no worse than what happened during WW2 when civilians ran out of several raw materials.
We’ve been running out of oil since the time I began reading in the 50’s. Something always comes along. There are still places on earth where oil is found just a few feet below the surface or even seeps through. The easy oil is getting more scarce. Meanwhile, many alternate energy sources are getting more play and, once again, something will come along to help. For example, if they could double or quadruple the energy density of light batteries, we would be on our way to a new society. Of course we’d have to generate all that electricity with clean coal or something. New industries and jobs await. I have no sense of doom.
The problem with these sort of fears is that they’re based on ‘if things go on as they are…’ Few things go on as they are, especially when doing so leads over a cliff. There are many alternatives to oil being explored. A lot of them are entirely viable today, just more expensive than oil. As easy oil disappears and the cost of oil goes up, alternatives will take up more and more of the market. As alternatives get the economy of scale and further research, their costs will go down. In the end, as others said, it may mean fairly minor lifestyle changes but not the end of the world.
Unless we can find a way to feul cars differently it will present a challange for the USA. Currently only about six cities, NY, SF, Boston, Chicago, DC, and Philly really have good public transit. They’re small urban cities with high densities.
Currently the large Western cities lack this. They are built around cars. It will cost a fortune to try to put public transit into those cities on a scale like the above six cities. Indeed Chicago’s public transit history shows lines were put in specifically to avoid population centers or placed in alley because of lawsuits by homeowners and business. And that was in the late 1800s. You can imagine we aren’t getting LESS litigeous.
Of course if you can fuel cars as cheap as gasoline is now, then the need to build this public transit goes away.
Why do you imagine that the only solution is a substitute for gasoline that’s cheaper than gasoline? How about a substitute for gasoline that’s more expensive than gasoline? After all, right now we’re using gasoline that’s twice as expensive as it was a decade or so ago. So if transportation fuel costs two or three or four times as much as it does in 2010, that’s an economic drag, but it isn’t a disaster. And there are literally dozens of substitutes for gasoline that are within that price range. Some alternative fuels may drop in price given wide spread adoption, but that doesn’t mean we face a Malthusian catastrophe if we have to spend more, it just means we have to spend more, and transportation absorbs a lot of future economic growth that could have gone to something else.
That’s an odd thing to say, considering that there are already wars fought over oil.
It’s also disingenuous when folks say that there’s nothing to worry about because we’ll smoothly transition to something else, when those same folks resist those who are trying to make smooth transitions based on the fact that there’s nothing to worry about. For the transition to be smooth, you have to start it before the scarcity of oil starts causing problems.
The only way a “peak oil” catastrophe could destroy civilization would be if rising prices/ declining supply crippled our very ability to adapt and seek alternatives. This has been debated ad nauseum, but the mainstream consensus is that we’ll muddle through. For starters, the curve of declining petroleum usage will look more like a series of steps than a plummeting slope, as new extraction technologies and more marginal reserves temporarily halt the decline for any number of years at a time. We have a pretty good idea of how much, even at worst cases, alternative energy supplies in a zero-petroleum world would cost, and it doesn’t appear to be a deal breaker. We’ll manage. In short, the end of petroleum does NOT look like a Mad Max movie, with people battling over an ever-declining supply of “juice”.
I think the biggest problem is that population has a tendency to increase, and so the global economy will want to consume ever-increasing amounts of oil. With output capped and then dropping, the Malthusian catastrophe occurs if alternatives can not keep up with not just the drop in supply but also ever-increasing demand.
Or do you have a proposal for halting population growth?
Oil is a valuable and strategic resource, and has thus been a *factor * in many wars. Iron, gold and copper are also valuable and strategic resources, and have also been a factor in many wars.
However nobody suggests wars are going to be fought over iron or copper. It just doesn’t make any sense. No modern nation could possible make a profit out of oil or iron taken by force of arms.
So I’d like to know what these wars are that are being fought over oil, rather than for political/ideological reasons with oil, territory, population and numerous other resources thrown into the mix
Who are these folks? And why on earth do you associate with them?
Why?
Why do we need to start making the transition when it totally unprofitable to do so? Why not wait until the scarcity starts causing economic problems, thus giving the people to whom it is causing problems an incentive to make the change?
Your idea that we can only have a smooth transition when it is totally unnecessary makes no sense at all. More importantly, history tells us that attempting to force pointless and unnecessary transitions onto the populace is a guaranteed way to have a rocky and usually abortive transition.
Well, he may be thinking that if you wait for scarcity to start causing problems before you start building the trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure required to produce gasoline from shale oil deposits, then you’ll be sitting around with critical shortages for two decades waiting for the mines and refineries to come online. As Alberta’s oil sands are showing, you can’t ramp these alternatives up quickly. The distortions in the labour and housing markets in western Canada are significant at the rate they’re building stuff at Fort Mac, and the output while nothing to sneeze at is hardly going to make a dent in things when conventional production starts dropping. If you need ten times the output, you have some serious building to be doing, and it’s going to take a long time to do it. If you wait, there will most certainly be one of those blips you promised there wouldn’t be.
Yes. Give women access to education, birth control and abortion, reduce infant mortality so that women can be confident that small families will survive, and ensure that their children will have security and opportunity of their own. That requires energy sources.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the following invasion by the world to kick them out.
There were other factors too. Iraq wanted to ‘cancel’ their debt to Kuwait by overthrowing their government. And they wanted Kuwaiti ports under their control due to how lucrative they were. Plus with so much oil under their control, they could control global markets to make Iraq rich. Iraq planned to invade Saudi Arabia not long after Kuwait.
But by and large it was a war over oil due to the strategic importance oil plays in global events. But it wasn’t a war based on oil being in short supply.
It seems to me that we are already in the transition period away from easy oil, and have been for a long time. We now routinely (unless something explodes) use oil that requires drilling two mile shafts that begin a mile under the sea, and oil that has to be piped across vast stretches of land or carried across oceans. All of this is factored into the cost, and we pay it. Each additional difficulty will be paid for as it is encountered.
As has been mentioned above, as these costs add up, existing energy alternatives will become more attractive. Some of them will most likely be made cheaper by technological advances, but the cost of oil will definitely rise, and that will drive the move toward alternatives while it makes the alternatives more relatively affordable.
One of the problems with doomsday peak oil scenarios is that they envision a sudden spike in the global cost of oil as we hit some imaginary wall. I think that the wall is actually a zone, and we entered it decades ago.
