One word: biodiesel.
There will surely come a time when oil will no longer be viable as the world’s primary energy source. It’s not going to happen particularly soon, AFAICT. Not by 2010, very very unlikely by 2020, IMHO.
And when it does, other power sources will come online. Either new technologies will be perfected or invented, or existing technologies (such as solar) will become competitive once the price is right.
Significant increases in the price of energy will bring on a recession, of course, just like they always have before. And the world will keep on turning, just like before.
There are obstacles to nuclear power that aren’t price-related, though. One is that it makes many people nervous. A more significant one is that we still haven’t figured out where to dump the radioactive waste that our existing nuke plants generate, at least here in the USA. It’s gotta go somewhere, but mostly it piles up in the backyards of the nuclear power plants. (I’m not sure how Canada, Europe, etc. are dealing with this.) But that’s just a problem with one particular replacement source of energy, and means nothing to this debate as a whole.
Here are some other links for information :
This is a good all around site with some links as well :
This site is Matthew Simmons company (lots of slideshows in acrobat) - he runs a multi-million dollar firm and was one of the advisors to the current administration on energy issues - he has some very disturbing charts and conclusions regarding world oil supply and North American natural gas.
http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/
This one plugs a book by a Princeton prof :
http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/index.html
This is a free yahoo group with lots of current news links and participants ranging from energy professionals to educated laypersons to the occasional “tin hat” person who gets lambasted by the rest.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/messages
Peak oil is not a myth, and the argument has moved on from wether oil will peak to deciding when. Some still have the peak oil production 20 years in the future, many more are looking at 2007 or 2010, some (including Simmons) indicate that we might be near or at the peak now.
Peak production does not mean the oil is gone, (more like half gone - the easy to get to half), it means that the year to year production (available now to use in our cars, factories, airplanes ,etc) will no longer be growing every year. For decades the amount of oil produced has increased and increased while the population, world economy, and food production also increased. When the supply year to year starts to level out and then go down, bad things will happen.
Our whole economic structure (global marketplace) is built on cheap transportation, on mining raw materials in one place, shipping them for processing to another place, shipping the piece parts to another for assembly, then shipping the finished goods to another place for sale. Food production is very energy dependent and will be a problem when that supply of readily available oil is getting smaller.
Oil (and other commodities) peak in production due to the way it is produced over time. The earliest production is made from the easiest to get to (cheapest to develop) supplies, then as you run out of the easier supply, you move on to more expensive, more energy intensive supplies (like arctic and offshore deep sea). Sooner or later you reach a point where the amount you can produce at one time goes down due to the nature of the supplies remaining. Someday there will be oil left in the ground that we cannot produce for energy profit - ie it will take more oil to extract than you get from it.
The people bringing this issue up are geologists, most of whom worked for (or still work for) the oil companies in exploration.
The idea that someone will perfect easy fusion just in time is great - but fusion has been 20 years away for a while now.
The idea that hydrogen can replace oil as an energy source is bad (hydrogen takes energy to produce - more than you get out - so it is a carrier). Hydrogen could indeed be used for transportation, but only with other energy sources used to produce (like nuclear).
The problem with other sources (like nuclear) is that we are not in a postion to quickly transition to those sources (we should be building hundreds of new safer, smaller, cheaper nuke plants NOW if not some years ago) and that transition period (when the starving masses want their food NOW and not 5 years from now) is when things might get a bit dicy.
The debate over how bad things will get at peak oil is indeed all over the place from those who see a total die-off to those who see a return to a family farmer with his mule and cattle and chickens to those who see solar being the answer etc. The real problem is how much is being done now to conserve what oil is left and to transition the new technologies.
It is a huge problem, one that Simmons says is our biggest challenge as a society - he advocates a “manhattan” style top priority project to wean us from oil before we hit the wall.
Look into it and also keep looking at current news and you will see more and more indications (like gas and oil prices, like Shell oil re-evaluating their stated reserves) that will start to nag at you.
Best wishes
adamant
sigh Catastrophists are so annoying.
Read the writings of the moron Paul Erlich from the 1970s. According to him, we’d be totally out of oil and food in the 1990s.
Remember all those idiotic Chicken Littles yowling about the Y2K disasters that were sure to happen?
This is the same thing.
Haj
Mostly true, bot not completely. Hubbert correctly proved the peaking of oil in the US in 1970. Here’s an online PDF by David Goodstein (the Caltech Vice-Provost who’s coming out with the book I linked above).
Nice reasoning Haj - since other people have made predictions of disaster that didn’t come true - that means that anyone who makes a reasoned, factual prediction must also be crazy?
Now I can stop worrying!
Thanks!
adamant
Whale oil was used in the 19th century for lamps. We started running low on it. God, I’m glad this fruitcake wasn’t around then! Instead of finding alternatives to whale oil, according to this guy we’d be running around killing each other in the dark.
I’m well aware of Hubbert…thats why I said that there ARE reasonable arguements that could be made (though even there expert opinion is divided). However, the cite from the OP wasn’t making many of them, and he was exaggerating even those…or going off on tangents all over the place. No?
-XT
I’ll respond to the title of the OP, and not the link provided.
More sober accounts of the situation can be found with the Association of Peak Oil.
As to the dichotomy in the thread title, it’s closer to a grim reality than an alarmist fantasy. America passed its peak oil production over 30 years ago, and there is every indication that world peak oil production is upon us or has passed within the last ten years. There are only so many decaying, prehistoric ocean beds, after all. From here on in, It will be smarter and more economically sound to make do with what we have than to expect much more to be developed.
The impact of having passed the world Peak Oil point is not that oil will be completely gone, or even uneconomical to develop and produce. I believe that long before either of these turning points come to pass, we will reach a point that not enough wealth will circulate widely enough in the economy to keep oil as something that most people, especially in this country, can afford to use.
It is on this topic that irresponsible alarmists feel free to give free reign to their wildest fantasies. That is unfortunate, because their rantings mask what will be some serious consequences of the new system.
American life revolves around affordable, individual transportation. A move to less oil consumption will require willing lifestyle changes on the part of individuals (carpool and and use public trans a hell of a lot more, buy and deal with owning a more fuel-efficient vehicle, forget about buying goods that are shipped in from far away), or unpopular decisions on the part of elected leaders (impose and enforce tough fuel-use limits, spend good tax money on the development of alternatives which might not pan out in the end), neither of which sounds particularly promising to me in terms of making large enough changes soon enough to avoid crisis.
If changes are not made in time, only the wealthy will be able to afford to continue to rely on oil, which really is the key in today’s economy to generating more wealth. Those who can’t afford oil will have to rely on the benevolence of the rich to explore alternatives to the oil, because their ability to pay for it themselves will have been severely hampered. Will those who can still afford oil be humanitarian enough to pay for those who didn’t make the cut? If so, what will happen as oil continues to deplete, and the originally wealthy are so no longer? If not, what the hell will everyone else do? At the very least, lack of foresight before the shortages really hit hard will lead to severe social pressures, at all levels, from the municipal to the international.
The key to the whole future, then, is in America’s (we use the most oil) ability and willingness to educate itself about the realities both for the short term and the long term, face hard facts and make uncomfortable decisions in the name of an admittedly unforseeable future. Given our track record, can you blame a person for being a little on the panicky side?
Your post sums it up much better than my rambling long windedness above.
One of the biggest problems is not the “problem” of peak oil, it is more how our society will respond (is not responding) to the coming peak.
Even on this thread among folks who pride themselves on truth, you see denial of facts (without looking into them probably), redicule of those who try to bring said facts to light, and a general “well, someone will fix it in time” instead of “what can I do to help”.
Economists (who have the ear of politicians and newsmakers more than those pesky unstable scientists) say that “the market will fix all” without realizing that the main problem is a physical resource being finite, and with the alternatives being less useful thermodynamically.
That and the whole inertia of things rushing on - it is really like heading towards a cliff that only a few are noticing and as we try to alert the driver, everyone else is hitting the gas and speeding the car up instead of braking or looking for a nice turnoff to avoid disaster.
There is plenty of energy available, there are solutions, but we are not pursuing them in the big way that we need to in order to soften the difficult transition.
Companies throughout the world are still making decisions based on “cheap oil” hoping that things will get better (like they always have in the past) when that will not be the case (at least not when the supply crunch is really here).
Thanks for the discussion
adamant
From James Howard Kunstler’s “Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle” at http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary7.html:
As scotandrsn noted above, ASOP has a website at http://peakoil.net/).
According to his website (www.kunstler.com), Kunstler is coming out with a new nonfiction book this year, The Long Emergency, to be published by Grove-Atlantic. “It will describe the changes that American society faces in the 21st century.” (No further publication data available.) Based on the title and the themes of his earlier nonfiction works, I assume this will be Kunstler’s take on what the passing of peak oil production means to the near future of auto-dependent America.
My problem with all this is twofold. First off, I’ve read a bit about this from various sources…and the ‘experts’ numbers don’t agree. In fact, they are wildly different. I’ve seen folks saying that we hit world peak production in the 80’s (or 70’s…can’t remember now), that we hit it a few years ago, that we are hitting it today, that its still 20 years out…and that its hundreds of years out because oil we can’t currently access economically will be fully accessable as new techniques and technologies come on stream. So, we have a wide range of possibilities here. In addition, I’ve seen the entire gamit of what it MEANS…all the way from the end of the world as we know it, death of the species, to a blip in the road, no worries. Thats a fairly wide range again.
Then we get into crystal ball gazing. Folks can TRY and gaze into the future and picture what technologies may come about, what techniques may be in use, what new discoveries we will find, etc…but people are horrible at this. Look in the past to similar ‘walls’ we were going to hit…and see how some smart and ambitious person or company or even country figured a way around it. Folks aren’t stupid, and if this thing is real and its a crisis…its also a HUGE oppertunity for someone or someones to make more money than any of us can even dream about (and I dream BIG).
I lied…there are three things that bug me. The third is the casual dismissal of ‘alternative’ energy sources we KNOW about and either have the capability of using or are on the verge of having. Stuff like hydrogen. Ya, it takes more energy to produce hydrogen NOW that you get out of it. But with nuclear power and new processing techniques that might not be true soon…yet this connection isn’t talked about by these people, who again poo poo the idea of nuclear energy for some fairly shallow reasons IMO.
In addition, fuel cell technology is being experimented on big time in other countries AND in the US (and fuel cells can run on other things than hydrogen…like methane). Battery technology as well is being heavily researched atm.
There are other alternatives, a lot of which have been put forth and just as blithely poo pooed (like shale oil and tar sands). Energy companies CURRENTLY spend millions or even billions on researching how to get at these things…because they want to MAKE billions and billions by developing the techniques and technologies to extract them economically. Think about it this way guys…100 years it was neither economically feasible nor technically possible to do things like drill for oil in the North Sea. Now, it is. Maybe 20 years from now it will be both technically possible AND economically feasible to tap into some of the reserves currently marked as too difficult to develop and extract.
In addition there are things that we know about but don’t currently have the technology or techniques to take full advantage of…like Methane hydrates, which are more abundant than fosil fuels by several orders of magnitude but that we can’t CURRENTLY tap into efficiently. If techniques and technology can be developed to safely and economically extract this vast resource we’ll kill several birds with one stone, as they ALSO produce fresh water. Perhaps the ‘cars’ of tomorrow will run on methane fuel cells…
I also find it hard to believe that if this is a serious problem that is so clear as some of these folks are trying to make it that other countries (since the US is so stupid, short sighted and greedy…oh, and evil) aren’t looking into more heavily. Are THEY all stupid too?
My own conclusion based on reading the various sides? That peak oil IS something to be concerned about, but that there are no indications that the human race is going to snuff it in 100 years due to complete collapse of civilization due to running out/fighting over oil. That nothing I’ve seen indicates that we AREN’T looking, and looking hard at alternatives (not because of peak oil, but because folks want to get rich), and that IF peak oil production happens and we start down the down slope, that someone will come up with an alternative. Necessity being the mother of invention and all.
-XT
p.s. One thing for sure if the gloom and doomers are right…we don’t need to worry about global warming! Since we are either A) All going to snuff it soon, or B) Have civilization collapse completely and go back to the caves and be hunter gatherers, we don’t need to fret about this minor problem. It will work itself out, no? 
There are definitely a lot of varying numbers out there, but often you find that they are describing different things. Most of the “100 years left” predictions are based on nonconventional oil (like tar sands, shale oil, very deep sea oil) and assume technology improvements, or assume new finds , etc. Also, most of them assume that the rate of use now will be the same for that 100 years, with the growth that we normally have, even doubling the amount of oil left will not lead to 100 years because of the growth in oil use over time (an assumption, but one based on years behind us of almost continual growth in use).
Also, looking at discoveries (ie - findings of oil) shows quite clearly that oil discoveries peaked years ago - looking at hard data today (not assumptions or forecasts) show that we are using 4 times what we find every year (and that ratio gets worse every year). Unless that changes (by whatever means) then we are getting to a point where we cannot grow supply anymore.
But looking into the next few years is not as hard as looking into next century. Also the money issue is not a guarantee if there is no physical way to provide that need.
I quite agree that nuclear energy should be on the table - in fact we should have been developing better (safer, cheaper, newer tech) nuclear for many years, the problem is we have not and are not trying to yet. By the way, unless you repeal the laws of thermodynamics, etc, you will never find a way to make hydrogen in a way that you get more power from the produced hydrogen than you put in. Barring magic that will not work, hydrogen will make sense perhaps as a transport fuel , but it will always be energy expensive.
In addition, fuel cell technology is being experimented on big time in other countries AND in the US (and fuel cells can run on other things than hydrogen…like methane). Battery technology as well is being heavily researched atm.
Actually I have noticed a lot of interest by China in getting oil pipelines arranged between them and Russia, and also some interest by China in projects with Saudi Arabia so other countries are doing something, they are all trying to jockey for access (or control) over the remaining easily accessible oil - most of which lies in a small area in the desert of the middle east. You don’t have to be evil to be greedy or shortsighted. I do not see the US as evil, I see all the world as shortsighted and driven mostly by short term business concerns instead of long term survival concerns. Things have worked pretty well for us so far being greedy and shortsighted, but mostly we rely on cheap energy (mostly as oil) to get things going.
Thanks for listening.
adamant
…nobody has mentioned the 1940’s German “LURGI” process for coal gasification, which was used by the Germans to make gasoline (after their supply from the Romanian oilfields was cut off). The USA has a 700-year supply of coal…all we have to do is build thousands of synthesis plants…and surely we can do it better now that the Germans did in the 1940’s…
Of course,this will mean a huge investment, but hell, we are spending 88 billion $ in Iraq-surely enegey independence is worth that much!
An example of people’s inability to predict the future without some sort of hints:
Here we have quite a few people naysaying hydrogen as a viable source of power because of the costs in production. Yet we actually are making some headway, and may find a way that is cheap and efficient. Perhaps by even using plants- http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/02/09/science.hydrogen.reut/
I’m sorry, but I find the counter-arguments less scientifically sound, less biased, and less nutcase, than the linked site. He sounds like a psycho, but he’s laid out his argument pretty well. Ignore the 10 pct of this site that goes over the top, and read the important links to things like CNN’s article on the subject, or wishful planning documentation from PNAC (a scary site in itself)… I think his arguments hold stronger water than the responses I’ve seen on this board. That doesn’t mean he’s right - but a better job of refutation must be done to convince me
Just musing…but it seems to me that the demand for oil is somewhat elastic.Suppose gasoline climbs steadily to a level of say $5.00/gallon. At such a level, the rich are not inconvenienced (and extra $60.00/week for gas means nothing). However, the vast majority will find such a price level to be extremely onorous…so conservation will kick in! At this price, a Toyota “Prius” will make sense (and a 12 MPG Hummer will be worthless!). So, the USA demand for gasoline would most certaily drop precipitously.
Toyota, Nissan,Hona (and GM)have vehicles (gas-electric hyrids), that can deliver 50 MPG plus…anf nobody wants them because they are small and slow.
Once we see $5.00/gallon gasoline, people willthink about driving a 3-ton gas hog SUV! :eek:
But [arguing the point of the quoted website at the top] - apparently food and fresh water production, among other staples, are also tied to oil production and oil prices. What happens when your grocery bill starts doubling every year? What happens when the city has to start charging considerably higher rates for fresh water? What happens the populace as a whole can’t afford these bills reasonably, especially in the face of an otherwise declining economy? Society begins to break apart, which feeds the problem like a feedback loop, creating increasingly worsening situations.
I read that article when it came out (the energyresources group pointed it out) but the article while sounding promising makes no predictions on timetables for being able to actually duplicate the feat, or mass producing hydrogen (using genetically engineered plants or whatever).
Either way, the process would still take more energy than you put in, ie use the sunlight energy directly would be more energy than splitting apart the water.
Basically this would be much much better solar power, which would be great for generating electricity directly (as well as using some energy to produce a transport fuel).
This sounds years away, and we need it today to make a difference for the transition.
What will happen as resources get scarce is that lines of research that pay off in years will be dropped for actually producing food now and energy now, and of course the military uses of energy will have top priority from everyone.
Nice article, I hope we can get something real out of this (and a multitude of other hopeful technologies), but it does nothing to make me feel better about the short term problems we are already seeing develop.
Thanks
adamant
Interesting thread. I’m by no means an expert on this subject, but as an employee of an oilfield services company (if drilling stops, our core business evaporates) I’ve had a long-time interest in this subject.
IMO, the OP’s link is somewhat over the top, assuming as it seems to that the growth in world population of the past century would not have happened at all without oil. Nor do I think the claims of the end of civilization or the human race are anything but hysterical scare-mongering. Frankly, it sounds like he saw The Road Warrior one too many times. Nevertheless, I am convinced that Hubbert curve is valid and that in the US we are well past the peak, and worldwide at or very close to the peak, of oil and gas production.
You do what European faced with (artificially) much higher energy prices, and dirt-poor Africans, for whom any hydrocabons are too expensive, have done for decades: conserve, use more energy-efficient devices or do without. Really, this just shows how out of touch with the rest of the world we pampered Americans are.
Conservation, however, will only get us a little further. One should always remember that all our current major energy resources are tapping supplies which took as many as hundreds of millions of years to accumulate. Once these are done, they are done. Implementing coal gasification to replace dwindling natural gas resources is all well and good, but the increased use of coal will mean that we don’t have 700 years’s worth of coal any more; maybe 300, or 100. Methane hydrates are indeed a huge untapped resource, but the enormous and growing demand today means that they may extend our usage levels by only another few decades. At some point, renewables will be pretty much all we have. I don’t know, a couple hundred years isn’t all that much, really; just because I won’t see it doesn’t mean it’s forever.
No matter what, there will be a series of energy crashes of increasing severity, probably not too long from now, and it is probably already too late to prevent major disruptions from happening. It is correct that there is no off-the-shelf replacement for hydrocarbon energy, and even if one was announced tomorrow, it would likely take at least 2-3 decades to make a significant dent in the current proportion occupied by hydrocarbons.
Bottom line, IMO: anyone thinking in terms longer than the next 5-10 years should consider the implementation of severe, even draconian, conservation efforts, at all levels, right freakin’ NOW. Every year we delay will just make the crash or crashes all that much harder when they come, and IMO they will come, probably in less than ten years. Of course, it will actually require at least one such crash to occur for anyone to take such a recommendation seriously.
I just hope I can remember my own advice when I decide it would be nice to fly back to the family home for Christmas next year.