Oil goes from $20 barrel to over $100 in ten years - not much sign of greater efficiency or new energy/oil sources compensating for that, hence economic stress.
Is that permanent ?
“Efficiency” and “New Sources” does not simply mean more efficient use of of petroleum, but also the economic feasibility of alternate sources as well.
You need to adjust for inflation and 2003 was a year with a particular depressed price. Adjusted for inflation the price of oil today is around what it was in the early 80s. The world didn’t end then, and I don’t know why you’d say efficiency hasn’t increased. I’d say it has increased immensely since the 80s and also even over the last decade. Engines have become more efficient and we have newer light-weight materials. Another factor is the Internet, which over the last 10 years has made it possible to handle many things that previously required travelling.
An there are new energy sources compensating. Wind-energy was almost non-existent in the early 80s, and solar panels very expensive. Both of these continue to decline in price and there’s nothing that seems to stop that the next many years.
You just repeated what I said back to me, as if I didn’t say there were new sources when I did.
Come on, an $80 plus increase in 10 years and you’re on about the price in the 80’s ?
Neither do I, because that’s not what I said, I said not much sign.
Anyone with a good grasp of English please feel free to enlighten me (but not you two thanks).
Well, yes.
The fact that the price of a barrel of oil has gone up $80 has to be factored against inflation or all you’re doing is deceiving yourself and your readers.
Using the first calculator I found searching ‘inflation since 1980’ I find that $100 oil in 1980 is the equivalent of $283.49 today. There’s no doubt that oil prices are running up, but to infer from that that oil production is peaking and then somehow tapering off is to ignore the fungible nature of the dollar, oil reserves and alternative methods of energy.
As stated upthread, the increasing price of oil inspires greater effort to find it and to develop cost-effective alternative energy sources. Both of which are a net benefit over time.
I see the increase in price as a good thing, and I do see signs of greater efficiency.
Demand is psychological, new sources and efficiencies are physical.
One of those is limited while the other is not.
That kind of an attitude will get you far in life. :rolleyes:
Since you are obviously trying to set people up for your inane, misunderstood, misguided and oh so very wrong “gotcha,” why don’t you just cut to the chase or bugger off?
Forever? No.
Not even for a long time, in the scheme of things.
On a long enough time scale, the graph looks like this: |
We didn’t use oil, then we used it all up quickly, dumping all the once-trapped carbon into the atmosphere, and then we don’t have anymore, and need new, more expensive energy sources.
And that’s the way it’s going to play out, no matter what happens in our lifetimes. The span of time between pre-oil society and post-oil society is going to be no more than a few hundred years, tops.
And frankly, the story is the same for all fossil fuels, though coal will last quite a bit longer than oil.
Peak oil, as the original Hubbert style peak of production is a real thing. What’s total fantasy is the extrapolation of economic effects by loons, nuts and other non-economist types.
Rather than worldwide “peak oil” happening, and then a rapid descent into anarchy, chaos and darkness, what will likely happen is that conventional petroleum will rise in price, and that will make petroleum alternatives (tar sands, oil shale, nat. gas) look more and more promising, especially the ones that are either not competitive with oil at the moment, or that are extractable, but not economic at the present time.
Over the long haul if the alternatives don’t meet demand, prices for energy will continue to rise, up to the point where more interesting alternatives become economic- things like methane hydrates and nuclear energy.
Personally, I see nuclear energy being the ticket out of the oil economy; with the right technology, it’s safe and provides huge amounts of clean energy (in operation; the waste problem would need to be dealt with).
And with enough energy, you could do things like run vehicles on hydrogen, or any number of other inefficient processes that might be economical if energy ends up cheap enough.
There may be economic dislocations as a result of rising energy prices, but they’ll be gradual, not precipitous- there’s no historical evidence that I’m aware of that would point to anything of the sort.
I’m going to respond to the question in the topic rather than the post itself, since the post is debatable and asks a different question.
First, the defintion: Peak Oil is the date after which oil production begins a long-term decline towards zero (and again never reaches the peak production rate). Defined thus, we’ll never really know it’s happened until well after it’s happened, though we might have a good guess.
As we find new sources for oil, and as relative demand for oil goes down due to greater efficiency, all other things being equal, the date of peak oil simply gets later.
Peak oil is inevitable (though, it’s possible that we see a number of ripples before the last true peak). The reason it’s inevitable is that it’s not an infinite resource, so at some point, production must decrease. Of course, production could decrease before we run out, simply because other energy sources become more economic.
Fluctuations near the peak are definitely possible. A new energy technology could come along making oil demand lower, but as prices decline a new application could arise that increases the demand again.
Practically speaking, though, the economy has over $5T invested in the oil indurstry infrastructure. It’s going to take quite a sea change to displace this with something new. My guess is that peak oil will happen about the same time we have a good new candidate. Once that new candidate is in place, many of the advantages of oil will fade, and demand will fall. Of course, it’ll take quite some time for all that infrastructure to be replaced, so I don’t predict a dramatic, catastrophic fall.
Not deceiving anyone because my post was a question (which nobody seemed to read properly), not a statement.
The 80’s price was due to an energy crisis, revolution, war, not just inflation. I don’t see the relevance of a spike caused by war and politics to a debate on peak of supply due to physical factors.
Unless you consider that if US oil hadn’t peaked then maybe the oil crisis wouldn’t have been so bad, and that particular price spike wouldn’t be confusing people.
I am also not referring just to American oil supply or consumption.
I don’t know what alternate methods of energy you mean - but if they are not oil then they don’t prove anything about peak supply.
You shut up.
But that’s the thing - prices staying high. If prices stay high then necessarily oil dependent people will have a lower standard of living - or lose supply altogether, unless new sources or efficiency make up the difference.
If you’re a guy in California making a good wage, you can absorb the price rise, if you live somewhere where you are just above the poverty line, you’re going to have a problem.
I know there are a lot of business considerations such as price gouging, cartelisation, taxation, market manipulation etc that affects the price of oil so it’s hard to point to just the cost of production as the sole cause of price rise.
So OK maybe the question could be will increased efficiency and new sources of energy (not just oil) compensate for supply tightness AND market crookedness.
I rely on public transport, where I live. A bus ride into town would cost me about 60p.
Then there was a price hike 2008, price went to about £1.40 and is now about £1.10.
60p to £1.10 in 5 years is massive change. All the buses have signs on them saying how they are greeen and efficient - but obviously whatever they are doing with the engines hasn’t compensated for the rise in price.
That bit of oil based infrastructure became untenable for me. So I bought a bicycle.
The alternative energy supply for me is pasta salad - which seems a bit of a step backwards.
No ones put alcohol based buses on the streets, no hydrogen powered buses or wind powered ones, no nuclear poweredBig Buses. They might turn up in the future, but when, and will they be cheaper than the oil powered ones ?
How much of that price rise is due to simple oil supply problem and how much to ‘market forces’ - I haven’t seen the breakdown yet, so if anyone has one please tell me.
Thanks for reading the question.
This is possibly not correct. Should someone figure out how to economically synthesise oil hydrocarbons - that’s ab initio, and not using something like the Fischer-Tropp process - then there will be no peak oil.
Here’s the thing. Hydrocarbons (complex carbon molecules) are the products of 500 hundred million years of biological growth. A humungous growth which slowly began 2 billion years ago.
When we mine oil and coal we thoughtlessly burn these complex molecules in mostly inefficient ways because kilo for kilo (ton for ton) they yield vast amounts of energy in return for a very slight effort. Its a return of 14:1. Nothing else compares.
Gasahol and relates biofuels are terribly inefficient so far. About 1:1.15 meaning you put 1 unit of energy in to get 1.15 out. Additionally valuable agricultural land which used to provide food gets sidelined into growing biofuel crops. You may have noticed the price of bread increase 50% in the last 5 years. That can be enough for a famine for many of the worlds population.
I have no doubt technology will save the developed world - fission, fusion, nano-batteries etc but while we survive, 4 billion people will fail.
It’s not saving me, so far. UK was an exporter but a lot of the North Sea wealth was wasted. There’s still no major house insulation push in the UK despite having millions of leaky old houses.
There are huge windfarms going up near me, and those are good and necessary, but so far the only direction energy prices have been going is up up up. And so, as you say, food price escalates. All that guff about adjusting for inflation seems nonsensical because oil price rise IS inflation, and it inflates everything else.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10178088/This-oil-price-rise-will-drive-inflation-upwards.html
Food prices are hiked due to speculation and gouging like oil is, so you have to figure out which proportion of cost rise is due to resource cost, and which is due to middlemen etc.
Egypt, of course, went from oil exporter to importer recently, and now they are killing each other. So far their solar, wind and nuclear don’t seem to be helping them.
“The Egyptian General Petroleum Co (EGPC) has said the country will cut exports of natural gas and tell major industries to slow output this summer to avoid an energy crisis and stave off political unrest, Reuters has reported. Egypt is counting on top liquid natural gas (LNG) exporter Qatar to obtain additional gas volumes in summer, while encouraging factories to plan their annual maintenance for those months of peak demand, said EGPC chairman, Tarek El Barkatawy. Egypt produces its own energy, but became a net oil importer in 2008 and is rapidly becoming a net importer of natural gas.”
Egypt also imports wheat - hard to do when your oil and gas revenue is falling rapidly.
“(Reuters) - Egypt has less than two months’ supply of imported wheat left in its stocks, ousted President Mohamed Mursi’s minister of supplies said, revealing a shortage more acute than previously disclosed.”
I digress.
You need to distinguish between two types of energy needs:
- Stationary
- Mobile (overwhelmingly transportation)
Stationary needs could virtually all be met by the electrical system if necessary, and you can fairly easily change the generating sources from one fuel to another (at most a few thousand natural gas or coal plants, a few hundred nuclear plants…) Note you don’t have to change the billion plus electricity using devices.
There is no problem for a very long time in coming up with energy sources for this–the huge problem is if you want to do anything about climate change. Note wind and solar are electricity generating sources.
Transportation needs are overwhelming met by petroleum (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel). And petroleum is reaching a peak. If you want to change this to a different energy system (electricity, fuel cells, natural gas…) you have to not only build a huge new infrastructure you also have to change each individual transportation device–hundreds of millions of them. This will take decades and there is a big question if there is enough petroleum for decades (note decades after you start–and basically we haven’t started yet).
Pretty straightforward summary, seems to me. Kind of echoing the famous Hirsch report in the infrastrucure lag problem. Only thing I would point out is it’s not necessarily oil supply per se, but the price of it that is the problem.
Supply may peak (many say it already has in about 2006) but the cost won’t peak for a long time.
But, there are a lot of efficiencies in other areas of the economy - processing power for a start - you can do a lot more computing on a barrel of oil than even last year. Maybe 3D printing will remove the need for a lot of transport costs, I don’t know.
If that is the case then we may be looking at a localised, stay at home culture emerging depending on computing and eschewing travel and global trade.
But that isn’t available now, for the global majority - efficient CPU’s and 3D printing aren’t sorting out Egypts fuel and food crisis, for instance.
What about that ?
If you mean “is there enough for us to use it at the same rate we do now over those decades”, then I suppose there’s some question there (not sure if it is “big” but whatever). If you mean that there won’t even be enough to actually provide the power to build that “huge new infrastructure”, leaving us just collapsing into a Dark Ages for want of power, then you are talking nonsense.