Peak Oil is History

http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/674/66/

by ph0rque • 16 years ago

35 61 16 years ago

culturechange.org

narrator2• 16 years ago

Choice 1: Burn lots and lots of coal + Fischer Tropsch + electric vehicles.

Choice 2: Thorium reactors + electric vehicles.

That's about it.

BTW, The "Peak Oil Community" are 5% oil and gas industry people, and 5% energy policy wonk want-to-bes.

The rest are radical environmentalists eagerly anticipating the ecological-Malthusian-doom rapture (see dieoff.org, etc) and are not interested in practical solutions and are just sitting in front of their computers waiting to be raptured up into their ecological-hand-tools-subsistence-agriculture wonderland.

fungi2• 16 years ago

> are not interested in practical solutions

but it's us stinky hippies that bang on the loudest and for the longest about sustainable transport solutions, renewable energy and sustainable population. (~>_aside form nuclear energy_<~) where do you draw that stereotype from?

edit: emphasis

ramanujan• 16 years ago

I have a Prius. I also support massive expansion of nuclear energy, just like Stewart Brand (of the Whole Earth catalog) and David McKay (British physicist). Caring for the environment doesn't mean forgetting physics. In addition, if we're talking TCO, many more people have been killed in oil wars than nuclear disasters...

w00pla3• 16 years ago

> but it's us stinky hippies that bang on the loudest and for the longest about sustainable transport solutions, renewable energy and sustainable population.

Nope. Wasn't the "stinky hippies" the groups that consistently protested against nuclear power? Being anti-nuclear power in the 70ies and 80ies was the bandwagon for the far left (now it is global warming).

roel_v• 16 years ago

No way dude, the stinky hippies only complain, they don't offer solutions. So yeah re-reading your comment, maybe you're right, but it's hardly the morally position they/you always claim it is.

jsz02• 16 years ago

Environmentalists in Europe have been known to protest expansion of high speed rail. Not sure if this is a common view or not.

blahedo2• 16 years ago

Incredibly frustrating that all the figures were thumbnails that are illegible and don't link to a higher-resolution version---and then the text doesn't even fully explain them. Does anyone know which country he's talking about for Fig. 3?

xanados• 16 years ago

1: http://www.transitionguelph.org/images/front5.jpg 2: http://orangejuiceblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/oil-pr... 3: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-kpMH_7eM/SkPP2QB4d9I/AAAAAAAABI...

The country is Russia.

blahedo2• 16 years ago

Thanks. I thought it might be, but I wasn't sure.

chipsy• 16 years ago

I let myself get scared a little, as I should with any good peak oil story, and then went looking for an Achilles' Heel.

"Some might also wonder why a shortage of oil should automatically trigger a collapse. It turns out that, in an industrialized economy, a drop in oil consumption precipitates a proportional drop in overall economic activity. Oil is the feedstock used to make the vast majority of transportation fuels -- which are used to move products and deliver services throughout the economy. In the US in particular, there is a very strong correlation between GDP and motor vehicle miles traveled. Thus, the US economy can be said to run on oil, in a rather direct and immediate way: less oil implies a smaller economy. At what point does the economy shrink so much that it can no longer meet its own maintenance requirements? In order to continue functioning, all sorts of infrastructure, plant and equipment must be maintained and replaced in a timely manner, or it stops functioning. Once that point is reached, economic activity becomes constrained not just by the availability of transportation fuels, but also by the availability of serviceable equipment. At some point the economy shrinks so much as to invalidate the financial assumptions on which it is based, making it impossible to continue importing oil on credit. Once that point is reached, the amount of transportation fuels available is no longer limited just by the availability of oil, but also constrained by the inability to finance oil imports."

This is the part which attempts to convince the reader that a simple recession/stagnation cannot occur.

Unfortunately, it vastly underestimates our resourcefulness and runs on the fallacy of the USA only ever being capable of transportation with petroleum, or of a collapse so swift and sudden(from full consumption to zero in a matter of months; an unlikely event, between price hikes, austerity measures, the application of strategic reserves, opening of existing private stocks, etc.) that no response can be made. If it ever becomes too costly to run petroleum-based freighters, we can still revive coal and sail technology. That alone will ensure the survival of ocean-bound transportation(and hence a lot of import-export dependencies). Overland, goods in the USA are transported through the most cost-effective freight system in the world; trucks are "last mile" haulers in most situations. Our existing rail and electric systems can revert to coal for some time to come, although nobody likes the ecological costs involved in coal. And this even leaves open the possibility of refrigerated transit, just not necessarily at present-day schedules.

So the remaining energy problems, as I see them, are in petro-agriculture dependency and infrastructure(primarily in housing stock). Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. People will die as a result of pretty much any peak oil scenario. A full collapse, though, requires both an overnight cratering of production, and an awful lot of faith in people to do exactly the wrong things.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

Econtalk had an episode about carbon shortage recently. It turns out that synthetic fuels manufactured from coal become economical far before petroleum is totally gone. And there are other more expensive technologies that come into play when the coal is gone.

All the while, renewable energy is getting cheaper by the year.

Here's the link. It is a fascinating podcast, though it wanders a bit near the end:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.htm...

narrator2• 16 years ago

With Thorium reactors you can generate so much electricity you can convert CO2 into hydrocarbons directly. If for whatever dumb reason thorium reactors don't happen, yeah Fischer-Tropsche Coal to Oil is the way to go. Al Gore will be upset though at all your non-carbon neutrality, for what it's worth but they'll sure as all heck do it in China. Problem is is that building an industrial scale Fischer-Tropsch plant is a big undertaking, on the scale of building a major oil refinery and you'd have NIMBYs up the wazoo anywhere you tried to build that in the U.S.

retube• 16 years ago

And don't forget that at ~$200 / barrel oil from tar sands becomes viable. The oil will be flowing for some time yet.

baq3• 16 years ago

ideally there should be a solar-wind-powered atmospheric CO2/H20 to hydrocarbon synthesis device in every backyard, and i believe that's how our grand(grandgrand)children will operate. it'll take a while to get there, though.

Tichy6• 16 years ago

"become economical far before petroleum is totally gone"

What does that even mean, though? If oil was gone today, dragging things by hand or with horses would become economical, too. That doesn't imply that it would afford us the same luxurious lifestyle we enjoy today (luxury == not having to drag stuff around by hand, among other things).

w00pla3• 16 years ago

> People will die as a result of pretty much any peak oil scenario.

Not really. South Africa was a third world country under heavy sanctions.

Yet it created industries to produce petroleum from coal (and even today these companies produce 40%+ of SA's liquid fuel requirements).

If a crappy third world country can do it with 70ies technology (most of which they weren't even allowed to import legally), why can't first world country do this?

jsz02• 16 years ago

We'll probably be too busy fighting each other every step of the way. I don't know much about SA's situation but I'm going to take a guess that it was the pro-apartheid government that made it happen. Maybe they weren't so consumed about fighting with each other since they had a common enemy to focus on. I'm somewhat convinced we're at the point in the US where the opposition party (either one) would sabotage the plan for short term political gain.

dasil003• 16 years ago

Maybe yes, maybe no. I think it's impossible to predict what will happen and how far human resourcefulness will get us. People alive in developed countries today take technological progress as a historical given, and we all have a vested interest in the current system. To imagine every aspect of our lifestyle to be eradicated overnight is almost unfathomable, so it becomes a psychological necessity to believe we will somehow figure it out. Of course there are always those prophesizing doom, and they have so far been wrong and crazy (at least during modern times), but just because it hasn't happen yet doesn't mean it won't.

And frankly I don't put much creedence in economic theory here, because there's no historical model for such a huge and global economy. I'd be more interested in the behavioral biology perspective, because the social seams are going to start coming apart very quickly if the world economy ever hits truly insurmountable difficulties.

jordanb• 16 years ago

I completly agree. I think there is a ton of low-hanging fruit in our economy, in terms of energy use. The fact is that energy has not been a resource worth conserving during the entire industrial expansion thus far. Energy's always been something that is cheap and getting cheaper. So there's never been any economic imperative for energy efficiency, so it's always been cheaper to burn more energy than to invest in efficiency.

I think an economy in which renewable energy sources are exploited, and in which energy is used as efficiently as possible, is one which could continue expanding for a long time after peak oil extraction is reached.

eru3• 16 years ago

Your argument may be too simple. If you have a look at the history of the steam engine, you will see massive gains in efficiency.

Those gains are what allowed industrialisation to escape Britain in reach the rest of Europe, where coal was more expensive than in Britain and labour less so.

(See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine as a starting point. I am sure there are better sources.)

Or look at the history of steel making. The 19th century alone saw huge decreases in the amount of coke used to make a single ton of steel---while improving quality all the time.

Tichy6• 16 years ago

While I also prefer to be an optimist in such matters, I never quite get the "we are so resourceful" reaction. Yes, a couple of times in history we (I mean earth, humans, as I am not from the US) have been lucky, and some looming crisis was averted. A lot of other times things didn't go so well. History is full of civilizations collapsing, wars, famines and so on. There is not always some genius at hand who invents a wonderful rescue device (as apparently with the agricultural revolution last century).

Personally, I used to hate cars and everything oil related. So I am the first who would welcome it if the economy would run on sustainable alternative energy. But I think oil is ultimately simply this: free energy. It is as if somebody gave your country several trillions of dollars (without inflation). So if you take that away, you suddenly have several trillions of dollars less (or more, just picked a random number here). You can not simply replace them, they are missing from the equation completely. So overall, you will be that much poorer, with all the consequences. Sure, you can build other things, but it will take time.

Mz5• 16 years ago

Yes, a couple of times in history we (I mean earth, humans, as I am not from the US) have been lucky, and some looming crisis was averted.

We avert stuff every day. It's just not "news" so you don't much hear about it. ("News" generally involves dirty laundry of some sort, not good outcomes.) When we had some huge earthquake in the East, it was News. When the world rose to the occasion and averted hundreds of thousands of expected additional deaths from famine and disease in the aftermath, big yawn. Moving on. Has Hollywood got some juicy scandal for us? When Iraq set fire to the oil wells as it was leaving Kuwait, Big News. When the entire world converged upon Kuwait with every available crack team for putting out such things and invented new methods on the spot to kill the fires in a much shorter time frame than was predicted, big yawn. Moving on. Can we come up with some juicy gossip from somewhere? When the desert bloomed like no one had seen in decades (if ever) from all the water and carbon in the aftermath of the fires and attempts to put them out, also hardly mentioned. Y2K also was a huge anticlimactic non-event after years of people getting ready for a global meltdown of our banking infrastructure...etc...

I've been talking about Peak Oil for years. I think it is a serious issue. But I'm an optimist and I think we can adapt. It doesn't have to be some nightmare scenario. It will only turn into that if we engage in too much denial and foot dragging and resistance to change.

Peace.

pandakar• 16 years ago

stendahl peak oil romanticism at its best

patrickgzill• 16 years ago

I like Orlov, find his writings to be a useful and interesting perspective, however there is much that is inaccurate or that remains unconsidered in this piece.

For instance, the issue of Iraq and Iran, both very undeveloped in terms of wells drilled and the modernity of the infrastructure that runs those wells.

Iraq, for all its recent investment, remains underdeveloped, and Iran has not had access to newer oil tech since 1979.

Further, there is the question of whether we are suffering from an "oil coming out of the ground" problem or "refine the crude oil into something we can actually use" problem.

The bottleneck at this point appears (from my admittedly limited, amateur research) to actually be in total refining capacity.

lzw• 16 years ago

I find it amazing that so much of the peak oil arguments come from looking at production in the USA, and also from seemingly looking only at production of light sweet crude.

Production in the USA is much harder now because of environmental regulations. These drive up costs and naturally would result in companies going offshore to produce... Yet I bet if you looked at proven reserves in e USA you might see a different figure.

Especially if you include forms other than light sweet crude. This easy oil is cheapest to refine but it is just one grade of oil, with many heavy grades going all the eay in to oil shale and coal tar and oil sands..... And the reserves of these types of oil are massive in the USA and staggering in Canada.

Further exploration is very difficult and banned for the Americas richest locations, such as ANWR. Before it was cut off from exploration, I believe many geologists believed that north of prudhoe bay there was more oil than was found in Saudi Arabia, and at the time they were keeping it under wraps as strategic reserve..... Now we pretend like it doesn't exist.

Finally peak oil is based on the theory that depleted fields never produce again, while I understand there are many fields that were previously depleted that refilled while lying fallow for several decades. It is possible that oil is actually a natural product of geological forces, not ancient plant matter, and that most fields will refill over time.

erikstarck• 16 years ago

I'm looking forward to a world not running on oil.

Finally, for the first time, there's global pressure to develop alternatives. The result of this can already be seen in hybrid cars and cheaper solar power.

Getting rid of oil is a Good Thing for so many reasons. We should salute it, not fear it.

wazoox• 16 years ago

Interesting, but he wants a bit too much collapse to be inevitable. The current crisis is probably related to the 2006-2007 oil prices hike (the first actual effects of Peak Oil), and the situation will remain so for a decade or two : oil prices climb, demand is killed off, crisis ensue, prices drop, partial recovery comes, and we start the cycle again.

That means that instead of a brutal collapse, we'll live a state of depression, recession and incomplete recovery for the next decades, with at some point an inflexion from less growth to more depression. That's what we have to get prepared to.

Peak Oil is History

Related Stories