Is This Peak Gas?

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021/10/11/is-this-peak-gas/

by mosiuerbarso • 5 years ago

36 56 5 years ago

consciousnessofsheep.co.uk

ls65536• 5 years ago

Site seems to be unresponsive right now (overloaded due to HN?).

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20211012131321/https://conscious...

karlkloss• 5 years ago

It may be peak articles about peak something.

eru2• 5 years ago

I haven't heard about peak oil recently nearly as around the mid 2000s when all commodities had exploded in price.

ashtonkem4• 5 years ago

There’s some possibility we hit peak oil last year, but it’s going to be less about running out of oil and more about the shifting economics of energy production. Less “we’re running out of oil” and more “renewables are so damned cheap”.

duxup3• 5 years ago

I remember articles about it in the 1980s.

Spooky233• 5 years ago

The answer to all of these doomsayer questions that appear when fuel costs spike is always:

No.

Energy is a cyclical market. That’s a healthy thing. Upswings in price trigger market forces to substitute or economize.

evgen2• 5 years ago

Am I the only one who remembers articles from late 2019 talking about how the crash of gas prices was going to drive all of the fracking operators to slow down operations or go out of business? This particular article seems to drag in some ill-defined and clearly unsupported 'energy cost per barrel' that seems to be off by an order of magnitude or so from the actual energy requirement for pulling up gas from a fracked well according to all other info I can find, so I am not quite sure how much credence I should give the rest of the piece.

VLM2• 5 years ago

That's a micro scale analysis. The article is all about the macro scale.

If one gas well in the North Sea runs out, you're correct someone drills another well. When ALL the gas wells in the North Sea run out, thats how you get a peak of 4.5MBE/day back around the turn of the century and now production has dropped permanently to a quarter of that around 1MBE/day.

If you have an infinite supply of something, like in some areas, drinking water, then economic activity controls water bottle filling plants. If you have a finite supply of something, like in some areas, drinking water, then economic activity has no effect if the wells are dry you don't have water. Water is very heavy commodity so trade between east of the mississippi with five feet of rain per year and California deserts with no rain, is irrational or at least very economic and environmentally expensive. On the other hand you can pack a billion dollars of silicon chips into a small moving van so world trade of semiconductors still makes sense... for now.

Also some economic activity being cyclical is "OK" or manageable. But food is oil, and you can't rationally go cyclical on food. So that's a second problem with oil. If you "let the market do its thing" with STM32 microcontrollers, you'll get a year long drought of 99% of everyone has nothing but the world will go on, more or less. Try that kind of supply squeeze with food and the government will fall within days.

throwaway09223• 5 years ago

I agree with the macro scale perspective you're sharing.

Regarding food, there's quite a bit of flexibility in food supply- we primarily produce calories for enjoyment, not sustenance. Yes, hunger will topple governments. But "letting the market do its thing" with food doesn't necessarily mean famine. It may mean shortages of specific foods which don't make economic sense. High meat prices, unavailability of particular types of fruits and vegetables.

Famine is terrifying, yes. But we should also acknowledge that there's a huge amount of contraction that can happen in our food production systems before bellies go empty.

Spooky233• 5 years ago

Humans are reasonably intelligent agents. We adapt.

Energy supply changes aren’t a black swan event. Every time there’s a price spike, the demand curve is shifted by replacement and efficiency improvements. That’s why coal is a dead industry. That’s why solar went from a rounding error to a significant player that has slowed peak electric demand.

Issues like water in arid areas like the American West are very different. Personally, I’m about 40, and I don’t think there will be a serious supply-side disruption in oil/gas supply in my lifetime. I do think that we will have a significant disruption in access to fruit and vegetable supply due to brain dead US agriculture policy. And I think my kids will see grain shortages in their lifetime as the Midwest aquifers are depleted.

jmnicolas2• 5 years ago

Because it always has been like that. One day they will be wrong.

refurb• 5 years ago

I remember way back in the mid-2000’s when gas hit $4/gal on the East Coast. Major supply shock.

Cries of “it will never go down!” and “this is peak oil!” were everywhere.

A year later gas was $1.50/gal, cheaper than it had been in decades.

orwin• 5 years ago

It was peak conventionnal oil no? That's why we started exploiting Shale oil, sands and getting those new tech deep sea platforms?

loudmax• 5 years ago

Healthy for the market. Not necessarily healthy for the climate.

folkrav• 5 years ago

Nor tons of individuals' wallets.

adrianN4• 5 years ago

The doomsayer scenario is that we don't reach peak-fossil-fuels really soon.

echelon2• 5 years ago

I doubt we've hit peak, but there are important things to consider.

If we run out of energy before we exit our gravity well, that's one instance of the great filter. Resource conflicts might also trigger war that could destabilize society and prevent us from advancing.

The world needs energy, yet many of us pay far less attention than we should.

Filligree• 5 years ago

We’re nowhere close to running out of energy. There’s thousands of years’ worth just in proven uranium reserves, never mind seawater and unproven reserves.

We’re just going to have to get over our fear of nuclear power.

dispat0r• 5 years ago

I guess people need to experience a full blown blackout to get over their fear of nuclear power.

matthewdgreen• 5 years ago

Also I'm told there's a giant nuclear reactor in the sky we might learn how to tap someday. Once we get done with the much easier nuclear buildout, of course.

adrianN4• 5 years ago

As long as the sun shines, we won't run out of energy.

echelon2• 5 years ago

We have to be able to harness that energy in a way that meets current and future demands. We've got a long way to go to rely only on solar, wind, etc.

We got really lucky that our planet accumulated vast stored energy reserves that were easy to extract and use.

goatlover• 5 years ago

Frank Drake (Drake equation author) at SETI argues that aliens stick to their solar systems because their sun will provide all the energy they will ever need and space is just not worth traversing. At any rate, whether we exit our gravity well en masse or not, the sun will still be shining.

fennecfoxen3• 5 years ago

[doom and gloom energy noises]

Meh. We're not staring down the abyss of the "net energy cliff" where near-100% of energy goes to procuring more energy. The reason for our shortages is because of things like (for instance) various politicians deciding to not-build Keystone XL (US) or to delay Nord Stream 2 (Europe). Because of these decisions — surprise surprise — we aren't being delivered the products they'd carry.

Some of those noises are even legitimate. But the Net Energy Cliff™ is a long long long way off. In hard-hit Europe, for instance, Germany is sitting on fantastical reserves of shale gas and oil which they could access by fracking, but won't. Good decision? Some say so. Energy-cliff apocalypse? Hahahaha no.

Heck, if it really came to that, we'd bring back nuclear.

evgen2• 5 years ago

Sorry, but Keystone XL has absolutely nothing to do with this and the fuel that it was going to transport is the dirtiest, heaviest crude around and not gas. After a year or more of lockdown and diminished demand we are now ramping back up and supply will take a while to catch up. Nothing magic about this and anyone who claims this is an indicator for some sort of long-term consequence (like the author of the original article) is clearly reading way too much into the tea leaves they are staring at.

fennecfoxen3• 5 years ago

Sorry, but Keystone XL has absolutely nothing to do with this

You say this as if energy consumption isn't fungible in the slightest, and that we'd gladly fall off the net energy cliff™ before trying to make any substitutions.

flavius296632• 5 years ago

Not building NS2 has nothing to do with this crisis in any way. The gas can be readily transported through existing pipelines just as it has been for decades.

If you're saying that Putin wants to strong-arm the west by not providing enough gas at normal prices until NS2 is approved, then yeah that makes sense. But this wouldn't be because of NS2, it's because of Putin.

fennecfoxen3• 5 years ago

Gazprom's unwillingness to send gas in transit through eastern Europe where it could theoretically run is indeed a real thing, and you're right that Nord Stream 2 would alleviate only political capacity limitations. (And FWIW, I'm against it, because I'm against Vladimir Putin, but I don't get to make these decisions.)

It's still limiting capacity. There's still lots of gas in Russia. Heck, there's still lots of gas in Groningen, they've just stopped pumping it. In neither case are we staring down a net energy cliff™.

vmception• 5 years ago

Comprehensive but barely worth commenting on since the same article, with convincing arguments for the time, have existed for the last 60 years at least. Here’s why (and I realize this is me commenting on it anyway):

Yes, there is a finite resource involved.

Yes, using it, whether we find more or not, makes the planet uninhabitable for the size of the human population due to it being uninhabitable for many existing species.

But is it peak gas/oil/whatever? No. It never is because currently uneconomical sources become economical. The article slightly addresses that by saying the last decade of fracking was an accounting gimmick that allowed unprofitable operations to work out okay. Uh yeh thats exactly whats going to happen with even more harder to extract and create gas.

duxup3• 5 years ago

I remember peek gas articles 40 years ago.

Anything that happens now is viewed through a pseudo "it's the system" and IMO sort of implied apocalyptic-ism about it. It really wears on me.

cipher_system• 5 years ago

A lot of countries and regions have passed peak gas years or even decades ago. Same for oil.

Globally we might not be there yet though.

fullstop• 5 years ago

Processes which were not economically feasible 40 years ago are options now. I believe that oil/tar sands are now in this category.

duxup3• 5 years ago

I think that is part of what makes these predictions a little iffy.

wazoox• 5 years ago

No, certainly not. However there's an interesting paper that shows that we're nearing peak fossil fuels probably much faster (in particular for coal) than most seem to anticipate, due to limits in EROEI. See

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...

And also https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/16/5112

A naive calculation brings 2037 as the global turning point for peak available energy from fossils (see the articles).

adventured• 5 years ago

It's rather staggering to think that global emissions might continue to rapidly climb for another 20+ years yet at a minimum, given the numbers as they are now.

r00fus• 5 years ago

That scenario would definitely be in the interests of the fossil fuel producers as prices would skyrocket during a supply shortage with demand constant or barely tapering.

soperj• 5 years ago

Science direct article doesn't really align with what we know about oil production. For instance, why would oil sands production decline? These are major installations where the majority of the cost is upfront. They aren't going to need to build new upgraders in the next 30 years to keep it rolling.

jmnicolas2• 5 years ago

I don't know for gas but it seams it's peak consciousnessofsheep.co.uk, site is unreachable for me ;)

JohnHaugeland• 5 years ago

Site got hugged too hard, so here's archive.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211011180352/https://conscious...

i_am_proteus• 5 years ago

[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

99_00• 5 years ago

If fossil fuels are being phased out investors won't be willing to take risks and invest in capital intensive projects that only pay off after decades.

This can lead to a painful short term energy crisis. Many will celebrate this pain and suffering pointing out that it creates an insensitive to move to alternatives.

drdeadringer• 5 years ago

Off and on I have been reading about Peak Oil articles dated from at least 1970 since 2006. Isaac Asimov even wrote a [perhaps speculative] piece about it.

Is this one of the "X will the the coming Y and always will be" topics?

Is This Peak Gas?

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