The real lessons of Cuba and peak oil

Cuba’s often discussed by the most common type of environmentalist, the lefty middle-class pseudohippy, including in a documentary, How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. For a discussion of it, see this youtube vid. It presents a picture of how “Cuba lost half their oil overnight”, and of a friendly socialist government helping the people to get into “all-organic agriculture”, and of how peak oil will create for us a happy friendly community. On the less-friendly to commies side, more recently there have been articles in the press saying that Cuba imports 70% of its food, or even 85%, mentioning that Cuba still has rationing.

Neither of these is a full or accurate picture of events. I’ve previously noted that we should beware graphs, because they often tell the truth, but not the whole truth; this is even more so with articles and documentaries.
Overall, total Cuban fossil fuel energy use went from a high of 0.51 quadrillion BTU in 1989 to 0.458 today, a drop of 10%. This is rather less than is commonly implied by groups promoting the success of Cuba’s “solution to peak oil”.

Note that Cuba does not appear to be planning to abandon fossil fuels; a Cuban newspaper tells us that the country has an electricity generation capacity of 3,500MW, 1,600MW of which were added in the last three years alone – all dependent on diesel and fuel oil, while another article boasts of the building of two new natural gas-burning plants of 35MW each, and that 3.45 billion cubic metres of natural gas a day are produced and consumed, about 10% for domestic cooking, and 90% for electricity generation. Doubling fossil fuel-derived electricity generation in three years is not really consistent with a plan to avoid future fossil fuel shortages; they obviously think peak oil is over for them and not coming back soon.

Overall, about 66% the oil Cuba uses is for electricity generation, the other 33% or so for transport. Much of the country was poorly-electrified or had occasional blackouts already, so they couldn’t cut oil use there. They decided to cut it for transport, thus transport lost 20/33, or most of its oil. That’s why you see on Cuban streets many horses and carts. So Cuba’s experience of a drop in oil supply is that it’s not cut evenly across the economy, but private transport misses out first.

The Oil Drum – Australia/New Zealand