Peak Oil: Taking A Stand

We live in a society where it is impossible to live a functional lifestyle and not consume products made from petro-chemicals every single day — electronics, fabrics, painkillers, food additives, cosmetics, fabrics, cleaning supplies, building materials, the list goes on.
More than ever, it is precisely because it is incredibly difficult to survive outside of our wasteful, exploitative and fossil fuel-obsessed system that we need environmentalists and other activists — yes, even if they own a cellphone and wear cheaply manufactured clothing — advocating for alternative means of production and modes of consumption. (links in original) [1]

Waiting for industry officials or their paid media mouthpieces—or political leaders with votes to gather—to deliver the truthful but sobering set of facts about our future energy supply will guarantee a long wait. Too many self-serving and short-term interests to be tended to make it unlikely we’ll get the honest and full disclosure about the challenges ahead.

Activists and others who share concerns about our warming planet and the fossil fuel supply versus demand factors still have a voice, and choices about how to use it. From my very first post, I made it clear that I am not the ideal candidate to serve as an advocate urging greater awareness about peak oil. There are moments when I feel guilty sharing information while enjoying the lifestyle we do.

Our big and prized possession is the second, much larger (seven-bedroom) home a stone’s throw from the Atlantic. Making the 90-mile round trip in our automobiles, on multiple occasions each week from mid-April to Thanksgiving—along with an occasional trek in the winter months—is the norm. Has been for a decade.

Public transportation remains an option. I walked, bused, subwayed, walked again, commuter-railed, and taxi-cabbed my way from and to our summer home in February. I did so because I dropped off one of our vehicles in the garage there since we were spending 11 days in California (part business, part vacation). We parked our SUV in a garage at home, and left a third vehicle there for one of our daughters. We drove a car while were on the West Coast, too.

Door-to-door, each of my two, one-way trips to our summer home took just under three hours. In our car, that 47 mile one-way trip takes less than an hour. That’s a tough trade-off to make. Selling the house is not our answer to that “problem.”

That doesn’t mean we aren’t modifying our energy consumption in others ways. We are. It’s impossible to study the realities of oil production and supply in the 21st Century and not be affected, greatly concerned, and make sacrifices or adjustments. We do so because the reality—not the massaged version offered by industry cheerleaders offering juicy bits of info about massive reserves and potential this or that while omitting all of the details which cast long shadows on that Happy Talk—is a fairly simple one:

Current data for the decline in oil fields’ production indicates that around 3 million barrels per day of new production must be achieved year on year, simply to sustain supply levels. This is equivalent to finding another Saudi Arabia every 3–4 years. In this context, fracking is at best a stop-gap measure. Conventional oil production is predicted to drop by over 50% in the next two decades and tight oil is unlikely to replace more than 6%.
Once conventional oil’s rate of loss exceeds unconventional oil’s rate of production, world production must peak. Production of sweet, light crude actually peaked in 2005 but this has been masked by the increase in unconventional oil production, and also by lumping together different kinds of material with oil and referring to the collective as ‘liquids’. (More recently, the term ‘liquids’ is often upgraded to ‘oil’, which is highly disinformative since the properties of the other liquids are quite different from crude oil.)
Fracking produces mostly shale gas (rather than oil), and the major growth in global ‘oil’ production has been from natural gas liquids (NGL; in part from shale gas). But the principal components of NGL are ethane and propane, so it is not a simple substitute for petroleum….
The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is worse for all unconventional oil production methods than for conventional oil….
This means that more energy must be invested to maintain output. [2]

As I’ve stated repeatedly, the “more energy invested” aspect of production is not all. With conventional crude production past-peak, Plan B requires more investments, higher prices, rapidly-depleting wells, environmental concerns now impossible to sweep under the rug, and assorted other inconveniences which tell a very different but much more honest tale about the energy challenges we’ll all be dealing with in the years to come.

So while it’s comforting to hear the wonderful stories about our ingenuity and fossil fuel abundance and all of the other offerings from those with a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that all is well, facts and reality tells us otherwise. Those of us who share those truths take very little delight in the message offered. The unpleasant reality of peak oil will cast a long shadow on my own lifestyle. Self-serving considerations of my own are hard to ignore.

Be that as it may, when you listen to or read the lovely and soothing tomes on the subject of our energy future, keep truth in mind. And lend a moment of your time to those of us sharing a few more details about that same story.

We put the event [The Transatlantic Security Dialogue; info here; see 1. 2. also] together because the prevailing idea that we have a bright future of increasing oil and gas production that can sustain our current way of life indefinitely is based on a selective appraisal of the data. We brought together experts from across the spectrum, and with a wide range of opinions, to have a comprehensive look at all the relevant data. When you only look at certain things, like the very real resurgence of US oil and gas production, the picture looks fine. But when you dig deeper into the data, it becomes clear that this is only part of the picture. And the big picture proves that our current course cannot continue without significant risks. [3]

More information, facts, and truth are rarely a bad thing—unpleasant or inconvenient as they may be. Who knows, with more of us anchoring ourselves in the facts, we might even start addressing the problems before they become Really Big Problems.

We could do worse….

Peak Oil Matters