[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Peak Cider


Let’s develop an analogy for world oil extraction and depletion:

The world’s oil fields are like a vast apple orchard. You have inherited this orchard and don’t yet know its full extent, so you hire people to survey it. Similarly, petroleum resources have been inherited from the geologic past and are finite—we just don’t know exactly HOW finite.

You have advanced to the point that you know the approximate number of trees. You just do not know exactly how much fruit these trees hold. Likewise, 95% of the world’s oilfields have been discovered, but we are uncertain of the true extent of the oil they contain.

The trees in this orchard are of several varieties, with differing qualities—tart, sweet, acid, astringent, aromatic. You have Summer apples—Red Astrachan, Chenango Strawberry, and Yellow Transparent; Fall varieties—Cortland, Macintosh, Gravenstein; and Winter apples—Baldwin, Northern Spy, Roxbury Russet. Oil, too, comes in several “flavors”: light, medium, heavy; sweet, sour; bitumen, gas liquids, “organic marlstone.”

Your specialty: cidering. Call it “refining.” You build cider houses and presses and invest in distillery equipment to enable your operation.

You hire and send out armies of pickers (“rigs,” etc.) to begin harvesting the crop. At first, it is easy: from the ground, the pickers gather all the ripest, juiciest, non-blemished apples, the finest varieties for cider. The workers truck the barrels of apples to the cider houses, your operation begins, and customers begin lining up outside the doors.

The cider flows a-plenty, and as the satisfactory quality of this cider becomes more widely know, the customers keep streaming to your doors and business booms. You soon can afford to hire more workers, build more cider houses, and increase your supply and your customer base.

As the lowest-hanging, reddest, finest apple trees begin to “deplete,” the workers move onto the higher limbs and to other trees. They use apple-pickers on poles (“technology”) and gather apples from the so-so varieties. Blended ciders are very good, though. They distill nicely and with some filtering and additives make a serviceable cider.

Business continues to grow, along with supply, so you’re making money and can afford to invest in new technologies: apple ladders, larger baskets and trucks, bigger presses and filtering equipment, finer yeasts and fermentation vessels. People have abandoned other beverages in favor of your ciders and have come to expect it. The lines out the doors extend out of sight and you’re moving cider like never before.

Soon enough, every tree has workers in it, high in the limbs, some even in high-tech “cherry-picker” equipment to reach those tasty-but-out-of-reach beauties. Prices must rise to keep this operation afloat and working at a high enough capacity to satisfy demand. The presses and distilleries run at full-tilt.

You are at peak.

And demand continues to grow.

So, you send workers back to the depleted trees to pick all the apples, not just the ripe, healthy ones. They pick unripe, blemished and diseased apples. They pick inferior and out-of-season varieties. The cider house workers are processing apples as fast as they come in, but the lower-quality fruit needs more TLC to make the quality ciders people have come to expect, and customers are having to wait in long lines.

With the low-hanging fruit all but gone; with workers abandoning some trees and clambering up others; with all but a few trees criss-crossed with ladders and dense with workers stripping them clean; your survey crew reports back that there are a few more good-quality trees in the back forty, but even picking these trees clean and fermenting the juice cannot keep up with rising demand.

And so the quantity and the quality of your cider begin to decrease: slowly at first, but relentlessly. Time to empty your inventory and close up shop.

You spend the winter planning next year’s crop, and your customers switch to more abundant beers and wines.

The latter options are, sadly, not available for petroleum producers and their customers.

[Peak_Modernity]

Overall it sounded pretty good to me. The only trouble that I see is that apples replenish every year and technology (fertilizers, pesticides etc.) truly does produce more supply, not just deplete it faster like with oil.

I like the part about the different varieties though. I think that is one of the most ignored factors of oil depletion.

[falser]

That analogy implies that oil grows on trees, which we all know is not true. That's the main problem with the analogy.

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hat analogy implies that oil grows on trees

[PeakOiler]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('killJOY', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]

The cider flows a-plenty, and as the satisfactory quality of this cider becomes more widely know, the customers keep streaming to your doors and business booms. You soon can afford to hire more workers, build more cider houses, and increase your supply and your customer base.

[Revi]

It is more like making a gravel pit out of your orchard in my opinon. The cider could go on forever if managed nicely, whereas the gravel pit is a depletable resource, and at the end you are left with nothing. There isn't any land left to grow trees and no possiblity of a steady income from it.

[fossilnut2]

Any analogy is only appropriate if apples are compared with apples and not with oranges (oil). (couldn't resist).

The use of analogy is fine as long as every 'if' is verifiable and the subsequent 'if' is verifiable and so on. Othewise it's like a house of cards and it all collapses. If your premises aren't all undisputed then the conclusion becomes hollow.

The other issue of any lengthy analogy is people think about the analogy more than the actual point trying to be explained. The discussion turns not to 'is that true about oil production' but rather 'is that true about apples?...what if the tree grower did this or that?"

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')The use of analogy is fine as long as every 'if' is verifiable and the subsequent 'if' is verifiable and so on. Othewise it's like a house of cards and it all collapses.

[Longsword]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('killJOY', '
')"Sadly, oil doesn't grow on trees. And there is no next year's crop."

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')think about getting a drink at the local pub

[bobcousins]

It's a well worked analogy, but perhaps slightly stretched. Once the reader understands the details of the analogy and the correspondence to oil refining, he could perhaps have been able to understand an explanation of Peak Oil directly.

I think the main problem is that you need an analog that captures the essence of the original without requiring too much explanation. I think most people's idea of an orchard is that you pick the apples, then make cider, then they grow again next year. There is nothing obviously peaky about it. Unfortunately I can't think of anything that has an obvious peak that would relate to Peak Oil.

As an example of finite resources, as has been noted, apples are generally considered renewable.

[coyote]

i like the analogy of cider, it includes both production and refinement. if you wanted to really tie it in with current events, you might mention that at some point it was actually the brewery that was the bottleneck to cider availability, and some took this fact to mean that there was no shortage of apples.

i also don't believe it's too 'happy' an analogy; oil is something most americans do think of as something to guzzle and enjoy. i'm a graphic designer; the colors due to be popular next year are warm and "happy happy happy"; i call it the 'denial' color trend.

my only two concerns while reading were addressed in the last paragraph, and have been noted by other responders: one, that oil is not renewable the way apples are; and two, that people need oil in a way that they do not need cider (though i have a few friends who might disagree).

actually now that i think of it, there is a third concern: that cider consumption should lead to a massive and unsustainable population increase. (well, hmm, alcohol can release inhibitions...) tongue in cheek of course, and of course these comments are nitpicking. a good analogy and an enjoyable read.

lou

[killJOY]

(thank you both for reminding me of the complexities of oil depletion. It IS exceedingly difficult to draw an analogy.)

[Heineken]

"As the lowest-hanging, reddest, finest apple trees begin to 'deplete' . . . ."

kill, since the trees themselves are not "lowest hanging," you need to rephrase this as follows: "As the trees with the lowest-hanging, reddest, finest apples begin to 'deplete' . . . ." Or maybe simply as "As the lowest-hanging, reddest, finest apples begin to 'deplete' . . . ."

(What is really depleting, the fruit or the trees?)

Overall this is quite well written. I'm not sure the analogy itself holds up, though, on close examination. More apple trees can always be planted; more oil fields can't be. A whole new crop of apples comes in every year, and with good husbandry, it can be larger and better than the previous year's crop. Oil is about to go into terminal decline.

Also, I haven't had much experience with growing apples yet, but are the best-quality apples always on the lowest limbs?

[EarthAbides]

I like the analogy, seems to hold up fairly well, when you consider that oil is also "renewable". You just need to explain that the harvesting season is relatively short, (200 years), while the winter/spring is on the level of a few million years... We'll have a long wait for the next harvest.

[perplexd]

I think the renewable nature of apples is a real problem. Not because the analogy is not a good one, and well done, but because the target audience is already looking for the cornucopian silver lining, and apple trees do not really expose the absolute limitations at all.

On the other hand, there is a limit to this year's harvest that is very real and with peak, maybe this is the good side of the analogy. You can plant all the trees you want, but it will take 10 years to get them online. I think if you are more explicit about confining it to dealing with this season's cidering problems, then you can encompass the concept that peak is not about oil "running out". There will be apples next year.

Meanwhile, if you double the trees per acre ration, you run the risk of damaging your tree root systems and depleting the soil so that none of your trees are drought/disease resistant.

Ultimately, you just can't make an ever increasing amount of cider, period.

Those seem like good directions to explore, perhaps.

On edit: I guess what I am noticing is that the focus on the trees (which are not limited) might be obscuring a more real limitation: the soil. There is a finite amount of soil, just like oil. The trees use the soil as fuel, just like our cars do. The soil can be ruined by overproduction just as an oil field can. The soil is the hidden power behind our trees, just as oil is the hidden power behind capitalism, etc.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('EarthAbides', 'I') like the analogy, seems to hold up fairly well, when you consider that oil is also "renewable". You just need to explain that the harvesting season is relatively short, (200 years), while the winter/spring is on the level of a few million years... We'll have a long wait for the next harvest. :lol:

[NEOPO]

In a few millions years or so "some" oil will be in place = renewable.
If we only had a few millions years we would be all set!!

Matt made a quick "apple tree" or "fruit tree" analogy here:

matt savinar on feet to the fire

I suppose that may be one thing you could add to yours.
Those trucks and workers have to work harder to get the high fruit so at some point it would be "fruitless" (pun intended) to climb that high or buy a truck with a bucket in order to get those apples and that the customers wouldnt be willing to pay the higher price required to cover the addition cost.

Yet when it comes to oil, the way much of the world is structured and the understanding of the limitations of the alternatives (beer wine/ethanol hydrogen etc ) we simply have little choice but to consume less.

[killJOY]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '"')As the lowest-hanging, reddest, finest apple trees begin to 'deplete' . . . ."

[falser]

I was thinking what is a better analogy for the current oil situation. The best I could come up with is the California Gold Rush. In the beginning, gold could be mopped up from rivers and streams with little work. The gold itself was cheap because it could be found easily with cheap labor, but the prices of everything else starting to skyrocket - food, clothing, tools etc. Once all the easy to find gold was mined, big companies came in with sophisticated systems. They diverted rivers in order to strip mine the riverbeds. They water blasted rocks away. They had to completely wreak havoc on the ecosystems in order to find more gold. The independent laborers eventually didn't make enough money from the gold they found. It just become too expensive for so little profit. I think it's very similar to how easily oil was found back in the 1800's across America - just poke a drill in the ground and you'd have a geyser. But these days we have offshore oil rigs drilling thousands of feet into the seabed and then another thousand horizontally, or we strip mine a hundred thousand acres of Alberta and cook tar out of sand in order to produce oil.