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Page added on April 14, 2014
Peak Oil: Not Quite So Easy
Most authors accept that conventional oil resources are at an advanced stage of depletion and that liquid fuels will become more expensive and increasingly scarce. The tight oil ‘revolution’ has provided some short-term relief, but seems unlikely to make a significant difference in the longer term. Even with a more sanguine view of global supply prospects, the large scale, capital intensity, long lead times and constrained potential of the various mitigation options point to the need for a coordinated response….
[A] full appraisal of the challenge posed by oil depletion must extend beyond geological assessments of resource size to include the potential of different extraction technologies, the cost of production of different resources, the operation of global fuel markets, the geopolitics of oil security, and the technical and economic potential for both efficiency improvements and resource substitution in multiple end-use sectors. In practice, few studies can adequately address this complexity. [1]
In many ways, the greater danger and challenge is not so much enlightening citizens about the realities of both our future oil supplies and the short-term boom in oil production. Forget about just explaining that a transition away from fossil fuel dependency is in out collective and long-term interests!
How on earth [literally] do we convert, adapt, substitute, or transition to/from just about every facet of our commercial and cultural lifestyles using energy sources and supplies that are not fossil fuels? Give a moment’s thought to your average day from the moment you awaken until you turn out the lights at the end of the day. How many products and services are you using in some fashion which does not exist but for fossil fuels?
That we won’t be running out of oil and gas for decades to come is a given—idiot straw man arguments that that is precisely what we are advocating notwithstanding.
But fossil fuels are finite resources. Finite as in not infinite. We’ve been using them for a very long time. A lot more of us—several billion, actually—have every intention of getting to where we are. That’s a lot more demand for that same finite resource base, the same one being drawn down each and every day.
It’s nice to know we have X gazillion barrels of resources; but that’s just an answer to a trivia question until we’re pouring some from those barrels into our gas tanks, etc., etc. That part is a wee bit more complicated, not that the Happy Talk cheerleaders for the oil industry mention any of that. No guarantees we have the technology, the money, or the time to extract at least some of the massive vastly abundant potential possible sources before we all really start to feel the pinch of an energy supply squeeze.
What the fossil fuel industry is providing us now, and increasingly so in the years to come, isn’t the same “stuff.” It costs more; it’s not as efficient; it depletes a lot faster, which carries its own set of challenges; it’s more difficult to locate and extract; investors aren’t as enamored by the profitability, so they aren’t opening up their wallets as readily or as quickly, and you can guess what happens to production efforts when the money pipeline is squeezed. That’s not the full list of drawbacks, but it’s a good start.
And since those same resources will be needed to design, develop, deliver, operate, maintain whatever the Big Plan B substitute winds up being (solar? wind? muffins?), a whole new set of predicaments has just popped up onto the adaptation and transition game board.
If we aren’t even talking about what we need to be considering on a massive, society-wide scale, we’re all going to be dealing with a collective set of very, very unpleasant surprises. Just a suggestion: perhaps we shouldn’t wait for that to happen?
12 Comments on "Peak Oil: Not Quite So Easy"
Arthur on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 11:53 am
Only one ‘solution’: solar panels on every roof and one or more wind turbines near every town.
And since those same resources will be needed to design, develop, deliver, operate, maintain whatever the Big Plan B substitute winds up being (solar? wind? muffins?)
Only in the early stages. The only factor that really matter is EROEI. Both wind and the latest solar have values higher than 10 and that is enough for a sustainable renewable energy base.
Forget about the car, that’s gone. But a renewable energy Johnny Come Lately like Holland will be able to substitute at least house hold electricity for 100% by 2023 purely based on wind. Maybe an overall energy substitution level of 30-50% can be achieved for developed societies like Europe and north-America by 2040-2050.
Future: no mass transport other than train, hardly cars (perhaps car sharing schemes), hardly plane traffic other than military, light industry, little global trade, fully developed IT communication and transaction infrastructure. Much more people in agriculture than the 2-3% today. The Israeli Kibbutz system as perhaps a model for the future. Return of the traditional family.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 12:39 pm
Your above is a nice preface to a cornucopian Sci-Fi drama with a happy ending. What could we call it? “Spaceship Holland”. Tiny Holland carves out a tiny niche in a collapsing world. Holland will rise above the waves of water and desperate foreign people knocking at its doors and attain greatness like years of old. Tiny Holland will quit the fresh-cut plants, flowers, and bulbs, and replace them with potatoes. The Dutch are already leading producer of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers. Dutch cheeses such as Gouda and Edam and other dairy products will support the 16MIL hardy souls. And while the fish hold out and if the Rhine ever cleans up fish will be on every table. Every roof will have solar panels even the roads. The place will be lit up like a Christmas tree in a world of darkness. I imagine when New York depopulates the Dutch will repopulate New York and start the gradual colonization of North America in a rhyme of history
Luck on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 1:22 pm
Arthur is right, the old Dutch traditions and life happened to be sustainable. But building windmills and solar panels on roofs in this flat country is another story. The Dutch politicians in their aim to have 18% renewable energy by 2020 forgot the stubborn Dutch nimby resistance. No windmills beyond my backyard, village, no windmills in the North Sea. If we drive by fossil driven cars to our beaches on a sunny day we won’t accept that ugly view on those windmill park even 12 miles offshore!
Arthur on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 1:23 pm
renewable energy Johnny Come Lately like Holland
I hope you did not miss that one, now did you Davy?
Davy, Hermann, MO on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 1:37 pm
Don’t get me wrong Art, if anyone will make it the Dutch will I just don’t buy any of us making it to your Sci-Fi world!
Arthur on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 2:07 pm
What is so Sci-Fi about wind mills?
I imagine when New York depopulates the Dutch will repopulate New York and start the gradual colonization of North America in a rhyme of history
http://tinyurl.com/ooolz94
Now that you mention it, we want it back.lol
Not difficult to recognize where the Breedweg (“Broadway”) is in Nieuw Amsterdam (sometimes misspelled as ‘New York’). Mark the *windmill*, roughly on the location where the WTC complex was. And the fortifications (Walls –> Walstraat) near Nieuw Haarlem, to keep assorted inconveniences out, such as Indians, British and similar.
Trent on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 2:13 pm
Davey, It must be exhausting to be you….even if you are right you are still wrong….do your legs still work? If they do get outside and live a little…you spend waaaaaay too much time on here! Ps…don’t let me hurt your ego……just a suggestion
Davy, Hermann, MO on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 2:26 pm
I hope you are right Art. Good to have some optimist to balance out the dregs like me that are deep dark doomers.
bobinget on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 3:06 pm
Why is Brent ‘only’ $108.10. OPEC output fell again last month with little comment.
When oil company propaganda hacks working overtime
telling us not to worry, a deadly ‘oil virus’ spreads across the Mideast. More then a hundred bus passengers were hurt, seventy one killed in a BOKO Haram attack in Nigeria Sunday.
Twenty seven Iraqis died in several suicide attacks this past week-end.
Civil War broke out today in Ukraine. Most Americans
believe Ukraine somewhere in US ‘flyover country’ so let Russians have it.
Rebels in Syria are fighting each other now Syrian Army is winning. Discouraged, angry Vets returning home to Saudi Arabia are jailed or worse.
KSA spent 67 Billion in 2013 on weapons.
KSA may have already taken delivery of many “Islamic Bombs”
An actual respiratory virus is running rampant in Saudi Arabian hospitals. Officials still in denial.
Iran is asking for additional processed U to run nuke.
Israel continues to threaten nuclear war to prevent nuclear war, of course.
Current US Congressman states flatly ONLY deep penetrating nuclear ‘bunker busters’ will ‘do the job’
on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
One piece of good news: Nuclear winter will slow global warming.
shortonoil on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 5:16 pm
“Most authors accept that conventional oil resources are at an advanced stage of depletion”
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For more than a century we have been coasting down a long dark, winding road from the top of an energy mountain. That road is named petroleum. The road ends at an unbridged abyss called depletion. The last few feet of the road is painted SHALE.
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The world’s petroleum reserve is in an advanced stage of depletion. In our 57 page report: “Depletion: A determination for the world’s petroleum reserve” we present a minutely detailed breakdown of how that result was attained. Anyone with the necessary mathematical skills can critique every step of the determination. More than a hundred people from all over the world have reviewed it, none so far, has substantially disagreed with it.
The report concludes, that as of 2012, 73% of the world’s extractable petroleum reserve had been removed. The report also concludes that the last 25% of that reserve will be orders of magnitude more costly to extract, and process than was the first 25%. The determination of the report is startling in its conclusion! As the percentage of the reserve that has been removed increases it becomes more costly. A point will be reached where it will no longer pay to continue. The remaining reserve is finite, and anything remaining after that becomes irrelevant; it will remain in the ground!
Stop by and see us sometime.
http://www.thehillsgroup.org
“Like the old man said, its not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that ain’t so”
Northwest Resident on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 6:49 pm
Trent — I spend almost every working day, eight hours a day, checking in on the comments and stories being posted here too. Reason why: The subject matter is intensely interesting to me and I am interested to know what people who dare to comment here are thinking, even those that I usually disagree with. Unlike Davy from MO, I also have to get some work done, which means that I check in every 30 minutes to an hour, whenever I have a break between programming tasks. I consider this blog/website to be something like a room with interesting characters hanging out, discussing things that really interest me. If this is where I and Davy and many others choose to hange out, WTF does it matter to you, and why would it be “waaaaaay too much time” if this is where the most interest is. Tell me where you spend most of your time and I’ll insult you for spending your time there too, then we’ll be even.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Mon, 14th Apr 2014 8:55 pm
Trent said – Davey, It must be exhausting to be you
Thanks N/R for summing up a view of why it is OK to be on this site way too much. As a doomer Trent I am seeing things move quickly towards a paradigm shift. I find it important now to stay in touch with the folks here many of whom share some of my thoughts. Trent, I detect a dissonance with your post. Why even give a rat’s ass about some Hoosier from MO spreading doom and gloom with his posts here? Anyway I work 12 hours a day on the farm. I admit the winter has been severe so I was on the site more than normal. I have an IPhone so I can take a break and check in on the blog when I am out in the fields. I most enjoy the morning with lots of posts before anyone but the Europeans are up. I drink allot of coffee and spit out the posts. If I bore or irritate you just don’t read or respond. Just do a mental “block sender” and send it to the trash file in your mind. And Trent when one post as much as I do you have to be humble in your arrogance because the more you talk the more open you are to criticism and ridicule. I probably have seen more of the world then you have being an ex 1%er and probably older than you. Anyway I feel privileged to take your criticism because it means you are reading what I say.