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Comment by magashna | Hacker News Reader

Might be the shock we need to work on renewables and batteries more seriously on a global level.

That's what we thought 20 years ago during the "peak oil" nonsense and they just invented fracking. Talking about oil "reserves" paints a picture that petroleum extraction is like just scooping sludge out of a big underground bucket. Real deposits come in a huge variety of forms and qualities, and extracting them sits on a cost spectrum. All making oil more expensive does is make the more expensive oil worth extracting, prices stabilize at a slightly higher point and the market adapts.

Unfortunately we aren't going to run out of oil anywhere near soon enough to save the planet. We need to do it the hard way.

However the costs of renewable tech is coming down - at some point it's just a better business decision to switch off oil.

Exactly. Which is the "hard way". We need to win this with technology and, where technology alone isn't enough, with government action to curtail emissions. We aren't going to get lucky and run out of oil.

> prices stabilize at a slightly higher point

Which encourages renewable development. Renewables would not be as successful today with oil at $20/bbl.

Renewables would be ahead on cost down to USD 9-10/barrel:

https://investors-corner.bnpparibas-am.com/investment-themes...

"Competitive" is a curve, not a point.

Solar can be cheaper for daytime generation before it's cheaper for nighttime generation (when you need to tack on the cost of storage). Electric cars may already have a lower TCO, but if you already have an ICE car, it may not be worth the transaction costs of immediately selling it and buying an electric car instead of waiting until you would have bought a new car anyway, whereas it could be if gas prices were higher. The TCO is also affected by how much you drive, so the gas price that justifies replacing your car depends on how much you drive it.

There isn't a price level where $0.01 below it no one can justify buying an electric car and $0.01 above it everyone can. The higher oil prices get, the more people end up on the other side of the line.

I'm really skeptical of lower TCO for electric cars. My gasoline-powered car is worth $5k. All electric cars with decent range cost more in depreciation alone than my TCO. I think in a few years a Bolt will have a competitive TCO, and maybe a Model 3 will a few years after that.

You're comparing the TCO of a new electric car to a used gasoline car. We all know that used cars have a lower TCO than new ones in general. Nobody is going to crush a perfectly operational two year old gasoline car just because of higher gas prices (though that would obviously cause it to suffer higher depreciation due to the loss in resale value).

The real question is, as the old cars become unreliable and age out of service, how does the TCO compare as between the new cars that will replace them?

I'm comparing the TCO of a good value gasoline car to the best value electric car available (including used models). If you have a ton of disposable income, buying a Tesla could be a good decision, but very few people are in that position. Since we are taking about TCO, I assume we are talking about a financially literate purchaser.

I fully expect that electric cars will have a reasonable TCO in the future.

> All making oil more expensive does is make the more expensive oil worth extracting, prices stabilize at a slightly higher point and the market adapts.

For traders, at exactly which point matters a lot.

> Unfortunately we aren't going to run out of oil anywhere near soon enough to save the planet.

Yes, it's probably a good estimate: It doesn't mean that we won't achieve the "peak" in some decades, eventually even "more expensive" options will be used up, just that that won't prevent having much more CO2 than now.

"Some decades" ? Last time I checked, Laherrere predicted peak conventional + unconventional for 2019 ? (There's always the political uncertainties of course, especially in the Middle East!)

The latest I was able to find from Laherrere is:

https://aspofrance.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/35cooilforeca...

"The main conclusion of this study is this from 2018:

-only 6 countries have not yet reached peak: Brazil, Canada oilsands, Kazakhstan, Iraq, UAE, Venezuela Orinoco

-19 countries (out of 35) have or will have a decline rate of 5 %/a

It means that, excluding the 6 countries before peak, the best and the simplest way to forecast future production is to decrease present production by 5 % per year"

"6 countries have not yet reached peak" and "excluding the 6 countries" surely doesn't sound like "peak" everywhere.

So yes, it seems that, at longest, in "some" decades the global peak will do happen. Laherrere also documents why the exact predictions are hard (see all the graphs there).

My point is more, whoever thinks that "scientists will always find something" surely thinks in short enough frames. There is a finite amount of fossil fuel material on Earth.

Peak oil isn't nonsense. Predictions about when are often wrong but the idea is sound.

And it never meant running out. It's exactly what it says on the tin: a peak and a probably very long tail of decline.

There is "peak oil" as the basic geophysical concept, which is perfectly fine.

There is also "peak oil" as the prophecy of imminent collapse of industrial civilization, which was a much bigger thing a decade or so ago. It may still have some loyal believers.

I think that people unfortunately have the means to extract far more oil than we have the means to safely burn in Earth's atmosphere.

I can confirm. My mom is susceptible to internet fear mongering and got on some "peak oil" forums back around 2005. Many of them wanted you to believe that things were going to spiral out of control and that rioting and food shortages were imminent. Of course they could go back and say that they never said that explicitly, but the implication was there and it was clearly meant to scare the shit out of you. It seems that there's a certain type of person that secretly wants society to fall apart because they think it will solve all of their social and financial problems. I'm not sure they've thought it through very well.

Well, there is an alternative.

You are talking about peak oil supply. Instead, what if we run into peak oil demand.

IE, instead of running out of oil, we run out of oil demand, as everyone moves away from oil onto better technologies.

Not likely to happen as we don't have better technologies, and now no time left to develop and especially build the infrastructure for them...

But, we do!

The cost of solar panels and wind has been going down dramatically over the last couple decades, and is only continuing to do so.

The percentage of electric cars is also increasing.

There is a lot of oil in the ground. It isn't going to run out in the next decade. By which time these technologies will have become even better.

I'm talking about today. What are the current energy cost comparisons? And the new infrastructure itself would need a lot of energy to build... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/

But... This whole conversation was about peak oil. We don't need all that stuff right now. We only need to build it before we run out of oil.

And I am saying that it is going to take us a much longer time to run out of oil, than it is to build all that new infrastructure. Not because building the infrastructure is easy, but because there is a whole lot of oil in the ground, and therefore we have a lot of time.

IE, people will stop using oil, because the price of solar, ect has gone down, way before we come close to actually running out of oil.

As you might know, peak oil is not about literally "running out of oil" (and the article I have linked expands on it), and my point is that we are in the very process of hitting peak (conventional+unconventional) oil - actually those attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure might mark this precise point... (or not, but we certainly don't have decades left...)

Ok, but we aren't currently in that process.

The potential oil production capacity of the world has massively increased, because of fracking.

And if oil prices go up, a whole lot of oil in the US and Canada , become immediately profitable to extract.

I think you are severely underestimating how much non conventional oil there is, that we could start extracting, if it became profitable.

AFAIK, the US tight oil has nearly peaked (and they still aren't profitable !!), and I don't think that there's much additional production capacity left there, though higher prices will certainly help. (The depletion rate is just too great to sustain the production for long...)

I am indeed unsure (and a bit scared) about the potential from oil sands (and maybe shale oil = kerogen).

This was one of the weakest Do The Math entries. Perhaps because it hinged upon human behavior more than physics/math (the author's strengths). The thesis:

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability — first in petroleum — our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but... energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term - effectively steepening the decline - for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

Yes, "we" would be willing to tolerate the use of increasingly scarce fossil energy to build non-fossil energy resources. Because the "we" investing in new non-fossil energy is largely separate from the "we" who worry about paying this month's bills if gasoline prices go up by a dollar a gallon.

Investors care about what consumers want insofar as they see a way to profit by building things that consumers will pay for. Building non-fossil energy projects in a time of high fossil energy costs counts. Depleting their investment capital to temporarily subsidize retail level prices of fossil-derived energy doesn't count. They were never going to offer to do the latter, and even populist politicians (of the American variety) rarely propose seizing wealth to directly subsidize gasoline/electricity/natural gas at the retail level. American politicians have different approaches to making energy cheaper.

There's a relatively small number of countries in the world that directly subsidize fossil fuels at the retail level for large swaths of the population. If this blog entry were written about e.g. India or Egypt I would find the political/institutional problem with higher fossil energy prices plausible as described. But it doesn't describe most of the world's democracies, nor China (for different reasons), nor most other countries.

There's also a lot of countries having a much less laissez-faire attitude regarding energy - I'd even say that the USA is more of an exception...

For instance, in Europe road transportation fuels tend to be heavily taxed - so they have the option of lowering those taxes to amortize any potential oil shocks (but not too long, and at the cost of taking the budget hit - a bit like India/Egypt in the end...)

Even a more centrally coordinated approach is likely to end up in roughly the same place as a laissez-faire market approach: building replacement energy infrastructure faster rather than slower as a reaction to a persistently declining petroleum supply. As long as that happens, the "energy trap" described by Murphy doesn't materialize. A major French response to the first oil crisis in the early 1970s was a government coordinated plan to build nuclear reactors [1].

It's only people pushed toward bad decisions by short-term desperation (weak government leaders facing rioting, individuals too poor to steer market investment decisions) whose behaviors would set up this "energy trap." Market-driven investors and rational governments alike will invest resources into reducing future consumption of an increasingly expensive fuel even if it somewhat exacerbates the immediate problems caused by higher fuel prices.

[1] Building nuclear reactors as a reaction to high oil prices made more sense than may be obvious now. At the time, France actually did produce a lot of electricity by burning oil. Oil-fueled electricity became much less popular after the 1970s except in petro-states and in isolated locations. Surprisingly, Pakistan managed to make the same mistake in the 1990s of building oil-fired electricity plants, which became very expensive to operate less than a decade later.

Ah, but we don't really have "Market-driven investors and rational governments" in the West anymore, not since the 80's :

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-private-equity-should...

And Macron was really an idiot when he thought that asking the poorest people to pay the most for the ecological transition was going to fly...

But isn't this also a symptom of an energy trap - the government itself not having any slack left for long-term planning ?

http://www.lecourrierdesstrateges.fr/2018/11/04/augmentation... (fr)

(Note that, in the end, the above seems to be very similar to issues in Egypt - government balance taking a hit due to less income from fossil fuels - well except that the Egypt issues are more dramatic, being caused by the country becoming a gas importer instead of exporter...)

Peak oil is nonsense. All resources on Earth are finite. What’s special about oil? Why not peak aluminum or peak concrete or peak cobalt?

> Peak oil is nonsense

No, it's not.

> All resources on Earth are finite. What’s special about oil?

Nothing; it would be special if it was an extractable resource and didn't have a peak where utility vs. cost of extraction meant that extraction declined from the peak.

> Why not peak aluminum or peak concrete or peak cobalt?

Aluminum and Cobalt, as extractable resources, will probably also have extraction peaks.

The earth's crust is 8% Aluminum.

But not all of it is equally easy to extract. In any case, yeah, “peak aluminum” is far more distant than peak oil.

Here’s Hubert’s peak oil projection and the actual oil production in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_pea...

Now there are multiple schools of thought, but one of them holds that when reality diverges so much from theory as in this plot, it’s time to question the theory.

I think maybe the hard way will be gene-edited phytoplankton and overcoming efficiency bottlenecks in photosynthesis, such as by introducing bacterical carboxysomes into plants to make RuBisCO more efficient, or by making plants use C3 in the midday leaves higher on the plant and C4 everywhere else, or by replacing chlorophylls with versions that respond to different wavelengths of light.

The peak of the peak oil scare was 40 years ago (given that the peak was scheduled for the mid 70s), not 20. This is actually the first time I’ve heard of there being another scare 20 years ago.

For example, Mad Max in 1979 comes from that sentiment.

I think the Carter administration's incident in the late 1970's is more accurately characterized as an "oil crisis" because there were real shortages, serious enough to alter trends in car purchasing habits, warranting economy automobile redesigns (smaller, lighter, more efficient, no more muscle cars). Gas stations actually ran out of gas, resulting in hours long waits on miles long lines, and theft by siphoning forcing the introduction of keyed locks on gas tanks.

These were real problems people faced, although it wasn't exactly a full panic.

Oil "scares" on the other hand were threats that raised eyebrows, and caused dramatic price fluctuations in anticipation potential problems. Each "scare" really only hit the wallet and bank account, without altering real behavior.

In that sense, yes, there were a few other "scares" between Jimmy Carter and present day. Each grouping came periodically, maybe every ten years. Almost all of them were tied to Iraq.

The first was the invasion of Kuwait in 1991. I think gas prices blew past $2/gallon for the first time.

The second was 9/11, and $4/gallon gas starting late 2001. This one was rough. Pretty much everyone I knew was groaning about gas prices, and with Iraq invasion rumors people started thinking $5 would break them.

The 2003 Iraq invasion actually resulted in a downward trend (due to international theft or spoils), but it's ever been below $2 again, and it's been back up to $4 at the pump, here and there, depending on geographic region and state taxes, here and there.

With the 2008 meltdown, oil prices weren't displaying any gouging, and there wasn't much of a scare at the 2001 decade mark, because as others have mentioned, fracking has buoyed domestic production.

Petrol is still cheap when inflation is considered (consider $1 in 1984 is $2.40 in 2018). Also, the first oil shock occurred during Nixon (with a second one under Carter).

You're confusing peak USA (conventional) oil - which happened circa 1970, with the peak world (conventional) oil, which happened circa 2010 . Next stop : peak world conventional+unconventional oil circa 2020 ?

Don't get your hopes up. There's trillions of barrels of oil resource in the Green River formation (Wyoming, etc)--more than the reserves of the rest of the world combined. It's very unconventional (oil shale/kerogen), but I've seen some estimates that say it's no more expensive to extract than tar sands oil (once you start developing the resource).

We're going to have to do this the hard way, as the other poster mentioned. Decide to keep it in the ground.

If it's "no more expensive to extract" (and process, transport, refine...), why hasn't anyone bothered yet ?

Because there's a large capital (and learning curve) upstart requirement. It's almost like you missed this: "(once you start developing the resource)"

Additionally, tar sands are very marginal economically. Arguably not profitable right now. Fracking tight oil is cheaper, and even that is not being pursued as vigorously as it was when oil prices were higher.

And there are environmental regulations that get in the way of oil shale/kerogen extraction. And for good reason.

That was true too for Oil Sands and Tight Oil. (Heck, any oil play needs capex, starting from the first drilled ones!) And yet we are... P.S.: But we basically seem to agree, so this is nitpicking on my part...

Global peak was scheduled for the mid 70s in the original 1956 paper. USA peak was set for 1970, which actually happened even if it was a false peak.

Have we read the same paper ? It was clearly forecasted for the turn of the century...

Peak oil featured prominently in Al Bartlett's talk about exponential growth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY Still a good talk, but it seems he was wrong about peak oil, just like Malthus was wrong about population growth.

How exactly was Malthus wrong about population growth ?

No, the price of oil will jump to 80-100/bbl and all of the tar sands extraction will become rather profitable again and North American production will explode.

OPEC had been keeping the prices around 100 until the tar sands extraction became big and they had to drastically cut prices because they couldn't handle the loss of revenue.

There is an enormous amount of oil tied up in those tar sands and it is very extricable, but it is considerably more expensive to extract such that it isn't economical at current prices.

Not to mention actually very inefficient and polluting.

Seriously. Ask some Athabascans about how extricable tar sands oil is.

We are so far out over our skis in terms of the need for oil input to the agricultural sector that the overall economic system will not bat an eye at despoiling everything around it.

Oil prices going back up to $100 a barrel would drive adoption of electric cars at a much faster pace.

Itd actually be a good thing for the environment.

The greater the cost the more conservation makes business sense.

If an efficient fridge is only 15$/month cheaper it's not replacing your current fridge. At 50$/month it quickly pays off.

We have crossed over into the period where renewable energy sources and related required infrastructure is on par or cheaper than fossil fuels.

It is now just a matter of capital costs replacing old infrastructure with new while ramping up the industries that provide the replacements.

Inefficiencies scale with ramp up speed, but if you increase the cost of fossil fuels those inefficiencies are more competitive so you get a faster ramp-up.

It would, but if it's anything like the last time gas was outrageously expensive, people seem to forget the high prices once they go down.

No one bought SUVs in 2008-2010, but now they're one of the most popular types of cars and ford has alltogether stopped making car models

Electric vehicle development has a large hysteresis, every time it’s pushed forward battery and component costs will fall, bringing new classes of vehicle below cost parity with combustion vehicles, that will only be reversed in part if the oil price returns to the same point as before.

What is "enormous" worth in terms of years of world consumption?

Enough.

Estimates generally exceed the total known amount of in-ground crude oil.

Enough to supply North America for a century.

Enough that it would never all be used, the price of extraction guarantees other renewable sources of energy will be very competitive while petroleum products will remain available near the previous peak raw petroleum prices from a few years ago (prices collapsed when production of this newer source started to ramp up).

It has been a really good foreign policy lever against Russia and unfriendly middle-east countries, limiting their oil profits and always holding over their heads that we could subsidize the shit out of it and drive them into poverty and ruin.

Source for this ridiculous "century" claim ?

(Also, "it would never all be used" is a given, what is the expected "peak gas" date ?)

I didn't look up the tar sands because it is kind of irrelevant considering the green river formation in the US alone has 3 trillion barrels worth of shale oil with half expected to be recoverable [0] and that is being extracted at current prices so no need for prices to go up. At 100 million barrels of oil usage per day for the globe, it could support the world's oil usage by itself for over 40 years. The US consumes about a fifth of global oil so that's 200 years worth of oil for you. There are also other shale oil sources in the US.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_Formation#Oil_shal...

1.) gas is not shale oil (= kerogen)

2.) shale oil is NOT being extracted - you're confusing with tight oil

3.) we don't know whether extracting shale oil even makes sense - for all we know, it might never become economically and energetically viable (IMHO, considering global warming, tight oil/gas & tar sands did not make sense in the first place either - especially since the whole tight oil industry hasn't even shown to be financially and therefore probably energetically profitable !)

4.) even if we did, the (E)ROI (and therefore, the pollution involved) is likely to be dismal

5.) a century ago, world oil production was a few million barrels per day, you can't just both assume business as usual and the consumption to stay flat when taking into account future consumption...

More seriously? I’m not sure it’s a reasonable position to claim that renewables and battery tech are not being “seriously” worked on.

Just looking at solar and battery manufacturing growth, on the order of $100 billion / year is being invested annually in these technologies. I think it’s very reasonable to conclude that doubling the investment would not nearly double the rate of advances, because all the top experts are already fully employed and fully funded.

Hmm, how does this compare with money invested in fossil fuels ?

As a percentage of the current market size, the R&D for batteries and renewables is probably an order of magnitude greater than R&D in fossil fuels.

From a public investment perspective, the trend is that fossil fuel R&D is shrinking, and renewables investment is increasing or steady. Renewables public investment was first higher than fossil fuels in 1998, and has been higher than fossil fuel public investment 9 out of the last 10 years. [1]

[1] - https://www.iea.org/statistics/rdd/

But 20 G$ isn't 100 G$... And that's just for the IEA countries, if you aren't counting the big fossil fuel players like Russia and OPEC on one hand and also China on the other - what is even the point of these numbers ?

And I see that the biggest US tight oil firms had a deficit of nearly 7 G$ for 2018, so I'd assume that their development costs (which are the majority of their costs due to the very high depletion rate) are even higher - so where does yours "order of magnitude greater" comes from ?

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-shale-finances/cash-flow...

"World's top banks pour $1.9T into fossil fuel financing since 2015"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180826

So that's ~$380 G$/y for "just" the "top banks".

If oil prices go up renewables become more profitable, BUT they also become more expensive, since energy is a huge component in their cost.

It's pretty much a wash.

Don't expect higher oil prices to spur renewables, it has never happened, and never will. Instead renewables become profitable (and thus popular) when we become more efficient at making and installing them.

> since energy is a huge component in their cost

I want to see some data to back up this claim.

> It's pretty much a wash.

I guess you'd need energy to make up >90% of the cost to make it "pretty much a wash"?

> I want to see some data to back up this claim.

I'll try to get some, but do a thought experiment: What component of, say, a solar panel cost is not energy?

> I guess you'd need energy to make up >90% of the cost to make it "pretty much a wash"?

Yes, and it is.

Not in terms of you have to pay oil companies all that money, but rather that energy is the multiplier that all prices are based off of.

If oil costs go up, then your suppliers costs go up, all the way down the chain. Including salaries - since the workers need more money to buy stuff, they want higher salaries.

Think about what is costs to make something, every single thing, at it's endpoint costs energy.

You've forgotten all of the other sources we use to produce energy: coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, renewables, etc.. and a fraction also comes from oil.

So oil tripling overnight would not result in a tripling of energy prices. There would be a small increase as load is shifted to other sources.. and there would be an increase in transportation costs of solar panel delivery. But the cost of a panel would barely increase. And those factories near nuclear, hydro, etc plants would see a slight competitive advantage over those in areas where energy comes from oil (but again, coal is a big source of energy.. oil much less so).

> So oil tripling overnight would not result in a tripling of energy prices.

By the very nature of energy, oil prices CAN'T triple without all other energy sources also tripling.

If there was a shortage of oil then the price of oil simply could not go up unless there just wasn't enough energy from other sources. Oil (and natural gas) are the most flexible of all energy sources, most of them are pretty maxed out, but oil and gas can adjust to take up slack.

Oil was 19$ in 1998, and 107$ a decade later (inflation adjusted). That’s over 5x.

https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices...

Here’s retail energy prices: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.php?t=p...

Show me where it went up anything close to 5x

> By the very nature of energy, oil prices CAN'T triple without all other energy sources also tripling.

This is false. You can't freely substitute oil with nuclear-generation as price vary. There are a huge number of cars and airplanes and plastics production that depend on oil.

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