Is This Peak Gas?
consciousnessofsheep.co.uk
consciousnessofsheep.co.uk
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20211012131321/https://conscious...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...
And also https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/16/5112
A naive calculation brings 2037 as the global turning point for peak available energy from fossils (see the articles).
No.
Energy is a cyclical market. That’s a healthy thing. Upswings in price trigger market forces to substitute or economize.
If one gas well in the North Sea runs out, you're correct someone drills another well. When ALL the gas wells in the North Sea run out, thats how you get a peak of 4.5MBE/day back around the turn of the century and now production has dropped permanently to a quarter of that around 1MBE/day.
If you have an infinite supply of something, like in some areas, drinking water, then economic activity controls water bottle filling plants. If you have a finite supply of something, like in some areas, drinking water, then economic activity has no effect if the wells are dry you don't have water. Water is very heavy commodity so trade between east of the mississippi with five feet of rain per year and California deserts with no rain, is irrational or at least very economic and environmentally expensive. On the other hand you can pack a billion dollars of silicon chips into a small moving van so world trade of semiconductors still makes sense... for now.
Also some economic activity being cyclical is "OK" or manageable. But food is oil, and you can't rationally go cyclical on food. So that's a second problem with oil. If you "let the market do its thing" with STM32 microcontrollers, you'll get a year long drought of 99% of everyone has nothing but the world will go on, more or less. Try that kind of supply squeeze with food and the government will fall within days.
Regarding food, there's quite a bit of flexibility in food supply- we primarily produce calories for enjoyment, not sustenance. Yes, hunger will topple governments. But "letting the market do its thing" with food doesn't necessarily mean famine. It may mean shortages of specific foods which don't make economic sense. High meat prices, unavailability of particular types of fruits and vegetables.
Famine is terrifying, yes. But we should also acknowledge that there's a huge amount of contraction that can happen in our food production systems before bellies go empty.
Energy supply changes aren’t a black swan event. Every time there’s a price spike, the demand curve is shifted by replacement and efficiency improvements. That’s why coal is a dead industry. That’s why solar went from a rounding error to a significant player that has slowed peak electric demand.
Issues like water in arid areas like the American West are very different. Personally, I’m about 40, and I don’t think there will be a serious supply-side disruption in oil/gas supply in my lifetime. I do think that we will have a significant disruption in access to fruit and vegetable supply due to brain dead US agriculture policy. And I think my kids will see grain shortages in their lifetime as the Midwest aquifers are depleted.
Cries of “it will never go down!” and “this is peak oil!” were everywhere.
A year later gas was $1.50/gal, cheaper than it had been in decades.
Someone in 1910 in Pennsylvania or Western NY would be concerned about peak oil from the standpoint that trivially extractable (by todays standards) oil was running out and is most out today.
That drives prices up, drives higher risk exploration, and ultimately exploitation becomes operational and cheap. This drives the price down like any other commodity business.
Is this one of the "X will the the coming Y and always will be" topics?
Which is good, because then hopefully some oil will be left over to bootstrap advanced civilization if the need arises. Otherwise things might stagnate at pre-industrial levels, or spend a long time lingering in a slave-powered semi-industrial state (where you have human power growing fuel for a small elite's technology, which consequently advances slowly).
In reality human history is littered with energy crises. At various times and places society has faced risks due to insufficient energy. Before the industrial revolution, deforestation represented a risk in some places, as did over-whaling for oil. Rather than just returning to slave labor to power everything, we found new energy sources and kept developing new technology. In the past this involved coal and eventually oil, but going forward this could easily be renewables or nuclear. Pretending that the lack of oil exploitation means the end of industrial society is a very myopic view of human society and technology production.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is fossil fuels may be required for the transition from a pre-industrial society to an industrial society that can do everything with renewable energy. We're towards the tail end of that transition, but it took a hundred+ years of fossil fuel use to get there. If there aren't any fossil fuels left, it may be impossible to make that transition again (say after a nuclear war that destroys the power grid and battery manufacturing/supply chains).
I think in theory that makes sense, but I doubt that it's practically a concern. I think in practice any situation where you're tapping the last bits of oil in order to re-boot a technical base, then I very much doubt that the planet would remain habitable long enough for that society to boot strap a new technical base and solve the problems created by burning the last of the oil. I think in such a scenario humanity is probably doomed.
I feel like you're thinking about climate change there and focusing too much on it. IIRC, even a global, full-scale nuclear war wouldn't render the planet uninhabitable. Billions would die, but some people with the skills to survive would make it through. I can think of other, more speculative collapse scenarios.
And that’s presuming there’s enough of it left to bootstrap. We’ve wasted a lot of it to get to the point where solar and nuclear exist, whether we could replicate that with what will be left is unclear to me. There’s certainly not a lot of good coal left, for example. We burnt most of it in the 19th century, and a new industrial revolution would have to make do with the subpar stuff we’ve left behind.
I don't think they say that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#Eart...:
> Within current models of the runaway greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide (especially anthropogenic carbon dioxide) does not seem capable of providing the necessary insulation for Earth to reach the Simpson–Nakajima limit.[7][8]
> Debate remains, however, on whether carbon dioxide can push surface temperatures towards the moist greenhouse limit.[24][25] Climate scientist John Houghton has written that "[there] is no possibility of [Venus's] runaway greenhouse conditions occurring on the Earth".[26] The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has also stated that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."[27] However, climatologist James Hansen disagrees. In his Storms of My Grandchildren he says that burning coal and mining oil sands will result in runaway greenhouse on Earth.[28] A re-evaluation in 2013 of the effect of water vapor in the climate models showed that James Hansen's outcome would require ten times the amount of CO2 we could release from burning all the oil, coal, and natural gas in Earth's crust.[24]
If you ignore the environment impact, you can bootstrap your Industrial Revolution with coal just fine. In fact, that's what happened historically.
Anything that happens now is viewed through a pseudo "it's the system" and IMO sort of implied apocalyptic-ism about it. It really wears on me.
Globally we might not be there yet though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211011180352/https://conscious...
This can lead to a painful short term energy crisis. Many will celebrate this pain and suffering pointing out that it creates an insensitive to move to alternatives.
If we run out of energy before we exit our gravity well, that's one instance of the great filter. Resource conflicts might also trigger war that could destabilize society and prevent us from advancing.
The world needs energy, yet many of us pay far less attention than we should.
We’re just going to have to get over our fear of nuclear power.
We got really lucky that our planet accumulated vast stored energy reserves that were easy to extract and use.
Yes, there is a finite resource involved.
Yes, using it, whether we find more or not, makes the planet uninhabitable for the size of the human population due to it being uninhabitable for many existing species.
But is it peak gas/oil/whatever? No. It never is because currently uneconomical sources become economical. The article slightly addresses that by saying the last decade of fracking was an accounting gimmick that allowed unprofitable operations to work out okay. Uh yeh thats exactly whats going to happen with even more harder to extract and create gas.
Meh. We're not staring down the abyss of the "net energy cliff" where near-100% of energy goes to procuring more energy. The reason for our shortages is because of things like (for instance) various politicians deciding to not-build Keystone XL (US) or to delay Nord Stream 2 (Europe). Because of these decisions — surprise surprise — we aren't being delivered the products they'd carry.
Some of those noises are even legitimate. But the Net Energy Cliff™ is a long long long way off. In hard-hit Europe, for instance, Germany is sitting on fantastical reserves of shale gas and oil which they could access by fracking, but won't. Good decision? Some say so. Energy-cliff apocalypse? Hahahaha no.
Heck, if it really came to that, we'd bring back nuclear.
You say this as if energy consumption isn't fungible in the slightest, and that we'd gladly fall off the net energy cliff™ before trying to make any substitutions.
If you're saying that Putin wants to strong-arm the west by not providing enough gas at normal prices until NS2 is approved, then yeah that makes sense. But this wouldn't be because of NS2, it's because of Putin.
It's still limiting capacity. There's still lots of gas in Russia. Heck, there's still lots of gas in Groningen, they've just stopped pumping it. In neither case are we staring down a net energy cliff™.
I hope we will get out of crisis stronger than before, not weaker, and don't default back to burning coal for the long term.