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Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

The peak and decline of US oil production is going to be one of the geopolitical stories of the next 25 years. If US renewables and nuclear don't fill the gap the need for global naval dominance is going to come knock knock knocking again. It looks very like there are three factors that are going to mean that reasserting dominace isn't just very hard:

- Missile tech has advanced and proliferated.

- US ship building is crippled, and expanding it (especially where needed) is going to be very difficult. Basically the US is going to need a lot of SSN and it won't be able to make them.

- There is a competitor power with sufficient resources to make it a real competition, and a very different conceptualisation of how the world should work.

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I don't know to what extent naval dominance will be useful. Even with EOR and TOR, Ghawar continues to decline, along with most of ME and Russian fields.

Global conventional peaked a long time ago, and EOR/TOR will only keep the game going another decade or so. Renewables and nuclear are the only long-term options. There's also coal, of which we have at least a hundred years in the PRB alone, if we're willing to match China in the "fuck the environment" game.

PRB: Powder River Basin, for the curious:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_River_Basin>

IIUC the U.S. has over a millenium's worth of energy usage in natural gas reserves. It does require using it, which means either EVs or nat. gas burning engines, and since we're already on our way to EVs that makes sense.

America was doing very well on renewable energy, it started a bit late than EU but accelerated quickly and just caught up. For some reason the new administration decided not to proceed any further.

Don't worry, I'm sure they are working to deliver war drones via ICBM

I don't think people realize that at current growth rates we have only 60 to 100 years or oil left. Growth will obviously flatten and decline way before then. The age of oil is over folks.

We've been saying that for 60 years.

I don't think people care. After all, they don't care about the degradation of our life support, which doesn't have much more than that either, at least at a civilization-sustaining level.

Nuclear replaces one problem with another (waste). Renewables are the only way

Nuclear waste is in no way comparable to the environmental damage incurred from the use of hydrocarbons in our economy.

Nuclear waste is not a substantial problem, technically. It's a NIMBY problem. It's just tradeoffs. Nuke is a wonderful power source that works today. That's better than tech that will work once we have 30 years of investment into storage and transmission networks. We do need renewables. We also need something to fill the gap in the meantime that isn't spewing carbon into an ecosystem that is already past a tipping point.

Nuclear "waste" is barely even waste, it's still full of a bunch of energy that could be put to use if we improved the reactors. It's just unusable in what we have now.

It's also miniscule.

The US to date has primarily approached the problem of civilian nuclear waste by planning for and building a single facility, then cancelling the entire thing before any waste was ever moved there. There are a couple pilot plants, those are exactly what they sound like.

The US will never solve the problem of nuclear waste.

Maybe 20 years ago. Something tells me if the nuke guys could get their shit together and grab the ear of the current admin, they could get their hole in the desert that they have always wanted. But instead they are more likely to play Nobody's Favorite as Big Oil continues to Big Oil and solar/wind continue to reap decades of subsidies.

Encase it in a big block of concrete. Dump it in the ocean. There, solved it. I know it sounds horrid because of the public perception issue, but it's really not a bad solution. Yes, I mean it. Be aghast!

Dropping nuclear waste in the Marianas trench is not a bad idea.

> It's just unusable in what we have now.

I really hate all of the defense of nuclear based on hypotheticals that realistically will never become reality by conveniently ignoring externalities like capitalism.

Our regulatory and governance environment is so unstable and can change significantly every 4 years. Companies play the long game and delay or resist change to outlast administrations.

This prevents any meaningful advance of the technology preventing it from becoming a viable solution.

This is not true for any of the nuclear waste generated in the US. Your talking about a fantasy world, not the current state.

Nuclear fission replaces one problem with another (waste).

this is nothing more than FUD. Waste can be repurposed, sometimes decades after the fact, as reactor technology improves. In fact, the latest reactors in service elsewhere in the world can recycle a portion of the waste as fuel, further minimizing it.

We also know its dangers and how to store it properly, and compared to the waste that simply oil and gas extraction creates, its significantly less (up to 90% less), and its exceedingly predictable.

Even if we know how to store it properly, that doesn't mean that we will store it properly. I don't see any reason why we should trust the MAGA regime (and the Democrats aren't much better) to handle it properly or to make things right if there is an accident.

> The peak and decline of US oil production...

The peak and decline of global oil production -not just U.S.- has been predicated for longer than I am alive. It's still in the future, and reserves have grown significantly. And the U.S. has natural gas reserves that are enormous, so at least the energy side is covered (though not non-fuel things like plastics and lubricants).

As for U.S. ship building... that could probably be fixed, though it will take years, but not so many that the USN's current advantages dissipate completely.

> The peak and decline of US oil production is going to be one of the geopolitical stories of the next 25 years

people have been saying that since the 70s at least. The reason why no one is fracking is because oil/gs is so cheap it's not worth it. If the price rises enough the wells turn back on and everyone starts doing it again. Renewables, demand, and regional stability is keeping prices low so putting in the extra effort fracking requires just isn't worth the return. Google says the average break even price of a fracking well in the Permian Basin (SW Texas) is $65/barrel. And the price of oil as of this comment is $65.98 so that would mean a lot of wells are just sitting there because it's not worth the money to pump.

And that's what it's all about: Energy Return on Investment. Conventional oil has a much much better return than fracking, and the US is out of it. This is what is meant by "decline". Sure, there's plenty of oil, but it's more expensive to get out, so we don't.

On the flip side, our economy is dependent on a certain EROI. Below that, it chokes because we don't have enough energy "slaves" to render the services we've came to depend upon.

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