Former BP geologist: peak oil is here and it will 'break economies'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
1882: "only 95 Million barrels remaining/4 years of oil left"
1919: "only 20 years of oil left"
1950: "only 100 Billion barrels left"
1956: "peak oil" by 1970
1980: "only 648 Billion barrels left"
1993: "only 999 Billion barrels left"
2000: "only 1016 Billion barrels left"
2008: "only 1238 Billion barrels left"
The point is not the peak oil will never happen, it's that we have no clue when it will.
Past precedent says prices will rise slightly, technology will improve, and new oil that was once too expensive to obtain becomes obtainable. Here's my prediction: We will switch to some cheaper alternative long before oil ever runs out. There won't be some dramatic crisis where everything goes to shit. It will be a gradual change where oil prices steadily climb and consumption slowly diminishes. Just like has already happened with countless other resources and just like is happening now.
Source and video explanation [Are we running out of Resources?]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcWkN4ngR2Y
And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish.
It also says that there's no natural law that "technology will improve" always, so that getting harder to get oil will only require the prices to rise "slightly". At some point a specific technology does not improve anymore, or you get diminishing returns.
Also, common sense says, that as time goes by, and measurements improve, it's far more likely for us to predict correctly how many barrels are left that it was in the past.
Common sense says that for a civilisation to run out of a resource and NOT find a proper, similarly cheap, replacement in due time, it's bloody probable. Nothing strange about it.
Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law. I guess they are more into science as religion, than in science as science.
(Shrug) On the one side, we have some people who have always said that. They have always been right.
On the other side, we have some people who have always forecast an imminent heat death of Malthusian malaise for us all. Those people have never been right, so I'd say they bear the burden of proof that This Time It's Different.
Never been right? They'd been right in predicting the Big Depression. They'd been right saying this "gold rush" thing was BS.
Heck, there were people who predicted the decline and fall of Rome quite accurately. There were people who predicted the dot-com bust quite adequately. There were people who warned about the dangers of Nazi germany (or even the dangers of the Versailles treaty) before it was even a consideration for most. There were people who warned about the housing market bubble quite adequately.
Now, as for why those people (doing the warning) might seem to be wrong more often that others saying it's all OK.
Consider someone playing russian roulette -- perhaps with a 20 bullet chamber. Some other guy warns him: what are you doing, are you crazy? But he pulls the trigger and nothing happens. The other guy warns him again, stop it man, you'll kill yourself. Again, nothing happens. This goes on for a while, until at some point, say the 14th try, the guy blows his brains out.
Well, this same thing happened with situations like the recent economic crash.
Now, some people view it like the person giving the warning was wrong 13 times, and only right once. They'll say, dismisingly, "Well of course he eventually got it right: he always kept to the same warning even when he was wrong. Even a broken watch tells the right time 2 times a day, etc".
But I'd argue that that person was right ALL ALONG. Even when nothing had yet happened. And that if some other kind of action was chosen as he warned it should be (e.g putting the gun down), the tragedy would have been avoided.
The Russian Roulette analogy is not applicable because we're not discussing random processes.
What, out of the recession? That's fairy tale level denial. The thing is still going strong, and it's not even close to over yet. Neither is the US economy coming out stonger at this point.
>The Russian Roulette analogy is not applicable because we're not discussing random processes.
Actually it's perfectly applicable.
For one, the processes we're discussing are essentially stochastic -- there are so many random factors playing into the economy at any given time.
Second, as with the russian roulette, the long term result after a specific consistent course of action is extremely deterministic (you blow your brains in one case, or you fuck up the economy in the other).
The only thing that's guaranteed when consuming a finite resource at an accelerating rate is that sooner or later, It Will Be Different.
It always depends. Every situation is different and it always boils down to a risk assessment. We have to make a collective call on whether the risks of doing nothing outweigh the benefits.
Unfortunately we can't rely on our current obsession: "the markets" to make an accurate risk assessment for us. Markets and oligarchies (and darwinism for that matter) operate within established patterns. They optimize and specialise for short term success. It takes external pressures to implement transformative change.
That external pressure will either be uncomfortably "communist" or the "creative destruction" of a global bloodletting that destroys most of our ecosystems.
Are you naive enough to assume that all effects of "precautions" are necessarily benign?
I'd argue that for a very large part of the global population, maybe even the majority, life as they know is, is pretty close to a Malthusian malaise, and has been for ages.
Sure technological improvements eventually got us to the energy level we were at in 2005 ... but only just barely and only for a week. Since then it's been going down, with predictable results.
And while shale (currently) provides a few years delay, it's only for a few years, and maybe even only America. That's the problem with these ass-saving technologies. The first few times they saved our ass for several centuries (coal + trains, which will keep working, later nuclear). The next revolution saved our collective energy-hogging asses for ~60 years. The next one, horizontal drilling, did for ~10-15 years. Now we have shale oil, which saves our asses for 5-6 years tops.
The situation is not as rosy as you indicate at all. We're effectively dependent on ALL technologies operating at totally maxed out capacity for economic prosperity, and a lot of these technologies are faltering all at the same time. It won't be pretty.
Frankly we have ~5 years to increase the efficiency of batteries (which have improved a factor 2 in ~100 years in mass/energy and volume/energy). Not by a factor of 2, but a factor of 10, to keep our society at the same technological level. Nobody has any even theoretical ideas to get a twofold improvement. We only have 5 years because of shale oil, and we knew perfectly well in 2000 that we'd need this super-battery before the decade was out, and humanity simply failed ...
I went to a robotic mechanics lecture 2 years ago. The opening line was this : you climbed 5 floors to get here, and you got seriously tired (the elevators were out). If you had been the best robot we have, with roughly half it's weight dedicated to battery you would have just used ~50% of the total energy contents of your battery. This is a problem that needs to be solved before we have any real hope of true independent robots.
Oh and let's feel inspired by nature. Wait. How does nature solve this ? Well, here's the basic formula for oil CnH2n+2. Here's the basic formula for human fat : CnH2nOOH. In both cases the energy is stored in the same chemical structure. The energy is pretty much stored in the exact same chemical bonds in the human body (or any animal) and in a gas tank. In other words : in 4 billion years evolution did not find a better way. Do you think humanity is likely to improve upon it ?
You best hope so. Or we'll see repeats of 2008, except without recovery.
I am confident that peak consumption will outrun peak production and that we have a lot of leeway to reduce consumption even more quickly without making major changes to our way of life.
"will be out in the mass market in 5 years",
or as in
"some research centers are taking grants and producing hald-assed results and/or there are some ho-hum products rushed out that don't work as expected and cost a ton"?
In other words, as in "next generation SSDs" or as in "memsistor drives/holographic memory for everybody".
From Oct. 2013: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/02/japan-solar-e...
From Apr. 2009: http://phys.org/news172224356.html
Jared Diamond's book Collapse is an exploration of the phenomenon. A bit hard to read if you're paying attention.
And common logic says that a resource that is finish will, sooner or later, finish.
(Let's ignore, for the sake of argument, the fact that oil isn't finite and can be produced in a lab from organic materials, albeit expensively; we can also ignore that oil will naturally form over millions of years from decomposing plant and animal materials, since that's largely irrelevant to humanity as we know it.)
Eventually, even as oil supply diminishes and prices go up, even as people switch away to electricity, someone somewhere will still have a need to consume oil. Years after it's barely useful anymore, even though battery tech has gotten so good it surpasses the internal combustion engine dollar for dollar even ignoring the tax credits, there'll be a lab buried away still burning it for something. And finally, some day, the last drop — or at least, the last easily-recoverable natural drop – of oil will be burned.
But, to be honest, it won't really matter.
The scariest energy-related crisis facing us in the foreseeable future isn't the inability to burn oil or other cheap but dirty energy sources: it's the ease with which everyone currently does burn them, slowly but surely smothering, melting, and then freezing the planet. I hope the BP geologist is right; I'd rather face peak oil than an ice age.
If you (or anyone) actually believed that you'd be going out and buying oil and oil rights, expecting to get rich off the massive price increase you are predicting.
If people did that it wouldn't be a problem in the first place (it would conserve oil from the present supply for future demand, stabilizing the price.)
PS financial institutions already do that.
But I do believe that markets are more rational than you are giving them credit for, and that the reason oil isn't being conserved even more is that no one actually believes that and is willing to bet their money on it.
Survivorship bias. If it hadn't worked that way in the past, we wouldn't be here talking about it :)
That is because IT IS a natural law.
If this law were not true, then there would be no humans on earth. It it scientific because there is evidence with real data to prove the hypothesis.
The fact is that humans are not only resource consumers but also resource creators.
It is you who misled science as science for "religion of the Doomsday". Science tells us that there is trillions of billions of stars, each carrying trillions of times more energy that we consume.
And the 1956 prediction of a peak around 1970 wasn't a prediction of a global peak, it was a prediction of a US peak -- which occurred just as predicted.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MC...
Its been rising for a while, but still way below the peak in 1970. The behavior observed is not at all inconsistent with the prediction.
And yet, even if all that is true, oil is still a finite resource being consumed with ever increasing demand.
The only thing this proves, if it proves anything, is that we're terrible at accurately stating the terms of the problem, not that there won't ever be a problem.
That can't be said for certain: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/making-renewabl/
But yes, I agree with you. If oil is for some reason impossible to produce synthetically then there will without question have to come a time when we need to switch to an alternative. I think that switch will happen naturally without the need for government intervention, though. Even without a synthetic alternative I think that switch will happen sooner rather than later.
Though the FT process is quite bad from a CO2 emissions POV.
it's not a fossil fuel that gets dug up. It's a renewable, carbon-neutral storage of solar power, really.
It's heavily subsidized, pushes food prices up, causes deforestation and requires more energy to produce than it produces.
It's a short term hack that exists because it fits in to the current energy systems, not a longterm solution. It certainly does constitute as 'oil' for the purposes of this discussion.
That's not just finding more efficient systems. That's inventing them, engineering them, building them, replacing existing systems, and the ROI of the ENTIRE process (including the activity needed for said replacement) needs to be at least 4% of the size of the economy. Every year. Even the renewable technologies we have, like solar, fail this test because of their production energy costs.
When was the last year we saw 1% improvement in the economy ? Right.
> Here's my prediction: We will switch to some cheaper alternative long before oil ever runs out.
But that's the thing, cheapness, or infinite availability, or both.. this threatens existing profits. Greater global good but less personal profit = not good enough. Hence my wondering about the existence of "advertising budgets" for steering away from that.
You may not personally have been affected by the previous price rise, but in the developing world and for people already living below the poverty line these price rises will trigger more riots, revolutions, mass emigrations and resource wars.
And then there's fertilizers...
I just hope nuclear or the unproven renewables come on line smoothly, otherwise coal might come back. There's 200 years supply for North America at current energy usage, in North America. But coal is awful. Just the radiation released into the air by burning it kills more people every year than Chernobyl and that's without considering "normal" air pollution.
Well, I don't see the reason for such optimism. Economies have breen broken for far less, including stuff like housing booms.
Now, some economies are so closely tied to oil (and so little diversified) that they will bust witout a doubt -- most middle eastern ones for example. Venezuela.
Then, even if we had a perfect replacement source, the investments needed in building it and replacing existing infrastructure would be enough to shake economies. As for the unfortunate economies that could not easily afford such makeovers, they'd be screwed for a long time.
What do you mean by "shake"? Doing all that replacement work would boost GDP growth and employment, would it not?
That's known as the broken window fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I'm sure the royal family/clan/tribe will be fine but the average Saudi will be in a much, much worse position than now.
Also in such a scenario I would expect countries like Saudi Arabia to curtail their own exports and start preserving it for their own needs. The day you see that happen you can rest assured that we're in deep trouble.
The actions of the Chinese govt are also interesting to observe. They've been buying up oil around the world but haven't really being attempting to engineer a paradigm shift in their energy policy.
We have endless summits on climate change and such but not even a single global summit on such an important issue.
The govts of the world maybe incompetent but I would like to believe that they arent incompetent to this scale.
So the gist of my point is that we might be facing some difficult times ahead but not an outright collapse.
http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/renewable-energy/import...
Solar is great for architectural uses, and with a decent electrical grid you can even out and match up the fluctuations in demand and generation. But if you need to ship quantities of energy dense easily usable power around; it's really hard to beat hydrocarbon fuels. And for manufacturing and installing all those solar facilities...?
Oh, so it's "conventional peak oil" and not "peak oil".
http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-econom...
http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-econom...
For example, a friend who is a town planner has to make sure that all new infrastructure takes expected sea level rises into account - even as her political masters deny global warming exists.
Meanwhile, mass society still can't even come to terms with the fact that many well respected mavens predicted that the Iraq War would be a disaster, that there would be a housing crash and that banks were incentivized to be corrupt and loot the economy. What hope for anti-biotics misuse, over-dependence on synthetic fertilizers and civilization surviving the anthropocene?
Oil can only get so expensive. We have lots of alternative sources of energy that put a lid on the oil price. Just to give some examples, at some point, making artificial oil out of coal will become viable on a large scale (just like Germany did during WWII), and there's always nuclear power.
And there's also lots of oil at sea that we have barely started to explore.
1. How can oil "only" get so expensive? By oil, we are referring to the act of gathering existing oil. There is no limit to the cost of gathering. Going deeper and deeper, or from lower concentration will become more expensive as time goes on.
2. We have a lot of alternative sources of energy that put a lid on oil price. Can you explain the mechanism for this? Are you referring to the true cost of oil, or just at the fillup station? Are you saying the major cost of gathering oil is the input energy, and because the input energy is alternative, the EROIE is infinite? Please elaborate.
3. making artificial oil out of coal will become viable on a large scale. Making artificial oil has nothing to do with gathering oil. The reason they did that was that oil was a more valuable energy medium than coal, because it can be used for many products, not just trains/ships/electricity.
4. There's always nuclear power. I am a big fan of nuclear power, but have no faith in governments making a sound scientific analysis. So unless nuclear power becomes cheap (infrastructure-wise), I think peak oil is still a big concern.
5. Lot's of oil at sea we haven't explored. There's a reason we haven't explored it - it costs way, way, too much. But I'm sure we will as the EROIE goes down.
So, if oil ever gets expensive enough, nobody will use it until we have used up eg more coal. While we use the coal and _not_ the oil, oil won't become scarcer, and thus won't increase in price.
Of course, it doesn't really make sense to go for oil that has less energy output than what its extraction costs. At any price. [0] Technologic progress will take care of some of that.
[0] Unless you use the oil as a kind of battery. Ie use 100J of solar power that's only available during the day, to extract 50J of oil usable anytime---that might be worthwhile, but it would compete with battery technology not with energy sources.
They're not interchangeable with oil at all. Even if we did have those plants, we'd still need to replace half the current infrastructure.
And more boringly, energy conservation and increased efficiency can have the same effect as new sources. A `smart grid' becomes a more and more lucrative investment as energy prices go up.
They are probably correct that cheap oil is done - the oil sands in Alberta, Canada are viable only when oil is above about $70/barrel. Of course when the price goes up, demand drops, so the need for higher production goes down.
In my opinion peak oil isn't the question: what we should be asking is how do we want to change our industies and lifestyles to reflect that energy is more expensive than it has been.
everyone should go read at least one article from that site. doesn't matter which one.