Already Past the Peak?

January 10, 2006

Here is a report worth looking at. It is called “Alberta oil sands will be world’s largest source of new crude oil by 2010: CIBC”, and is interesting in that it is produced by a respectable Canadian bank, and sets out their concerns about the future of oil supplies. One quote from the article is “Alberta’s oil sands will become the most important source of new oil in the world by 2010 as conventional crude dries up”. If Alberta’s oil sands are the most important source of new oil by 2010 then we are in trouble. The end of the age of cheap oil has indeed arrived. Tar sands are extractable, but with a much higher cost, both financial and environmental. They also take almost as much energy to extract as we get from them (they have an Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI) rating of around 1.5). Tar sands are really scraping the barrel (so to speak).

The report adds, almost as a casual aside, that “conventional oil production around the world apparently peaked in 2004″. It is the thing that we’ll see with oil peak, it will be denied as we approach it, denied as we go over it, and then spoken about as though everyone had always known about it and it was just a fact of life once we are beyond it. It is an interesting article, an insight into nervous bank boardrooms the world over.

Rob Hopkins

Rob Hopkins is a cofounder of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network, and the author of The Transition Handbook, The Transition Companion, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, 21 Stories of Transition and most recently, From What Is to What If: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want. He presents the podcast series ‘From What If to What Next‘ which invites listeners to send in their “what if” questions and then explores how to make them a reality.  In 2012, he was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and was on Nesta and the Observer’s list of Britain’s 50 New Radicals. Hopkins has also appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought and A Good Read, in the French film phenomenon Demain and its sequel Apres Demain, and has spoken at TEDGlobal and three TEDx events. An Ashoka Fellow, Hopkins also holds a doctorate degree from the University of Plymouth and has received two honorary doctorates from the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. He is a keen gardener, a founder of New Lion Brewery in Totnes, and a director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, an ambitious, community-led development project. He blogs at transtionnetwork.org and robhopkins.net and tweets at @robintransition.

Tags: Fossil Fuels, Oil