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Fermi’s Paradox and the End of Cheap Oil
Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Radar
I’ve been thinking of Fermi’s Paradox since I saw the documentary film A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, with its dire predictions of the wars and disruptions that could occur on the downward slope of the Hubbert curve. While I remain an optimist about the power of human ingenuity to surmount enormous challenges, I have enough sense of history to know that catastrophes do happen, that societies fail to make the right choices, and that civilizations fail.
What if the answer to Fermi’s paradox is not the absence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but merely the absence of high technology? The movie makes the case that the extraordinary flowering of our society has been driven by our profligate use of oil as an incredibly cheap energy resource — and one that won’t last.
With haunting images of once vibrant oil fields that are now ghost towns, the movie is a thought-provoking counterpoint to An Inconvenient Truth. If the movie’s contentions are correct, we’re truly caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Either global warming or peak oil will lead to an urgent transformation of civilization as we know it, or our failure to transform quickly enough might well lead to the end of civilization as we know it.
And if indeed cheap oil is a prerequisite to the first flowering of technological civilization, might a Roman-Empire-style collapse due to some future disaster make it difficult to rebuild to spaceflight-capable levels due to lack of said resource the next time around? Many of the large scale energy technologies that we imagine replacing oil are energy intensive to build. They are, in a sense, themselves dependent on oil.
(5 May 2008)
More at the original. According to Wikipedia, Tim O’Reilly is:
the founder of O’Reilly Media (formerly O’Reilly & Associates) and a supporter of the free software and open source movements. He is widely credited with coining the term Web 2.0.
UPDATE (May 6)
Andrew Leonard at Salon has a comment: Peak oil explains lack of UFOs.
The End of Cheap Oil is Now
Mark Hertsgaard, People’s Weekly World
Never underestimate a politician’s ability to pander. With gasoline prices nearing $4 a gallon and the summer driving season approaching, presidential candidates John McCain and Hillary Clinton have responded by calling for a consumer holiday from the federal gasoline tax. But both McCain and Clinton must know that blaming taxes for soaring gasoline prices is absurd. The tax hasn’t changed. What has changed is the price of crude oil, which hit a record $119 a barrel in April.
Get used to it. Contrary to McCain and Clinton’s feel-good simplifications, there’s no easy answer to this problem. Gasoline prices are rising-and will continue to rise-because global demand is outstripping supply. Combine America’s gas-guzzling ways with millions of new middle class consumers in China and India, and global demand is bound to increase for years to come (absent a global economic depression). Meanwhile, global oil supplies are essentially flat. This mismatch pushes up prices.
The real issue that McCain, Clinton and anyone truly serious about gas prices must confront is peak oil. Peak oil theorists do not suggest that the Earth will surrender its last drop of oil anytime soon. Rather, they contend that the world’s oil supply has, or soon will, hit its upper limit, and then shrink. This, the end of abundant oil, spells the end of cheap oil. As limited supply confronts growing demand, the result will be volatile higher prices and shortages that could bring back the gas lines of the 1970s. And that’s just for starters. The modern world needs cheap oil like the human body needs oxygen; remove it, and we could be headed for economic decline, resource wars and social chaos. …
Mark Hertsgaard (www.markhertsgaard.com) is the environment correspondent for The Nation and the author of many books, including Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future.
(5 May 2008)
About People’s Weekly World: “Since the first issue of the Daily Worker came off the press in 1924, our press has been in the battles of the U.S. working class and people’s movements.”
Shell Execs Briefed on Peak Oil in 1956
David Room and Steve Tanner, The Cutting Edge News
When did Shell executives first learn that the world would one day face the moment of peak oil, known to many as Hubbert’s Peak? Answer: as far back as 1956 when M. King Hubbert delivered his seminal speech to Shell employees predicting the day when oil reserves would begin to decline. For more than a half century, Shell has known that the world of the 21st Century would begin running out of oil with disastrous ramifications. Yet little was done to prepare society.
… “I was the next speaker, when I got a signal calling me off the platform,” Hubbert recalled in a 1989 interview.
While the Mayor was making his address, Hubbert got a telephone call from an executive assistant in New York, expressing “considerable alarm” about his paper. The assistant pleaded with Hubbert to “tone it down,” taking out parts he claimed were “sensational.” To which Hubbert replied: “Nothing sensational about it, just straightforward analysis.” The assistant then asked Hubbert, “That part about reaching the peak of oil production in ten or fifteen years, it’s just utterly ridiculous.”
… Hubbert’s forecast caused shock, consternation and denial in various parts of the petroleum industry. He would later say, “That caused a jolt… The first reaction was honest incredulity. Then the industry split. One side refused to accept the situation and started changing the figures. The other side, people like Shell, found they could not change the figures.
“Well, after about a week, when the responsible [Shell executives] did begin to come back [from their meetings’, I think there were some pretty red faces in the New York office and maybe even in Houston. For one thing, they had a chance to look at their data and they found they couldn’t disprove anything I’d said. So the whole thing had been a tempest in a teapot by people who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.”
David Room and Steve Tanner write on energy issues including Hubbert’s Peak. This article is drawn from an oral history interview with Marion King Hubbert by Ronald E. Doel, January 4 to 6 February 1989, located at the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD. More information can be found at Hubbert Tribute: www.mkinghubbert.com/.
(5 May 2008)
The anecdote gives a flavor of the Hubbert personality. The original has a photo of a smiling Hubbert and his famous curve. -BA
On Quenching Our “Big Thirst” for Oil
Kyriacos Zygourakis , ASPO-USA
In an effort to explain the steep climb of the price of oil, a recent New York Times article1 looked at the increasing worldwide demand and outlined the difficulties the energy industry will face in meeting this demand, which will rise by 35 percent by 2030 according to the International Energy Agency. Halfway through the article, the author noted:
“…a small band of skeptics view today’s record prices as evidence that oil supplies have peaked… But most experts believe that there are still enough oil reserves, both discovered and undiscovered, to last at least through the middle of the century. The problem is that in many corners of the world, geopolitics, more than geology, has removed much of those reserves from the reach of independent oil companies…”
First, peak oil is no longer just the “view of a small band of skeptics.” It is firmly based on science and is now accepted by a growing number of mainstream economists, politicians and media in Europe and the US. More importantly, however, the previous argument seems to ignore a crucial fact: the key factor in meeting the US and worldwide demand is not the amount of oil reserves, but the rate at which the oil from these reserves can be produced. Therefore, it is not enough to claim that “…there are still enough oil reserves, both discovered and undiscovered, to last at least until the middle of the century…” With the existing fields of most oil producing countries already in decline, we must know if we can discover and produce the oil from these undiscovered reserves fast enough to meet our growing needs.
According to the same article, limited access to undiscovered oil is a major obstacle to the solution of our energy problems. This is essentially the same argument made by those who favor opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, the Outer Continental Shelf and other currently restricted areas to oil exploration. But, can we really stop the long-term decline of US oil production rates by allowing the development of resources located in the moratoria areas?
… In summary, opening currently inaccessible areas to oil exploration and development will only add another shoulder peak to the production curve, but will not reverse the long-term inexorable decline of the US oil production. Is this sip of oil a good enough reason to start drilling in the moratoria areas that span 21 US states and large parts of our Outer Continental Shelf? Should we not look instead for other ways to quench our “big thirst” for transportation fuels?
Kyriacos Zygourakis is a professor of chemical engineering at Rice University.
(5 May 2008)
12 steps of Peak Oil
Charlie Smith, Vancouver Peak Oil Executive via Georgia Straight (Canada)
This is from the Vancouver Peak Oil Executive (permission to reprint from Jon Cooksey)
The 12 Steps of Oil Anon
(With a tip o’ the hat to Alcoholics Anonymous)
Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:
1. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction to oil-that our lives had become unsustainable.
2. Came to believe that a dedication to the facts about peak oil could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to dedicate our will and our lives to the creation of a new and better way of living.
4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of the ways we have become dependent on cheap oil for our livelihood and lifestyle.
5. Admitted to ourselves and to others in the peak oil community that we hadn’t a clue about what to do next, and crashed.
6. Became entirely ready to listen to wisdom from others who have found solutions to fossil-fuel dependency.
(5 May 2008)
Quenching the world’s growing thirst for oil
RS Sharma, The Financial Express (India)
… The Association of Peak Oil is crying itself hoarse predicting that we have either reached, or are on the verge of, peak oil. From here onwards, the slide is imminent and production is bound to decline. On the other hand, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (Cera), contesting the peak oil theory, sees no evidence of a peak in oil production before 2030, with global production eventually following an undulating plateau for one or more decades before declining slowly.
However, there is no contesting the evidence that supply is becoming severely constrained with each passing day. Demand growth, fuelled by the booming economies of China and other developing nations, is one of the factors.
But the predominant factor is that supply has failed to keep pace with demand. The moot question now is: does the world have enough oil to feed the ever-growing demand of developed and developing countries-and for how long?
(6 May 2008)
