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Peak Oil
Markets can’t create oil: U.S. needs a real national energy policy
Editorial, Eugene Register-Guard (Oregon)
The United States has bet its economic future on the ability of market forces to take care of energy supply problems. The current run-up in oil prices is a result and, according to free-market ideology, a corrective reaction will eventually follow: Growing demand has caused prices to rise, and high prices will encourage conservation, innovation and increased production. But the invisible hand of the market promises to slap Americans in the face before it puts cheap gas in their tanks.
A laissez-faire approach to energy relieves people and governments of responsibility to avoid waste or plan for the future. Congress and the president can approve an energy bill stuffed with subsidies and pork, and declare their work done. The 20-year absence of improvements in the fuel efficiency of the nation’s cars and trucks can be accepted as a rational response to consumer preferences. A faith in the power of markets to optimize the allocation of resources leads to a belief that any meaningful intervention in the self-balancing mechanism of supply and demand is futile at best, harmful at worst.
But as the price of gasoline edges toward $3 a gallon, it’s time for Americans to start asking serious questions: What if energy – specifically, petroleum – were subject to geological constraints as well as market forces? And what if the world oil market operates in ways that put the United States at a permanent disadvantage?
(30 August 2005)
It takes imagination to lead America
Editorial, Daily Astorian (Oregon)
Welcome to the century of what follows oil or fighting over what’s left of oil.
The 1979 movie Americathon opens with a scene of joggers and bicyclists moving along a Los Angeles freeway. The plot is that America has run out of oil and the federal government faces bankruptcy. In addition to being very funny, Americathon’s premise contains more than a grain of truth.
No one expects that particular moment to arrive soon. But the world and this nation are clearly at a turning point. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Gerald F. Seib noted, “In brief, while the 20th century was the century of oil, the 21st already is unfolding as the century of whatever follows oil, or the century of fighting over what’s left of oil or both.”
At the advent of a new energy era, it is sad that our nation’s leaders have so little to offer.
The leadership gap is especially apparent in the face of the Iraq War. American troops are committed to a conflict that is very much about oil, but our president has offered no plan to achieve energy independence or, in Seib’s words, to move us into the century of whatever follows oil.
How close are we to running out of oil? For a highly accessible analysis of that question, Peter Maass’ cover story in The New York Times Magazine Aug. 21 is a good starting point. Maass penetrated the relatively small cadre of experts who follow oil production in Saudi Arabia, the world’s most significant producer. He explains the technology and economics of withdrawing oil from wells that are largely depleted.
(31 August 2005)
Newest (and very informative and very scary) report from an anonymous insider
The Oil Drum
This is from an oil industry insider I consider quite credible. She was definitely right about everything in her last post. If she’s right about this one, we may finally start to get a true picture of what’s going on. [insider report begins…]
There are MANY production platforms missing (as in not visible from the air). This means they have been totally lost. I am talking about 10’s of platforms, not single digit numbers. Each platform can have from 4 to 100+ wells on it. Most larger ones have 20-30 wells in this area, with numerous caisson wells. They are on their sides, on the bottom of the gulf – they will likely be left as reef material, provided we can get permission.
(31 August 2005)
More on Katrina:
Continuting coverage at The Oil Drum
Katrina Links (Gristmill)
Oil production takes a hit (SF Chronicle).
The Era of Contingencies
WHT, MOBJECTIVIST
Every once in a while I ponder why, when Hubbert correctly predicted the date of peak oil in the U.S. around 1970, we still seem to extract a substantial fraction from domestic sources over 30 years later. In fact, several contingencies extended our run for years.
1. Alaskan oil
2. low throughput stripper wells
3. Gulf oil
4. other offshore oil
5. easing of consumption rates
I think of stripper wells like sucking a thick milk-shake through a straw; the rate limiting effect has nothing to do with your lung strength. The combination of throttling and working near the boundaries of the possible effectively extended the back slope of the U.S. peak a bit beyond what we would have expected. Along the same lines, see Bubba’s post as we approach the end of the line for the deep offshore rigs.
I declare that the era of contingencies has officially ended (1970-2005, RIP). Tar sands, oil shale, and methane hydrates qualify as second order contingencies; a miracle has to occur before we even consider them as remotely possible. War and hegemony, both imagined and real, has become the new contingency. And realizing that fact has become an admission of defeat. The oil economy has virtually no other options left. And global warming will stomp on us if we exercise our dirty wild card.
The Event that Introduces Peak Oil to a Nation
(29 August 2005)
Winning the Great Wager
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
…Unfortunately, our society depends on non-renewable resources. This is not going to continue for two reasons.
The first is that most of these resources have increasingly severe environmental costs – simply getting them or using them leaves us with less natural capital. Burning oil is changing our climate. Mining metals leaves more and more ecological scars on the landscape (a harrowing sight everyone on the planet should see at least once, if only in a photo, is the formerly lush and beautiful pacific island nation of Nauru, which has been stripmined of the phosphates in its soil, leaving it a flat, featureless, nearly-dead rock).
The second reason is that we’re running out. We have probably already passed the peak of global oil production. Oil company experts debate whether we will effectively run out of oil in 20 years or 50, but the essential point remains: if you’re under 50, you can probably expect to live to see the day when affordable oil is gone.
In the meantime, our ability to burn oil, to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers, to brew chemical pesticides and cheap plastics and alloys, all mask the limited nature of the renewable natural resources at our disposal. They allow us to live a lifestyle that is both more luxurious and more destructive than we could possibly afford to live with our current technologies if we were reliant on renewable resources alone.
…So there we are. We need, in the next twenty-five years or so, to do something never before done. We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization. The model we replace it with must be dramatically more ecologically sustainable, offer large increases in prosperity for everyone on the planet, and not only work in areas of chaos and corruption, but help transform them.
(24 February, 2005)
Very long overview. Mentioned in a recent WorldChanging post, Green China Overview.
The End is Nigh
Review of Kunstler’s The Long Emergency
David Ehrenfeld, Amercian Scientist Online
Kunstler’s thesis is straightforward: Malthus was right, but cheap oil has postponed the day of reckoning, creating a century-long “artificial bubble of plenitude” and generating a host of intractable problems partly or entirely related to our prolonged energy spending spree. These problems include serious damage to our agricultural infrastructure, global climate change and the reorganization of living places into unsustainable suburbs and cities. Now cheap oil is disappearing fast, leaving only the problems behind. …
The Long Emergency is more than a list of disasters, present or impending. It is an attempt to understand how we got to where we are. Nearly 100 years of cheap oil have allowed us, even prompted us, to construct an economic and social system that depends utterly (often without our knowledge) on a continuous, never-failing energy subsidy. The system cannot stand on its own feet. It is unstable, lacking internal restraints and negative feedbacks, and most of all it undermines all stabilizing alternatives, such as diverse small businesses and local community support systems.
There is much more in the final chapter than I can do justice to in a review: The many topics discussed include, among others, the new economy and new commerce that will accompany the end of oil-dependent consumer culture (he predicts the demise of the chain stores and the rise of scavenging), possible political fragmentation of the nation, changes in education, the end of romantic childhood and changes in race relations. The picture he paints is incomplete—he doesn’t say what will happen to health care, the arts or entertainment in the long emergency—but there is material enough to provoke scientists and laypeople alike into considering what lies ahead. …
(Sept-Oct 2005)
