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Peak Oil
It’s the end of oil / Oil is here to stay
Kenneth Deffeyes and Peter Huber, Time magazine
Deffeyes: It’s the end of oil
World oil production is about to reach a peak and go into its final decline. For years, a handful of petroleum geologists, including me, have been predicting peak oil before 2007, but in an era of cheap oil, few people listened. Lately, several major oil companies seem to have got the message. One of Chevron’s ads says the world is currently burning 2 bbl. of oil for every barrel of new oil discovered. ExxonMobil says 1987 was the last year that we found more oil worldwide than we burned. Shell reports that it will expand its Canadian oil-sands operations but elsewhere will focus on finding natural gas and not oil. It sounds as though Shell is kissing the oil business goodbye. M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist, correctly predicted in 1956 that oil production in the U.S. would peak in the early 1970s–the moment now known as “Hubbert’s Peak.” I believe world oil production is about to reach a similar peak.
…For two years, I’ve been predicting that world oil production would reach its peak on Thanksgiving Day 2005. Today, with high oil prices pushing virtually all oil producers to pull up every barrel they can sweat out of the ground, I think it might happen even earlier.
Huber: Oil is here to stay
The “Peak Oil” theory fits nicely on a cocktail napkin. Its curve looks like this: Colonel Edwin Drake starts pumping crude in Pennsylvania in 1859. We’ve been pumping faster and faster ever since. Sooner or later, on this finite planet of ours, it just has to run out. U.S. production peaked in the 1970s. Global production will soon be on the downside of the same dismal curve.
Nonsense. Technology and politics–not geology–determine how much we pump and what it costs.
…The price of oil has always fluctuated. In inflation-adjusted dollars, it was higher in the early ’80s than it is today. Extraction technologies continue to improve much faster than supply horizons recede. We’ve got the right know-how and the right planet. What we lack is the political will.
(23 October 2005)
Jumping from the sinking ship of Empire:
Vermonters move to secede from USA
livetrii, Peak Oil Anarchy
James Howard Kunstler, author of the book about Peak Oil “The Long Emergency,” will be the keynote speaker at The Vermont Convention on Independence to be held in the House Chamber of the State House in Montpelier, VT on Friday, October 28th, 2005. Sponsored by the Second Vermont Republic, … this historic event will be the first statewide convention on secession in the United States since North Carolina voted to secede from the Union on May 20, 1861.
… Earlier this year, Vermont secession activists published their opening salvo, the Middlebury Institute Letter. It declared:
We believe that, of the options open to those who would dissent from the actions and institutions of a government grown too big and unwieldy and its handmaiden corporate sponsors grown too powerful and corrupt, the only comprehensive and practical one is some form of separatism….
Moreover, the accumulating signs point to a series of major crises that will seriously disrupt and may even destroy the American system in the near future. These include economic disruptions in the wake of global “peak oil” production before 2010, deterioration of the power of the dollar through mounting and uncontrollable national debt and trade imbalances, continued degradation of vital ecosystems on which the nation depends, climate change and severe weather causing widespread devastation of coastal areas, extended use of military force worldwide leading to increased terrorism and the reinstitution of the draft, [and] judicial takeovers at the Federal level by rightwing ideologues capable of altering fundamental legal rights…
(22 October 2005)
Finding fuel for the burbs: A costly task
Alan J. Heavens, Philadelphia Inquirer
As anyone who has had to be shoehorned into and out of a PATCO High-Speed Line car during the last few months will tell you, something is adding more mass to mass transit.
Since Labor Day, weekly ridership has increased by 6,500 to 9,400 people, said PATCO spokesman John Matthewson, coinciding with the spike in gasoline prices (at one point to almost $3.50 a gallon) in New Jersey after Hurricane Katrina.
“For the first nine months of 2005, 180,000 more people rode the line than in January to September 2004,” Matthewson said. Add the cost of driving to sharply higher prices for natural gas and heating oil this winter, maybe even fuel shortages, and – shades of the 1970s – energy conservation is a hot topic again.
“It is a huge problem, and about to get more huge,” said John Kromer, senior consultant at the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania. “We really won’t see how this all plays out until a year from now.” A documentary by Toronto filmmaker Gregory Greene, The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream, maintains that current problems will not be shortlived. About 60 people attended an Oct. 11 screening of the 2004 documentary sponsored by Penn’s Urban Studies Program.
…Dominic Vitiello, a professor of urban studies at Penn, said Kunstler’s statements in the film “are colored by his intense dislike” of suburbia. But the documentary’s focus – oil depletion and the energy challenges it presents – are the most pressing issues in city planning today, and will continue to be in his students’ future careers, Vitiello added.
“There are lots of reasons to criticize suburban sprawl,” said Vitiello, “especially its fostering of social, economic and regional segregation. But I’m not so sure that the suburbs will be all that terribly bad off in facing the challenges created by peak oil. “If you live on an acre in a suburb of Oklahoma City,” he said, “you might be able to grow enough to feed your family.”
…And, Vitiello said, unless you read the financial press, “you don’t come into much contact with energy issues, so the debate over peak oil probably comes as a surprise. Otherwise, you get the impression that a couple of hurricanes and the failure to revive the Iraqi oil industry are the reasons for higher fuel prices.”
Vitiello shares investment banker Simmons’ upbeat view of the future. “We will be working from home a lot more, finding new sources of power that will take us off the grid,” he said. “We will solve energy problems house by house.”
(23 October 2005)
Good summary of peak oil and the suburbs, using a local showing of “End of Suburbia” as a news hook. Note how the reporter interweaves standard PO information with interviews with local experts — a good model for other journalists seeking to write on PO. The Philadelphia Inquirer requires (free) registration. -BA
James Kunstler Debates Peak Oil on Public Radio (AUDIO)
Open Source Radio via Global Public Media
James Howard Kunstler, author of the Long Emergency, and Michael Lynch, President, Strategic Energy & Economic Research Inc., debate peak oil and the unsustainability of suburbia with on Open Source, a public radio show with Christopher Lydon.
(23 October 2005)
How to Kick the Oil Habit
by Michael D. Lemonick, Time Magazine
As prices rise, the race for new energy sources–from wind farms to liquid coal–heats up. If anyone harbored any doubts that hybrid cars are hot, last week the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show put them to rest. Carmakers practically ran over one another promoting their versions in attempts to catch up with Honda and Toyota, the technology’s pioneers. …
If this explosion of innovation has a problem, however, it may be that the developments are coming too late to allow a smooth transition to the postpetroleum era. Hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol from vegetable matter, solar cells, wind power, synthetic gasoline from coal–all could make a dent once they are available in sufficient quantities. …
(23 October 2005)
Fairly standard piece, quotes from Lovins, Heinberg, Simmons.-LJ
Petroleum Review: Skrebowski’s Megaprojects Update & more
Chris Skrebowski, Oct 05 Oil & Gas Fields Megaprojects via Global Public Media
[Global Public Media] features the full version of the October 2005 Oil & Gas Fields Megaprojects, which provides vital updates on the future of world oil and gas production. We also feature Chris Skrebowski’s introductory editorial to the Megaprojects update, along with a PR report on BP, now the world’s number 1 non-state oil producer.
Oil and Gas Field Megaprojects October 2005 – the full report
BP beats out ExxonMobil to become the top non-state oil producer
(23 October 2005)
Also see The Oil Drums thread and comments to really ‘kick the tyres’ of PR’s update.-LJ
