Peak oil – Aug 31

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Honey, We Killed the Planet
Nicholas von Hoffman, The Nation
God and/or the cosmos may be infinite, but nothing else is. Hence it is a lead-pipe certainty that human beings are going to run out of oil. The only question is when.

There is no agreement on this, but forty years from now is often cited as the moment when the world’s pipelines will go gurgle, gurgle, glug and nothing will come out except a gasping sound. More likely, there will still be some oil around in 2046, but you and I will not be able to afford it.

As the end of oil approaches, the price of this commodity, which was once sold for 10 cents a barrel, will approximate the current price of beluga caviar. Beluga, of course, comes from the roe of the sturgeon, a fish once abundant in the Caspian Sea. Thanks to the unbridled appetite of caviar lovers, and those who catch and sell it, the fish has all but disappeared. But even if its admirers had shown some self-restraint, it would not have mattered because the Caspian Sea itself is in the process of vanishing, thanks to all manner of environmental rape and pillaging.

It follows that long after the gas stations of America close down and the cars that once filled up at them have been converted to garden pergolas and jungle gyms for the wee ones, a few absurdly rich people will still have some oil or gasoline. It will have become so expensive by then that they will keep it in their wine cellars next to their bottles of Château Lafite-Rothschild. Thus, in the strictest sense we will never, as simple-minded optimists insist, run out of oil.

… Maybe the end-of-oil hypothesis will prove false, maybe the technology genie will invent a nontoxic, cheap oil substitute, thus enabling every man, woman and adolescent in America to drive around in a Hummer. Even so, a major conservation effort is in order if only for ecological and environmental reasons.

That is not going to happen: The preponderance of political power is held by men and women over the age of 40, who will probably not live long enough to suffer the terrifying changes that will come to a country unprepared for the end of the Age of Carbon.

May the infinite God help Americans under the age of 40. As matters stand now they can look forward to a frightening future. It will be a future the older people did nothing to prepare them for or to prevent.

The young people must look to themselves to avoid what’s coming to them. They don’t have much time, and they don’t have much training. They have been brought up on the slogans of “fun first” and “if you can’t be anything else, be cool.” At the rate they’re going, they’re not only going to be cool, they’re going to be freezing.
(30 Aug 2006)
This is the third column about peak oil that von Hoffman has published in The Nation. As you can see, when he gets going his rhetorical powers rival those of James H. Kunstler. I grew up reading von Hoffman’s hilarious and ascerbic columns, so it’s good to have him aboard. -BA

BBC series on peak oil starts Sept 4
Driven by Oil, BBC (Radio 4)
When Will The Tap Run Dry

Monday 4 September 2006 9:00-9:30 (Radio 4 FM)
Repeated: Monday 4 September 2006 21:30-22:00 (Radio 4 FM)

Oil has meant mastery throughout the 20th Century. It is the world’s biggest and most pervasive business, and ‘the’ strategic commodity on the world stage.

Tom Mangold explores the biggest debate facing the oil industry today – will we run out of oil, and if so, when?
(Aug 2006)

Silicon Valley entrepeneur Rodgers develops solar, believes in peak oil
Original: Sun Total
Najeeb Hasan, San Jose Metroactive
Controversial Silicon Valley maverick T.J. Rodgers is suddenly high tech’s biggest champion of alternative energy. Does it matter that he’s ultimately in it for the money? Or that he can’t stand environmentalists? He certainly doesn’t think so.
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…Rodgers is one of those rare Silicon Valley entrepreneurs colorful enough to make the jump from the obscure dreariness of the valley’s business pages. He was dubbed “one of America’s toughest bosses” by Fortune. And there was the infamous incident in which Rodgers publicly and unapologetically skewered a nun who demanded he include more women and minorities on the board of Cypress Semiconductor, the company he’s run since 1982.

He made waves again when he called the federal government’s post-9/11 curtailment of civil liberties a bigger threat to America’s freedom than any threat “posed by Al-Qaida” in the op-ed pages of the Mercury News. He’s also courted controversy with his public criticism of hobnobbing with government officials to win tech subsidies, and his still-ongoing feud with residents in La Honda about a vineyard he’s building on the region’s hilly terrain.

But these days, Rodgers is raising eyebrows with his foray into alternative energy, namely solar power.

…Rodgers, now at the helm of a company that is widely considered to produce the highest efficiency solar cells in the world, is not ultimately motivated by the same green impulse that drives pushers of solar as an alternative energy. He’s unabashedly in it for the money.

Rodgers responds that being in it for the money is ultimately also being in it for the greater good. And Silicon Valley’s King of Solar could care less what the global warming crowd says to do about the environment

…This is not to say that Rodgers doesn’t accept the fact that resources dwindle. In fact, he’s a big believer in what’s known as Peak Oil theory. The theory, put forth by M. King Hubbert, a Shell Oil consultant in the 1950s, predicted that the world’s oil production would peak in 2000 and then fall. Hubbert also correctly predicted that domestic oil production would peak at about 1970. Rodgers thinks that Hubbert may be off on world oil production by a few years (many Peak Oil theory advocates now say production will peak in 2010), but he is still right that it will peak. What Rodgers doesn’t buy is the vision of the movement’s main current spokesman, Richard Heinberg, a faculty member of the New College of California in San Francisco, who envisions catastrophic consequences for humanity-picture a devolution to agrarian lifestyles and vicious resource wars-once oil production peaks.

“No, I’m not concerned about some great catastrophe,” Rodgers sneers.

Rodgers explains what he sees as a pattern: “They develop a theory, they write themselves a little paperback book, they develop a following, and then they preach and then they want what is, in effect, political power, which means, in effect, the right to order people what to do,” he says. “So, no, I react very hostilely toward the moral mandate. Who the hell has the right to tell me what the moral mandate is? To me, the highest moral mandate is that I am making a product, solar cells, that people want, and I sell it to them to make a profit for my shareholders. That’s moral, that’s right. But the concept that I’m working on some greater good-I am working on the greater good.”
(Aug 30 – Sep 5 2006 issue)
From the libertarian side of peak oil…

Will the End of Oil Be the End Of Food?
Jason Mark, AlterNet
American agriculture is fatally dependent on oil. A few forward-thinking farmers are trying to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
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Farmer Richard Randall doesn’t believe in the notion of “peak oil,” the argument that civilization will soon experience an acute — and irreversible — petroleum scarcity that will fundamentally alter our way of life. A 61-year-old wheat and sorghum grower from Scott City, Kan., Randall says he’s seen high oil prices before, and that today’s expensive petroleum is just part of a natural market cycle that will eventually adjust itself, leading to lowered fuel costs.

“I think there’s plenty of oil there,” Randall said recently. “I feel that if we allow the marketplace to work without interruption in the supply, we will find a level. It’s not going to be as low as it was, but it will come down. We do need to produce oil where we can.”

Randall may not be certain when oil prices will level out, but it’s abundantly clear to him that $70/barrel petroleum is taking a huge bite out of his business. Nearly every part of his farming operation is being impacted. The price for the diesel fuel that runs the tractors and trucks on his 4,500-acre farm have more than tripled in the last four years, rising from 80 cents per gallon to close to $3. Fertilizer prices are also up sharply. Since synthetic fertilizers are made from natural gas, they too are impacted by higher fossil fuel prices; the cost of fertilizer has gone from about $160 per ton to $460 per ton in the last three years. Smaller, organic growers are also feeling a pinch from costlier petroleum. The price for the plastic drip irrigation tape commonly used on organic fruit and vegetable farms is up 20 percent from two years ago.

Because farmers operate in a commodity market where buyers and brokers dictate the price of the harvest, high oil costs have been particularly painful. Unlike other businesses, farms have no way to pass their rising costs on to consumers.

“All of our expenses have gone up pretty well, but we can’t put on a surcharge for fuel like everyone else can.” Randall said. “It’s made it a lot tougher.”

For farmers like Randall, today’s challenges may be tomorrow’s crises. The problems of coping with high oil prices reveal how utterly dependent our food production system is on nonrenewable fuels. As long as oil is plentiful, that dependence isn’t a concern. But in some circles fears are growing that if global petroleum production begins a steady decline, our entire food system will be strained, testing our ability to feed ourselves.

“How dependent on oil is our food system?” Richard Heinberg, a leading “peak oil” scholar and the author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies said in an interview. “Enormously dependent. Fatally dependent, I would say.”
(31 Aug 2006)

Peak Oil and Permaculture
Big Gav, Peak Energy (Australia)
I went along to the “Peak Oil and Permaculture” show last night – both Richard Heinberg and David Holmgren spoke well, and the attendence was much bigger than I’d imagined – over 700 people – but there wasn’t much new information for jaded old bloggers like me.

David Holmgren did come up with one interesting stat – wood pellet stoves are the fastest growing energy source in Europe apparently (something he heartily approved of). Richard Heinberg spent quite a bit of time on the “Oil Depletion Protocol” which I tend to think is a dead horse that needn’t be flogged too much – it won’t ever happen in the world that currently exists, regardless of its merits.
(30 Aug 2006)
This excerpt is just a small part of Big Gav’s grabbag of peak oil, economics, politics, etc.

-BA

Steep decline in UK oil production
Islamic Republic News Agency (Iran)
—-
British oil and gas production in the North Sea has continued a steep decline despite the increased drilling activity following high prices.

According to the latest monthly report from the Royal Bank of Scotland published Tuesday, the combined daily average output for UK oil and gas in June was down 13 per cent on the month, while annual production fell 18 per cent.

Oil production growth was down 4 per cent compared with May at 1,411,961 barrels per day (bpd) and down 13 per cent on the same month last year.

The fall in gas output was even greater, decreasing by 23 per cent to 6,429 million standard cubic feet per day (mmcfd) on the month and by 24 per cent compared to a year ago.

Crude oil production, which has been in decline for the past five years, has now fallen by over 300,000 bpd since the beginning of 2006.
(29 Aug 2006)
Mobjectivist brings out his charts.
This article from Iran looks as if it were compiled from other reports (see next item). -BA

UK June gas output down 24% on the year: RBS index
Platts
UK natural gas output in June 2006 was 6,429 million cubic feet/day (182
million cubic meters/day), down 24% from June 2005 output of 8,493 million cu
ft/day, according to latest figures from the Royal Bank of Scotland oil and
gas index.

…”Early summer maintenance depressed oil, and in particular, gas
production in the North Sea in June,” said RBS in a note, “but the sharp
decline in production compared to one year ago suggests that the secular
decline of the North Sea continues.”

“It is a conundrum that the increase in investment spending seen over the
last year has not resulted in measurable output growth. Soaring costs fail to
explain the sluggish supply response, since higher input bills have not
prevented a sharp pick-up in drilling activity.”
(29 Aug 2006)