Peak oil – March 22

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

A UA professor thinks an oil crisis is imminent–so kiss your old life goodbye
Saxon Burns, Tucson Weekly
Professor Guy McPherson understands why it’s hard for people to accept it when he says the world as they know it is about to end.

…If McPherson is living in two worlds–as a mild-mannered college professor by day, and a wild-eyed survivalist stocking a fallout shelter by night–it’s because he has a vision of Tucson’s future that’s the stuff of dystopian science-fiction novels. He sees a Tucson in which dead cars litter the streets, and mass migrations leave large swathes of the city uninhabited. Gasoline won’t be available to transport food into the city, and there will be power bottlenecks hampering the transportation and pumping of water–not to mention keeping people cool with air conditioning. Tucson will become a desolate, inhospitable place.

“It’s hard to imagine a … capacity of more than a few thousand people 20 years out, and those are going to have to be very hardy folk,” he said. “No air conditioning. Perhaps they’ll be harvesting water, growing all their own food. But those are the choices in the days ahead. You’re going to have to generate your own water and generate your own food. Tough to do that in Tucson.”

On the regional and national scale, McPherson worries government and social structures will disintegrate. The notion of globalization would be relegated to the dustbin of history, and people will go back to an agrarian lifestyle in small communities.

McPherson may seem like he’s all doom and gloom. He often gives off the appearance of someone who’s pained with the knowledge of something he can’t change, like a 30-year-old who has just received the test results confirming that he’ll develop an incurable, fatal genetic disease.

…Leslie Liberti, director of the city of Tucson Office of Conservation and Sustainable Development, said there just isn’t enough solid information to move forward with a program specifically addressing Peak Oil.

“We’ve heard a lot of differing opinions on the topic,” Liberti said. “It’s something that, unlike global warming, where at least we’re getting to the point where there seems to be a general consensus on the issue, the estimates of the timing of Peak Oil and the ramifications are pretty varied. It’s hard for us to have a real strong position one way or another until it’s clear where the scientific community is falling on this.”
(22 March 2007)
This long article does a good job of showing different viewpoints on peak oil, and giving some basic background.

In contrast to Ms. Liberti’s assertion that there is no consensus about peak oil, the issue is in fact much clearer than that of global warming. Among serious observers, the range of dates is between now and 20-30 years from now. Even CERA, the most vocal and influential of the peak oil skeptics, admits that peak oil is inevitable and will arrive within the lifetimes of most of us. If one examines CERA’s assumptions carefully (for example about non-conventional oil sources), their projections fall even closer to that of the peak oil camp. Hopefully, the soon-to-be-released reports on peak oil from the GAO and the National Petroleum Council will provide a better view of our prospects. -BA.

Does the Hubbert Linearization Ever Work?
Robert Rapier, The Oil Drum
Part II: The Titanic, Oilsville, and Saudi Arabia

In Part I, we examined the evolving Hubbert Linearization (HL) of Texas oil production, and found that the predictive precision of the technique was quite poor. The error range was on the order of 3 decades. However, some have suggested that the trends just need to stabilize, and then we can be more confident in the predictions. Others offered rationalizations for why Texas behaved as it did, and suggested that the HL is still a useful predictive tool provided we somehow filter the data. Still others suggested that it is futile to attempt to linearize non-linear data. In this essay, we will push this issue further. I will examine more cases that cast grave doubts in my mind that the HL can accurately predict anything.

But first, does this debate even matter?

A number of people have latched on to the sinking of the Titanic as an appropriate analogy for the debate over the methodology and timing of peak oil forecasts. I see those analogies as missing a number of key points. If you wish to apply an appropriate analogy, try the following.

After the Titanic hit the iceberg, a debate quickly ensued on how fast it would sink. One train of thought was that it didn’t matter, because everyone was doomed anyway after the precious few lifeboats were utilized. Most of these people sat idly by biting their fingernails while others made decisions that would affect them. One train of thought suggested that based on the alignment of the stars – which had correctly forecast prior disasters – sinking in 2 hours was inevitable. These people proceeded to warn everyone to expect the ship to go down in 2 hours. They demonstrated unwavering faith in their forecast.

But another group employed a more scientific approach. First, they challenged the faith-based group to show a case in which their methodology had ever been demonstrated to work. Challenges to their arguments were met with repetitious assertions of the original claims. Yet the scientific group continued to challenge the argument – not because they didn’t think the ship was sinking – but because they saw some inherent dangers in faith-based arguments and they were not satisfied with the integrity of the conclusions.
(22 March 2007)
Thanks to Robert Rapier for providing an explanation of why he believes this very technical debate to be important. No matter what one thinks about Hubbert Linearization, it does seem to be very important to have unbiased and accurate predictions about oil depletion.

-BA

James Schlesinger: Energy crisis demands immediate attention
Janelle Frazier, Collegiate Times (Virginia Tech)
James R. Schlesinger, a leading expert in the energy field and the first U.S. Secretary of Energy, spoke yesterday evening at the Lyric about the nation’s energy crisis. Schlesinger is also currently co-chairing a study for the Department of Defense energy strategy. He articulated that consumption of oil as an energy source in today’s society is a serious problem that will not disappear in the near future, but rather demand immediate attention.

“We are not going to reach energy independence in this nation and have better control over our national security as long as we remain dependent on the internal combustion engine and air traffic to move people and goods,” Schlesinger said.

With $5 billion worth of oil being used daily and the world’s existing oil fields in a decline of about 4% a year, Schlesinger detailed three relatively immediate alternatives: conservation, renewable resources and nuclear power. However, his prediction that future demand for oil would mean finding the equivalence of nine Saudia Arabia’s had more of an impact on the crowd.

Sponsored by the Dean’s Task Force on the Environment and the Dean’s Task Force on Energy Security and Sustainability, the series hopes to raise community awareness about the need to acknowledge the energy crisis and its effects on the environment.
(22 March 2007)
Strange days when James Schlesinger, the former head of the CIA, sounds more energy and environmentally conscious than either the Republican or Democratic parties. -BA

Transcription of Simmons interview
Matt Simmons transcribed by Zoe di Magnifico
Matt Simmons gave a great, succinct interview on the Bloomberg Report about Peak Oil a couple weeks ago. It has been linked to in previous posts on TOD as well.

I showed the interview to my English conversation class and typed up a transcript for it. Here is the transcript for anyone who might want it:

…AW: Tell me how you draw your conclusion that at this point we’ve hit peak oil.

MS: Well, if you follow the numbers and you look at what’s going on with Mexico’s giant Cantarell field, which is now in a very serious state of decline, and then you look at the North Sea and you see just the UK and Norway, it’s pretty obvious to me that those three areas alone could actually decline by 800,000 and a million barrels a day in 2007. That pretty well wipes out almost all the production gains coming on stream, and implicit in that [is that] it assumes everyone else is flat. So, I think basically too many of our oil fields are too old. They’re now…too many are now in decline. The Middle East is basically out of capacity. There’s some projects that are being worked on, but most don’t, kind of, hit the market until 2008 [or] 2009 and we’re running out of time.

…AW: Alright, so, you’ve outlined a pretty grave problem here as far as supplies go. Three hundred dollars a barrel oil: How do you fix that?

MS: Well first of all I think we need to address as many supply fixes as we can to stabilize supply. I don’t think we will ever basically be able to continue to create any significant growth in supply. And we have to start addressing the intensity of how we use energy; and particularly transportation since that’s 70 percent of the oil barrel. And, you know, I, the a…It was interesting being in China speaking on the need to end globalization as we need it today. That was sort of a popular topic. Uh, we need to liberate the workforce and let people work when they want and where they want and payback productivity. So I see a number of very large changes coming, and if we make the changes right [then] we’ll get through this just fine. If we don’t, it could really be a problem.

(Feb/March 2007)