From the archive: This piece was originally published on September 23, 2025
Gen Z is a generation born into a world full of anxieties—from school shootings to climate Armageddon to a pandemic and political violence. But I’m here to give you one more thing to worry about!
A high-stakes debate about the timing of peak oil has been simmering for decades. Although few of today’s Gen Z members know much about it, their lives will be impacted profoundly by the waning of the petroleum era.
It’s helpful to revisit this subject not just because there’s a new potential audience and pool of debaters, but also because there is important news regarding U.S. and world oil production.
Since there’s a lot to convey, I’ve chosen a succinct format, Q&A. You can skip to whatever question stirs your interest. Also, each question starts with a short overview.
1. What is peak oil?
Overview: Peak oil refers to the maximum rate of global oil extraction prior to its inevitable decline due to either depletion of the resource or falling demand. The term also refers to the debate about when the peak will happen.
We live on a finite planet. When we extract nonrenewable natural resources today, we reduce the amount that can be extracted in the future. Observation confirms this intuitively simple principle: over past decades, individual oilwells, oilfields, and whole oil-producing countries have become depleted and no longer yield economically significant amounts of petroleum.
Typically, in an oil-producing region, extraction starts slow, builds up to a peak as more wells are drilled, and then declines as the cost of accessing what’s left inevitably rises. Drillers naturally target the highest-quality and easiest-to-get resources first, leaving lower-quality and harder-to-get resources for later. Usually, the peak of production occurs when roughly half of the total oil that will eventually be extracted is gone.
Since oil is mostly useful for its energy content, we must account for the energy required for drilling, refining, and transporting oil. If these energy costs approach or exceed the amount of energy obtainable from the oil being extracted, the exercise becomes economically pointless. In all older oil wells and oilfields, oil is left in the ground after drilling and pumping cease simply because extracting more of it would take too much money and energy.
The peak oil discussion is not about completely “running out” of oil; that will never happen. But global society currently burns through over 83 million barrels of crude per day, and that can’t go on forever. (By the way, “oil” can be defined as “crude” or more broadly as “crude plus condensate” [C+C] or even “crude plus condensate plus natural gas liquids” [C+C+NGLs]; if you use the most generous definition, world oil production now exceeds 100 Mb/d).
That’s peak oil in a nutshell. But the phrase “peak oil” also refers to a debate that reached its own peak 20 years ago—a debate about when global oil production would hit its maximum rate and start to fall. Some scientists, looking at the data, concluded that world oil discoveries were not keeping pace with extraction, and that the peak would occur in the early 2000s. Other geoscientists, and most economists, argued that new technology would enable world oil extraction rates to continue climbing for decades to come. (Who was right? See question 3.)
2. Why is peak oil important?
Overview: The modern industrial world was built with cheap fossil energy, primarily oil. Peak oil could mean the end of growth-based economics and consumerism. Humanity will have to adapt to using much less energy—as it did for thousands of years prior to the last century or two.
Because energy is everything. Energy is what enables us to do anything whatever. Fossil fuels are energy-dense, representing tens or hundreds of millions of years’ worth of stored ancient sunlight. One barrel of crude oil, currently trading at around $65, represents the energy equivalent of riding a bike hard for 8.6 years (with breaks for weekends and holidays). That’s why the advent of the petroleum era—which was made possible by the invention of better drills and pumps, as well as engines that could turn the stored energy of oil into useful work—revolutionized society.
Since the start of the fossil fuel era two centuries ago, human population has exploded 800 percent and so has global per capita energy usage. Life today in a typical city looks profoundly different from daily life in 1820. We tend to attribute this difference mostly to technological innovation, but modernity would never have happened without an unprecedented abundance of energy (most tech inventions are ways of using, not producing energy).
Oil plays a pivotal role in modern society, providing over 90 percent of all transport energy. Petroleum’s constituents and related hydrocarbons (methane, butane, propane, etc.) are useful also as feedstocks for producing plastics, paints, fabrics, and medicines. Nearly everything we typically see in a modern city is there because of fossil fuels, and mainly oil.
In recent decades, the rapid growth of energy from fossil fuels enabled an equally rapid growth in human economic activity. Societies became dependent on growth to provide jobs for a growing workforce and returns on investment for an expanding investor class. Today, every politician, regardless of party or ideology, promises more economic growth. But more growth requires a continued increase in energy. Imagine the chaos that could ensue as the rate of oil’s flow diminishes. If we can’t get the economic growth we’ve gotten used to, if the price of oil and other fossil fuels becomes volatile and less predictable, we could enter prolonged recessionary times.
Peak oil is therefore a profound challenge to modern industrial societies. In fact, modernity may be unsustainable unless alternative sources of energy can replace oil (and other fossil fuels) at scale and in time to prevent a substantial reduction in available energy. (See question 6.)
3. Wasn’t the “peak oil theory” disproven?
Overview: Forecasts that the world’s oil extraction would peak during the early years of this century were wrong. Oil extraction grew. However, conventional oil flow rates flatlined and almost all growth has come from unconventional oil, mostly U.S. tight oil from fracking. This temporary abundance led many energy analysts to focus instead on forecasting peak oil demand, due to the adoption of electric vehicles and renewable energy.
The basic principles and dynamics of resource depletion are unarguable; however, some forecasts for when the global petroleum extraction rate would peak and decline failed.
During the first decade of this century, many books, websites, and documentaries about peak oil appeared, and the topic achieved notoriety. The furor was tied partly to the immediacy of the claims: many forecasters said that global oil production would peak very soon—before or around 2010. As that date came and went, public interest understandably waned. The forecasts were too specific, since data were open to alternative interpretations; also, pessimistic analyses were based on conventional oil only, with the potential role of unconventional oil largely dismissed (more about this below).
At the same time, climate change was becoming the overarching issue of environmental policy. Climate activists argued that the world’s problem was too much oil, not too little, and that renewable sources of energy could fully substitute for fossil fuels, and soon.
However, the main reason for the loss of public interest in peak oil was the fracking revolution. New drilling technologies (hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling) made it possible for petroleum companies to target oil trapped in rocks with low permeability, often shale (the resource is known as “light, tight oil” [LTO] and is one type of unconventional oil). Tight oil extraction requires high rates of drilling, because individual wells deplete quickly; it therefore also requires lots of investment capital. The fracking revolution likely wouldn’t have happened without the economic context of low interest rates, which resulted from the 2008 financial crisis (which itself was linked to high oil prices). Nevertheless, the results have been spectacular: U.S. oil extraction has risen from 5 million barrels per day in 2010 to 13.4 Mb/d today and now leads the world.
World conventional crude oil extraction plateaued in 2005, approximately when many peak oil analysts forecast that it would cease its long ascent. However, since then energy markets have been well supplied with unconventional oil to meet rising demand.
The peak oil discussion didn’t entirely go away; it was largely reframed as peak oil demand (as opposed to peak supply), based on the assumption that adopting alternative energy sources and electric vehicles would soon reduce society’s dependency on crude. But, as we are about to see, the argument for peak supply may be primed for a comeback.
Photo by Werzk Luuuuuuu on Unsplash
4. What’s new in the peak oil debate?
Overview: Government and industry sources say that tight oil extraction in the U.S. will peak soon. If it does, there are few options left to keep the global extraction rate from falling.
U.S. tight oil was always going to be a short-term energy source for society, as we at Post Carbon Institute argued in a series of technical reports and a short book. Today, data show that American tight oil production is close to peaking. In effect, the oil patch is all drilled up with nowhere to go.
This is not just our interpretation. The Energy Information Administration (EIA, an office of the U.S. Department of Energy) expects American oil output to begin falling after next year. The most productive tight oil region, the Permian play in Texas and New Mexico, is the last of the major regions to peak, and it is looking peakish indeed. Petroleum geologist Art Berman explains, “The plays have been over-drilled and wells are interfering. They are cannibalizing production from each other.” Once that pattern fully takes hold, overall extraction rates cannot be maintained.
Oil company executives, who in the past tended to dismiss the peak oil discussion, are now openly talking about a near-term shale peak. Travis Stice, the chair and CEO of Texas-based Diamondback Energy, recently told investors that it is “likely that U.S. onshore oil production has peaked and will begin to decline this quarter.” Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub told the industry conference CERA Week in March that her company expects a peak in U.S. production sometime between 2027 and 2030, but more recently said that growing economic uncertainty means “it’s looking like [the] peak could come sooner.”
Politics isn’t helping. U.S. President Donald Trump has promised to ease the way for the American oil industry to significantly increase production and thereby reduce gasoline prices for motorists. The administration is seeking to open millions of acres of public land to oil and gas drilling—which would have far-reaching environmental consequences. Trump’s newly politicized Department of Energy now blames former President Joe Biden’s policies for charting a “disastrous path” for American energy production. However, U.S. oil output set new records under Biden’s presidency, and more new drilling permits were issued during Biden’s term than in Trump’s first term. Trump’s policies may ironically hasten a decline in U.S. oil extraction. His sweeping tariffs against American trading partners are raising costs to drillers for steel and equipment, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA). Further, lower oil prices (a stated goal of Trump policies) would incentivize tight oil drillers, whose costs are already high, to reduce drilling operations.
If U.S. tight oil is peaking, the country’s natural gas produced by fracking (often called shale gas) will likely be close behind. Natural gas is used mostly for electricity generation, as a heating fuel, and as a chemical feedstock. American gas production, like conventional oil production, was headed downhill until the adoption of fracking, which boosted the country’s gas output dramatically, and now accounts for 80 percent of total extraction. But shale gas suffers from the same constraints as tight oil—rapid depletion of individual wells and the requirement for high rates of drilling. According to resource consultants Goehring & Rozencwejg,
“The great gas fields of the shale era have already whispered their farewells. The Marcellus in Pennsylvania—still the heavyweight of American gas—topped out at 27.8 bcf/d in late 2023. It now sits 1.2 bcf/d, or roughly 5%, below that high-water mark. The Haynesville, a once-bustling engine of supply in Louisiana and East Texas, crested at 14.7 bcf/d in May of last year; it has since fallen by 2.6 bcf/d—nearly 20%. Only the Permian Basin, clocking in at 20.2 bcf/d, has yet to exhibit clear signs of decline. But we believe that, too, is merely a matter of time.”
G&R expect the peak of U.S. shale gas output to occur between 2027 and 2030.
If there’s anything to be learned from the peak oil discussion of the early 2000s, it’s that forecasts are problematic. We simply cannot know exactly how all the relevant variables will interact. Just one example: oil extraction rates depend somewhat on oil prices. When prices are high, drillers expand operations; when prices drop, drillers idle rigs. Currently, oil prices are at the low end of profitability for shale drillers. Prices could rise, thereby incentivizing more drilling and, for a while, higher extraction rates; however, if the U.S. economy is headed toward slower growth or recession, as many analysts believe, oil prices might fall.
Nevertheless, regardless of prices, it’s clear that the oil and gas industry is approaching an inflection point where more drilling may not translate to increased supply the way it used to.
Photo by Yiquan Zhang on Unsplash
5. Is global peak oil nearly here?
Overview: World peak oil is probably upon us. There is some uncertainty due to oil prices: if prices go higher, drillers will deploy more rigs and the peak could be put off for a few years. But the easiest-to-get and most profitable oil is already gone.
As discussed in (3) above, world conventional oil extraction rates have been on a bumpy plateau since 2005 (though with a temporary uptick around 2016). Most new production has been from tight oil, oil sands in Canada, and deepwater oil in Brazil. Without the fracking revolution in the United States, world oil supply would barely have increased in the past 20 years. That begs the question: if U.S. tight oil extraction is peaking, and if the long conventional oil plateau ends soon in a decline, how will the world keep petroleum output growing? Conventional oil production in a long list of countries (including Angola, Mexico, Norway, and Russia) is either already declining or set to decline in coming years.
Some countries are increasing their extraction rates. A few, like Argentina, are employing fracking technology (though no country is poised to repeat the U.S. miracle). Other countries increasing extraction include Brazil, Canada, and Guyana. But the total increases are barely able to balance declines in other oil-producing nations.
Again, higher oil prices would stimulate more drilling, but declining energy return on the energy invested in drilling will be the ultimate limit on world oil.
6. Aren’t renewables riding to the rescue?
Overview: Yes, solar and wind electricity generators are being installed at record rates, but not nearly sufficiently to forestall the likely economic impacts of peak oil.
Renewables now account for 40 percent of U.S. electricity generation (though a good share of that is hydro, which was already a major power source before solar and wind started growing significantly in the last couple of decades). However, electricity represents just 20 percent of all energy usage. The other 80 percent—which includes most transportation, heating, and manufacturing energy—will be challenging to electrify.
A full replacement of fossil fuels with renewables-sourced electricity confronts a problem of scale: the world uses vast amounts of energy, and past energy transitions were additive rather than a replacement of one source with another (we still use as much firewood as we did before our adoption of fossil fuels). Further, economic growth requires ever more energy usage. So far, annual growth in energy demand has surpassed the amount of new energy coming from renewables, with the result that fossil fuel usage and greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing despite the cumulative global investment of trillions of dollars in solar and wind power.
There is also a materials problem. Solar and wind power generators and their batteries require an array of minerals, including sand, copper, nickel, lithium, and rare earth elements. Vast quantities will be needed also for new industrial equipment that runs on electricity rather than carbon-based fuels. The World Bank, the IEA, the IMF, and McKinsey and Company have all issued reports warning that supplies of these materials will be insufficient unless mining expands dramatically. But new mines are often located in ecologically sensitive areas or regions stewarded by Indigenous peoples.
World demand for oil could wane as electric vehicles replace vehicles that burn gasoline and diesel fuel. In 2024, 20 percent of all new cars sold globally were EVs (though the EV growth trend is faltering in Europe and the U.S. due to expiration of government incentives). China leads in EV manufacturing, but its industry is plagued by low profitability. EVs still represent only about 4 percent of the existing world passenger car fleet.
Taking all these trends into account, most economists conclude that peak oil demand is still years away.
Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash
7. What’s the take-away message of peak oil?
Overview: Because the industrial way of life depends on a temporarily abundant energy source that will be hard (if not impossible) to replace, it is inherently unsustainable. Start now to look for ways to reduce energy dependency and become more self-sufficient.
There are actually a few take-aways.
- Oil depletion will likely deliver a future very different from the never-ending ramp of economic growth and technological progress that most economists and politicians have promised. Energy may become scarcer, and, as a result, everything may be harder to do. It’ll be up to us to negotiate which activities we’ll reduce and which we’ll maintain, and which segments of the population will shoulder more of the burden of adaptation or suffering. Will society prioritize food, shelter, and health care? Or will it sacrifice these to profits and to the rapid deployment of AI?
- Once one starts looking at the world in terms of depletion, it eventually becomes apparent that industrial civilization is unsustainable on many fronts. The ways we currently use energy and materials cannot be maintained far into the future. We must adopt simpler and more modest ways of living on the planet.
- Peak oil will not solve climate change. Even if oil extraction rates start declining immediately, there is enough recoverable oil (and coal and natural gas) left to raise global temperatures several degrees—though there’s probably not enough fuel to justify the worst emissions scenarios of the IPCC.
- In general, peak oil is bad news for our growth-addicted economy but good news for nature.
- If the crises facing humanity were to be arranged in a hierarchy of importance, peak oil wouldn’t be at the top. In my humble opinion, that dubious distinction would go either to global toxification (via plastics and chemicals) or climate change. These two problems have the potential to damage Earth systems profoundly, and in ways that will require thousands or millions of years of evolutionary adaptation. Peak oil is a shorter-term problem that will mostly affect humanity (though, in the aftermath, people desperate for food and fuel might scavenge resources from forests and grasslands at unsustainable rates). But it does portend the end of growth-centered modern industrial civilization.
Peak oil calls on us to imagine a lower-energy future and to start adapting now. It’s a game-changer, and a life-changer.
Croatian translation (thanks to Zoran Skala): Vrhunac nafte za Generaciju Z
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Key among reasons why our economic system demands incessant growth at all costs is debt – both public and private debt. Debt is a bet that tomorrow will be materially better than today. Only if more material & energetic wealth is generated tomorrow can interest on debt continue to be serviced. So if it is impossible to increase real wealth due to declining marginal returns on investment, the economy enters a game of musical chairs, where every so often a business or maybe an entire industry goes under. Take away enough of the musical chairs, and you enter a recession with attendant employment loss. At the same time, both the private and public sectors have to borrow even more in order to service older debt. Increasing debt injects more money into circulation, increasing circulation. Consumers are then squeezed at both ends – job loss due to recession and cost of living increase from inflation. Demand plummets, not because people don't want stuff but because they can't afford it. This is known as demand destruction.
Demand destruction means that people are unwilling to pay the prices that suppliers require in order to make it worth their while to keep supply up, so more suppliers either shut down part of their operations or entirely go out of business, accelerating a recession. Less business activity means less use of oil, so oil prices fall, decreasing incentive to drill. At that point, it doesn't matter how many acres the federal government is willing to open up to the oil barons. It isn't worth the energy never mind the monetary investment to drill in harsh Arctic conditions or in deep water (remember the Deep Water Horizon?) and concoct complicated and trecherous methods of transporting it to refineries, so oil production will slow.
With less oil in production, both manufacturers and service companies are caught between paying more for a scarce component of production – oil – and inability to raise prices due to a consumer base that cannot pay more for the product or service. So more businesses shut down either partially or entirely, accelerating the recession.
The net result is a permanent, forced economic contraction that defies bailout.
The economic contraction of the 1930s after the 1929 crash was the reason that the U.S. deliberately created Consumerism. Demand for goods & services had to be stoked in order to get people to spend, to inject money into businesses, to get businesses to grow and add jobs and production. Maybe in 1935 that was a good thing, but now we're suffering from way, way too much of a "good thing."
An economic contraction will be painful for a lot of people. Somehow these things always hurt the most vulnerable first and worst. But if we don't choose an orderly and fair path to contraction, it will be forced upon us, both caused by and causing decline in oil supply in a reinforcing feedback loop until some new, lower plateau can be reached.
It's been a while since I read Enough Is Enough by PCI's own Rob Dietz, but if I recall, he explained all this in detail. The Honest Sorcerer and Nate Hagens also explain what I've attempted to lay out here. I hope I haven't butchered their work!
Does anyone think that the ‘Masters of the Universe’ who control the economic levers of the globe are going to willingly give up on the hyper-growth, consumer-based model (whether it is the USA model, the Chinese model, or some other model does not matter)?
One hundred to two hundred years after peak oil we will have peak coal.
Most folks are unaware that coal constitutes about 90 percent of global fossil fuel resources (not including tar, oil sands or oil shale); oil and natural gas slightly less than ten percent (Source 1).
These vast coal resources can be exploited and processed into liquid fuels. The Germans did this during World War II and the South Africans did when they were under international sanctions during the apartheid years.
M. King Hubbert estimated that 80 percent of the U.S. minable coal resources would be consumed between the years 2040 and 2440. Peak coal would occur during the latter years of the 22nd Century or early in the 23rd Century (Source 2).
There is no ‘energy transition.’ What is going on is an ‘energy addition.’
The most recent issue of The Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy was issued late in June (Source 3).
Under key highlights, the Statistical Review attempts to be upbeat, noting (page 4) that…
“Although wind and solar grew nearly nine times faster than total energy demand, fossil fuels also grew (just over 1%) in 2024.”
“At 4%, electricity demand growth continued to outpace total energy demand growth, an indicator that the world’s energy system continues to electrify.”
“All contributing factors to an energy transition that continues, but is increasingly disorderly.”
Other sobering statistical factoids lifted directly from the Statistical Review include the following:
*** Carbon dioxide emissions increased about one percent, setting a new annual record of 40.8 gigatons of CO2 equivalent.
*** Global oil demand increased by 0.7 percent over 2023, setting a new consumption record of 101 million barrels of oil per day.
*** Global natural gas production rose to 4,124 billion cubic meters, an increase of 2.5 percent over 2023 figures.
*** Coal reached a global record level of demand at 165 exajoules. China, the world leader in the production of solar panels, generated almost 60 percent of its electricity from coal.
In round numbers, fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) provided about 87 percent of all primary energy to power the global economy. Renewables provided about nine percent of primary energy (and a third of this was hydropower).
The percentage of primary global energy contributed by fossil fuels has barely changed over the last several years.
As the Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil likes to say, “The Numbers Don’t Lie.”
The fundamental problem is too many people consuming too much energy.
The late E. F. Schumacher described the path forward over fifty years ago in his excellent book Small is Beautiful (Source 4). Fritz understood that humankind’s salvation did not depend on technology, but on a behavioral and spiritual transformation. Unfortunately, his vision has not come to pass. Since his book was published in 1973, global economic output has expanded by a factor of six, world population has doubled, and global primary energy consumption has increased from approximately 72,000 terawatt hours (TWh) to 186,000 TWh.
Hubbert ended his 1969 energy overview with the following words (Source 2, pages 238-239):
“It now appears that the period of rapid population and industrial growth that has prevailed during the last few centuries, instead of being the normal order of things and capable of continuance into the indefinite future, is actually one of the most abnormal phases of human history. It represents only a brief transitional episode between two very much longer periods, each characterized by rates of change so slow as to be regarded essentially as a period of nongrowth. It is paradoxical that although the forthcoming period of nongrowth poses no insuperable physical or biological problems, it will entail a fundamental revision of those aspects of our current economic and social thinking which stem from the assumption that the growth rates which have characterized this temporary period can be permanent.”
However, rest assured that our ‘Masters of the Universe’ are not going to go quietly into the night. Bank on it!
Source 1: J. D. Moody, 1978, The world hydrocarbon resource base and related problems, in Philip & Williams (eds), Australia’s mineral energy resources: assessment and potential, pp. 63-69. Earth Resources Foundation, University of Sydney, Occasional Publication No. 1
Source 2: M. King Hubbert, 1969, Chapter 8/Energy Resources, in Resources and Man, Committee on Resources and Man, National Academy of Sciences – National Research Council, published by W. H. Freeman & Company, pages 157 – 242.
Source 3: https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
Source 4: E. F. Schumacher, 1973, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, HarperPerennial, 324 pages.
"declining energy return on the energy invested in drilling" This concern is only valid if you assume that only oil can be used to power drilling. Some years ago, we were told that even 25% renewable power would be very difficult to integrate into the grid. Now we are at 40%, and some countries are running at 100% for several days or even a week. It seems quite possible that we might use more energy to get that oil than the oil itself can produce in order to have highly dense energy suitable for niche applications. This would be founded upon renewables/battery technology not much more advanced than what is available today.
But the grid isn't keeping pace with overall energy-demand, nor can it substitute.
And please don't fall for the 'better technology' line. Jevons told us what happens, a long time ago. It is the source energy we need to consider – having depleted or abandoned fossil energy, we're down to real-time solar. Which needs to be captured using? Real time solar (at best, temporarily-stored). And it all needed built yesterday. Ain't gonna happen. A lot of green-new-deal types hoped it would (I was one – have been off-grid in a 300-watt house for over 20 years) but it didn't stack up.
I don't think we'll be hunter-gatherer (too much area has been cleared/de-lifed) but I don't think we'll be doing anaesthetic dentistry either. Something else, if at all…
That's what thermodynamics, the ruler of the universe, dictates.
We have millions of terawatt-years worth of fission fuels on Earth, and billions of terawatt-years worth of fusion fuels. (For comparison, all fossil hydrocarbons combined had maybe a couple thousand terawatt-years worth of energy before we started consuming them.) It would violate no law of thermodynamics to use as much as we want of the nuclear fuels.
Um, yes it would.
Low grade heat is the result of work done. Add too much low-grade heat to the planet, you eventually boil the oceans away. Although obviously you've gone extinct first.
That would not be an example of violating any law of thermodynamics. That would just be unwise–on a planet which had no ability to radiate heat out to space. Fortunately, we do not live on such a planet. All of our human energy activities combined are producing around 20 terawatts of heat. Meanwhile, warming of the Earth's surface by sunlight is about 87000 terawatts. And nearly all of it radiates into space each day. Each 46 hours, the sun deposits 4 million terawatt-hours of heat at the Earth's surface. If we put 4 million terawatt hours of heat towards CO2 extraction from the air, that would be enough to remove 2 trillion tonnes of CO2. And that would be enough to return the air to pre-industrial CO2 levels as well as to solve the problem of ocean acidification. And the result of expending all that heat would be that the Earth would cool down.
Nope.
You need to go back to school.
The energy in (to the planet) needs to equal the energy out. Or we cook or freeze. That means a marginal effect (us burning carbon to do work) makes a change from the status quo. Don't fall for (or spin using) that old 'inconsequential in the face of' nonsense.
There is a small positive in the discussion of transfer from fossil fuel to electric and that is that electric systems are inherently more efficient than heat-based (hydrocarbon) ones, so if the present split is 80/20 fossil/electric, one does not have to find an extra 4 times the present electric supply to go entirely electric but you can get away with much less.
Thanks Stephen.
I see multiple advantages in the transition to electric power.
– Electricity has multiple uses as well as multiple methods of generation.
– Fossil fuels inevitably exacerbate climate change.
– Sources to generate electricity (solar, wind, etc.) are widely dispersed unlike fossil fuels. It becomes harder for a few companies and countries to dominate the energy supply.
– FFs are limited. See Heinberg’s latest post on peak oil.
– The technology for renewables and electricity is advancing at breakneck speed, for example the new types of batteries.
Reducing energy consumption is also critical, but that is a separate question.
At one point Richard wrote, "modernity may be unsustainable unless alternative sources of energy can replace oil" and I thought that he'd succumbed to bargaining with collapse. However, he recovered to writing, "industrial civilization is unsustainable on many fronts." But immediately after that second quote, he wrote, "The ways we currently use energy and materials cannot be maintained far into the future. We must adopt simpler and more modest ways of living on the planet."
It seems that Richard, who compiled his Five Axioms of Sustainability , still believes that it's possible to live a modern lifestyle (compared with a couple of centuries ago). I hope I'm wrong in this. It's clear that it doesn't matter, for sustainability, how we use non-renewable materials, as using them at all is unsustainable (without perfectly recycling all materials so that no more extraction is needed).
Simplification is definitely needed but we should be realistic that it is probable that the only lifestyle which is truly sustainable is a hunter-gatherer one (within a climax ecosystem). And though I'd hate modernity to go away, what I want, or what anyone wants, has no impact on reality.
Heinberg opined… "sustainability is a relative term. It seems reasonable to take as a temporal frame of reference the durations of prior civilizations, which ranged from several hundreds to several thousands of years. A sustainable society, then, would be one capable of maintaining itself for many centuries into the future."
On that view, it appears we have non-renewable consumable resources which would nonetheless qualify as sustainable. Take-for example, deuterium in our oceans. Let's say we will only be able to extract half of it to consume in deuterium-deuterium fusion reactors (though we can already easily extract it from much lower concentrations). So for the half we allow, that would represent a total energy budget of 64 billion TWy of heat. If we were to also limit the evaluation interval to 500 million years (probably beyond the point solar expansion would render Earth uninhabitable to humans), that would let us gradually increase our net energy consumption to around 12 times what it is now (approaching 20 TW). So that would be a perpetually increasing consumption of a non-renewable resource that could last far longer than the habitable time we have remaining. Is there any reason we should not consider that a sustainable consumption of a finite resource?
I think it depends on what you mean by "modern lifestyle compared with a couple of centuries ago." Does Richard believe we can maintain current levels of complexity, industrialization, and energy/resource demand? No. But could we possibly find a way to hold on to some of the advances of the last few centuries? Yes, hopefully. I personally would like to think that my great grandchildren might have access to dentistry not provided by the local barber, for instance. But it would help if we actually understood the predicament we're in and allocated energy/resources/human ingenuity towards the most important needs rather than massive data centers churning out AI slop.
Well, whenever I think about this stuff, I just can't see a way to keep any technology going indefinitely. Simplifying would certainly buy us time but, eventually, we succumb to the five axioms of sustainability. Non-renewable resources will eventually become too expensive to extract and to do so, the extraction industry must be a viable size. But, there would eventually be no non-renewable resources available to us, to sustain any kind of modern society. So don't rely on dentistry being around for ever; better to have a healthy diet (and don't eat any free sugars).
The only sustainable life-style, as far as I can tell, is a hunter-gather one. I'd love to be wrong on that but haven't seen an argument for how the five axioms of sustainability can be violated and still have a sustainable society.
If there is no way to maintain modernity indefinitely, at any level of complexity, shouldn't we be trying to figure out the least painful way down? Unless you know of a way to keep modernity indefinitely?
You might think about a la Tainter/Patzek (the Energy-Complexity spiral). I think about the tremendous amount of modern tech needed to make a single 'modern' screw. So this question is amazingly complex.
E.g., most folks don't spend a moment's thought on 'simple' ball bearing metallurgy, but there's no transportation without those.
I find it interesting that someone who fell for early 21st century peak hook-line and sinker is the one now trying very carefully to cast the same ideas into the next go-round of the idea. I would like to hear from the people who knew it was a joke back then, as they have for more credibility on the topic.
Great summary. I wonder if any Gen Z people will read it and take it to heart?
Summary indeed. My question is why aren't we asking the people who knew it wasn't a big deal back then, and could explain why now, 8 years after the 2018 global peak (according to EIA IES data) it matters? Local gasoline is <$2/gal….8 years after global peak. Hello….
Most of my friends are Gen Z and younger. They are struggling just to pay rent. That is, survival is now taking over. They're thinking about getting money, basically.
The next 4 years will be telling.
This 'debate' is long over*, and though fun to rehash, a framing both simple and that sticks in the mind (especially of the simple-minded) is worth generating.
Probably the majority of even the most fundamental neo-religi does not fail to go to the dentist or ER when sick enough**, so that would likely be the most beneficial and useful framing.
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* although dishonest scientists are everywhere, especially among Affluent families – i.e., deca-millionaire and, especially, above – It's very clear from direct observation, to climate models, to pure thermodynamics that the end-game started decades ago.
** I did see a young fam and the ascites-ridden husband had a teeshirt saying "God is my Health Insurance plan." I should have asked if he'd ever had a toothache, but that would be showing off, I suppose.
"Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub told the industry conference CERA Week in March that her company expects a peak in U.S. production sometime between 2027 and 2030"
The interesting part is what Occidental is doing to prepare for that. They have sunk billions into developing atmospheric CO2 extraction technology, and hydrocarbon synthetic fuel engineering. The world's largest CO2 extraction plant is currently ramping up operations in Texas and should be extracting around a half-million tonnes of CO2 from the air per year by next year. The Stratos CO2 facility in Texas is the first of several planned, and their focus at this point is on gaining build proficiency and lowering build cost. For the short term, they will be using that CO2 for oil field enhanced extraction to rejuvenate lagging oil fields, but their ultimate goal is to combine the captured CO2 with hydrogen to produce syncrude–from which the full current range of liquid fuels can be refined. All this process needs is a cheap source of abundant heat, which is why Hollub has also indicated she would love to get into nuclear.
In the meantime, there are dozens of hotter, smaller Gen 4 reactors being developed, and just the secondary heat from a 200 MW Gen 4 electric power plant could drive the extraction of a million tonnes of CO2 per year. And an Austin company has recently secured a license to begin extracting uranium from seawater using a process developed at Pacific Northwest National Lab (with other labs around the world developing alternate uranium extraction methods). And development work is underway for molten salt fast reactors, with the first demo models expected to fire up around the mid 2030's. Using molten salt fast reactors, one cubic kilometer of seawater holds enough uranium to produce 78 TWh of heat. One gallon of gasoline holds about 33.7 kWh of heat. So at 25% conversion efficiency (30% has been demonstrated at lab scale), uranium from one cubic kilometer of seawater could produce 575 million gallons of gasoline. Moreover, uranium is washing into the world ocean at a rate of around 35,000 tonnes per year–enough to produce 6 trillion gallons of gasoline. (World gasoline consumption is currently around 1.6 trillion gallons per year.)
"declining energy return on the energy invested in drilling will be the ultimate limit on world oil."
Or more precisely, on world fossil oil. There will be no such limit for synthetic oil.
"Because the industrial way of life depends on a temporarily abundant energy source that will be hard (if not impossible) to replace, it is inherently unsustainable."
We will definitely have the ability to replace fossil oil with synthetic oil. It is just a question of when the descending costs of uranium extraction and nuclear reactors will cross the ascending costs of fossil oil extraction.