Sidewalk Philosophy වීදියේ දසුන

For the planet, it’s payback time. The world is waking up to climate change. There are many conferences, movies and books that deal with this impending disaster. Even though one could argue that little is being done to avert the problem, at least there’s plenty of awareness. In fact, informing the public about this inconvenient truth made Al Gore a Nobel laureate.

However, there’s something less known, unpreventable and far more dangerous that would hit us harder, and much sooner. It’s called Peak Oil. Unlike climate change which would bring ambiguous results (benefits to some, disasters to many, and perhaps leave a few unaffected), peak oil will affect us all, regardless of where or how we live. As things stand now, we’re utterly ill-equipped to cope with it. Quite probably peak oil will mark the end of industrial civilisation, and significantly threaten the survival of our species.

What is Peak Oil?

Oil is a non-renewable, finite resource. The earth doesn’t replenish oil reserves – they are rare results of an extraordinary combination of circumstances that occurred many millions of years ago¹. The more we use this ancient sunshine, the less of it we have for future consumption. The faster we exploit, the faster the reserves deplete.

And exploit we do. History is ripe with examples of how rapid consumption gobbles up oil fields. Countries that were once leaders in petroleum production rely on imported oil today. In the 1950s, it was not Saudi Arabia but the United States that was the world’s greatest producer of oil. Much of the military and industrial might of the US grew out of this giant oil industry. Today, however, they produce only 3% of the world’s oil (and consume a whopping 25%)². Texas oil fields which fuelled entire armies in the Second World War (of both sides, as now revealed³) are but mere shadows of their past glory.

Not many people foresaw it though. When Dr. Marion King Hubbert, an oil exploration geologist, predicted in 1956 that US oil production would peak in about 1970 and decline thereafter⁴, his views were scoffed at. But his analysis has since proved to be remarkably accurate.

Dr. Hubbert asserted that for any given geographical area, from an individual oil field to the planet as a whole, the rate of petroleum production tends to follow a bell-shaped curve. This is now known as the Hubbert peak theory.

Source

Thus, Dr. Hubbert was the first to talk about peak oil. As it’s today interpreted, the term peak oil refers the maximum rate of the production of oil in any area under consideration, recognising that it is a finite natural resource, subject to depletion.

With the information that was available at the time, Dr. Hubbert predicted a worldwide peak would occur in 1995 at 12 gigabarrels per year if the then current trends in consumption and production continued⁵. However, these trends didn’t continue unchanged: during the late 1970s and early 1980s, global oil consumption dropped, mainly due to the 1973 and 1979 oil crises. They were wakeup calls to big consumers like the US, which led to more energy-efficient vehicles as well as the introduction of alternative energy resources, which also brought down consumption for a limited period. This meant that we didn’t reach the peak in 1995.

However, Dr. Hubbert was not too far off the mark.

Where is the peak?

Dr. Colin J. Campbell is a modern-day Hubbertian. A petroleum geologist with over 40 years of experience working with oil giants like Texaco, British Petroleum, Amoco, Shenandoah Oil, Norsk Hydro, and Fina, he knows oil inside out. He founded the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), and is a trustee of the Oil Depletion Analysis Center (ODAC) in London. Dr. Campbell’s organisation ASPO originally predicted that oil peaked in the spring of 2004, at a rate of 23 gigabarrels per year. In 2005, ASPO revised its prediction for the peak, from both conventional and non-conventional sources, to the year 2010⁶.

Another prominent peak oil proponent and a geologist with almost 40 years of experience, Dr. Kenneth S. Deffeyes (who has worked with Dr. Hubbert at the Shell Oil Company research laboratory in Houston, Texas), predicted in his book Beyond Oil - The View From Hubbert’s Peak that global oil production would hit a peak on November 25th, 2005. This was later revised to December 16, 2005, but days hardly matter when predicting such a huge event.

Scientists aren’t the only people who are trying to raise awareness about peak oil, though. Investors and bankers who are good at sniffing a trend, especially when it involves colossal amounts of money like oil always does, are speaking out.

While peak oil isn’t quite yet mainstream media material, several independent journalists are spreading the word. David Strahan, a trustee of ODAC, is one such investigative journalist. He’s also the author of The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man. He has an interactive map on his website which clearly illustrates the story of oil depletion: almost all main oil producing countries are approaching peak in and around 2010, or have already peaked.

Peak oil predictions are not prophetic declarations of inspired men. There has been meticulous analysis of data over the years, and today we have several robust analytical models which are capable of forecasting production trends. As published on theoildrum.com most of these peak oil forecast models point to a peak sooner than 2010. At the latest, it would happen in 2012.

Peak oil is no longer a doomsday story of a bunch of suicidal maniacs. Scientists, Economists, Journalists, Politicians as well as ordinary men and women are waking up to the reality. Former US Energy Secretary Dr. James R. Schlesinger, in his keynote address at the ASPO6 conference, said⁷:

And therefore to the peakists I say: you can declare victory. You are no longer the beleagured small minority of voices crying in the wilderness. You are now main streams. You must learn to take yes for an answer and be gracious in victory.

Why should I care?

Once we reach the summit, it’s all downhill from there onward. As the characteristic bell curve suggests, we’ll hit terminal decline, production dropping by at least 3% per year under “normal” conditions. The oil on the other side of the hill would be more difficult and costly to extract, of poorer quality and located mostly in inaccessible or politically unstable places. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted. The likely decline rate would be closer to 10%, as human conflicts for this scarce resource increase⁸, and runaway climate change brings extreme weather conditions. Andrew Gould, CEO of Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services corporation, said of the oil decline that “An accurate average decline rate is hard to estimate, but an overall figure of 8% is not an unreasonable assumption”⁹. This would mean that we’d see a 50% drop of supply in less than 10 years from reaching the peak.

Discovery of new oilfields peaked in the mid-1960’s and has declined precipitously ever since. Even now, for every three to four barrels of oil the world consumes only one barrel of replacement oil is discovered¹⁰. Yet, demand will continue to rise, perhaps at unprecedented rates, as India and China join the party¹¹. All requirements for the ideal disaster are set in place.

As Adam Porter said in the Project Censored 2005 entry for peak oil:

The story that global oil output is peaking, that the demand will continue to outstrip production, is simply the biggest story of the age. Bar none. It connects to everything else. It is a building block for all other stories; be it Iraq, corporate greed, Chinese growth or basic political power.

To understand what this means, it is important to have an idea of how much dependent we are on oil.

At a glance, it seems that peak oil would only affect cars. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Today, oil plays a vital role in providing all essentials of human civilization (let alone the luxuries), from the food we eat to the clothes we wear, from the houses we live in to the medicines we take.

As geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer points out in his (rather frightening) article Eating Fossil Fuels, today’s agriculture is simply unsustainable without a steady supply of oil; each and every step of modern food production is fossil fuel and petrochemical powered. Commercial fertilizers and pesticides can’t be made without oil. Almost all farming equipment are made using, or powered by oil. Food storage systems, powered by electricity often made with oil, are manufactured in oil-powered plants, and transported on oil-powered vehicles. In fact, agriculture is one of the biggest oil consuming industries in the world.

Within a few years of Peak Oil occurring, the price of food will skyrocket because of the soaring costs of fertilizer, storage and transportation. But it won’t be long before food production itself becomes impractical.

The apparel industry is no different. As the organic Trade Association points out, producing one pair of regular cotton jeans takes three-quarters of a pound of fertilizers and pesticides. Each T-shirt takes one-third of a pound. Anything made of synthetic materials like nylon, polyester, or acrylic requires gratuitous amounts of petroleum to produce.

Oil is required for a lot more than just food and clothes, though. It is also required for medicine, nearly every consumer item, water supply pumping, sewage disposal, garbage disposal, hospitals and health systems, police, fire services and national defence.

In other words, if you take oil away, the world will crumble. Imagine over six billion humans in a world without bare essentials – how long will it take for the massive die-off to begin?

It’s panic time. Seriously.

Peak oil means peak civilization. Terminal decline of oil production is the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.

The Hirsch Report¹², commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, states:

Over the past century, world economic development has been fundamentally shaped by the availability of abundant, low-cost oil. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal, coal to oil, etc.) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation at least a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and long lasting.

We don’t have a decade. If we’re fortunate, the peak would be delayed to 2012, which leaves us with 4 more years. It’s quite likely that we’ll see the peak sooner. It’s also quite likely that we’ll have no preparation whatsoever.

Are the political powers aware of this monumental problem? Why is the main-stream media silent on this issue? Could technology save us? And most importantly, what can we, as ordinary people, do? These are some of the questions we’ll attempt to answer in future articles.

Footnotes

1. The widely accepted biogenic theory of oil formation views crude oil and natural gas as the product of compression and heating of ancient organic materials over geological time. (Back)
2. According to the Energy Information Administration which provides official energy statistics from the U.S. government. (Back)
3. It’s a little known historical fact that the US was a key supplier to the Nazis. In fact, Germans completely depended on Standard Oil, a US company, for tetraethyl lead, an essential component in German aviation gasoline. Without the explicit help of Standard Oil, the Nazi air force would never have gotten off the ground. See http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v13/3/oil.html (Back)
4. Hubbert, M.K. (1956), Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf
   Text-only version: http://www.energybulletin.net/13630.html (Back)
5. Noel Grove, reporting M. King Hubbert (June 1974). “Oil, the Dwindling Treasure”. National Geographic.
   Online: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/natgeog.htm (Back)
6. Rembrandt H.E.M. Koppelaar (2006-09). World Production and Peaking Outlook. Peak Oil Netherlands.
   Online: http://peakoil.nl/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/asponl_2005_report.pdf (Back)
7. Watch a segment of this speech on the ASPO YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ia-sk1OqHk (Back)
8. Jeff Vail explains five geopolitical feedback loops which will affect post-peak production decline: Return on Investment, Mercantilism, “Export Land” model, Nationalism and Privateering. He concludes: “so-called “above-ground factors” are driven by the geological reality, these geopolitical processes are positive feedback-loops, and they will accelerate the decline in global oil production beyond that predicted by models derived from logistics curves.”
   http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/04/five-geopolitical-feedback-loops-in.html (Back)
9. Andrew Gould. April 4, 2005. Howard Weil Energy Conference. New Orleans, Louisiana. (Back)
10. ASPO Newsletter, October 2007: http://www.aspo-ireland.org/contentFiles/newsletterPDFs/newsletter82_200710.pdf (Back)
11. In 2004, India and China battled over African Oil: http://www.energybulletin.net/2614.html
    Then, in 2005, over Russian Oil: http://www.energybulletin.net/4325.html (Back)
12. The Hirsch report, the commonly referred to name for the report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, was created by request for the US Department of Energy and published in February 2005. It examined the likelihood of the occurrence of peak oil, the necessary mitigating actions, and the likely impacts based on the timeliness of those actions.
    http://www.acus.org/docs/051007-Hirsch_World_Oil_Production.pdf (Back)