"My father rode a camel; I drive a car; my son flies a jet; his son will ride a camel."
--Saudi saying
"The solution is to pray. Under the best of circumstances, if all prayers are answered, there will be no crisis for maybe two years. After that, it's a certainty."
-- Matthew Simmons, energy investment banker and adviser to George W. Bush
The world faces enormous energy challenges. There are no easy answers. ? ExxonMobil Oil Company, 2005
One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over. ? Chevron Oil Company, 2005
The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. ? SAIC Report to the U.S. Department of Energy, 2005
"The fifth revolution will come when we have spent the stores of coal and oil that have been accumulating in the earth during hundreds of millions of years... It is to be hoped that before then other sources of energy will have been developed... Whether a convenient substitute for the present fuels is found or not, there can be no doubt that there will have to be a great change in ways of life. This change may justly be called a revolution, but it differs from all the preceding ones in that there is no likelihood of its leading to increases of population, but even perhaps to the reverse."
Sir Charles Galton Darwin, 1952
This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult,
apocalypse Bible sect or conspiracy theory society. Rather,
it is the scientific conclusion of the best-paid, most widely
respected geologists, physicists and investment bankers in
the world. These are rational, professional, conservative
individuals who are absolutely terrified by the phenomenon
known as global peak oil."
March 14, 2005 Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (Republican, Maryland) speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives
?The oil crisis is very, very near.?
Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, Vice President of the National Iranian Oil Company
?The looming oil crisis will dwarf 1973?
CBS News, Market Watch?s story: ?The Petro-Apocalypse? 2004
Why we need to be concerned with Peak Oil
Ever since this most unusual hurricane season, ?Peak Oil? has plagued the news, from the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, BBC, USA Today, CBS, etc. Most news agencies refer to the peak as the time when roughly half the recoverable oil resources are exhausted and the age of cheap oil is over. The real key to understanding peak oil is the time when production of oil reaches its peak and goes into decline, regardless if the oil is ?half gone? or not, although traditionally maximum production happens fairly near the 50% depletion mark but this is certainly not always the case, especially with natural gas where the production peak can be anywhere from 50% to 80% depleted mark. For the past couple of months, I?ve gotten heavily involved in Peak Oil, getting involved with Portland Peak Oil group and even meeting senior energy policy makers on both the city and state government level, reading books, and personally preparing for peak oil, an event as inevitable as death and taxes. The implications of peak oil are enormous; it will affect every human being on the planet, and affect every aspect of day to day life. Shell Oil predicts that once we are past peak, that all oil extraction will come to its logical conclusion and completely end in 37 years. There will be plenty of oil still left in the ground at this point, but this will be the point where you have to burn a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil out of the ground, the Energy Returned on Energy Invested (ERoEI) will drop to 1:1 and simply will no longer work as an energy source. In other words, the second half of Hubbert?s peak will happen much faster than the first half, even with the more optimistic predictions of the Major oil companies. Exxon Mobil has launched a multi million marketing campaign to educate the public about peak oil. Peak oil plagues environmentalist?s web sites, socialist websites, and investor websites and even Republican's websites like Dr. Barlett, Congressmans from Marlyland. To put it another way, both the Catholic Church and Galileo are signing the same exact tune: Peak Oil is coming and it?s coming soon!
To get this in perspective, lets do a simple thought experiment. Lets say you wake up tomorrow and gas costs $10/gallon. You may be thinking that now would be a great time to buy a Prius or other hybrid and lose the SUV. Sounds like a great idea right? Well there?s only one simple problem. It takes an enormous amount of heat to create steel. In fact, to create a ton of copper from ore requires 112 million BTUs (Brithish Thermal Units) and it requires 22 billion BTUs for a ton of aluminum, the equivalent of 356 barrels of Oil! This is why the energy costs of building a car are enormous. Not only will gas at $10/gallon seem unaffordable, but now that Prius is going to cost a fortune as well. ALL alternative energy, be it solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, bio-mass, thermal depolarization, methane hydrates, geothermal, et al are all heavily subsidized by cheap oil and you cannot separate the costs of these alternatives independently of the cost of oil. This is why something like bio-diesel will forever be a moving target. Since bio-diesel costs $5 a gallon now, you maybe waiting to make the switch once gas reaches that level, the trouble is, bio-diesel will follow the same exact trajectory, not to mention there?s not enough farm land in America to support our current consumption level with bio-diesel crops. In fact, you cannot separate the cost of energy we get from food from the cost of oil as there is no organic replacement of natural gas based fertilizers, the cost of which has doubled in the last year alone and is already on its path to the stratosphere.
CNN and other news agencies, when discussing the topic of peak oil, are quick to point out: Canada has massive reserves of oils sands, the US has massive reserves of coal which can be converted into fuel, and we also have massive reserves of shale oil, perhaps enough to last 200 years! This may be true although 200 years is quite optimistic. This is like finding out that you have a bank account with one million dollars! There?s only one small catch: The maximum amount you can withdraw on any given day from your million dollar bank account is $13 dollars and you currently have a $260 a day spending habit. The coal sands of Canada are an open pit mining operation in permafrost, they use natural gas to heat water which heats the soil to dig, and use natural gas to ?cook? the oil out of the sand. They want to build several nuclear plants to help in this process. Given several nuclear power plants, massive amounts of trucks and all the infrastructure in the world imaginable to dig and process these sands, one million barrels a day would be a fantastically optimistic production level for these resources, barely enough to satisfy Canada, let alone America?s 20 million a day habit. You simply cannot get these fossil fuels out of the ground and to market at the same pace you can pump oil out of Texas or elsewhere. Again, the point to stress with Peak Oil is not to simply ask ?how much do we have left? but rather ?How much can be bring to market on a daily or yearly basis??. Shale Oil and Synfuel (made from coal) face the same dilemmas. Yes, we will surely be using these resources and they will come to market, just not at anything like the rate we currently consume oil and the fuel from these sources will be very very expensive.
Peak Oil will change every aspect of your life. Prepare now for an energy depleted future.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil