There’s some possibility we hit peak oil last year, but it’s going to be less about running out of oil and more about the shifting economics of energy production. Less “we’re running out of oil” and more “renewables are so damned cheap”.
> There’s some possibility we hit peak oil last year, but it’s going to be less about running out of oil and more about the shifting economics of energy production. Less “we’re running out of oil” and more “renewables are so damned cheap”.
Which is good, because then hopefully some oil will be left over to bootstrap advanced civilization if the need arises. Otherwise things might stagnate at pre-industrial levels, or spend a long time lingering in a slave-powered semi-industrial state (where you have human power growing fuel for a small elite's technology, which consequently advances slowly).
I have never understood this meme of "without oil we'll return to pre-industrial society", it seems like a pretty self serving narrative created by the oil and gas industry.
In reality human history is littered with energy crises. At various times and places society has faced risks due to insufficient energy. Before the industrial revolution, deforestation represented a risk in some places, as did over-whaling for oil. Rather than just returning to slave labor to power everything, we found new energy sources and kept developing new technology. In the past this involved coal and eventually oil, but going forward this could easily be renewables or nuclear. Pretending that the lack of oil exploitation means the end of industrial society is a very myopic view of human society and technology production.
> I have never understood this meme of "without oil we'll return to pre-industrial society", it seems like a pretty self serving narrative created by the oil and gas industry.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is fossil fuels may be required for the transition from a pre-industrial society to an industrial society that can do everything with renewable energy. We're towards the tail end of that transition, but it took a hundred+ years of fossil fuel use to get there. If there aren't any fossil fuels left, it may be impossible to make that transition again (say after a nuclear war that destroys the power grid and battery manufacturing/supply chains).
Ah, that's very different from what I thought you were saying.
I think in theory that makes sense, but I doubt that it's practically a concern. I think in practice any situation where you're tapping the last bits of oil in order to re-boot a technical base, then I very much doubt that the planet would remain habitable long enough for that society to boot strap a new technical base and solve the problems created by burning the last of the oil. I think in such a scenario humanity is probably doomed.
> I think in practice any situation where you're tapping the last bits of oil in order to re-boot a technical base, then I very much doubt that the planet would remain habitable long enough for that society to boot strap a new technical base and solve the problems created by burning the last of the oil.
I feel like you're thinking about climate change there and focusing too much on it. IIRC, even a global, full-scale nuclear war wouldn't render the planet uninhabitable. Billions would die, but some people with the skills to survive would make it through. I can think of other, more speculative collapse scenarios.
The current models basically say that if we burnt all of the oil, we’d turn our planet into Venus with runaway warming. I don’t think that’s the path we’re on now, but I think that would be the path we’d land on if we were bootstrapping another society with the oil we left behind at the end of this century.
And that’s presuming there’s enough of it left to bootstrap. We’ve wasted a lot of it to get to the point where solar and nuclear exist, whether we could replicate that with what will be left is unclear to me. There’s certainly not a lot of good coal left, for example. We burnt most of it in the 19th century, and a new industrial revolution would have to make do with the subpar stuff we’ve left behind.
> Within current models of the runaway greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide (especially anthropogenic carbon dioxide) does not seem capable of providing the necessary insulation for Earth to reach the Simpson–Nakajima limit.[7][8]
> Debate remains, however, on whether carbon dioxide can push surface temperatures towards the moist greenhouse limit.[24][25] Climate scientist John Houghton has written that "[there] is no possibility of [Venus's] runaway greenhouse conditions occurring on the Earth".[26] The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has also stated that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."[27] However, climatologist James Hansen disagrees. In his Storms of My Grandchildren he says that burning coal and mining oil sands will result in runaway greenhouse on Earth.[28] A re-evaluation in 2013 of the effect of water vapor in the climate models showed that James Hansen's outcome would require ten times the amount of CO2 we could release from burning all the oil, coal, and natural gas in Earth's crust.[24]
Am I the only one who remembers articles from late 2019 talking about how the crash of gas prices was going to drive all of the fracking operators to slow down operations or go out of business? This particular article seems to drag in some ill-defined and clearly unsupported 'energy cost per barrel' that seems to be off by an order of magnitude or so from the actual energy requirement for pulling up gas from a fracked well according to all other info I can find, so I am not quite sure how much credence I should give the rest of the piece.
That's a micro scale analysis. The article is all about the macro scale.
If one gas well in the North Sea runs out, you're correct someone drills another well. When ALL the gas wells in the North Sea run out, thats how you get a peak of 4.5MBE/day back around the turn of the century and now production has dropped permanently to a quarter of that around 1MBE/day.
If you have an infinite supply of something, like in some areas, drinking water, then economic activity controls water bottle filling plants. If you have a finite supply of something, like in some areas, drinking water, then economic activity has no effect if the wells are dry you don't have water. Water is very heavy commodity so trade between east of the mississippi with five feet of rain per year and California deserts with no rain, is irrational or at least very economic and environmentally expensive. On the other hand you can pack a billion dollars of silicon chips into a small moving van so world trade of semiconductors still makes sense... for now.
Also some economic activity being cyclical is "OK" or manageable. But food is oil, and you can't rationally go cyclical on food. So that's a second problem with oil. If you "let the market do its thing" with STM32 microcontrollers, you'll get a year long drought of 99% of everyone has nothing but the world will go on, more or less. Try that kind of supply squeeze with food and the government will fall within days.
I agree with the macro scale perspective you're sharing.
Regarding food, there's quite a bit of flexibility in food supply- we primarily produce calories for enjoyment, not sustenance. Yes, hunger will topple governments. But "letting the market do its thing" with food doesn't necessarily mean famine. It may mean shortages of specific foods which don't make economic sense. High meat prices, unavailability of particular types of fruits and vegetables.
Famine is terrifying, yes. But we should also acknowledge that there's a huge amount of contraction that can happen in our food production systems before bellies go empty.
Humans are reasonably intelligent agents. We adapt.
Energy supply changes aren’t a black swan event. Every time there’s a price spike, the demand curve is shifted by replacement and efficiency improvements. That’s why coal is a dead industry. That’s why solar went from a rounding error to a significant player that has slowed peak electric demand.
Issues like water in arid areas like the American West are very different. Personally, I’m about 40, and I don’t think there will be a serious supply-side disruption in oil/gas supply in my lifetime. I do think that we will have a significant disruption in access to fruit and vegetable supply due to brain dead US agriculture policy. And I think my kids will see grain shortages in their lifetime as the Midwest aquifers are depleted.
Not sure why the downvotes, because you’re directionally-correct; exploration shifted to onshore nonconventionals (fracking, tar sands) and more complex conventional offshore wellplans, plus investments in improved recovery from producing wells. These have been wildly successful approaches in economic terms, but they were definitely in reaction to a loss of easy-to-access oil formations.
Someone in 1910 in Pennsylvania or Western NY would be concerned about peak oil from the standpoint that trivially extractable (by todays standards) oil was running out and is most out today.
That drives prices up, drives higher risk exploration, and ultimately exploitation becomes operational and cheap. This drives the price down like any other commodity business.
I doubt we've hit peak, but there are important things to consider.
If we run out of energy before we exit our gravity well, that's one instance of the great filter. Resource conflicts might also trigger war that could destabilize society and prevent us from advancing.
The world needs energy, yet many of us pay far less attention than we should.
We’re nowhere close to running out of energy. There’s thousands of years’ worth just in proven uranium reserves, never mind seawater and unproven reserves.
We’re just going to have to get over our fear of nuclear power.
Also I'm told there's a giant nuclear reactor in the sky we might learn how to tap someday. Once we get done with the much easier nuclear buildout, of course.
Frank Drake (Drake equation author) at SETI argues that aliens stick to their solar systems because their sun will provide all the energy they will ever need and space is just not worth traversing. At any rate, whether we exit our gravity well en masse or not, the sun will still be shining.
Meh. We're not staring down the abyss of the "net energy cliff" where near-100% of energy goes to procuring more energy. The reason for our shortages is because of things like (for instance) various politicians deciding to not-build Keystone XL (US) or to delay Nord Stream 2 (Europe). Because of these decisions — surprise surprise — we aren't being delivered the products they'd carry.
Some of those noises are even legitimate. But the Net Energy Cliff™ is a long long long way off. In hard-hit Europe, for instance, Germany is sitting on fantastical reserves of shale gas and oil which they could access by fracking, but won't. Good decision? Some say so. Energy-cliff apocalypse? Hahahaha no.
Heck, if it really came to that, we'd bring back nuclear.
Sorry, but Keystone XL has absolutely nothing to do with this and the fuel that it was going to transport is the dirtiest, heaviest crude around and not gas. After a year or more of lockdown and diminished demand we are now ramping back up and supply will take a while to catch up. Nothing magic about this and anyone who claims this is an indicator for some sort of long-term consequence (like the author of the original article) is clearly reading way too much into the tea leaves they are staring at.
> Sorry, but Keystone XL has absolutely nothing to do with this
You say this as if energy consumption isn't fungible in the slightest, and that we'd gladly fall off the net energy cliff™ before trying to make any substitutions.
Not building NS2 has nothing to do with this crisis in any way. The gas can be readily transported through existing pipelines just as it has been for decades.
If you're saying that Putin wants to strong-arm the west by not providing enough gas at normal prices until NS2 is approved, then yeah that makes sense. But this wouldn't be because of NS2, it's because of Putin.
Gazprom's unwillingness to send gas in transit through eastern Europe where it could theoretically run is indeed a real thing, and you're right that Nord Stream 2 would alleviate only political capacity limitations. (And FWIW, I'm against it, because I'm against Vladimir Putin, but I don't get to make these decisions.)
It's still limiting capacity. There's still lots of gas in Russia. Heck, there's still lots of gas in Groningen, they've just stopped pumping it. In neither case are we staring down a net energy cliff™.
yeah, there is no energy cliff, only bad political decisions. Supporting NS, NS2, Banning fracking, and I would also add a "wishful thinking" reduction of fossil fuels, before the grid was ready for that. Germany alone invested 100 billions in green energy subsidies. Those money could have kept a lot of gas or coal burning.
I hope we will get out of crisis stronger than before, not weaker, and don't default back to burning coal for the long term.
Comprehensive but barely worth commenting on since the same article, with convincing arguments for the time, have existed for the last 60 years at least. Here’s why (and I realize this is me commenting on it anyway):
Yes, there is a finite resource involved.
Yes, using it, whether we find more or not, makes the planet uninhabitable for the size of the human population due to it being uninhabitable for many existing species.
But is it peak gas/oil/whatever? No. It never is because currently uneconomical sources become economical. The article slightly addresses that by saying the last decade of fracking was an accounting gimmick that allowed unprofitable operations to work out okay. Uh yeh thats exactly whats going to happen with even more harder to extract and create gas.
No, certainly not. However there's an interesting paper that shows that we're nearing peak fossil fuels probably much faster (in particular for coal) than most seem to anticipate, due to limits in EROEI. See
It's rather staggering to think that global emissions might continue to rapidly climb for another 20+ years yet at a minimum, given the numbers as they are now.
That scenario would definitely be in the interests of the fossil fuel producers as prices would skyrocket during a supply shortage with demand constant or barely tapering.
Science direct article doesn't really align with what we know about oil production. For instance, why would oil sands production decline? These are major installations where the majority of the cost is upfront. They aren't going to need to build new upgraders in the next 30 years to keep it rolling.
If fossil fuels are being phased out investors won't be willing to take risks and invest in capital intensive projects that only pay off after decades.
This can lead to a painful short term energy crisis. Many will celebrate this pain and suffering pointing out that it creates an insensitive to move to alternatives.
Off and on I have been reading about Peak Oil articles dated from at least 1970 since 2006. Isaac Asimov even wrote a [perhaps speculative] piece about it.
Is this one of the "X will the the coming Y and always will be" topics?
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