Peak Oil
The price of crude oil dominated the energy news for the past month, with oil reaching prices over $98 a barrel. While there’s really nothing magic about $100 oil, economists have invested the number with their own brand of mysticism. Why 98.67 is regarded so differently from 100.00 is a mystery to me.
What we did see during the past month are startling changes of position on the part of the deniers, with the Secretary of Energy speaking of “The Age of Insufficiency,” oil company execs emphasizing that petroleum isn’t the only source of liquid fuel after all, and even the venerable Wall Street Journal has finally conceded that infinite quantities of crude are not there just for the taking
Deniers are in full retreat and oil appears poised to break the $100 barrier. Some are speaking now of $150 oil – perhaps by the end of 2008. On the home front, my wife filled her tank and reported paying $50 for the first time in her life. And a growing number of people are finding reason to agree with Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes when he said peak oil happened Thanksgiving, 2005. Peak oil is not yet proven; to establish certainty requires a few years of declining production. Otherwise, companies and nations may mislead us if they wish. I like to think if I were sitting on a whole bunch of underground crude I’d wait a few years until oil hit maybe $500 a barrel before putting it up for sale. Why not? And to keep occupiers from the United States out I wouldn’t tell anyone I had it. I’m a reasonably honest fellow, but even I might resort to a lack of candor in that situation. But let’s cut to the chase. I have some major articles that appeared on the digital media worthy of respect and attention and it might be worth your while to look them up.
Getting A Handle
Have you ever examined www.eia.doe.gov? Were you, like me, blown away by the huge great sea of data? Don’t even know where to begin trying to make any sense of it? Boy, have I got a deal for you.
‘Gail the Actuary’ is a staff writer for The Oil Drum, www.theoildrum.com, a most important web site. Like this blog, The Oil Drum has a stable of writers; in their case they stick to energy sources and oh-my-goodness they are good. Gail the Actuary has taken the data handsomely provided by EIA and worked it up into a series of graphs that do indeed begin to make sense of the data. A superb piece of work by somebody who knows what a spreadsheet is capable of producing. It was Gail that supplied the information on percentage of corn consumed for fuel production/amount of fuel produced that I spoke of in my last essay. All based on statistics from the U.S. Energy Department. Highly recommended reading. Even worth posting on the wall.
You wanna have a look, go to the referenced site, search for ‘Gail the Actuary’ in the staff listings, click on “U.S. Petroleum Supply, Some Overview Graphs.” I promise your few minutes will be richly rewarded.
After The Peak
Worldwide peak oil production is not for me to declare, though I can certainly keep an eye on the situation. The event predicates life style changes, perhaps to a considerable degree. What to expect? My own personal energy guru, Tom Whipple, has provided his thought on the issue. Lots of other writers have done the same, but I respect Tom more than the others. Doomsayers can get carried away. Tom works hard, and I think effectively, at keeping within reasonable limits, allowing for the ingenuity of our species to come up with previously unconsidered solutions.
Tom’s thoughts on the subject can be found on www.energybulletin.net. Look for “After the Peak?’ published on November 1st of this year. As an example of Tom’s thinking, he predicts (and gives you the basis of his predictions) that five years after production shows a definite decline, the individual motorist can count on no more than half the gas he’s getting now. That begins to look like a WWII situation. Tom supposes that, given the absolute necessity of fueling emergency vehicles, growing and transporting food and that sort of thing, the government will necessarily impose an allocation system rather than depending entirely on pricing on pricing to reduce demand. We don’t want those fire engines opting out.
Five years isn’t very far in the future, whether we have already started or will soon start. Should you be one who likes to plan for the future, this is another highly recommended article.
Preparing Transportation For Oil Depletion
This is an article appearing on EB that lets me climb up on my hobby horse – the future of transportation. It’s actually a review of a book to be published this month (December, 2007).
A brief key paragraph from the EB article, written by Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl which I quote in full:
“Our assessment of numerous alternatives to oil as a transport fuel concludes that, as oil depletion progresses, only electricity could reasonably power acceptable levels of land transportation. Oil products will be increasing limited to fueling marine transportation and aviation.”
Another:
At the heart of planning for oil depletion is whether it will be anticipated in a timely manner. If anticipated, the result could be a ‘soft landing’ into oil depletion. If not, scarcity and price increases during oil depletion could produce a ‘hard landing’ involving economic and social disruption and dysfunctional panic responses.”
It’s an academic work written by academicians (well, one of them is, the other speaks to industry rather than students), and they establish the basis for their conclusions. Another brief essay written for those who wish to be aware of what’s going on.
Local News
A fourth piece, a commentary appearing in the Oregonian on Friday, November 23rd and asks if renewable energy is helpful. Not surprisingly, the author thought it was. Which most of us already know. But the author supplies some interesting statistics, and I appreciated that. For example, he says natural gas supplied to electrical generators rose in price by 300 percent since 1999, that coal rose 45 percent, and we know what’s happening to oil, though extremely little is used for electrical production anymore.
On Nov. 27 the Oregonian, in the business pages, reported that Google, your helpful search engine, announced it will go solar to supply its huge demand for wattage to run its virtual empire. In an editorial on the 28th the paper clarified with information that Google is supporting a research effort aimed at bring the price of solar down, the price being of the semiconductors themselves. (You may recall from last month that in Germany a 3.5 MW solar facility is run by three – a guy and his two dogs. Fuel was free. Low operating cost.) At any rate, Google supposes a 25-50 percent reduction in solar panel costs as a result. Nice to hear from a commercial source offering encouragement
Climate Bulletin
Scientific American is back with us. They are running a synopsis of the IPCC report in their current issue. You may run out to your favorite magazine stand to buy one, to the library to read it for free, or you may view the article on your monitor at www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=world-leaders-urge-action-on-climate-change.
What’s For Supper?
Richard Heinberg is a professor at the Santa Rosa branch of the New College of California where he teaches courses on Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Community. He is the author of five books, including: A New Covenant with Nature: Notes on the End of Civilization and the Renewal of Culture and Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology . His latest book is The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies . His online newsletter can be found at: www.museletter.com.
Only rarely in history does someone come up with truly original thinking – Einstein and e=mc squared comes to mind. All the rest of us at best contribute incrementally to the human store of knowledge. Acknowledging the debt to predecessors is a prerequisite of academic status.
That is the case with Dr. Heinberg’s major paper that appeared on Dec. 3rd on www.energybulletin.net. It is well thought out, well constructed, well documented by footnotes. We have taken the liberty of quoting the first bit of it, in hopes that others may be inclined to go the original to see where the man is going.
“What will we eat as the oil runs out?
by Richard Heinberg
Our global food system faces a crisis of unprecedented scope. This crisis, which threatens to imperil the lives of hundreds of millions and possibly billions of human beings, consists of four simultaneously colliding dilemmas, all arising from our relatively recent pattern of dependence on depleting fossil fuels.
The first dilemma consists of the direct impacts on agriculture of higher oil prices: increased costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs.
The second is an indirect consequence of high oil prices - the increased demand for biofuels, which is resulting in farmland being turned from food production to fuel production, thus making food more costly.
The third dilemma consists of the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events caused by fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the greatest environmental crisis of our time; however, fossil fuel depletion complicates the situation enormously, and if we fail to address either problem properly the consequences will be dire.
Finally comes the degradation or loss of basic natural resources (principally, topsoil and fresh water supplies) as a result of high rates, and unsustainable methods, of production stimulated by decades of cheap energy.”
Juice
And finally, again on EB on Dec. 5th comes notice of a new proposed wind farm in the Columbia River valley east of the Cascades. It proposes just short of a gigawatt of new generating capacity. That’s more than twice the output of the Boardman coal fired power plant.
This news, coupled with the previously mentioned intent of Google to cut the price of solar panels in half, strongly suggests the age of true renewables has arrived.

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