Whether in print or in their private thoughts, most Peak Oil believers grapple with the immediate effects of oil scarcity. They picture a scenario based on history or speculative fiction, refining their expectations as the real future reveals itself and like Kafka's ape, looking for a way out. In today's Falls Church News-Press, Tom Whipple postulates that increasingly precious liquid fuels will be allocated to aircraft and ships. Since cellulosic biofuels and hydrogen are not ready for prime time, he expects that our already available electric power grid will be the most likely ground transport fuel for the immediate future. But in Peak Oil prognostication, all solutions reveal even deeper problems. Electric cars may serve in a limited capacity, but will we have enough resources to actually build them? Will any but the very rich be able to afford them?
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“…increasingly precious liquid fuels will be allocated to aircraft and ships.” Does this guy know that refining crude isn’t an either/or proposition; that if you want to turn crude oil into some bunker for a ship and some jet fuel for a plane you also wind up with some gasoline? Does he think the gas will be thrown into a creek like it was before the automobile created a huge demand for gasoline?
The guy also envisions overhead electric lines along highways to power trucks, akin to the trolley cars once common in big cities. Folks, there’s a reason the trolley disappeared, and it’s not that GM did away with them to sell buses.
This article wasn’t ready for prime time. But some people do look forward to apocalypses.
I remember hearing the peak oil argument in the 1970’s and again in the 1980’s. It skipped the 1990’s but is back again now. I suspect we will hear it again in the 2010’s, 2020’s…….
It’s a basic law of human nature that we don’t like to hear bad news. We are not rational creatures, but rationalizing ones. When we hear bad news, the natural reaction of most people is to justify why it’s not true, and start shutting it down by decrying it as apocalyptic, pessimistic, off-base, crazy, or just plain wrong.
It’s another fundamental tenet of human nature that most people don’t like change. We are a race driven by inertia. We like what we like, and we don’t want it to change.
Unfortunately, another irrefutable fact is that the supply of fossil fuels is limited. There is a fixed amount in the ground. The last time I checked, there weren’t herds of dinosaurs dying by the millions to replenish the supplies. So, if something is limited, and you keep sucking it out and can’t make any more, eventually it will run out.
As much as it deeply pains me as a hard-core car enthusiast, all the hard science points to that time coming soon for oil. All of us as car enthusiasts don’t want to hear that. I too don’t want to hear that. I love the rush of a torquey V8, or a high-winding Japanese VTEC engine as much as anyone. But whether we like it or not, we are reaching the downward sloping part of the oil supply curve. No new major oil finds have been made in decades. There just isn’t any more in the ground, folks, and it is what it is.
As painful as it is, and as much as we don’t want to think about it, gas is never going to be “cheap” again. There will be fluctuations, there will probably even be a short-term correction as the current “decoupled” pricing bubble deflates. But it is never going to be a whole lot cheaper than it is today, and will increase significantly over the next several years.
It would be so much nicer to believe that gas will again be under $2 a gallon, and that there will be plenty of it for as long as we want, and all that good stuff is “just around the corner”. But, no matter how much we try to delude ourselves and talk ourselves into it, it’s just not true.
The world is changing. It doesn’t mean the end, but things will change for us car enthusiasts. For the independently wealthy that can afford gas at any price, life (as always for the rich) will not be affected very much. For the rest of us that still work for a living, we can look at Europe for a peek at what things will probably be like in the near and intermediate term future – smaller, more fuel efficient cars, more use of trains and mass transit. Long term, very unfortunately, the car just won’t be able to have the same place in our lives it once had.
It was a fun run while it lasted.
Coal-to-liquid technology is profitable at the current price of oil. I don’t expect prices to increase much in the long term because of this.
50merc: While I think the military may see to it that their aircraft and ships get the fuel they need, Whipple’s assumption didn’t make sense to me, either. For example, I could see commercial shipping start to exploit wind again.
carnick: As a kid I remember getting free dinosaur glasses from the gas station, but petroleum actually seems to derive from ancient deposits of plant matter.
bucksnort wrote:
“I remember hearing the peak oil argument in the 1970’s and again in the 1980’s. It skipped the 1990’s but is back again now. I suspect we will hear it again in the 2010’s, 2020’s……”
“As if it’s nonsense?”
In reality, the oil production capacity of the United States did indeed peak in the 1970’s, which is probably mainly what you’re referring to. And that’s why we’ve become dependent upon oil produced by other countries.
The current peak oil ‘argument’ is that the production capacity of those countries we’ve become dependent upon is at or nearing a peak — and from that point forward, all of the oil consumers on the planet will “fight” for whatever remains.
Of course, that’s only part of a much bigger story, but one fact will probably remain: We have been enjoying “cheap” oil — oil that has been inexpensive to produce and refine into the gasoline and other products we consume. There are other oil resources that will be more expensive to produce and refine into products, but that’s the ticket: They will be “more expensive.”
Some day, you may look longingly back to the days when gasoline was “only” four dollars per gallon.
A good chunk of Whipple’s article verges on the senseless.
The basic situation is this: There is a certain amount of all the various fossil fuels in the ground. Nobody knows how much this is, but we can say that it is “a lot.” Some fraction of those fuels are recoverable, given our current technology and pricing assumptions. Change the technology and pricing assumptions, and your estimate regarding recoverable reserves changes. If oil companies begin to regard $100/bbl oil as a long-term fact of life, more and more of them will take the plunge into tar sands, oil shale, coal-to-liquids, and the like (all of which might cost $50/bbl to produce), and all of a sudden “recoverable reserves,” which never included those sources before, will get bumped up.
The general worry behind Whipple’s article is the idea of Peak Oil — that production rates tend go up until they reach some peak, and then start to decline. This is broadly true of any given oil field, and can be extrapolated to a batch of oil fields. Technological fixes can sometimes bump the shape of the curve, but there is ultimate decline. The U.S., for instance, hit peak production in the 1970s, and has been producing less and less ever since. But to extrapolate to the world scale would be misleading in the following respect: Total domestic production declined as our conventional fields peaked, because it was never supplemented by unconventional oil. That was because cheap imports (cost of production $5-$25/bbl) were generally available to outcompete domestic unconventional sources (cost of production $50/bbl). If we really are coming up on peak conventional oil for the world, then there will be no other sources of cheap-to-produce oil waiting overseas to smother the development of unconventional oil technologies, and those will finally have a chance to take off. Prices may never be so low as they were in 1999 (remember $0.99/gal gasoline?), but if the average tar sands plant can produce marketable crude at $50/bbl, then average $2.50 gasoline could be a long term prospect.
But even if we are hitting, or will hit, some relevant peak in oil production, Whipple’s article is still rather senseless. A peak is not a cliff. Oil — and lots of it — will still be available in very large quantities for many years after such a peak. The prospect of millions of cars suddenly going idle due to a lack of anything to fuel them with — or prices too high for anyone to afford — is somewhat absurd.
Given the pace at which a decline in production rates could be expected to occur, there is ample time for a more orderly response, be it through conservation to make supplies last longer, adoption of alternative technologies, or some other strategy. Each year there would be some response at the margins — prices go up, the most inefficient cars are forced off the road, or the most pointless trips are not taken, and demand is brought down a bit to just fit within supply. But that is a fraction at a time, and not a sudden idling of the entire automotive world.
Arguably, the shift away from SUVs in the environment of $3/gal gasoline — and the near-halt in U.S. consumption growth over the last year — is an example of this sort of thing already in motion. The verdict so far: Painful, perhaps, but not catastrophic.
Frankly, global warming concerns provide a much better reason to think that we will seriously reduce fossil fuel consumption in the coming decades, rather than sheer supply constraints.
NBK-Boston :
March 1st, 2008 at 10:49 pm
A good chunk of Whipple’s article verges on the senseless.
One factor totally ignored in the replies is the massive increase in vehicle ownership in countries such as China and India. Even if oil production doesn’t decrease the competition for supply continues to increase on a daily basis.
Our own short sighted policies are anti nuclear and utilize coal, natural gas and oil.
Whipple reasoning may not be spot on but his final analysis might not be far off.
BTW, at what price point for oil and gasoline does the ANWR become mandatory for national security purposes, and to keep our economy from melting down?
Autoacct,
Good point. When do we tell the folks in Florida that a few oil platforms in the view are just too necessary to continue to banish by fiat.
Carnick,
Define soon. Otherwise, your entire point has zero meaning.
Also, your comments on human nature only tell half the story. Plenty of people a panic prone, and when they hear a theory like peak oil, global warming, or global freezing they want something done about it.
I think the biggest thing (which was touched on) is that we’re working with fuels/energy that are finite. We may not have tapped it all out now, but with around 6 billion people between China and India coming into automobiles and other forms of transportation it stands to reason that whatever supplies we do have are going to start being burned through much more rapidly than ever before.
I recall seeing something a couple of weeks ago about the US air force using some alternate fuels experimentally in some air craft. I’m not sure if this is just some headlines for the Air Force and a company of the week or if they are actually seeking alternative forms of fuel for their air craft. If they really are seeking alternatives that leads me to believe that the government believes in a situation soon where oil/gasoline/fuel is scarce.