Blogtrek

The Upcoming Oil Crisis

I am going to start a new series of blogs on this subject and may even start a new blog on it. I am really getting concerned to the point of having it shadow everything else to do. Our civilization is slowly running out of oil. I just hope that this current runup of gasoline prices is not the start of what the oil experts call the "Big Rollover", the point at which demand for oil exceeds supply.

Today I will summarize the problem and show a scale from 0-10 on which people who talk about the oil situation can be rated in terms of optimism and pessimism. The first thing to note is that there is only a finite amount of oil on this planet, and that it is not renewable, since it takes a million times as long for this planet to develop oil as it takes for humans to use it up at our current rates. Further, the development of our current standard of living seems to be mainly a product of oil; so much so that we may want to call the period from 1900-2050 the Oil Age. This age will contain my entire lifetime.

Now for some figures. According to the World Almanac, which gets its figures from oil companies and oil-producing nations, there are one trillion barrels of oil on this planet right now; a barrel is 42 gallons. The world is currently using oil at the rate of 80,000,000 barrels of oil per day, or 30,000,000,000 barrels per year. A simple division yields 33 years. It's not that simple. As oil is taken out of the ground it gets harder and harder to get the remaining oil. The amount of oil that a well is capable of getting out in fact goes down exponentially with time. For this reason, production of oil can increase only to a certain point, and then it must decline, even with plenty of oil in the ground. The point at which this is reached is called "Hubbert's Peak". The United States reached its Hubbert's Peak in 1970, and after that we had to import oil. At the same time, demand is rising exponentially, currently at about 2 percent a year. Sooner or later, supply will fall behind demand, and then prices will go up hyperbolically, an event called the Big Rollover. This will cause a severe jolt to our civilization, and the pessimists are predicting no more driving, political upheavals including possible catastrophic wars, starvation, blackouts, and possibly up to 4 billion people dying off.

So we go to other fuels. The problem is that this may be difficult or expensive, despite the fact that more energy hits the Earth from the Sun each day than is in all the oil that ever was, is, or shall be on this planet. Natural gas will peak shortly after oil. Coal will last a while but its use will seriously pollute the planet. Going nuclear will increase the chances of nuclear weapons getting into the hands of terrorists. Hydrogen seems a way out. It is like fossil fuels such as gasoline, but without the carbon. Already we can make a hydrogen or fuel-cell powered vehicle. But where do you get the hydrogen? Getting it from a fossil fuel would defeat the purpose of using hydrogen. It will have to be obtained from water by electrolysis, and that requires energy, which will need to come from the Sun. Already there are solar-powered electrolysis plants built, but this still remains a method with a lot of problems. The optimists are saying that we will convert to these and this will ease our transition from oil. The pessimists are saying that all of these will fail.

So which is it? I will write about this for a few days, but I am going to provide here a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the most pessimistic and 10 the most optimistic. Here are my guidelines:

10 - Oil is a renewable resource.
9 - We will run out of cheap oil well after 2050 and we should be on other fuels by then
8 - We will run out of cheap oil around 2035 or so and with some effort we should get through OK
7- We will run out of cheap oil around 2015-2020 and this will cause a serious crisis, but we will get through OK with other fuels
6 - We will run out of cheap oil next decade, causing a serious crisis, and it is probable, but not certain, that we can develop other fuels
5 - We will run out of cheap oil next decade, causing a serious crisis, and it is not certain if we will get through it.
4. - We will run out of cheap oil within about 10 years or so, causing a severe crisis, and it's probable that we will not be able to get through it.
3 - We will run out of cheap oil in about 10 years, and we will probably wind up with a serious deterioration of our style of living
2 - We will run out of cheap oil in about 10 years, and this will cause many calamities, such as famines, wars, and blackouts.
1 - We will run out of cheap oil in about ten years, bringing us back to the 1700s and causing 4 billion people to starve or be destroyed by nuclear war.
0 - We will run out of cheap oil soon, causing the human species to become extinct.

I feel that I am a 6 on this scale. So I think we are headed for a serious crisis. One thing working in our favor is that we will be entering a Fourth Turning, the time in which people take on crises and solve them. Here is how I rate other authors: Vijay Vaithyswaran, 8; Kenneth Deffeyes, 3; Colin Campbell, 2; www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net , 1; http://www.dieoff.org , 1; Paul Roberts, 5; Jeremy Rifkin, 7 (although he sounds like 3 in the beginning of Hydrogen Economy), Goodstein ("The Party's Over"), 4; Heinberg, 2; the US Government, 8; Kiplinger (letter and magazine), 8. In future blogs, I will go in to more detail on these items. What I would like to empathise, though, is that this will be a crisis, and like the Chinese ideogram for this word says, it will be a time of danger and opportunity.