Peak Oil and Descent

The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler is a pretty decent intro book describing the urgent problems surrounding peak oil and what life will be like transitioning away or rather down from oil. He really is a descent author.

Peak oil is the critical issue that creates the descent imperative. While coal, nuclear, and renewables all need to be a part of our descent discussions, oil is the dominant resource in our industrialized civilizations. Human civilizations are depleting global oil reserves at a rapid rate, about 31 billion barrels every year are pumped up from the earth's crust and piped, shipped, and trucked mostly to centers of population and wealth. This number is increasing as wealthy nations increase consumption every year and China, India and the rest of the globe's peripheral countries develop competitive petroleum based economies.

What does 31 billion barrels mean? According to Kunstler, our planet had stored 2 trillion barrels of liquid oil before humans started burning it. As of the year 2005 humans had extracted roughly 1 trillion, or half. Half is the tipping point. Peak oil happens when half of the oil in a reservoir has been extracted.  Reductively speaking, the second half requires more energy and is more expensive to extract.  Furthermore, it is just impossible to pump out every barrel. Once half has been reached, production gets more expensive and slows down, wreaking havoc on our economies because they are completely addicted to oil.

So, if the current level of 31 billion barrels stays constant and there are no new reserves discovered, our civilizations will use the 1 trillion barrels of liquid oil remaining in about 32 years. That means that it took 150 years, from 1859 until 2009, to reach one half and now the second half will be gone in 1/5 of that time. The difference between 1859 and 2009 is that now the world is forced to support more people consuming more based on models of growth that ignore ecological realities. We will not be able to extract all of the remaining reserves because at some point in the extraction of the second half of reservoirs it will take more than a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. That's a serious problem. We also have a global economic climate that promotes growth as inherently beneficial. China alone poses annual threats to global oil production because its economy grows 9 percent every year and its oil consumption grows commensurately.

That was long winded but important. It takes a few years to assemble the global data on oil reserves, so a true understanding of what we have left is only acheived in hindsight. This hindsight played out with U.S. peak oil production when geologists and markets discovered in 1971 that U.S. oil had peaked the year before. It is likely that global peak oil has already occurred, sometime in the last 8 years. This is the hypothesis of current geologists who are in the Hubbert and Deffyes camp. It is not in the interest of oil companies--who hold the information about global reserves--to be factual or transparent about what our addictive societies depend on to sustain false growth. On January 9, 2004, Shell revealed that it had exaggerated its reserves by 20 percent, or 4.5 billion barrels. OPEC regularly makes statements that it can increase production to meet global demand, but does not follow through possibly because its fields are reaching peak.

But what if we discover lots of new oil? That just won't happen. Our current production relies on fields discovered before 1964, the year when the rate of global oil discoveries peaked. The largest OPEC reservoirs in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that provide the world with most of its oil were discovered 70 and 57 years ago respectively. We just are not finding new reserves that can promise to yield significant amounts anymore, and do not think that it is because the oil industry, backed by the governments of wealthy nations, are not trying hard enough.

But what about the 3 billion barrels in the Alberta tar sands? To start, the ratio of energy produced to energy expended there is 2:1.  That compares to 28:1 in the Texas oil fields of 1916. The oil extracted from the tar sands is dirty dirty oil and requires a messy and corrupt operation to extract it. Locals' voices are silenced as the noisy machines pollute the air and water and raise respiratory and immune system problems in surrounding communities. The sands have to be dug up and piled high, denuding landscapes and killing ecosystems. Then the oil has to be extracted and intensively cleaned to produce a product that is only good for asphalt. Our addicitive economies relying on this miniscule amount of dirty oil is equivilant to the following anecdote: An alcoholic walks into an old pub and asks for a beer. "We're out," says the bartender. "But if you want, you can tear up the carpet that has been here since we opened and probably squeeze out enough spills to fill a mug."

There is much more to say on the topic of peak oil.  Last month, I read Crude by Sonia Shah and I just checked out Powerdown by Richard Heinberg from the library and I hope to write more soon.  However, to finish and bring back 31 billion:  the U.S. with less than 5 percent of the world's population consumes 25 percent of its oil, or about 7.5 billion barrels every year (that is 20.5 million barrels every day!)  The U.S. is at the tippy top of this spike in human energy consumption and will soon be descending the energy dependence of our infrastructure, industry, and lifestyles.  I want to prepare for this descent with realistic urgency, intelligent research, discussion, and creativity.