I’m talking today at a Brisbane Institute forum on oil and whether it’s running out. 12:30 at the Hilton. I’ll try to post my presentation soon.
387 thoughts on “Peak Oil”
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John Quiggin 
Well is it???
No one is saying that it will run out in the short term. We will however face dwindling supplies as our rate of discovery of new oil is dropping. There is also no reliable data on Middle East oil as there is no independant audit of reserves – only what the Saudi’s etc tell us what they have.
It’s probably well behind the eight-ball for many of you who are familiar with the peak oil issue, but Catalyst had an introduction to the topic this week.
Personally, I remain unconvinced by the more alarmist claims, for the simple reason that if we get desperate we can convert coal into liquid fuels (as South Africa has done for decades). Yes, the investment required to do so would be massive, but if there’s equally massive profits to be made supplying a fuel-starved world I’m pretty confident the market can do so.
The environmental implications of this process (which is far more greenhouse-intensive than petroleum-based fuels) I leave to the reader to contemplate. *That* scenario is the one I’m more worried about.
Scientific American (July 2005) has a major article on CO2 capture and storage.
Rechargable hybrid electric cars. Solar Towers. Ethanole. Photovoltaics.
All these leads me to believe that we will transition without too much fuss as and when oil steadily becomes scarse.
Did I mention uranium?
Terje, solar towers and photovoltaics are essentially irrelevant to Peak Oil. We have no shortage of coal or uranium to generate electricity with.
I support the use of nuclear power to reduce greenhouse emissions, but to claim it has anything much to do with solving the problem of peak oil is an unfortunate distortion that nuclear advocates sometimes indulge in.
Ethanol from sugar is a useful minor adjunct to petroleum. Ethanol from grain crops is a conjob and an excuse to pump subsidies to farmers. Either way, you couldn’t make enough of the stuff to substantially replace oil without starving a significant fraction of the developing world.
Robert – How can you say that we can just convert coal to oil? Apart from the environmental aspect there is not enough suitable coal to really make a difference. Also the rate of conversion is too slow for demand.
Nuclear power will not solve our peak oil problems as you say however it will not solve our electricity problems either. There are far too many issues that need to be solved. Also Uranium though it seems limitless now is a finite resources as well.
Why do we keep pinning our future on finite resources?
Terge – Transition will not happen overnight. If we started now we could perhaps have alternatives in place in time however that is not going to happen. A 5 to 10 year lead time will be needed and what will we do in the meantime? Sustaining the current rate of oil production with technology pumping the maximum of oil out of tired fields could result in a plateau of oil production followed by a very steep decline. In this case we will not have time, as while we are in the the plateau all major players in the business will all be saying “there is plenty of oil” as they are now. We cannot transition without our fossil fuel economy being largely intact. A steep decline in oil supply could lead to a collapse that makes transition impossible.
The problem is of course that so many of the energy solutions to oil require oil…
Robert, the notion that western grain production feeds the third world is just as much a con job as the notion of ethanol from grain. Western grain exports flood third world markets and outcompete local producers, deprive the developing world of first world grain and developing world agriculture will increase.
The problem occurs of course when first world ethanol production provides a better price than developing world mouths. A bit like Ethiopian soy bean production.
I strongly agree with Ender.Whether or not we have reached ‘Peak Oil’ – and the Catalyst program on the subject was quite good – it seems that too many people are complacent about the potential of alternatives to oil. Simply listing alternative energy sources – ethanol, biofuels, hydrogen, nuclear power etc – will not magick them into place on the scale required to provide a real alternative to ubiquitous petroleum: a vast scale.
The very great transitions from one dominant source to another – from wood to coal, from coal to oil – have taken at least fifty years. I’ve always loathed the global oil economy – it’s literally toxic – but I’m quite sure that if oil production were to begin declining in the next few years, we would not have enough alternative fuels available to avoid a serious economic crisis. Currently, There Is No Alternative.
These discussions often seem to proceed without any consideration of the most obvious response to a shrinking supply of oil – using less of it. If 70% of global oil consumption is used in transport, ceasing wasteful practices such as shipping foodstuffs around the world (for example, most of our garlic comes from China) and encouraging people to buy smaller cars (for example, phasing out motors larger than 2 litres for small passenger vehicles) would have a huge impact on our consumption levels. Unfortunately there’s still plenty of cash to be made burning the oil while it lasts.
Ender,
The transition to hybrid electrics is already under way. The transition to rechargable hybrid electrics is just beginning. Both of these will over time have a significant impact on oil usage.
Photovoltaics may still be peripheral however Solar Towers (ie http://www.enviromission.com.au) look very promising to me. Uranium offers an almost endless source of energy, however neither of these offer a portable power source in the way that petrol does. For that we will need to turn to vanadium batteries or hydrogen or ethanol or some such thing.
If Oil runs out next Wednesday then the transition will indeed be painful. However if oil prices rise steadily over a few decades (so that in real terms they hit say US$300 a barrel in about 2040) then I think we will have little trouble moving to other means of transport etc.
Whether these other means have a lower ecological footprint is another matter.
Regards,
Terje.
Terje and JohnM – the main problem is convincing people that there is a problem. Why should cars over 2 litres be phased out if there is plenty of oil? The response I get to these suggestion is “Why should I have to give up my V8 just because some lefty greenie says the oil is running out” Right now the Prius, and I drive one regularly, is dismissed by my workmates as not having enough power and they would never buy one.
This is why I maintain that there will be nothing done and the price of oil will be maintained artificially low until we drop off the cliff.
BTW Uranium is not endless at all. There is a finite amount of it unless we re-process it however, this opens another bucket of worms – do we really want heaps of weapons grade plutonium circulating around the place.
Ender,
The pessimist in me agrees with you when you talk about the “cliff”. Perhaps price signals for fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, milk and other basic necessities will convince the public at large that a crisis looms, whereas the surging price of petrol seems to have failed.
Another problem is that the main source of information for the vast majority of people both here and elsewhere in the first world is TV news, newspapers and magazines. All of these media forms are advertising driven, and the advertisements are for products made from monoculture crops grown with hydrocarbon fertilisers, cars with over-sized engines and energy-hungry features like electric windows and DVD players, holidays overseas on oil-guzzling planes, etc etc. Obviously these adverstisers don’t want to see a heartfelt plea to use less energy opposite their advertisements, nor even a discussion of the possibility of economic contraction. Contrast this with the discussion on public radio, where one can hear environmentalists on a weekly basis discuss, with either weariness or a tone of panic, both the possibility of an oil peak and the necessity for emitting less CO2.
I am guilty of mixing two issues here, but the possibility of a peak in oil production is not the only reason we should stop using so much oil. I am reminded of a cartoon with a CEO addressing the room: “We find ourselves poised at the brink of an environmental catastrophy. On the other hand, there are unparalled opportunities for profit”. Given that the juntas weilding power both here and in the US, and to a large degree the rest of the first world are basically the legislative arm of big business, the cliff production option looks more and more like the realistic future scenario.
I for one look forward to the good Professor’s presentation. Will beat the alternative that I declined to attend, a debate featuring Andrew Bolt on “the University far left and public life” at RMIT, also at 12.30.
>Robert, the notion that western grain production feeds the third world is just as much a con job as the notion of ethanol from grain. Western grain exports flood third world markets and outcompete local producers, deprive the developing world of first world grain and developing world agriculture will increase.
Additionally it should be noted that the principal importers of western grain tend to be middle income countries (such as Egypt and Iraq) and not the least-developed countries.
The combination of plug-in hybrids and bio-deisel (a much more energy-efficient fuel to make than ethanol) could significantly reduce developed world demand for oil for passenger transport.
This leaves three much more intractable problems:
1. fuel demand in the developing world where the additional up-front cost for hybrids will be much harder to afford;
2. road freight, road freight prices are likely to rise very significantly if hybrid technology is introduced, especially since it’s likely to be difficult to store and discharge sufficent power to meet the power needs of larger trucks with current battery technology;
3. air transport – there’s currently no realistic alternative to av-gas except, possibly, biodeisel. If airlines are forced to shift to biodeisel we can firstly expect a protracted period while the operational and safety issues are worked out and secondly a major increase in airfares.
For our cities, the best way to reduce oil consumption (and pollution) will be massive investment in public transport. Set aside some highway space for massive and numerous trains and trams. Most private commuter travel could be undertaken with glorified electric golf carts. Computerising and automating all cars (hands off driving) would also reduce fuel consumption and the accident rate.
For air travel, we might at last see a return to the age of airships for cargo and people.
Eventually, of course, the world economy will be founded on hydrogen and solar energy, but it will be a long time coming.
Peak Oil? Must be the pointy end of the oil debate.
you can only examine this debate through a hubbert telescope!
Whaleoil went peak in the nineteenth century!
Haw Haw. When will you replace your oil-based puns with hydrogen-based ones?
Ian – I do share your thoughts that plug in hybrids, battery electric cars and bio-diesel in combination will certainly help however I am not confident that these measures will be implemented in time. It also has to combined with a smart electricity grid where the PHEVs and BEVS are storage nodes in the grid.
Peak Oil for us is bad enough – spare a thought for those people in the third world. If you have no firewood becuase most trees within walking distance have been used then the only way to cook food and boil water is with kerosene etc. For these people high oil prices could well be a death sentence not just an inconvenience as there income is so low they do not have extra money for higher fuel costs.
I’ve been following “peak oil” off and on for more than a year now, taking in books by David Goodstein and Kenneth Deffeyes along the way.
I refer everyone to an interesting debate in this month’s Prospect magazine:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7156
The debaters are Jeremy Leggett (physicist(?), ex-Greenpeace, and author of the recently-published “Half Gone”), and David Jenkins (formerly of BP). With all due respect to Prof. Q., asking “When will we run out?” is to ask the wrong question. As peak oil theorists are fond of arguing, reserve to production (R/P) ratios can be used to predict that oil will last a long time, but give too optimistic a picture. The better question is: when does supply begin to run behind demand? This determines when the seller’s market arrives. If the peak of world oil production is indeed as close as 2008 (some have even put it at 2004 or 2005), then there may not be enough time to effect a smooth transition to alternative energy sources. We are then in for a rough ride. We should all remember that the oil price rises of 1973 and 1978 preceded major worldwide economic downturns.
Incidentally, did anyone see the article by Charles Krauthammer on oil, reproduced in the Fin. Rev. opinion pages a couple of weeks back? Krauthammer is a prize chump but this article perhaps contained a grain of sense in his suggestion that continuing high oil prices might benefit us by spurring the search for alternatives. (I was less taken with his suggestion that plundering Alaska for oil is also part of the solution for the US consumer.)
QUOTE: We are then in for a rough ride. We should all remember that the oil price rises of 1973 and 1978 preceded major worldwide economic downturns.
RESPONSE: The oil crisis of the 1970s was in fact a US monetary crisis that triggered a global monetary crisis. Gold shot upwards at least 12 months before gold but nobody complained of a gold shortage. The problem was excessive printing of US dollars. Once the arabs noticed that their US treasury bonds were falling in value they figured that Oil left in the ground was a better investment for the future than bonds that were being debased by inflation. The problem then became a real shortage as Oil was diverted to become a store of wealth in the Arab nations rather than a source of fuel in the west.
The following chart shows two prices normalised so they equal 100 in the base year. The prices are:-
BLUE = US$ price of OIL
RED = US$ price of GOLD
Note the stability of the oil price during the Brenton Woods gold standard (ie green region on graph). That was a time when we had price stability in COMMODITIES and not just in CONSUMER goods. Then came the epoch of screwy monetary policy.
While I am showing off charts the following is interesting. Australia has approximated a gold standard better than nearly any other nation over the last decade.
I’ll be interested in your post as following this issue and have not a clue on future course of prices. A spate of literature suggesting peak oil upon us and other experts saying oil abundant for another 50 years at least.
The end of fossil fuels wrongly predicted on so many occasions — recall Jevons on coal. Another false alarm or a really new environment. And will it matter much anyway.
One interesting sign — car makings pushing electric-powered vehicles and Shell diversifying into other energy sources.
Will Prof JQ stick his neck out?
The only reason our European civilisation has appeared to have been more advanced than Aboriginal Australian society is that we have exploited solar energy, which over at least tens of millions of years has been turned by biological and geological processes into a such highly convenient and concentrated forms as in petroleum natural gas and coal.
Our supposedly intelligent species has stupidly burnt around half of what rightly belongs to all future generations of humankind in little more than one hundred years.
QUOTE: what rightly belongs to all future generations
RESPONSE: A dubious claim.
Terje. Like Ender says, uranium only offers long term energy if we use fast breeder reactors, which unfortunately produce plutonium by the bucket load. Bad, bad outcome. Especially in the day and age of global terrorism.
If we start using electric cars in large numbers (and I hope we do soon), then solar towers and various other forms of large scale clean electricity generation may supply a substantial fraction of our transport energy, especially for short local runs less than 100 klms a day.
Ian Gould, I agree about air travel. Unless there is a major breakthrough in new liquid fuels then the era of cheap bulk air transport is over, and we go back to sailing ships and lighter than aircraft, like Will De Vere said. I can’t see biodiesel ever producing the obscene quantities needed for air transport. Furthermore, I am not even sure that it is a viable fuel for aircraft.
I note that Catalyst showed a brief visual of a bus that uses a hydrogen fuel cell during last Thursday’s story on Peak Oil. I think this technology shows a lot of promise.
Nevertheless, I think we are in for the “mother of all oil shocks” in our lifetimes, whether that be 5 years or 10 years. Once Peak Oil is in site, speculation and hoarding alone should send oil prices through the roof. My advice- convert your car to LPG now!
Terje, I would have thought what I wrote was self-evident and morally indisputable. So, could you please elaborate a little more what you meant by “a dubious claim”?
Terje, regarding your optimisim for a smooth transition to an economy, which is not based on fossil fuel, which you say will be brought about by a gradual rise in petroeleum prices, I suggest you read “Domino Effect and Interdependencies”. (It was originally at http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/portal/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=452&Itemid=2.
but it’s been ‘hacked’ by a cretin who goes by the name of ’00_Zeus_00′, so I have put my own copy on my own web site.) The article shows how, because of the way in which almost every aspect of our modern economy is so dependant upon the supply of cheap petroleum, a sudden rise in its price, perhaps triggered by a natural disaster similar to Hurricane Katrina could set off a chain reaction leading not only to the collapse of our global economy, but also of our civilisation.
If you say it can’t happen, it already has, many times, as Ronald Wright has shown in “A Brief History of Progress” (2004) and as Jared Diamond has also shown in “Collapse” (2005). Civiizations have grown beyond the capacity of their natural environments to support them and have collapsed catastrophically as a result. These civilisations have included the Sumerians, the Mayans, Angkor Wat, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders etc. The essential difference between them, and our globalised civilisation, is that we have discovered fossil fuel and have used it to extend the limits of nature way beyond the limits that those civilisations had reached, but there are still limits and we may have already gone beyond them.
If our globalised civilisation does collapse, the consequences hardly bear thinking about.
Steve Munn, LPG is also a finite resource. Cars running on LPG may run a few years longer, than cars running on petroleum, but world supplies of natural gas will peak soon soon after world supplies of petroleum peak.
After that we will have to rely on either expensive polluting technology for the conversion of coal to liquid with all the problems of additional green house gas emissions or renewable energy forms.
In the latter case it will be much harder to harness from the relative trickle of energy which the sun provides to the earth, the same amounts of solar energy that have been packaged for us by nature into coal, gas and petroleum over tens of millions of years.
As Ross McCluney wrote in an essay “Renewable Energy Limits” on page 174 of the excellent “The Final Energy Crisis” 2005 , edited by Andrew McKillop and Sheila Newman.
It is clear that attempts to solarize the world economy are fated to run into serious obstacles, unless population and per capita energy consumption are drastically reduced. A major commitment to solar energy is likely to transform landscapes and seashores, brining forth many new environmental problems, while demanding very large capital spending.
Ultimately, we need to know if technology not based on fossil fuels is bootstrappable. Just about any renewable energy infrastructure, which is built today – solar panels, dams, wind turbines – has been built using fossil fuel.
When fossil fuel runs out, will it be possible to use the relative trickle of energy which comes from wind turbines and solar panels to mine and fabricate the raw materials necessary to build more solar panels and more wind turbines? I have a lot of trouble imagining how this could be done.
It is inevitable that in time our wind turbines will wear out and our solar energy panels will degrade, after which it may not be possible to build more.
In the long term we will have no alternative but to drastically reduce our energy consumption. We would be well advised to start preparing for this now.
Another excellent resource in which these sorts of questions are thrashed out by many very well-informed, and often very well qualified people, is the “Running on Empty, Oz” (roeoz> mailng list. It can be found at :
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/roeoz/
Whoops! The link to the article “Domino Effect and Interdependencies” was somehow not posted last time. Here it is :
http://www.candobetter.org/roeoz/dominoEffect.html
James Sinnamon
Modern, mass-produced solar panels and windmills, and the very large custom built windmills already produce far more energy over their lifetime than is consumed in their construction. (Given proper installation and use, of course.)
The real issue here is will we have enough non-hydrocarbon based generation online in time for decline in hydrocarbon based generation.
Terje, I deliberately did not write that the oil price rises of the 1970s caused the recessions (in the sense that they were the sole cause). I wrote that recession followed the price increases. (“The two energy crises of the 1970s were followed by the worst recessions since the 1930s”: Paul Krugman, ‘The Return of Depression Economics’, Penguin, 2000, p.7). Formulating things this way allows for the possibility of other causative factors at work. According to Stuart Holland, in ‘The Global Economy’ (Weidenfeld, 1987): “…the results of the original OPEC price increase were complex rather than simple.” Moreover, “…while inflation rose from an average of 5% to over 12% in the industrial market economies between 1972 and the end of 1974, in large part because of OPEC price increases, it had fallen again to below 7% at the end of 1978”. Some of the OPEC countries that benefited from the price increases were able to recycle the profits back into western economies either directly through shares in companies or through the Eurodollar markets. Herman van der Wee, in his compendious survey of the world economy (‘Prosperity and Upheaval, The World Economy 1945-80’), summarised matters thus: “The OPEC cartel reacted [to the downward price movement for oil and gas] in Nov. 1973 with a dramatic increase in oil prices as a countermeasure against the general inflation trend and the depreciation of the dollar. The impact of the rise in oil prices on the world economy was heavy. The shock wave quickly aggravated the recession which had already been set in motion at the beginning of 1973 by restrictive national economic policies.”
I think it is clear enough that the oil prices increase were, at the minimum, a necessary condition for the recession that followed.
I blame Nixon more than the Arabs. I suppose that is my main point.
“The only reason our European civilisation has appeared to have been more advanced than Aboriginal Australian society is that we have exploited solar energy, which over at least tens of millions of years has been turned by biological and geological processes into a such highly convenient and concentrated forms as in petroleum natural gas and coal.”
That is quite ridiculous. European society in Greece and Rome was far advanced beyond Aboriginal society in 19th century Australia, 2-3000 years before the industrial revolution.
And the real reason European society was more advanced had nothing to do with oil and everything to do with horses, cattle and agriculture. Australia’s native fauna and flora has very little in the way of species suitable for anything other than subsistence hunting and gathering.
After 200+ years of white settlement in Australia, the macadamia nut is the only native species that have been found suitable for commercial production, and nuts are not a suitable staple diet for humans.
Alternative liquid fuels like coal to liquids and gas to liquids have serious volume and time constraints which reduce their ability to replace declining oil production on the scale which may well be needed. The Hirsch report (for US DOE , Feb 2005, “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management” http://www.cge.uevora.pt/aspo2005/abscom/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf ) suggests that “Crash programmes”, the size of the Manhattan project, are needed to be started 1-2 decades before the peak. Yes, alternatives are technically possible, but not at all likely on the scale and timeframes needed if global oil production declines soon (as is happening for Greater Burgan, the world’s second biggest oilfield). A 5% decline in production from existing fields needs an additional 4Mbbl/day from new fields (each year) or alternatives just to keep production at current levels. This is a big ask.
Prof Aleklett’s Peak Oil presentation (the longer one delivered at UWA) is available at ASPO-Australia.org.au. We organised his Australia tour, so we are interested in feedback on how the various events went. ASPO-Australia was formally launched by Prof Aleklett last Monday, at a news conference held at the RAC(WA) media room. We are a network of people working at a professional level on the probability and impacts of Peak Oil, and on possible mitigation and adaptation strategies for Australia.
Suggestions, advice and volunteers for ASPO-Australia will be very welcome indeed. There is a lot to do, even if we have 1-2 decades before the peak. If it comes in 5 years, we need to do even more, and sooner. We are also keen to hear from people who have good evidence for a later peak, as there are many scenarios and forecasts and no-one should be too dogmatic about any one prediction. Perhaps someone can run a book on when it will happen. I think the even money is now on a peak between 2010 and 2015, with lower probabilities of a peak before and after that date. I think 2035 is about 100:1 against, in bookies’ terms a rank outsider, but others will differ.
Regards, Bruce Robinson
Yobbo,
Plato wrote in the fourth century BC:
“What now remains compared to what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted way … Mountains which have nothing but food for bees … had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept in the loamy earth … feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.” (Quoted in “A short History of Progress”, 2005 by Ronald Wright, pp 87-88)
Ronald Wright goes on to write:
“It is no coincidence that Greek power and achievement began to wane about this time. Archaeology reveals a similar picture around the Mediterranean. Southern Italy and Sicily were well wooded until about 300 BC …”
Ronald Wright shows that the degradation of the environment was a factor which caused the decline of the Roman civilisation as well as Greek civilisation.
In “A Brief History of Progress”, as well as in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, there are many examples of more spectacular collapses of other civilisations, also supposedly more advanced than Australian aboriginal hunter gatherer societies : the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders, the ancient Angkor Wat civilisation, the ancient Sumerians etc.
All of these societies destroyed the environments which were necessary to sustain them in stark contrast to Aboriginal stewardship of this continent for 40,000 years (perhaps disregarding the initial environmental destruction that Tim Flanney, in “The Future Eaters”, holds that Aboriginals caused when they first settled on this continent. )
Given that our modern globalised society is in the process of destroying our planetary life support system, and has, in little more than one hundred years, stupidly burnt half the fossil fuel which took at least tens of millions of years for nature to create, it has yet to be conclusively demonstrated that our society is superior to Aboriginal society.
The opposite would now seem to be the case.
Seeker, what you say about solar panels and wind turbines producing more energy than it takes to build and maintain them is a topic of hot dispute on the “Running on Empty, Oz” maiiling list. (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/roeoz/)
If we are to be certain that they produce more energy than what they consume, we need to take into account all the costs of manufacture, erection, maintenance and decomissioning. We also need to account for the costs of creating and maintaining infrastructiure to distribute the energy. I would like to be as confident as you that when all energy inputs are properly accounted for, we are substantially ahead.
If you can refer me to the figures upon which you base your conclusion, I would be grateful.
James – REOZ while it is an interesting list does compose of a lot of people who are very pessimistic about the future and see no way that we can come through it. I butted heads with a lot of people there because my view is that there is a way forward however I share some of their pessimism as I do not think that the correct steps will be taken without a major crisis.
Bruce Robinson,
Thanks for the article. It makes for compelling reading. In particular the notion that geology is more significant than price as a determinent of oil output.
I note that hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) feature prominantly amoungst the potential demand mitigators. I would be interested in any “wedge” scenerios that look at plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_hybrid_electric_vehicle
Regards,
Terje.
Ender, I still think ROEOZ is a very good list to subscribe to in spite of the extreme pessimism of some of the contributors. Even the pessimistic contributors have a lot of useful knowledge.
I can’t know whether or not this pessimism will be borne out by the course of events, but the only rational response, in my opinion, is to assume that there is hope.
“and we go back to sailing ships and lighter than aircraft, ”
ahahahahahah…im willing to bet $1000 that sailing ships will never again be the major form of transport for humanity.
oil, like wood and coal before it, will increasingly become a marginal source of energy
the idea that in 500 or 1000 years time humanity will still be burning something for energy is ridiculous.
nuclear fission or fusion will more than likely replace fossil fuels, maybe toward the end of my lifetime.
well coal is not exactly marginal now, but its not used in transport a la steam engines, and if it ran out (which it isnt going to do for a while) there is a lot of nuclear fuel for electricity generation.
Plug-in hybrids (and other technological cargo-cultism)
Hirsch’s paper for US DOE has the small wedge for more efficient vehicles, but he only considers technologies available commercially now. This would include petrol-powered hybrids, but not large-battery hybrids. The same logic applies, however, of long lead times, and very slow adoption. Half the cars being bought in Australia this week will still be on the road in 20 years time (on current trends: see BTRE (2002) Fuel Consumption by New Passenger Vehicles in Australia, Information Sheet 18 http://www.dotars.gov.au/btre/docs/is18/is18.htm ). Hence it will take a long time to change the vehicle fleet (it took 18 years to change from leaded to unleaded vehicles, for instance, even when it was a mandatory change that no leaded petrol new cars could be sold after 1 Jan 1986). We can not make hybrids or fuel cells mandatory, so it will take much much longer to change the fleet without enormous expense and disruption.
That is, all these “technological fixes” that people propose are very likely to be too little and too late, due to the enormous inertia in the system, if peak oil comes within 5-10 years as seems probable.
There is a good long article published in the New York Times on Sunday 21st August.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21OIL.html?ex=1282276800&en=4c742b408ca7847a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
The final sentence is
“When a crisis comes — whether in a year or 2 or 10 — it will be all the more painful because we will have done little or nothing to prepare for it.”
The final statement was published before Hurricane Katrina, and is all the more prescient after it.
It would not be hard for economists (or anyone) to model the uptake of new vehicles and technologies, for instance a 5% pa improvement of new car fleet fuel consumption, and what (small) effect that would have on overall fuel consumption. The FBT means that most new cars are first bought by people who get their fuel paid. This means there is not a lot incentive for new car buyers to choose efficient cars. These cars then go out into the secondhand fleet for the rest of their working life. The wedge (of oil saved over time) for more efficient vehicles is small, and can be negative if people continue to drive more kms per person.
>im willing to bet $1000 that sailing ships will never again be the major form of transport for humanity.
Have you seen the prototype freight ship with an airfoil-shaped kite for propulsion?
QUOTE: Plug-in hybrids (and other technological cargo-cultism)
Hirsch’s paper for US DOE has the small wedge for more efficient vehicles, but he only considers technologies available commercially now.
RESPONSE: A valid point of demarcation for the purposes of analysis. If peak oil is real and imminent then it would seem that that implementing Kyoto is pretty irrelevant. If consumption is limited by output and the peak is coming soon then we don’t need to worry too much about capping CO2 output.
Terje,
1. Half or more of CO2 emissions come from burning coal and natural gas fro electrictiy generation;
2. Much of the non-conventional oil locked up in tar sands and oil shale requries very large amounts of energy to produce – you effectively burn 2-3 (or more) barrels of oil for every barrel you produce.
3. As several people have already noted, oil production (and use) will continue at near-current levels for probably a decade or mroe after we hit the peak.
Ian,
1. Yes. However oil running out should mitigate to some extent.
2. That sounds like a reason why oil from tar sands will never make it to market. So it would seem to be irrelevant to the CO2 discussion.
3. Yes.
Regards,
Terje.