Peak Oil: The Reallity

The fashionable response to high energy prices is "Peak Oil Panic." But that is reacting to a fantasy scenario--not the reality.

As you can see, large supranational blocks are very different from individual countries. They have a tendency to plateau for extremely long periods of time. For example, North America has been on a plateau of about 14mbd for almost 20 years. Asia-Pacific has been on a plateau of 6-7mbd for almost 20 years. South/Central America has logged a couple of long plateaus, most recently a plateau of about 6.5mbd for 10 years.

The evidence suggests that the world (as the largest supranational unit) will plateau for a very long time -- even decades -- just like CERA says.

POD

Oil and coal are dirty fuels, and we would do well to move away from the pollution of fossil fuels to cleaner and more sustainable forms of energy. But "Peak Oil" enthusiasts are claiming that there is not enough time to transition. They are screeching from their blog rooftops and soapboxes that we are all doomed. They are not trying to create panic--mind you. They merely want to let us know what is coming, then sit back and watch the panic set in. But in reality, what sort of fringe-kookery are they?

Petroleum geologists are pretty sure that there is more than enough oil in the world to meet projected demand for at least the next 25 years. In other words, as I reported in my article “Peak Oil Panic” last year, geologically speaking “peak oil” is at least a generation away.

Reason

What type of apocalyptic visions do the peak oil prophets-of-doom project into our futures?

The most pessimistic of these Cassandras, like American writer James Howard Kunstler, predict nothing less than the wholesale collapse of industrial civilization. In his 2005 bestseller, The Long Emergency, Kunstler envisaged a future in which the survivors of the oil-peak catastrophe eke out a living in an 18th-century-style economy: the great cities are abandoned, almost all production is for local consumption, and the higher technologies have mostly been lost.

Kunstler's great hate is the suburbs, which are mainly an artifact of the cheap-oil era, and one gets the feeling that he would secretly welcome any catastrophe that destroyed them.

Commentary

We are seeing higher oil prices now--although if one corrects for inflation, the prices are not as high as most human-passive-news-receptacles tend to think. And while it is fashionable to say that world oil production will reach a sharp peak, then decline indefinitely down to zero--that is the fantasy of the neo-Malthusians.

Such groups as this and this actually want to see the human population forcibly reduced to about 10% or less of its present level.

But human overpopulation is not Earth's problem. Humans thrive in cities--if the cities are well designed and administered, and if the city's human average population IQ is high enough to support a high tech infrastructure. The population of Taiwan is far denser (636 per km2)--but more prosperous and better educated--than the population of China (137 per km2). China has attained the status of world's biggest polluter and greenhouse gas emitter. Rather than planning a violent invasion of Taiwan, China should be learning to imitate Taiwan's success.

The concept of the arcology--the self-contained city--is a useful one for viewing a population-dense but healthy and thriving population. But far more interesting than studying how many hundreds of billions of humans a healthy, thriving, technologically advanced planet Earth could support, is studying how many humans a healthy thriving technologically advanced Solar System could support.

The asteroid belt contains an estimated 825 quintillion (a billion times a billion) tons of iron -- enough to build shells around planets, gigantic cities in space, and starships carrying entire civilizations. How much is this iron worth? Lewis performs a fanciful calculation: At present prices of around $50 a ton, the asteroids yield $7 billion of the metal per person for everyone alive today, or an affluent standard of living for a population far larger. Moreover, iron is merely one element found in the Main Belt, which also contains gold, silver, copper, manganese, titanium, uranium, and much else.

Reason

As for peak oil, we can see from the graph above that oil production is not likely to reach a sharp peak. What will be seen for the next few decades is a long plateau with slight ups and downs. When oil production truly does peak, it will be due to a precipitous drop in demand caused by alternative sources of energy.

There may be ample reasons for a person to "plan for the Apocalypse", but peak oil theory is not one of the better ones. Still, for people lacking in logical facility and of limited imagination, peak oil belief may be better than selling crack on the street.

For others who actually care whether their thought processes are tracking in at least a rough parallel path to reality, it is important to test hypotheses against real world data points and trends. That is something that the quasi-religious CAGW believers and peak oil believers tend to avoid. For the religious and the quasi-religious, it is beliefs that matter, not reality--to our best approximation.

Peak oil and "global warming" are not existential risks. Rather, they belong to a class of "dysfunctional ideologies" which, if adopted by advanced societies on a broad scale, would contribute to the loss of vigour and resilience that a civilisation must have to survive. So rather than warning of existential risks, they become one component of a civilisational decadence and fatigue that could lead to the loss of a civilisation.

Interesting reading:

Oil Prices going down in 2008?

Why we'll never run out of oil--Discover Magazine

Confessions of Peak Oil (ex)Believer

Don't Panic written by a peak oil believer who does not see it as a problem.

Politics and Reality of peak oil scare