Thesis #18: Peak Oil may lead to collapse.
by Jason GodeskyEnergy, like matter, cannot be created–it can only be transformed. That is the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy, which also entails that matter can be transformed into energy, making matter and energy differing states of the same thing. When you burn wood, part of the wood’s matter is converted into energy–the light and heat of fire. Fossil fuels are created out of organic matter, by applying eons of pressure deep inside the earth to the remains of dead plants and animals. The result can be coal, petroleum, or natural gas. They all can be converted into energy with great efficiency, making them the most effective fuels ever discovered. In considering the quality of a fuel, the relevant measure is not simply how much energy the matter can yield, but how much energy it yields per energy put into it, or ERoEI, energy return on energy invested. On that score, fossil fuels were once unmatched. Petroleum once had an ERoEI near 100–for the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil, you could extract 100 barrels of oil. But that, too, is subject to diminishing returns, and more recently, the ERoEI of fossil fuels has been dropping. “Peak Oil” is simply the law of diminishing returns applied to petroleum extraction.
A barrel of oil is a barrel of oil, and it will always have the same yield of energy as any other barrel of oil. The ERoEI changes based on how difficult and expensive that barrel of oil becomes to extract. The first oil reserves we extracted were the largest ones, those nearest the surface and/or those under pressure–often bubbling up all on its own. This oil was the lightest (meaning it had fewer impurities) and sweetest (less sulphur), which made it the easiest to refine. As these reserves were depleted, the pressure inside them dropped, and energy needed to be exerted on the reserve to move the oil up. This oil deeper in the earth tended to be heavier and more sour, which meant that not only did it take more energy to extract, it also took more energy to refine. Eventually, those reserves ceased to be economical, well before all the oil was exhausted. New reserves needed to be found, but these were obviously inferior. They were smaller, or they were deeper, or they weren’t under any natural pressure, or any combination of those three. They started off less efficient and, like the original reserves, grew less economical as extraction proceeded.
The first to notice this phenomenon was M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist who worked for Shell from 1943 to 1964. As Energy Bulletin’s “Peak Oil Primer” explains:
In the 1950s a US geologist working for Shell, M. King Hubbert, noticed that oil discoveries graphed over time, tended to follow a bell shape curve. He posited that the rate of oil production would follow a similar curve, now known as the Hubbert Curve (see figure). In 1956 Hubbert predicted that production from the US lower 48 states would peak in 1970. Shell tried to pressure Hubbert into not making his projections public, but the notoriously stubborn Hubbert went ahead and released them. In anycase, most people inside and outside the industry quickly dismissed Hubbert’s predictions. In 1970 US oil producers had never produced as much, and Hubbert’s predictions were a fading memory. But Hubbert was right, US continental oil production did peak in 1970/71, although it was not widely recognized for several years, only with the benefit of hindsight.
No oil producing region neatly fits bell shaped curve exactly because production is dependent on various geological, economic and political factors, but the Hubbert Curve remains a powerful predictive tool.
The peak of U.S. oil production in 1971 was the most significant event of the post-war era. Any economy can ultimately be understood purely in terms of energy transformations, and fossil fuels are the foundation of any industrial civilization. That transiton occurred because of a different “peak” problem–not fossil fuels, but timber. As Richard Cowen writes in the online, rough draft of Exploiting the Earth under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press, in chapter 11: “Coal”:
The situation was different in England and France. Much land had been cleared for agriculture in Roman and again in medieval times, and the population was much denser than in mountain Germany and Bohemia. Although metal mining was never on the enormous scale of the Central European strikes, many small mines exploited tin, lead, copper, and iron deposits. All these ores were smelted with charcoal, and with heavy demands on the forests for building timbers for castles, cathedrals, houses, and ships, for building mills and most machinery, for barrels for storing food and drink, and fuel for the lime-burning, glass and brewing industries and for domestic fires, the English and French found that they were approaching a major fuel crisis.
A fuel “crisis” implies a lack of supply, and the other factors involved are supply and transport. Overland costs of transport were very high except for the highest-value goods, and it was simply not economic to carry bulky material like wood for very far on a cart. So thinly populated areas in forest land had no fuel crisis at all, whereas large cities soon felt a crisis as woodlands close by were cleared.
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Nations were therefore faced with only two alternative solutions: to import timber from Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and/or to substitute coal wherever possible. Transport costs imposed severe penalties on transporting timber long distances unless it was needed for special purposes such as building construction, pit props, or ship-building, and the coal-mining and coal-processing industries grew astonishingly, beginning in Elizabethan England and extending to European regions as the timber crisis overtook them.
Every economic indicator suggests that the timber crisis was most acute in England from about 1570 to 1630. It is at this time that we see an unwilling but dramatic change to coal as the nation’s industrial fuel.
Wood was the preferred fuel for fires, as well as a primary construction material. As the population of northwestern Europe grew, so too did its appetite for wood. The forests of England were utterly destroyed. As Cowen points out, “You will search in vain today for Sherwood Forest. It exists only on road signs and movies that are filmed on sets somewhere else.”
Coal was favored only by blacksmiths. For every other purpose, the black, dirty smoke was considered a major public nuisance. Laws were passed against the burning of coal, until it became a necessity. Obviously, Europe and France did not clear-cut the whole world, or we would have no trees today. Scandinavia and eastern Europe had very healthy forests–and lumber that was being exported to France and Britain. The question was how much did it cost to transport that wood to where it was needed. Shipments of wood from Scandinavia and eastern Europe added travel cost to the wood which were not previously necessary. So, while wood remained wood, the cost of that wood increased significantly, forcing northwestern Europeans to turn to an inferior, dirty fuel: coal. Cowen describes some of the social ramifications of this change:
A fundamental change in English domestic building followed, as more brick chimneys were built to accommodate the fumes from the smoky fuel. By 1618 London had 200 chimney sweeps, who would eventually give the world its first example of an environmentally produced cancer, from contact with soot. There were law suits against coal pollution, and there were courageous judges who would rule against the nuisance.
But with coal–and even moreso later with petroleum and to a lesser extent natural gas–Europeans had stumbled not only on a fuel with outrageously high ERoEI, but a fuel that encouraged, rather than discouraged, technical innovation. As Joseph Tainter explains in his 1996 paper, “Complexity, Problem-Solving, and Sustainable Societies“:
In one of the most interesting works of economic history, Richard Wilkinson (1973) showed that in late-and post-medieval England, population growth and deforestation stimulated economic development, and were at least partly responsible for the Industrial Revolution. Major increases in population, at around 1300, 1600, and in the late 18th century, led to intensification in agriculture and industry. As forests were cut to provide agricultural land and fuel for a growing population, England’s heating, cooking, and manufacturing needs could no longer be met by burning wood. Coal came to be increasingly important, although it was adopted reluctantly. Coal was costlier to obtain and distribute than wood, and restricted in its occurrence. It required a new, costly distribution system. As coal gained importance in the economy the most accessible deposits were depleted. Mines had to be sunk ever deeper, until groundwater came to be a problem. Ultimately, the steam engine was developed and put to use pumping water from mines. With the development of a coal-based economy, a distribution system, and the steam engine, several of the most important technical elements of the Industrial Revolution were in place.
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It generated its own problems of complexity and costliness. These included railways and canals to distribute coal and manufactured goods, the development of an economy increasingly based on money and wages, and the development of new technologies. While such elements of complexity are usually thought to facilitate economic growth, in fact they can do so only when subsidized by energy. Some of the new technologies, such as the steam engine, showed diminishing returns to innovation quite early in their development (Wilkinson 1973; Giarini and Louberge 1978; Giarini 1984). What set industrialism apart from all of the previous history of our species was its reliance on abundant, concentrated, high-quality energy (Hall et al. 1992). 5 With subsidies of inexpensive fossil fuels, for a long time many consequences of industrialism effectively did not matter. Industrial societies could afford them. When energy costs are met easily and painlessly, benefit/cost ratio to social investments can be substantially ignored (as it has been in contemporary industrial agriculture). Fossil fuels made industrialism, and all that flowed from it (such as science, transportation, medicine, employment, consumerism, high-technology war, and contemporary political organization), a system of problem solving that was sustainable for several generations.
Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. If our efforts to understand and resolve such matters as global change involve increasing political, technological, economic, and scientific complexity, as it seems they will, then the availability of energy per capita will be a constraining factor. To increase complexity on the basis of static or declining energy supplies would require lowering the standard of living throughout the world. In the absence of a clear crisis very few people would support this.
Peak Oil poses a familiar crisis, then. Peak Oil is the moment at which we have extracted half of all the oil in the world–meaning another half remains. But the first half was light, sweet crude in large reserves near the surface and under pressure; the second half is heavy, sour crude in small reserves deep inside the earth where we must apply our own pressure. It is the half that costs more to obtain, but continues to deliver the same benefit as before. When it takes a barrel of oil to obtain a barrel of oil–when petroleum’s ERoEI declines to 1–then it doesn’t matter how much oil is still left, it’s no longer economically viable. The petroleum age is over.
The implications of that are profound and far-reaching. In “The Oil We Eat,” Richard Manning elaborates the nature of agriculture in general, and the particular dependence of modern, industrialized agriculture on fossil fuels. He writes:
The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.
Industrial society itself is a product of petroleum–not because it produces energy (almost anything can do that), but because of its high ERoEI. As that continues to drop, we will find ourselves in the same position as the British and French did when they took up coal–in need of some other, inferior source of energy. The prospects for that are grim, to say the least. Most of the most promising “alternative fuels” suffer from some debilitating drawback. For instance, the energy that goes into producing a single photovoltaic cell drops its ERoEI to an estimated 1. Hydrogen cells are energy carriers, not energy sources. And Brazil’s experiment with wide-spread biodiesel yielded very ambivalent results.
The image above comes from Stuart Staniford’s 6 September 2005 entry at the Oil Drum explaining the thresholds between contraction and collapse, titled, “4%, 11%, Who the Hell Cares?” He writes:
I define the collapse threshold to be the depletion rate at which society collectively loses enough faith in the future that they are no longer willing to risk investments to preserve that future. This appears to be one of the fundamental characteristics in past societies that collapsed. The Easter Islanders gave up their intensive rock gardens, the Chaco Canyon people stopped building new Great Houses, the Mayans even stopped keeping track of their Long Calendar….
In our case, consider a potential investor in a company that is raising capital to open a lead mine to make batteries for anticipated future demand for plug-in hybrids. Let’s say it takes five years to get the thing producing, and then the initial capital will take five more years to repay before it starts to really make money. So this investor has to believe society will hold together well enough over that time for his investment to really be worth it. Otherwise he’s investing in gold instead (or vodka!).
Obviously, if our hypothetical investors do not feel enough confidence to make this investment, now society is in real trouble - the batteries needed to power the plugin hybrids are not going to be there when they are needed. And so on, across a thousand similar decisions across the economy.
Not only that, but the point at which wealthy investors are giving up hope about the future is also probably similar to the point at which the rest of society gives up hope too, and starts looking for alternative ways to survive. One of the leading effects of that is likely to be a loss of law-and-order. Things go downhill very rapidly from there as we have seen in the last week in New Orleans. We also know conflict was a major factor in the decline of Easter Island, Rome, and the Chaco Canyon Anasazi. Human beings can turn into bands of looters, and even cannibals (as at Chaco Canyon), with amazing speed once they lose faith in society.
Collapse occurs when the returns on complexity are no longer sufficient to warrant further investment–and that is precisely the problem that Peak Oil may very well pose.
There is much debate over when peak oil will occur. Many of the vested interests–including large American oil companies and Middle East monarchies–have a long record of deception with regard to their official numbers. Earlier estimates gave us another ten or more years to figure out what to do, but those estimates proved to be based on the over-reported reserves of Shell and Saudi Arabia. An increasing number of experts are suggesting that we may be at peak right now. This year’s hurricane season may have caused a sufficient “bump” in production that we are now seeing the highest numbers we ever will. Saudi Arabia, the world’s second largest supplier of oil (behind Russia), has been exporting crude oil that is increasingly heavy and more sour, to the point where they have experienced problems finding a buyer for it. Rumors persist that the Ghawar Superfield, the centerpiece of Saudi oil, has peaked. Princeton geology professor emeritus Ken Deffeyes even went so far as to predict a specific date for Hubbert’s Peak: 24 November 2005, Thanksgiving in the U.S. According to Jeff Vail, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Tom Weimer, in charge of USGS, did not think that a fall 2005 date for Hubbert’s Peak was an unreasonable estimate.
I said above that the North American Hubbert’s Peak was the most significant event of the post-war period. The complexity of any culture is a function of energy, and it’s energy that has always created the shape of history. Romans very explicitly fought for new farmland, for instance. The petroleum age has merely coalesced all of our needs into a single, needful resources. When our own supply of it began to run out in the 1970s, the famed “energy crisis” ensued, resulting in the widespread “hopelessness” and economic recession associated with that decade. The United States needed new sources of oil, and so developed the “twin pillar policy,” to rely on Iran and Saudi Arabia. When Iran moved to nationalize its oil industry, the CIA assassinated the democratically-elected Mossadeq and backed the Shah–events that ultimately led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and a surging sentiment throughout the Mddle East that freedom from European powers and their meddling could be won through radical Islam. At the same time, the “twin pillar policy” collapsed, and the United States became dependent on Saudi Arabia.
That dependence has forced the United States to back many unsavory dictators and tyrants, or else allow economic recession. That U.S.-backed despotism led to many myriad resistance movements against our heinous allies, including the Ba’athists in Iraq and Syria, Mubarak in Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, and others. The goal of al-Qa’ida is to unite the local resistance movements into a pan-Arabic revolution with a short-term goal of destroying the countries that now dominate the region (being the legacies of arbitrary colonial divisions, and ruled by ruthless, Western-backed dictators), and a long-term goal of replacing them with a single caliphate. Al-Qa’ida focuses its ire on the United States because it is the common enemy of all of these local resistance movements, though in each case only a secondary one.
Al-Qa’ida’s “rallying cry” to the Islamic world was sounded on 11 September 2001, and immediately appreciated as carte blanche by a far-sighted, visionary but ultimately ruthless group in American politics, the so-called “neoconservatives.” Disciples of Leo Strauss, their political philosophy unites a Hobbesian worldview with avowedly Machiavellian pragmatism. With Saudi Arabia’s reserves nearing their peak, these “neocons” saw an opportunity in 9/11 to sieze the resources the United States requires before we reach crisis levels, and prepared an invasion against our erstwhile ally, Saddam Hussein. The current war in Iraq, like every war in history, is about resources–in this case, the only resource that still matters: oil. The neoconservatives should be congratulated for their far-sighted preparations, if not for their ruthless lack of morality. Such is the cost of an industrialized civilization. As such, the invasion of Iraq may be seen as the first of the “oil wars” that so many have predicted to break out in the shadow of Hubbert’s Peak.
Certainly we have seen a certain upsurge of violence to control petroleum reserves. In late September 2005, the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force held Nigeria’s oil production “hostage”, taking over 10 oil flow stations and offering to return them only upon the release of their leader, Dokubo-Aasari.
Recently, Congress held sessions to “hold oil companies accountable” for record-high oil prices during the disasters of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. With record-high oil prices came record-high profits for oil companies, and the mainstream media worked to generate outrage for the oil companies who appeared to profit so much from the suffering of Katrina. Of course, the reality of the situation was the amoral grinding of capitalism’s gears in the shadow of Hubbert’s Peak. With peak production comes peak refinement demand–choking supply at the refining level. Oil companies sell to one another freely at every level; every oil company sells to every oil companies’ refineries, including their own and their competitors’. The same occurs at the distributor and retail levels. A BP retailer is under no obligation to buy his oil from a BP distributor. The result is that oil prices are very much set by supply and demand, foiling any attempt an oil company might make to artificially raise or lower its prices. An industry insider and Oil Drum reader commented:
ExxonMobil, owning their own up and down stream divisions, could sell at a loss or reduced profit on the retail end, provided they compensated their convenience store owners for their lost gasoline revenues (these stores are franchises). But that would make whatever cut they did offer twice as financially painful—they would take the announced cut and associated reduction in profit, and then have to pay the store owners their traditional profit to keep them happy.
So you are not asking them to just fall on their own sword, but to get back up and hurl their bloodied body on it again…ouch!
So—if ExxonMobil did do this, it would be a huge gesture! But only those in the same business would understand the magnitude of what they had done. And whoever did it would shortly be replaced by the Board of Directors as the principal shareholders all called for his head on a pike! Remember, outside of the energy sector, the stock market is a total losing proposition.
While the world fights for the last few drops of good oil, though, the larger question seems to go unaddressed. Peak Oil is not such a unique problem. In fact, we have repeatedly faced the essential crisis with successive fuels throughout the history of civilization. In each previous iteration, we were saved by an alternative which, while initially considered inferior, proved to have just as high an ERoEI–or, often, higher–as the fuel it replaced. Peak Oil has a strong possibility of bringing down civilization itself as a proximate cause of collapse, but it is by no means certain. This crisis has been averted in the past, and we might avert this one, as well. But with low research budgets and little interest in alternative fuels, that hope is becoming increasingly dim. In all previous iterations, there was, at this point, already a clear alternative in play. We have no such clear alternative. The closest we have to such an alternative is nuclear power, which will give us, at most, another 50 years. Nuclear power uses very little uranium, but there is very little uranium in the world.
Peak Oil does not ensure collapse, just as the timber crisis England and France faced did not ensure their collapse. That said, we should be deeply concerned, because where they had coal, we have nothing. In all previous cases, the alternative that prevailed was already known and widely available before the situation reached crisis levels. Not only do we not have that, but very little has been put into research and development efforts to develop such alternatives. Overwhelming resources will be needed, too. Not only is our need for an alternative no guarantee that it exists, but, as we have previously seen, we have already passed the point of diminishing returns for invention. So we see once again that the immediate problems posed (in this case, Peak Oil) are not so critical in and of themselves, but because of the larger context of complexity’s diminishing returns, becomes unsolvable.
Cornucopians discount the threat Peak Oil represents by insisting that the market will adapt. Of course, they are correct, but they suffer a failure of imagination to consider what the market’s adaptations might include. Genocidal warfare is a very efficient way to reduce demand, for example. As Tainter highlighted in Collapse of Complex Societies, collapse is an economizing process.
Many civilizations of the past have collapsed for precisely this diminishing return curve that Hubbert’s Peak embodies. It was “peak wood” that ended Cahokia and the Hohokam, and brought on the Dark Ages that followed the Bronze Age. Obviously, Peak Oil has the potential to end our civilization, but it is by no means assured. Were it the only such crisis we faced, it might even be solvable. But with the peak likely already upon us, the time for coming up with a solution may already be passed. Solutions take time to implement, especially across an entire civilization, and the downside of the curve is always faster than going up. As Jared Diamond wrote in “The Ends of the World as We Know Them,” “History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability.”
Of my list of the real issues of Peak Oil you touched on ERoEI, diminishing returns, the oil we eat, the date of peak/reserve politicizing, depletion rates, lack of viable alternatives, market fallibility, and our leaders’ general response to the crisis. You also briefly touched on some of the exacerbating factors like hurricanes and political instability, and made the strong case that Peak Oil is not a new phenomenon in world history. Excellent work, Jason.
If it wouldn’t make the article too long, I’d add maybe a brief paragraph touching on oil’s essential role in our economy (should be obvious to informed people, but couldn’t hurt to emphasize), why Peak Oil is often called a “liquid fuel crisis”, and the lack of redundancy in our system. Those are the only issues on my list that you “missed”, though the first one could sort of be taken for granted.
I’ve seen so many articles (particularly the more mainstream ones) missing the point that it isn’t even funny. Far too often will articles get into a debate about the origins of oil (as if it matters where it comes from when depletion rates are still 8%), or the partisan implications, or the wonders of new technological advancements (for the last time, technology doesn’t create energy), or the “adaptability of the market”. Thanks for an article that addresses the true issues with Peak Oil.
Comment by Devin — 2 December 2005 @ 6:12 PM
Great article, great website. I’ve spent the last couple of hours reading what you guys have to say and found in very educational.
You wrote that
…with low research budgets and little interest in alternative fuels, that hope is becoming increasingly dim. In all previous iterations, there was, at this point, already a clear alternative in play. We have no such clear alternative…
Are you sure about this? There’s a mini bubble in the stock market now around alternative energy stocks, particularly solar. The Sunpower IPO last month valued the company at 1.5 billion bucks, even though it only makes around $60 million a year. Capitalists and investors seem to be very interested in this alternative.
Comment by Lope — 2 December 2005 @ 7:50 PM
Collapse is now guaranteed. It is utterly unavoidable for a number of reasons.
Cheap oil energy created the conditions for the world’s population explosion, world wide extraction of minerals and resources and the necessary food production, transportation and distribution to ensure that this cyclic process would continue.
It has now reached the end of its course.
No “alternative” energy source exists to replace this. None. The consistent failure to recognize this fact, leads to the wrong assumptions and conclusions regarding Peak Oil. We have effectively reached “Peak Energy” for all practical purposes. Our civilization by extension has peaked also, now the law of entropy occurs and diminishing returns.
Except we’ve got a massive problem now. We can no longer sustain our present populations.
Die-off is going to occur on a massive scale. This too is unavoidable. For all practical purposes, peak oil = peak civilization, which is now reached its climax.
Toss into the mix the collapsing eco-systems worldwide, global warming, massive population overshoot, skyrocketing energy prices (from ANY source) and the staggering economy and many other factors - collapse is now a guaranteed certainty.
It was cheap energy which created the conditions, and human stupidity which chose them.
Comment by SurvivalAcres — 2 December 2005 @ 8:57 PM
awesome article and great points. Made my way here though IshCon and god do I feel better for it.
Comment by Seth — 2 December 2005 @ 11:39 PM
Lope-
Solar energy is not sufficent to replace even the energy that we get from oil, let alone the products we get from oil. I know some people who are very found of saying that by covering Arizona with solar panels we can generate enough power for the entire world. Here’s my issue: Arizona is a big state. It’s larger than most countries. There is also shipping issues, storage issues, and god forbid it ever rain. Also, no one really knows what ecological impact diverting that much of the sun’s output would be.
Hydrogen is a panacea for many reasons. It cannot be contained 100%, it’s not a dense fuel, and we get the vast majority of our hydrogen from fossil fuels anyway. Also, it is not an energy source, but rather an energy carrier. A very inefficent one at that. I believe the figure was 75% loss of power, and that is with high power, efficent fossil fuels. With hydrolosis it’s even worse. Besides which, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, not on Earth.
The rest have similar problems. There is no technology currently available that can replace oil.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 December 2005 @ 2:23 AM
some comments:
1. oil is more than just fuel. petroleum products are in our foods, and almost all of our consumer products. oil’s presence in the economy is totally pervasive.
2. the oil we have grown accustomed to is light sweet crude - the highest quality and easiest to refine product. just trying to migrate the economy to lower quality oil will have an incredible impact.
3. our entire economy infrastructure is based on fossil fuels. any replacement you might consider must be a drop-in replacement for light sweet crude if you want no hiccups. that eliminates solar, wind, nuclear, and even hydrogen…unless you have a solar car, a sail-powered truck, a nuclear friegh train, or a hydrogen car. now wait, aren’t there hydrogen car prototypes? sure, but where is the entire economic infrastructure needed to migrate the car economy to hydroogen? its not there. hydrogen as it is being sold today is not workable. to make hydrogen happen we would need a D-Day plan to build nuclear reactors in order to produce the hydrogen. then replace the entire piping infrastructure we use to ship fuel. then replace each fuelling station. just doing this might take more oil than we have left.
4. think on the last point. we need oil to create the next energy economy. do we have enough? do you have enough breath at the end of a 400 meter sprint to hurl a javelin to a gold-medal distance?
Comment by grumpY! — 3 December 2005 @ 2:40 AM
You write “When it takes a barrel of oil to obtain a barrel of oil–when petroleum’s ERoEI declines to 1–then it doesn’t matter how much oil is still left, it’s no longer economically viable. The petroleum age is over.”
That doesn’t seem correct to me. Although hydropower is cheap, you can’t use it to power a plane. Air travel (and other forms of transportation that need transportable density) will continue to get used long after the ERoEI is below one.
Didn’t Germany, in WWII, produce synthetic oil, at great cost, so that they could keep planes in the air? In any case, we’d certainly do the same if our civilization was on the line.
The point is “ERoEI
Comment by Anonymous — 3 December 2005 @ 6:08 AM
This and the previous thesis explore some of the proximate causes of collapse. The ultimate cause, as we’ve already seen, is the diminishing returns of complexity. Because of that, both of these theses deal not with deterministic consequences, but with probabilistic threats. We face a large number of such threats, any of which may or may not happen. The problem is, the only way for our civilization to survive is if they all don’t happen. Throw a dozen coins in the air–if any of them come up tails, you lose. If the increasing cost of complexity is AIDS, then these are the cat colds and innocuous infections that we might’ve shrugged off in our hale and hardy youth, but are now lethal.
Devin,
I thought I addressed that with the quotes from Tainter and Manning….
That’s the next thesis.
Lope,
The key word here is “mini.” I’m no expert on these matters, but I’ve heard the ERoEI of a photovoltaic cell is about 1. There’s some buzz, but it shows all the telltale signs of a hyped-up bubble. But there has been more than a few articles in the press about the low R&D budgets–check out the Oil Drum’s article from this past September, “About that savior, technology….”
Survival Acres,
A number of reasons, each one solvable on its own, but as a whole, completely unsolvable. Peak Oil is one of those reasons. There’s no reason we couldn’t have another miracle, just like the miracle that saved us in the Bronze Age, and the miracle that saved us in the Renaissance. But you need a Peak Oil miracle, and a biodiversity miracle, and a climatological miracle, and, and, and. Miracles are pretty damned unlikely when it’s just one, but we’re asking for several dozen all to be delivered in a span of a few years.
There might be something out there we’ve yet to try burning.
OK, I had a hard time keeping a straight face with that one, yeah, it’s pretty far-fetched we’ll find some entirely new fuel, much less find it soon enough to matter. And I’m pretty skeptical of the alternatives on the table currently, I think you can pick that up in the article. But there are some people like our good friends at Peak Oil Optimist and the Ergosphere who think we can. They’re both very smart people, and I’m willing to grant the possibility that they might be right. I think it’s a bit unlikely, but I’ll grant the possibility. The essential problem of Peak X has been solved several times in the past with precisely this approach, so it’s theoretically possible, at least. Whether or not it’s practically possible this time around is something we’ll just have to wait and see.
Grumpy,
True, but it’s a relatively small percentage of our oil that goes into petrochemicals, so if we could find some other fuel, we could easily save the rest for petrochemicals and pump it for its value in that even when its ERoEI as a fuel drops below 1.
Indeed. That’s as big a problem as the cost of pumping itself. I’d hoped I’d made that clear in the article….
Actually, we’re already seeing the downfall of air travel. See my previous post, “The Spirit of St. Louis.”
You can use hydropower to power a plane if you have some way of carrying the energy–like hydrogen? So the problem isn’t unsolvable: we just need to be REALLY inventive, REALLY quick. Which is a problem exacerbated by the fact that it’s harder and harder for us to invent, because we’ve passed the point of diminishing returns for invention … getting back to the idea that this problem is not so unsolvable on its own, but the whole nest of problems taken together is utterly unsolvable.
Yes, Germany took a big hit to their ERoEI with synthetic oil, which was much lower than real oil, but still well above 1.
Just think about it for a moment. If ERoEI is 1, then you’re not gaining any more energy for all your pumping and drilling. If ERoEI drops below 1, then you’re actually losing energy with drilling. So, at 1, oil reverts to its original status as disgusting, useless thing you sometimes see oozing out of rocks.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 December 2005 @ 8:45 AM
Nitpicky points out of the way: when wood or fossil fuels are burned, none of their mass is converted to energy. This only happens in a nuclear reaction. The energy released by burning fuel is stored in the arrangement of electrons in the chemical bonds of the fuels.
Although it’s somewhat fanciful, if our energy requirements do continue to increase, eventually we’ll have to go solar, albeit with titanic orbiting solar cells that beam down energy. The sun supplies each patch of ground with 160–170 Watts per square meter on average every day; on sunlit ground with a clear sky, this may be over 1000 W/m². Of course, we’ll have to be pretty desperate to get to that.
Comment by Tyson Burghardt — 3 December 2005 @ 10:50 AM
Hey –
Nice, Jason. I do not spend time at the Peak Oil sites, largely because I find much of thier rhetoric to be just that — meanwhile, you have written a concise, well reasoned and well supported explanation of the factors involved in Peak Oil with examples of previous Peak events. This should be the type of document that they are spreading rather than the fear mongering bs that is so hot…
Although, I do see that you decided to use that hideous and illogical quote from the ‘industry insider’. Do I need to explain again how completely he misses the point?
Janene
Comment by Janene — 3 December 2005 @ 11:07 AM
Jason — Oh, I see the oil’s essential role part now. Sorry about that. And as for the lack of redundancy being the next thesis, I see that too. Which just leaves how this is a liquid fuels crisis as much as anything, and that’s a bit redundant with how useful oil is.
On the subject of ERoEI — the above person was (perhaps unintentionally) making the point that oil is such a valuable resources, that even when it does not return energy on energy investment, energy should still be invested to extract it. Pretty telling statement about just how valuable oil is, huh? By analogy, we mine gold and diamonds and many other things that have a negative ERoEI simply because they’re valuable, not for their energy input. So the main point still stands, that oil will cease to be an energy source, since its ERoEI will be less than one — but we might use it anyway, because it’s that useful.
On collapse — The likelihood of collapse is difficult to estimate, because obviously no one can see the future. As Jason says, there might be a deus ex machina the way there has been in the past. Now, the likelihood of this (I think tragic) “miracle” energy source must be judged by a number of factors… availability, scalability, quality, transportability, timeframe to implementation, and already current development (we can’t switch to an energy source we don’t know about). Even then, the other many facets of the interconnectedness of all things on Earth stand to reason that there will be a collapse anyway, and still soon. Jason has done an excellent job of covering the many aspects of this bigger picture, and looking at Peak Oil in isolation is one of the most common errors made by Peak Oilers.
Now, what I’M worried about is whether or not we personally have the time to adapt or not. I’ve long since given up on the whole of society, but that doesn’t mean that we individually will not have problems. I’ve heard Jason’s arguments for why we should be okay, but it remains to be seen how all this is going to play out. Looking at all the ways to die and the relatively thin edge of the knife of survival is perhaps not the best way to feel secure in yourself, granted. No wonder people surround themselves with visions of candy canes and sugar plum fairies.
Comment by Devin — 3 December 2005 @ 2:59 PM
Thanks for the responses Benjamin and Jason.
Adaptation can occur pretty quickly in the capitalistic system. Look how fast the internet was built - infrastructure, content, software etc. Why can’t the same happen with alternate energies and energy saving technology?
Maybe solar and other energies won’t be able to meet all of our needs, but if you complement this with changes in people’s attitudes concerning consumption and progress, then the average person’s use of energy will decline. There have got to be a lot of inefficiencies out there, small things that people can do to reduce consumption. Small things to make the world less complex rather than extreme measures. The declining birthrates we see all over the world mean the next generation will be smaller, therefore less energy will be required.
Again, great article and discussion.
Comment by Lope — 3 December 2005 @ 5:40 PM
I would be much more concerned about a “hydrocarbon peak” than an “oil peak”. Certainly there is a vast amount of coal, sand oil, etc. available throughout the world. I think that it was back in the oil crisis of the ’70s when it was said that at $6 per gallon (in 1970 dollars) for gasoline, it would be financially feasable to produce gasoline from coal. Also, remember that the first diesel engine ran on coal dust.
The biggest problem is the U.S., which has always been an oil pig. There is much that could be done right now. I would think in three years we could get big long haul trucks off of the road (and the freight onto the railroads), and in five years, we could get most of the national airlines passengers out of the planes and into high speed trains. Also a national building insulation program wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Comment by G. Anton Bosanque — 3 December 2005 @ 6:15 PM
Actually the first diesel engine ran on peanut oil, but anyway. What you’re talking about would be a severe reduction in complexity and renewed concentration on locality. The only food you could eat would be that which was locally produced, without the help of oil. The population would decrease quickly and substantially.
No current alternative exists. Beyond that there is the problem of taking that alternative and integrating it into our infastructure, or making a new infastructure. Doing that takes a lot of time. And could only be done with our current infastructure. We’re fast running out of time. Not to mention the financial problem. The US dollar is only being held up right now because all oil transactions are done in the US dollar. No oil, no big US dollar. Many companies are already switching to the Euro, and we’re feeling it. It’s a big concern in financial sectors.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 3 December 2005 @ 8:41 PM
What, and electrons are not part of the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the wood? Why is my wood smaller after a fire, then? And what happened to that law of conservation of mass-energy I read so much about in grade school science class?
I still think you’re taking it a little too personally. I still read it to say that high oil prices are the result of a capitalist market–no evil, price-fixing Big Oil companies, and no gouging local retailers. I don’t think gouging’s going on at any level. I think we’re starting to see the price of Hubbert’s Peak.
A little known fact about the internet–or, I should say, well-known to computer scientists, and completely unknown to everyone else. The reason the internet took off so much was because all of the components for it were developed with NSF grants before the infrastructure was in place. Once the wires caught up, the software and other technology was already there. CS dept’s love to include this in their grant requests, which is where I heard about it. So, there’s a key part to any “quick adaptation” the capitalist system has ever made in the past, or is likely to make in the future: all the necessary components should have been developed years before and reached a stage of relative maturity, where all you need to do is put them all together.
We’re hitting peak now, and at present, we have none of the necessary components ready, much less mature. For a “quick adaptation,” they needed to be ready by 1980. So I’d estimate we’re at a good negative twenty years on the timeline we’d need for such an adaptation. We might’ve had a good chance at it once upon a time, but we elected Reagan, instead. Now, we’re down to a snowball’s chance in hell.
It’s morning in America!
Waste. You’re sounding Marco’s note. I’m preparing a thorough refutation of that, but it will be at least tomorrow before anyone sees it. Short form: even if you could cut all the waste, it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 3 December 2005 @ 11:17 PM
“A BP retailer is under no obligation to buy his oil from a BP distributor.”
I don’t think that this is true. I think retailers are contractually restricted to their franchisor. Out in my neck of the woods Texaco has traditionally had very high prices. On averge it’s been 15 to 20 cents more per gallon than the station across the street. So in recent years gas station owners have been switching franchises as soon as their contracts with Texaco expired.
You should fact check this claim.
Comment by Peter — 3 December 2005 @ 11:58 PM
This paragraph needs serious reworking:
I said above that the North American Hubbert’s Peak was the most significant event of the post-war period. The complexity of any culture is a function of energy, and it’s energy that has always created the shape of history. Romans very explicitly fought for new farmland, for instance. The petroleum age has merely coalesced all of our needs into a single, needful resources. When our own supply of it began to run out in the 1970s, the famed “energy crisis” ensued, resulting in the widespread “hopelessness” and economic recession associated with that decade. The United States needed new sources of oil, and so developed the “twin pillar policy,” to rely on Iran and Saudi Arabia. When Iran moved to nationalize its oil industry, the CIA assassinated the democratically-elected Mossadeq and backed the Shah–events that ultimately led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and a surging sentiment throughout the Mddle East that freedom from European powers and their meddling could be won through radical Islam. At the same time, the “twin pillar policy” collapsed, and the United States became dependent on Saudi Arabia.
See part in italics. It makes it sound like the Iran coup d etat and installation of the Shah took place in the 1970s and not the 1950s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi_of_Iran
Comment by Peter — 4 December 2005 @ 12:10 AM
Jason Godesky:
Great!!!
That tells a lot about the reliability of any of your other considerations.
IGNORANT MORONS…
I did not care to follow up on your previous reply for good reason:
“Never argue with a fool. Someone watching may not be able to tell the difference.”
Comment by Ah no nymous — 4 December 2005 @ 3:41 AM
Technically Nitpicky is currect. The phrase “mass into energy” is almost solely used to refer to radiation. The combustion process is soley chemical with no radiation. The energy release is heat.
(almost any carbon chain could replace the one I use here, but this is sufficent to demonstrate the point.)
6O2 + C6H12O6 -> 6CO2 + 6H20 + energy(heat)
That being said. His choice of rebuttles demonstrates an arragant posturing that truely defeats any purpose he might have had by pointing out a minor error. After all the error was one of terminology, not of fact. The oil is burned to generate energy and is then used up. Technically it’s the chemical bonds that are turned into energy not the mass, but for most people the difference is moot. And irrelevant, the point stands regardless of the choice of a phrase.
Comment by Benjamin Shender — 4 December 2005 @ 10:47 AM
Ah no nymous,
Is your knowledge evenly spaced over all areas of expertise? You know as much about entymology as you do about linguistics? There are no spots that are poorer than others? If so, you are a most exceptional individual. Most of us have areas we are stronger in, and areas we are weaker in. I’m stronger in biology, but weaker in physics and chemistry. I’m stronger in the social sciences, than in the physical ones. You’ll see that I mostly restrict myself to the social sciences, with points about the physical sciences relegated almost exclusively to minor supporting points, as above.
Ben’s explanation makes sense, and in fact, I remember hearing it before. I’m not sure how I might have written the phrase any differently, as a more accurate rendition would be horribly unwieldy. Even the original poster admitted it was “nitpicky,” and even now I agree with Ben’s assessment that it’s mostly irrelevant.
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” I don’t think there’s any doubt left here.
Peter,
You’ve never seen a Texaco truck filling up a BP retailer? It happens all the time. Some retailers are still obligated to buy some percentage of their oil from their company’s distributor, but it’s usually pretty low. The natural selection of the market: whoever decided on that policy first could make more profits at the retail level by cutting retailers’ costs, which would force everyone else to do the same to stay competitive. Which is why you’ll now regularly see Texaco trucks filling up a BP retailer. High oil prices from one retailer to another have to do with other considerations, like demand (which can fluctuate widely based on relatively minor differences of location–a retailer on a busier intersection has a lot more demand, and can raise the price a lot more over one that’s not so busy).
Texaco’s a special case, because of their “Techron” oil, which only comes out of Texaco distributors. That means Texaco retailers are much more bound than usual, which would explain why your counter-example is Texaco. Another quote from that same Oil Drum article above: