
Peak Oil is History - ph0rque
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/674/66/
======
chipsy
I let myself get scared a little, as I should with any good peak oil story,
and then went looking for an Achilles' Heel.

"Some might also wonder why a shortage of oil should automatically trigger a
collapse. It turns out that, in an industrialized economy, a drop in oil
consumption precipitates a proportional drop in overall economic activity. Oil
is the feedstock used to make the vast majority of transportation fuels --
which are used to move products and deliver services throughout the economy.
In the US in particular, there is a very strong correlation between GDP and
motor vehicle miles traveled. Thus, the US economy can be said to run on oil,
in a rather direct and immediate way: less oil implies a smaller economy. At
what point does the economy shrink so much that it can no longer meet its own
maintenance requirements? In order to continue functioning, all sorts of
infrastructure, plant and equipment must be maintained and replaced in a
timely manner, or it stops functioning. Once that point is reached, economic
activity becomes constrained not just by the availability of transportation
fuels, but also by the availability of serviceable equipment. At some point
the economy shrinks so much as to invalidate the financial assumptions on
which it is based, making it impossible to continue importing oil on credit.
Once that point is reached, the amount of transportation fuels available is no
longer limited just by the availability of oil, but also constrained by the
inability to finance oil imports."

This is the part which attempts to convince the reader that a simple
recession/stagnation cannot occur.

Unfortunately, it vastly underestimates our resourcefulness and runs on the
fallacy of the USA only ever being capable of transportation with petroleum,
or of a collapse so swift and sudden(from full consumption to zero in a matter
of months; an unlikely event, between price hikes, austerity measures, the
application of strategic reserves, opening of existing private stocks, etc.)
that no response can be made. If it ever becomes too costly to run petroleum-
based freighters, we can still revive coal and sail technology. That alone
will ensure the survival of ocean-bound transportation(and hence a lot of
import-export dependencies). Overland, goods in the USA are transported
through the most cost-effective freight system in the world; trucks are "last
mile" haulers in most situations. Our existing rail and electric systems can
revert to coal for some time to come, although nobody likes the ecological
costs involved in coal. And this even leaves open the possibility of
refrigerated transit, just not necessarily at present-day schedules.

So the remaining energy problems, as I see them, are in petro-agriculture
dependency and infrastructure(primarily in housing stock). Difficult? Yes.
Impossible? No. People will die as a result of pretty much any peak oil
scenario. A full collapse, though, requires both an overnight cratering of
production, and an awful lot of faith in people to do exactly the wrong
things.

~~~
jacoblyles
Econtalk had an episode about carbon shortage recently. It turns out that
synthetic fuels manufactured from coal become economical far before petroleum
is totally gone. And there are other more expensive technologies that come
into play when the coal is gone.

All the while, renewable energy is getting cheaper by the year.

Here's the link. It is a fascinating podcast, though it wanders a bit near the
end:

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.html)

~~~
baq
ideally there should be a solar-wind-powered atmospheric CO2/H20 to
hydrocarbon synthesis device in every backyard, and i believe that's how our
grand(grandgrand)children will operate. it'll take a while to get there,
though.

~~~
ph0rque
You mean trees? The fit your description perfectly, except for the wind-
powered part.

~~~
baq
almost, except trees take too long to grow and cars don't run very well on
wood. i mean something that gets CO2 and H20 and yields gas, lpg, diesel or
something else that can be put into your tank without making a trip to a
refinery first.

see e.g.
[http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/08/12/bug.diesel/in...](http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/08/12/bug.diesel/index.html)
for the basic idea.

~~~
eru
What's so magical about a small scale?

------
narrator
Choice 1: Burn lots and lots of coal + Fischer Tropsch + electric vehicles.

Choice 2: Thorium reactors + electric vehicles.

That's about it.

BTW, The "Peak Oil Community" are 5% oil and gas industry people, and 5%
energy policy wonk want-to-bes.

The rest are radical environmentalists eagerly anticipating the ecological-
Malthusian-doom rapture (see dieoff.org, etc) and are not interested in
practical solutions and are just sitting in front of their computers waiting
to be raptured up into their ecological-hand-tools-subsistence-agriculture
wonderland.

~~~
fungi
> are not interested in practical solutions

but it's us stinky hippies that bang on the loudest and for the longest about
sustainable transport solutions, renewable energy and sustainable population.
(~>_aside form nuclear energy_<~) where do you draw that stereotype from?

edit: emphasis

~~~
jsz0
Environmentalists in Europe have been known to protest expansion of high speed
rail. Not sure if this is a common view or not.

~~~
fungi
hm didn't know that, guess it all depends where the line runs if you are going
to make a serious environmental case vs's NIMBY.

fwiw the greens just got us a feasibility study for australias first high
speed line (under the world 4th busiest flight corridor) but i'm sure i'll be
a very old man b4 anything comes of it

------
blahedo
Incredibly frustrating that all the figures were thumbnails that are illegible
and don't link to a higher-resolution version---and then the text doesn't even
fully explain them. Does anyone know which country he's talking about for Fig.
3?

~~~
xanados
1: <http://www.transitionguelph.org/images/front5.jpg> 2:
[http://orangejuiceblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/oil-
pr...](http://orangejuiceblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/oil-
production.bmp) 3: [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-
kpMH_7eM/SkPP2QB4d9I/AAAAAAAABI...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-b-
kpMH_7eM/SkPP2QB4d9I/AAAAAAAABIA/DYgyPgGWj8E/s400/russia_production.jpg)

The country is Russia.

~~~
blahedo
Thanks. I thought it might be, but I wasn't sure.

------
patrickgzill
I like Orlov, find his writings to be a useful and interesting perspective,
however there is much that is inaccurate or that remains unconsidered in this
piece.

For instance, the issue of Iraq and Iran, both very undeveloped in terms of
wells drilled and the modernity of the infrastructure that runs those wells.

Iraq, for all its recent investment, remains underdeveloped, and Iran has not
had access to newer oil tech since 1979.

Further, there is the question of whether we are suffering from an "oil coming
out of the ground" problem or "refine the crude oil into something we can
actually use" problem.

The bottleneck at this point appears (from my admittedly limited, amateur
research) to actually be in total refining capacity.

------
wazoox
Interesting, but he wants a bit too much collapse to be inevitable. The
current crisis is probably related to the 2006-2007 oil prices hike (the first
actual effects of Peak Oil), and the situation will remain so for a decade or
two : oil prices climb, demand is killed off, crisis ensue, prices drop,
partial recovery comes, and we start the cycle again.

That means that instead of a brutal collapse, we'll live a state of
depression, recession and incomplete recovery for the next decades, with at
some point an inflexion from less growth to more depression. That's what we
have to get prepared to.

Related papers :

* Rubin and Buchanan crisis analysis: <http://www.manicore.com/fichiers/Rubin_Buchanan_CIBC.pdf>

* Lloyds 360° risk insight : [http://www.manicore.com/fichiers/LLoyds_Chatam_House_froggat...](http://www.manicore.com/fichiers/LLoyds_Chatam_House_froggatt_lahn.pdf)

------
ck2
For what it's worth, this is pure politics IMHO and not HN worthy.

------
pandakar
stendahl peak oil romanticism at its best

------
Confusion
As the price of oil goes up, alternatives for the various uses of oil will
appear. There are plenty of those already, they are just not economically
viable. At the same time, everything is still getting cheaper and we are
faring better and better. I don't see why the net result couldn't be a switch
away from oil that takes a few decades, without our (increasing) wellbeing
being jeopardized.

------
lzw
I find it amazing that so much of the peak oil arguments come from looking at
production in the USA, and also from seemingly looking only at production of
light sweet crude.

Production in the USA is much harder now because of environmental regulations.
These drive up costs and naturally would result in companies going offshore to
produce... Yet I bet if you looked at proven reserves in e USA you might see a
different figure.

Especially if you include forms other than light sweet crude. This easy oil is
cheapest to refine but it is just one grade of oil, with many heavy grades
going all the eay in to oil shale and coal tar and oil sands..... And the
reserves of these types of oil are massive in the USA and staggering in
Canada.

Further exploration is very difficult and banned for the Americas richest
locations, such as ANWR. Before it was cut off from exploration, I believe
many geologists believed that north of prudhoe bay there was more oil than was
found in Saudi Arabia, and at the time they were keeping it under wraps as
strategic reserve..... Now we pretend like it doesn't exist.

Finally peak oil is based on the theory that depleted fields never produce
again, while I understand there are many fields that were previously depleted
that refilled while lying fallow for several decades. It is possible that oil
is actually a natural product of geological forces, not ancient plant matter,
and that most fields will refill over time.

------
erikstarck
I'm looking forward to a world not running on oil.

Finally, for the first time, there's global pressure to develop alternatives.
The result of this can already be seen in hybrid cars and cheaper solar power.

Getting rid of oil is a Good Thing for so many reasons. We should salute it,
not fear it.

