Centerblue.org

In the wake of ever-rising petroleum prices, people are casting about for explanations and wondering what the future holds. While some say we can just increase production, the truth is that more and more of the remaining reserves of oil are in places where it is increasingly expensive to extract–such as the deep ocean or in countries that have suddenly discovered the use of oil as a political weapon.

Additionally, a new idea is gaining traction in mainstream consciousness: the concept of “peak oil.” Peak oil, roughly defined, is the idea that worldwide oil production will increase only up to the point at which we have extracted half of the Earth’s oil reserves. After that point arrives, production will begin to decline at an increasingly sharp rate despite our best efforts to maintain it, with potentially very serious consequences for a population with an ever-growing thirst for oil. The theory was first developed by Shell geologist Marion King Hubbert for predicting peak US oil production. It was later expanded to include world production as explained by Kenneth Deffeyes’ book, “Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak.” Other publications have fueled the fire and have essentially validated the theory, including Matthew Simmons’ “Twlight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock And The World Economy;” The Department of Energy’s Hirsch Report urging the US to begin now in moving to alternative fuels to minimize the economic shocks of peak oil; and even the US Army Corps of Engineers’ report titled “Energy Trends And Implications for U.S. Army Installations.”

The big problems are that nobody can quite agree on when peak oil will occur, or on just how serious consequences will be when it does. Some experts like Deffeyes believe peak oil already occurred in late 2005, which they believe explains the current extreme oil price volatility and which makes it very late for beginning mitigation strategies. Other experts estimate its occurrence five, ten, twenty or more years in the future.

On the issue of consequences, the Hirsch Report and websites like Life After The Oil Crash (LATOC) and dieoff.org ring some very serious alarm bells. Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett has given presentations to Congress and others on peak oil, and has used information from the LATOC site. The websites essentially predict the collapse of modern civilization as it is quickly and increasingly cut off from its most precious resource, given that everything in our civilization from food growth and transport to plastics rely on petroleum. They believe we are already too late to save ourselves by switching to alternative energy sources that would in any event be inadequate to replace oil.

I’ve often wondered whether so-called peak oil “alarmists” were being overly pessimistic. The pessimism seems especially obvious in light of how amazingly quickly we are moving closer to an ethanol infrastructure as a result of higher oil prices. Other rays of hope are out there too, such as companies moving entirely to wind-powered energy.

The Peak Oil Debunked blog has published an excellent counter-argument to the peak oil pessimists that is well worth a read. While not denying the inevitability of peak oil, the main arguments are essentially that a) using less energy than we do now would not be catastrophic, given the huge amount of waste currently built into the system; b) we use oil for so much now only because its cheap and convenient, and when that is no longer true we will re-prioritize our energy use and make do with alternatives; c) the energy used to switch to alternative energy can be in the alternative of what we would use energy for, instead of on top of it (for example, we could build an electric train instead of a fuel-guzzling airport rather than creating both); and d) we need not find a single alternative to oil when multiple technologies together can fill the void.

The article is a great read, and I always appreciate challenges to established dogma.