http://www.monbiot.com/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=625
See this same article
also at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1202-09.htm
----------
Related information:
"Peak Oil: A Turning Point for Mankind", by Colin Campbell
Colin Campbell is a petroleum geologist. His excellent 1 hour
presentation can be viewed on Michael Ruppert's web site's
home page. The link is on the right side of page pretty far down:
www.fromthewilderness.com
The link to the actual video is here: (Real Player video)
http://www.rz.tu-clausthal.de/realvideo/event/peak-oil.ram
The link to the transcript of presentation (including slides)
is here:
http://energycrisis.org/de/lecture.html
----------
The
Bottom of the Barrel
Oil is running out, but no one wants to talk about
it.
By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 2nd December 2003
The oil industry is
buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved
the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British
territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that
this is a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North
Sea oil
is in terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the
human predicament has become when you discover that this
"huge" new field will supply the world with oil for
five and a
quarter days.1
Every generation has
its taboo, and ours is this:
that the resource upon which our lives have been built
is running out. We don't talk about it because we cannot
imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
Oil itself won't disappear,
but extracting what remains
is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery
of new reserves peaked in the 1960s.2 Every year, we use four
times as much oil as we find.3 All the big strikes appear to
have been made long ago: the 400 million barrels in the new
North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the
1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small
new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones.
No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that
the global production of oil will peak before long.
The only question is
how long. The most optimistic projections
are the ones produced by the US Department of Energy, which
claims that this will not take place until 2037.4 But the
US energy information agency has admitted that the government's
figures have been fudged: it has based its projections for
oil supply on the projections for oil demand,5 perhaps in
order not to sow panic in the financial markets. Other
analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin
Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before
2010.6 In August the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told
New Scientist that he was "99 per cent confident" that
the date of maximum global production will be 2004.7
Even if the optimists are correct, we will be scraping
the oil barrel within the lifetimes of most of those
who are middle-aged today.
The supply of oil will
decline, but global demand will not.
Today we will burn 76 million barrels;8 by 2020 we will
be using 112 million barrels a day, after which projected
demand accelarates.9 If supply declines and demand grows,
we soon encounter something with which the people of the
advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar:
shortage. The price of oil will go through the roof.
As the price rises,
the sectors which are now almost
wholly dependent on crude oil - principally transport
and farming - will be forced to contract. Given that
climate change caused by burning oil is cooking the
planet, this might appear to be a good thing. The
problem is that our lives have become hard-wired
to the oil economy. Our sprawling suburbs are
impossible to service without cars. High oil prices
mean high food prices: much of the world's growing
population will go hungry. These problems will be
exacerbated by the direct connection between the
price of oil and the rate of unemployment.10
The last five recessions in the US were all
preceded by a rise in the oil price.11
Oil, of course, is
not the only fuel on which vehicles
can run. There are plenty of possible substitutes,
but none of them is likely to be anywhere near as cheap
as crude is today. Petroleum can be extracted from
tar sands and oil shale, but in most cases the process
uses almost as much energy as it liberates, while
creating great mountains and lakes of toxic waste.
Natural gas is a better option, but switching from
oil to gas propulsion would require a vast and
staggeringly expensive new fuel infrastructure.
Gas, of course, is subject to the same constraints
as oil: at current rates of use, the world has about
50 years' supply,12 but if gas were to take the place
of oil its life would be much shorter.
Vehicles could be run
from fuel cells powered by hydrogen,
which is produced by the electrolysis of water. But the
electricity which produces the hydrogen has to come from
somewhere. To fill all the cars in the US would require
four times the current capacity of the national grid.13
Coal burning is filthy, nuclear energy is expensive and
lethal. Running the world's cars from wind or solar
power would require a greater investment than any
civilisation has ever made before. New studies suggest
that leaking hydrogen could damage the ozone layer
and exacerbate global warming.14
Turning crops into
diesel or methanol is just about viable
in terms of recoverable energy, but it means using the land
on which food is now grown for fuel. My rough calculations
suggest that running the United Kingdom's cars on rapeseed
oil would require an area of arable fields the size of England.15
There is one possible
solution which no one writing about
the impending oil crisis seems to have noticed: a technique
with which the British and Australian governments are currently
experimenting, called underground coal gasification.16
This is a fancy term for setting light to coal seams which are
too deep or too expensive to mine, and catching the gas which
emerges. It's a hideous prospect, as it means that several
trillion tonnes of carbon which was otherwise impossible
to exploit becomes available, with the likely result that
global warming will eliminate life on earth.
We seem, in other words,
to be in trouble. Either we lay
hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which
case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or
we run out, and civilisation collapses.
The only rational response
to both the impending end
of the Oil Age and the menace of global warming is to
redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this
cannot happen without massive political pressure, and
our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity.
People take to the streets because they want to consume
more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching
tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that
most people would choose the tableware.
In view of all this,
the notion that the war with Iraq had
nothing to do with oil is simply preposterous. The US
attacked Iraq (which appears to have had no weapons
of mass destruction and was not threatening other nations),
rather than North Korea (which is actively developing a
nuclear weapons programme and boasting of its intentions
to blow everyone else to kingdom come) because Iraq had
something it wanted. In one respect alone, Bush and Blair
have been making plans for the day when oil production
peaks, by seeking to secure the reserves of other nations.
I refuse to believe
that there is not a better means of
averting disaster than this. I refuse to believe that
human beings are collectively incapable of making rational
decisions. But I am beginning to wonder what the basis of
my belief might be.
The sources for this
and all George Monbiot's recent articles
can be found at www.monbiot.com
References:
1. The Buzzard field
is believed to contain 400 million barrels
of recoverable oil. The US Energy Information Administration
estimates global daily oil demand at 76 million barrels
(see below).
2. Richard Heinberg,
2003. The Party's Over: Oil, War and
the Fate of Industrial Societies, p.36. New Society
Publishers, Canada.
3. Bob Holmes and Nicola
Jones, 2nd August 2003. Brace
yourself for the end of cheap oil. New Scientist,
vol 179, issue 2406.
4. ibid.
5. US EIA, 1998.
Annual Energy Outlook, cited in Richard Heinberg,
ibid, p.115. The extract reads as follows: "these adjustments
to the USGS and MMR estimates are based on non-technical
considerations that support domestic supply growth to the
levels necessary to meet projected demand levels".
6. Colin J. Campbell,
1997. The Coming Oil Crisis. Multi-Science
Publishing Co. Ltd, Brentwood, Essex.
7. Bob Holmes and Nicola
Jones, ibid.
8. US Energy Information
Administration, 2003. Annual Energy
Outlook 2003 With Projections to 2025.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/
9. ibid.
10. Alan Carruth, Mark
Hooker, and Andrew Oswald, 1998.
Unemployment Equilibria and Input Prices:
Theory and Evidence from the United States.
Review of Economics and Statistics 80: 621-28.
11. James C. Cooper
and Kathleen Madigan, 10th January 2003.
Will the Economy Skid on Oil? Business Week Online.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2003/nf20030110_5883.htm
12. Richard Heinberg,
ibid. p. 126.
13. Hugh Williams,
6th September 2003. Hydrogen hype.
Letter to New Scientist, vol 179, issue 2411.
14. Cited in Anil Ananthaswamy,
15th November 2003.
Reality Bites for the Dream of a Hydrogen Economy.
New Scientist, vol 180, issue 2421.
15. This is back-of-the-envelope,
and depends on two unchecked
assumptions:
a. that the average mpg is 30,
b. that the average annual mileage is 5000.
This gives an annual fuel use of 167 gallons/car/year.
One acre of rapeseed yields 115 gallons of biodiesel.
There are 22.7m cars in the UK, which means 33m acres, or
13.3m ha. England's surface area is 13.4m ha.
16. Fred Pearce, 1st
June 2002. Fire Down Below.
New Scientist, vol 174, issue 2345.
2nd December 2003
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