Before I move I thought I would say something about some possible events
that will transpire within the next 10 years which will have profound
effects upon the world long term. Sometime between 2004 and 2010 the world
oil production will peak out at something like 30 billion barrels of oil
per year. After that will come a slow, inexorible decline in world oil
production. Very little that we do will be able to turn that decline around.
I write this as a person whose responsibility it is to find new oil
sources. While we have been wildly successful over the past 3 years, my
group hasn't been able to change the facts outlined below by much more than
a dent.
First, the back ground, then the consequences.
In 1956, M. King Hubbert, analyzing the production of oil in the US lower
48 projected that the US oil production would peak out in 1970 at around 16
million barrels per day. see:
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/images/com19.gif
Hubbert had fit the production to a Gaussian error function and it was
based upon this that he made his prediction. Everyone pounced on Hubbert as
a terrible pessimist. Hubbert was wrong. Oil production didn't peak out in
1970---it peaked in 1971! He missed it by a year. Since that time the US
oil production has declined (always within 5% of Hubbert's original
prediction) to the point now where we are producing just under 6 million
barrels of oil per day here.
Can this decline be avoided? No. Earlier in my career, I and thousands of
other oilmen and women were invovled in the most massive drilling and
exploration effort ever. This occurred in the period between 1979 and 1984
as we tried to turn around the decline of oil production in the US. If you
look at the graph above you will see that all we did was flatten the
decline for those years. When the price fell in the mid 80's and
exploration was curtailed, the decline in production caught up with where
it would have been if we hadn't engaged in that tremendous drilling
effort.The decline will continue but could be abated somewhat by allowing
exploration in places the government has ruled out of bounds. I will quote
Price:
"At current rates of consumption, known reserves of Petroleum will be gone
in about thirty-five years; natural gas in fifty-two years; and coal in
some two hundred years." David Price, Population and Environment: A Journal
of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 16, Number 4, March 1995, pp. 301-19
1995 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
Hubbert Curve analysis shows that within the next few years the world's
yearly oil production will top out at 30 billion barrels a year or so. For
comparison, Prudhoe Bay oil field had 20 billion barrels in place with only
12.5 billion recoverable. The rest will be left in the ground. Prudhoe Bay
represents less than 1 years worth of oil for the world. We don't find a
Prudhoe Bay each year. For the past 20 years we have been using more oil
than we have been finding. (people think oil is always going to be here).
See:
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/campbell/images/com10.gif
I have been a very successful oil-finder. I estimate that I have been
involved in the discovery of around 3/4 of a billion barrels of oil. But
one is humbled when he realizes that that is about 15 days supply for the
world. From that perspective, I haven't been very successful.
If one wants to see charts of the past production and predicted future
production of the various oil producing countries, see:
http://dieoff.com/42Countries/42Countries.htm
Petroleum is used to manufacture a wide range of products, many of which I
have no knowledge of. But the ones I know of, oil is used to make
synthetics used in clothing; it is used to manufacture plastics, detergent,
lip gloss, paint thinner, furniture polish and hundreds of other things.
What are the consequences of the decline of the oil age over the next 50
years? It depends upon what and how we replace petroleum with. I will
outline what we will lose if we don't replace it and then go into possible
replacement scenarios.
Here is what I see:
First, the auto will be a thing of the past--period. Enjoy your cars while
you can. People will either have to telecommute, bicycle to work like the
Chinese, or lose their jobs. Cities like Houston, where there are major
commute distances requiring lots of gasoline, simply won't be viable in the
future.
The restriction of autos also applies to farm equipment. Modern
agricultural methods are possible only because we have tractors which can
plow, fertilze, and harvest the crops. They run on petroleum. Without fuel,
tractors can't plow and the food supply will be threatened. As petroleum
decreases in abundance, more natural gas will be converted to other uses,
such as is now occuring on a small scale--natural gas powered cars. This
will cause a rise in natural gas prices which is a major ingredient in
agricultural fertilizer. That means that food production costs will rise
and yields decline. Pesticides are also made from petroleum. While no one
likes pollution, without pesticides, crop yields would be much less per
acre, which is why organic food costs so much.
Our economy depends upon the movement of products across the seas and
across the land. This movement is accomplished today by petroleum-based
internal combustion engines. GNPs will decline without transport. Raw
materials won't be able to get to the factories and finished products won't
be able to get to market. How can an economy survive that?
Petroleum is used to make electrical energy which in turns powers the
computer upon which I am typing. A severe energy crisis will cut into the
power generation and thus the our ability to use computers, air
conditioning which is so essential in the south and heat so essential in
the north. We have too many people to return to wood-burning fires.
Given that a population without energy is one that will probably riot in
the streets, politicians will have lots of pressure on them to ensure their
countries oil supplies at home and abroad. A shrinking oil supply will
cause squabbles over who gets the oil. The Asian economies are just now
coming into the 20th century and their thirst for oil, for money, for
political freedom is just now blossoming. The lack of oil will have
profound influences upon the decisions their political leaders will make.
Some of the oil exporting nations may come under pressure to cease
exporting and simply use the oil for their own countries' need. This, of
course will cause grave concern in petroleum dependent countries.
Alternative Energy sources. What can take over?
What can be done to avoid the above implications? To avoid some of the
problems we must replace 75% of the world's energy supply with a new energy
source. This will be tough. Many authors are taking a very dismal view of
the future when petroleum runs out. Some even saying that a new stone age
awaits us (http://www.oilcrisis.com/duncan/olduvai.htm). David Price writes
of several options:
*****************David Price Quote***********
"To take over for fossil fuels as they run out, an alternative energy
source would have to be cheap and abundant, and the technology to
exploit it would have to be mature and capable of being operationalized all
over the world in what may turn out to be a rather short
time. No known energy source meets these requirements.
Today's second-most-important source of energy, after fossil fuels, is
biomass conversion. But all the world's wood fires, all the grain
alcohol added to gasoline, and all the agricultural wastes burned as fuel
only provide 15% of the world's energy (WRI/IIED, 1988, p.
111). And biomass conversion has little growth potential, since it competes
for fertile land with food crops and timber.
Hydropower furnishes about 5.5% of the energy currently consumed (see note
5). Its potential may be as much as five times greater
(Weinberg & Williams, 1990, p. 147), but this is not sufficient to take
over from fossil fuels, and huge dams would submerge rich
agricultural soils.
The production of electricity from nuclear fission has been increasing, but
nuclear sources still supply only about 5.2% of the world's
total energy needs (see note 5). Fission reactors could produce a great
deal more, especially if fast-breeder reactors were used. 7 But
anyone with a fast-breeder reactor can make nuclear weapons, so there is
considerable political pressure to prevent their
proliferation. Public confidence in all types of reactors is low, and the
cost of their construction is high. These social constraints make
it unlikely that fission's contribution to the world's energy needs will
grow fifteen-fold in the next few years.
Controlled thermonuclear fusion is an alluring solution to the world's
energy problems because the "fuel" it would use is deuterium,
which can be extracted from plain water. The energy from one percent of the
deuterium in the world's oceans would be about five
hundred thousand times as great as all the energy available from fossil
fuels. But controlled fusion is still experimental, the technology
for its commercialization has not yet been developed, and the first
operational facility could not come on line much before 2040
(Browne, 1993, p. C12).
Visionaries support the potential of wind, waves, tides, ocean thermal
energy conversion, and geothermal sources. All of these might be
able to furnish a portion of the energy in certain localities, but none can
supply 75% of the world's energy needs. Solar thermal
collection devices are only feasible where it is hot and sunny, and
photovoltaics are too inefficient to supplant the cheap energy
available from fossil fuels.
While no single energy source is ready to take the place of fossil fuels,
their diminishing availability may be offset by a regimen of
conservation and a combination of alternative energy sources. This will not
solve the problem, however. As long as population continues
to grow, conservation is futile; at the present rate of growth (1.6% per
year), even a 25% reduction in resource use would be
obliterated in just over eighteen years. And the use of any combination of
resources that permits continued population growth can only
postpone the day of reckoning."
David Price, Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary
Studies Volume 16, Number 4, March 1995, pp. 301-19 1995 Human Sciences
Press, Inc.
************End quote******************
What do I think will happen? Just as one can not change the laws of
gravity, we can't change the Hubbert curves for the world. We may not know
exactly what the the actual peak of production is, one thing is certain.
Within the next decade world oil production will peak and begin to decline
and there is absoltutely nothing we can do about it. A high effort oil
exploration program will slow the decline. Conservation, which will surely
occur as the oil price rises, will delay the ultimate day of reckoning but
not for long. If we were to cut the oil use by 1/3 today, we might delay
the decline by about 15 years.
For the oil man, the end of the cycles of hire and fire at our companies
may be at hand. As the oil supply declines worldwide, there will be a need
for good oil finders.
One can't replace the oil with oil shale. It costs a barrel of oil in
energy to produce a barrel of oil from oil shale. Thus it is a bad
investment.
Some have suggested a hydrogen economy where we split oxygen from hydrogen
via photocells and then ship the hydrogen like natural gas. It takes energy
to do this and solar cell technology is not up to it yet.
The plain fact is that we must find a new energy source within 40 years,
preferably within 25 years. The best hope is fusion. But as Price, above,
notes, it is still a ways off and research budgets for fusion research are
rather miniscule. They need to be vastly increased.
While this post sounds incredibly pessimistic, I am optimistic that
something will be discovered that will allow us to avoid this crisis, like
the discovery of coal mining allowed the Rennaisance world to avoid an
energy crisis coming from the deforestation of Europe during that time. The
failure of our species to find a solution to this problem is too awful to
contemplate. Whatever it will be, it must come quickly.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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