"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 civilization in
denial."

http://tinyurl.com/xf8c
http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html

Bottom of the barrel

The world is running out of oil - so why do politicians refuse to talk
about it?

Tuesday December 2, 2003

The Guardian

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 recognize 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.

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 civilization 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. Every year we use four times as much oil as we
find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m
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. 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, 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. In
August, the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he
was "99% confident" that the date of maximum global production will be
2004. 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 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels a day,
after which projected demand accelerates. 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. The last five
recessions in the US were all preceded by a rise in the oil price.

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, 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. 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.

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.

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. 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 tend to 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.


-Romdinstler