A January 2012 commentary in the scientific journal Nature, which I missed at the time, argued that global oil production reached a stable-ish plateau around 2005. The general theory of peak oil (which is more or less inescapable unless some process can make oil other than geology) holds that we can stay at or around that plateau as long as we want to pay more and more to extract each subsequent barrel. Meanwhile oil prices will tether global economic growth to the ground by pulling us back to depression whenever economic expansion starts to create a demand for oil that supply can’t meet.
Then something happens when the economic drag cannot support the extreme efforts needed to get at the really tough crude in deep sediments and refractory tar sands. What happens, I don’t know. Klaatu berada nikto?
***Update***
It appears the article is paywalled, so here is a fair use excerpt:
From 2005 onwards, conventional crude-oil production has not risen to match increasing demand. We argue that the oil market has tipped into a new state, similar to a phase transition in physics: production is now ‘inelastic’, unable to respond to rising demand, and this is leading to wild price swings. Other fossil-fuel resources don’t seem capable of making up the difference.
[…]Production of crude oil increased along with demand from 1988 to 2005. But then something changed. Production has been roughly constant for the past seven years, despite an increase in price of around 15% per year2 (at Brent crude (London) prices) from about US$15 per barrel in 1998 to more than $140 per barrel in 2008 (see ‘Oil production hits a ceiling’). The price still reflects demand: it declined to about $35 per barrel in 2009 thanks to the 2008–09 recession, and recovered along with the upturn in the global economy to $120 per barrel before declining to its value today of $111. But the supply chain has been unable to keep pace with rising demand and prices. […]We are not running out of oil, but we are running out of oil that can be produced easily and cheaply. The US Energy Information Administration optimistically projects a 30% increase in oil production between now and 2030 (ref. 2). All of that increase is in the form of unidentified projects — in other words, oil yet to be discovered. Even if production at existing fields miraculously stopped declining, such an increase would require 22 million barrels per day of new oil production by 2030. If realistic declines of 5% per year continue, we would need new fields yielding more than 64 million barrels per day — roughly equivalent to today’s total production. In our view, this is very unlikely to happen. […S]everal recent studies suggest that available coal is less abundant than has been assumed. US coal production peaked in 2002, and world coal-energy production is projected to peak as early as 2025 (ref. 8). Whenever coal-reserve figures are updated, the estimates are usually revised downwards: estimates of world reserves (79% of which are held in the United States, Russia, India, China, Australia and South Africa) were decreased by more than 50% in 2005, to 861 gigatonnes. […]Of the 11 recessions in the United States since the Second World War, 10, including the most recent, were preceded by a spike in oil prices13. It seems clear that it wasn’t just the ‘credit crunch’ that triggered the 2008 recession, but the rarely-talked-about ‘oil-price crunch’ as well. High energy prices erode family budgets and act as a head wind against economic recovery.
pragmatism
you hanker for a hunk of cheese? look it’s a wagon wheel!
PurpleGirl
but, but, but… the skygod is going to refill all those emptyish wells any day now. amirite?
chopper
not quite. there are still physical limits to extraction of certain types of oil. i don’t care how much money you want to throw at alberta’s tar sands, you just can’t get 30 million bbl/day out of it. and we’re looking at a great deal of decline in existing conventional fields over the next few decades.
Seebach
Capitalism will surely save us.
Brachiator
Then the world seriously gets down to the task of developing alternate fuel sources.
__
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dollared
Tim, mostly agree with the Peak Oil characterization, but I think we underestimate our greatest resource: the conservation reserve. Oil capacity does not “tether” growth, it drags growth, and we reduce the drag by utilizing unused capacity to conserve.
Example: US oil consumption is dropping, and in four years our fleet MPG has gone up about 10%. It could easily go up another 25% in ten years, using current vehicles and recently released in-market downsized engines, and another 20-40% over the following ten years with mild and full hybrids and vehicle weight reduction. Now that would reduce world oil demand significantly, with about 100% of the reduction absorbed by Asia, so we break even, but it shows that there are huge unutilized reserves of conservation.
So the significance of Peak Oil is not The End of Growth, or Catastrophe. What it might mean is Stimulus Through Vehicle Turnover. Oh, and Gringos Eventually Drive Girly Eurocars – GEDGE. But not for another 20 years.
wrb
An alternate theory is that the price of hydrocarbons will be set by the cost of alternatives:
-always low enough to keep people from switching over.
Whenever hydrocarbons get expensive enough that activity on alternatives has picked up, hydrocarbon prices have dropped and the infant competition has been strangled.
Carol from CO
What happens? The Amish rule the world.
cmorenc
This is where the myth that it is government regulation and restrictions that are causing high gas prices is such perversely counterproductive disinformation. The remaining oil becomes economic to produce as price goes up, which has the corresponding positive feedback effects of making alternative (non fossil-fuel) energies competitive enough for the efficiency of larger scaling to kick in.
Another fellow and I were watching a cable-TV news piece about rising gas prices in the lounge area of the YMCA locker room, and his comment about “regulation and restrictions” was an eye-roller. My attempt to explain the basic facts of supply and demand (YO!, China and India, + oil being a fungible international-market commodity) and how it was increased price that made additional domestic sources feasible to produce…aggh, got nowhere against this guy’s Fox-addled mind. Dude, do you realize that almost NONE of the oil that will be produced via the proposed Keystone pipeline will remain on the domestic market? Do you realize that most of Alaskan oil goes to Japan, not the US? We have such a deep reservoir of pure bullshit-addled ignorance about our domestic oil and energy supply…
kindness
When gas is $8 a gallon, the right will 1) blame the Democrats & 2) start to admit that the world has a finite source of oil.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
Oil Production is an example of a ‘rear-view mirror metric’: It takes so long to compile and analyze the data from all over the world, you have no way of knowing where the Peak is until you’ve already passed it.
__
This study is consistent with others I’ve seen over the past couple of years. Oil as an energy source isn’t going away for a long while, but the age of Cheap Oil is already over. We’re already half a decade into whatever age is to come.
Roger Moore
Of course the other possibility is that the price of oil will get high enough that people will start using alternatives and demand will decline. We’ll switch to public transportation and electric cars, find alternative feedstocks for plastics and lubricating oils, and find practical biofuels for applications where electricity isn’t an option. Eventually, oil will be restricted to applications where there really is no practical alternative. That’s what orthodox economics says ought to happen.
wrb
@dollared:
The waste that can be eliminated without suffering is tremendous. We have people regularly firing up a 10,000 lb vehicle to go to the store every time they finish a pack of cigarets.
gaz
@Tim F: LOL! I just finished watching the Evil Dead series with my sis.
That last line. How apropos =) heh.
Unsympathetic
The point isn’t that oil is not available. There’s plenty of oil – never been questioned. [“Proven Reserves” is another topic for another thread.]
The point is that CHEAP oil is not available.
EROEI [Energy Returned Over Energy Invested] is the metric by which we determine the output of an oil find. Back in the early 1900’s, if you stuck a straw in the ground in Texas, you got oil. EROEI of nearly infinite. Tar sands takes a lot more energy to get from the ground in Alberta to the door of a refinery than oil from Saudi Arabia. Oil from 5000 feet beneath the ocean outside Brazil is also harder than oil from Saudi Arabia – it takes lots of energy to set up the well, drill far enough to find it and pump it up a mile-long tube into a tanker.
The point in the last paragraph? In essence, we used to spend 1 barrel of oil to get 10 more. Now we’re spending 3 to get 4.
THAT is peak oil, and that’s not a debate.
The problem isn’t the “number of barrels produced” – it’s the amount of energy required to produce those barrels that’s changing.
Linnaeus
@chopper:
There’s also the Energy In/Energy Out issue, but maybe when you speak of physical limits, you meant that as well.
__
It takes energy to get energy. In the past and up to the present day, the energy payoff from extracting oil has been so much greater than the energy required to get it. But as the easily extracted oil runs out, it takes a greater energy investment to get new oil, and the payoff begins to lessen. Eventually you reach a point where you lose because you’re using more energy to get new energy. This can be mitigated by improved techniques, more efficient machinery (and more efficient processes to make that machinery, etc.), but eventually you’re going to bump up against some limits.
Schlemizel
BUT . . . BUT . . . There are a hunnert-gazillion-brazillian barrels of oil under the good ol USofA right now!!1!
Lets ignore that it will be ecologically impractical to extract most of it or that a lot of it is tied up in sand & rock formation that will require huge amounts of water and more energy to extract than it will produce. Peak oil is a liberal lie to . . . to . . . well I don’t know why but just like global climate change they are liars who want to make us do something for some reason that I just know we can’t do!
BigHank53
As the price of oil increases steadily, due to higher extraction costs, more people and industries switch to alternative power sources. Theoretically it’s a smooth process; wars and natural disasters screw things up. The tricky part is going to be keeping the extraction industries from dumping all the externalities (pollution and greenhouse gasses) on the public while they keep all the profits.
Comrade Dread
Have faith in the Invisible Hand of Mammon, who will bestow upon us the next generation of energy with which to continue to expand our economic growth indefinitely… well, indefinitely for the upper class. The rest of the wankers can go pound sand, so says the infernal Invisible Hand as it repeatedly flips you poor bastards off.
PurpleGirl
@kindness: I don’t think so. That’s when, for example, Rick Perry and others start to overtly and loudly pray to their skygod to refill the wells.
__
It will have the same result as his pray meetings for rain and an end to the drought in Texas.
wrb
Peak oil is LUUUUVED by the hydrocarbon industry. From peak oil it follows that
1) hydrocarbons should be very expensive
2) We must go after every hydrocarbon despite the environmental externalities because otherwise civilization will collapse.
3) Environmentalists are traitors.
Gin & Tonic
I thought Peak Oil was reached around the mid-1840’s.
__
Oh, you weren’t talking about whaling.
PurpleGirl
@Gin & Tonic: LOL.
chopper
@Linnaeus:
i always explain it like a farmer needing water from his well. at first the well near the house is always flowing. then it runs dry so he has to dig another well farther away. and then another even farther.
pretty soon he has to walk 5 miles each way to get a bucket of water in the hot sun and he ends up drinking it all before he gets back.
jonas
When Jesus founded America, he promised Moses and George Washington two things: all the guns they wanted, and all the oil they wanted. Cheap oil is our birthright and anyone who says otherwise is a homosexual traitor.
AnotherBruce
We need to find a way to harness stupidity and plug it into into the electrical grid.
Stupid idea, it would probably cause a world wide blackout.
Anoniminous
First off, Peak Oil does NOT mean “No Oil.” It means global oil production will follow the Hubbard Curve.
As global oil production declines the consumption of crude oil shifts as low-value percentage use of global production, e.g., gasoline, will decrease as the price rises and the high-value percentage consumption will increase, e.g., pharmaceuticals.
This process will ripple through “Civilization As We Know It” by having all kinds of affects and effects, on all kinds of levels, on everything from agriculture to urban land use patterns some of which can be predicted, e.g., the collapse of suburbia “As We Know It,” and some will be a surprise. The rate of change is unknowable since consumption depends on human demand, and nobody knows what the global population will be in 2020, offsetting technologies that may – or not – be introduced, change – or not – in Public Policy, & yadda-yadda-yadda.
chopper
@Schlemizel:
oil shale aint even oil. i hate it when people point at shale formations calling it ‘oil’. that’s like pointing at a coal seam in WV and saying ‘look at all the oil!’.
gene108
And Geology will make oil again! Oil is a renewable resource! You may just have to wait 500 million years to get at it again!
Linnaeus
@chopper:
That’s a good analogy.
liberal
@gene108:
Actually, there’s the “abiogenic” theory of fossil fuels. AFAICT no one believes it, but one of the guys behind it had a history of making some very interesting conjectures.
SRW1
Access to that commentary is 32 bucks if you don’t have a subscription to Nature! The guys at Nature must think that there’s a hell of insight in it if they belief it’s going to sell at that price.
S. cerevisiae
I’m investing in a supercharged car, hockey gear, shotguns, cigarettes and whiskey. Wastelands, here I come!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@kindness:
The right already admits that the world has a finite supply of oil. That is why they are so gung-ho on the concept of using the U.S. military to steal it, e.g. from nations with names that being with I and end with Q.
They just won’t admit that the producable supply of oil is finite and peaking when doing so would support things that liberals want, like energy conservation. But when this fact can be used in support of things they enjoy, like killing brown people, they are just fine with the idea.
Downpuppy
One of the things that happens as the market gets tighter & tighter is that other needs come into conflict with energy needs. The needs of the people with money take precedence. Corn goes to make fuel, palm plantations replace food crops, food prices rise, & people starve to keep the vehicles rolling.
The Bobs
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: “The right already admits that the world has a finite supply of oil.”
Crazy as it sounds, I have spoken to a number of right wingers who have denied this basic fact. One was even highly educated. I tried to explain to him why he was wrong. He just stopped talking to me. Forever.
The Ancient Randonneur
Jesus, do we have to have Mittens bust out his Etch-A-Sketch and explain EVERYTHING?
MikeJ
@wrb: We have people regularly firing up a 10,000 lb vehicle to go to the store every time they finish a pack of cigarets.
A milspec humvee is less than 6,000 pounds.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@The Bobs:
Oh well. I guess that is an improvment over “a boot stomping on a human face”, huh? Small victories…
Yeah, I get that there are individual nutjobs like this. My point is that for the right taken as a group, they are OK with playing the oil is scarce and valuable card when it suits their objectives, like justifying wars in the Middle East. But God forbid we should try to exercise caution and prudence in our use of this scarce and valuable resource.
Culture of Truth
We’re also running out of water.
doug
Love the Go! Team reference!
deep
In AD 2101, war was beginning.
Roger Moore
@liberal:
There are probably some abiogenic sources for methane, particularly serpentinisation of olivine with carbonic acid containing water. But there’s no reason to think this is the major source of methane, or that there’s any abiogenic petroleum.
Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity
I do. It’s called “a massive die-off”, because without modern petrochemicals, we can’t grow food in quantities anywhere like what we are now.
dollared
@Roger Moore: Roger, you win the internets today for the link to the very cool concept of extremophiles living off hydrogen produced from rock metamorphosis. Thanks!
chopper
@dollared:
also, for using the term ‘serpentinisation of olivine’ which is *awesome*.
S. cerevisiae
@Democratic Nihilist, Keeper Of Party Purity: Long pig for everyone!
Arclite
@cmorenc: What you said, but also too, speculation on oil futures doesn’t help either.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
this is all well and good, but production may have peaked because demand peaked. perhaps there is a degree of thirsty for oil that the producers world wide have more or less abided, because it makes them the most money over the life time of their wells.
Anoniminous
@Roger Moore:
Olivine.
And it’s purty as well. Also. Too.
wrb
@MikeJ:
The biggest civilian pickups are around 10,000lbs
a quick google found three versions of the 2012 Ford F-450s at 9,750 lbs.
I recall reading of a Dodge diesel model weighing in at close to 11,000 lbs.
catclub
@Roger Moore: “AFAICT no one believes it” … outside of loons on the internet.
—
I thought that _one_ drill rig had been tried in a place where only abiogenic oil could be the source. Other than that, nobody with their own money believes it enough to drill.
PeakVT
Even if oil was abiogenic there’s no evidence that it is forming at anything like the rate at which it is being depleted.
The Other Chuck
CLAP LOUDER
catclub
@PeakVT: I am not a fan of the abiogenic oil theory, but I think part of it is that the oil
is _MUCH_ deeper than the reserves presently being tapped, so there could still be lots of it.
—
We have taken 150 years to far more rapidly deplete the biogenic oil deposits than the time it took to make them. So what?
—
If there were 150 years worth of abiogenic oil, they (we) would pump it even if the creation rate is far smaller than the pumping rate.
PeakVT
@catclub: There can’t be oil fields “much deeper” than current fields because the heat and pressure would turn the oil into gas.
barath
Folks who don’t know about Tom Murphy’s excellent blog on energy should check it out:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/
He had a great post on all our energy options and the constraints we face:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/02/the-alternative-energy-matrix/
Arclite
@Roger Moore:
In a perfect world of rational actors, I would agree. And I also agree that this is what *should* happen. However, what I think will happen is that the top 10% of earners will be able to afford $10/gal gas and all the price increases that will result from that and leave the rest of us to scrounge in poverty, while creating an extensive security apparatus to keep us in our place when we begin to protest. Although this prediction sounds like dystopian fantasy, we’ve already seen a lot of this..