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PEAK OIL: Reality, exaggeration or faint
hope?
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Increase oil and gasoline taxes to fund sustainable energy
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"Peak Oil" is the name for a number of theories predicting,
variously, the imminent end of oil or the decline of cheap oil as oil prices rise and oil gets more difficult to
find. "Peak Oil", so far as it makes sense, is based on two facts:
1. The amount of burnable Carbon in the Earth's 6.6 sextillion
tons of mass is large, but finite;
2. The output from every oil field rises sharply to a maximum and then decreases slowly, not in a Bell but in a
"tailed" curve. |
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As oil gets more difficult to extact and becomes a scarcer commodity,
oil prices will rise sharply; which is a restatement of the fact that in every oil field the cost of extraction
is lower at first, and then higher as pressure injection with water and even kerosene raises cost while output
falls.
But we are really confusing things if we talk only about "Peak
Oil".
After all, we're talking about burnable Carbon, natural gas, tar sands, oil, anthracite and bituminous coal, peat moss
and biofuels.
All forms of burnable Carbon derived from STORED SOLAR ENERGY
built up over the millenia and aeons, as the process
of photosynthesis uses solar energy from sunlight to free Carbon from CO2 and turn it into wood and brush, plants,
peat, oil sands, coal and oil, and natural gas as well as methane, etc.
So what we're really concerned with is what might be called the
"Cosmic Carbon Cycle" of the Earth's ecosystem.
- Volcanic eruption of huge masses of CO2 and other forms of combined
Carbon;
- Plant growth stimulated by CO2, turning it into organic compounds
and burnable Carbon -- and ambient O2, which supplies fuel for animals;
- Slow decomposition of organic compounds into burnable Carbon in
the form of organic debris, then peat, oil and tar sands, oil and coal, and natural gas at the deepest levels of
the Earth.
- Reversion to carboniferous rock, ready for new eruptions and release back into the atmosphere.
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What's really happening with our extraction of oil and other forms
of biomass "stored solar energy" is that we're expending the work of ages, capturing all that Carbon,
and releasing it "artificially" at once.
This is a new phenomenon, something not part of the natural Cosmic Carbon Cycle. |
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Far from "Peak Oil", we have hardly touched
the surface
of the huge quantity of burnable stored Carbon.
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Probably all our oil, coal and other extraction has only reached far less than ONE PERCENT of the amount of burnable Carbon
stored from past solar radiation and plant growth. It's true most of the cheap, easily extracted oil is gone,
but that only means the price will rise.
And we still have huge quantities of cheap coal and cheap natural gas, which are no less an artifical interruption
of the Cosmic Carbon Cycle.
Hence, instead of peak of fossil energy as peak oil,
we should be looking at the total of fossil energy stored in the Earth, which is an incredibly large number, in
which we have not yet made much of a dent. |
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The problem is NOT that we're going
to run out of oil!
Our problem IS that we're NOT going to run out of oil -- before suffocating in the debris
of the oil economy. |
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| The awful experiment on which we are engaged -- freeing all the stored Carbon
back into the air -- has the effect of releasing the CO2 from millions of volcanic eruptions in a short period
of geologic time, a terrible risk to take. But the solution is simple: use up the plentiful solar energy that
strikes the Earth each day, 160 trillion kW, in the form of solar panels and wind turbines. Rather than be frightened
by the spectre of "Peak Oil", we should be aware of the terrible danger of ANY burning of fossil fuel,
whether it's oil, coal, peat moss, tar sands, natural gas or methane. We need to learn to live on the ambient
sunlight energy that falls on the Earth each year, and not dig up and undo past sunlight's effects of safely storing
excess Carbon Dioxide (CO2) from the air as "fossil Carbon". |
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Calling for "the end of times" is famously lucrative for the predictors.
You never would have heard of Malthus (1766-1834) but for his charmingly innocent belief that food supplies would
increase only arithmetically (flat line up), while population increased geometrically (curved up). Poor Malthuseans,
didn't take into account the fact that such puny mathematical models don't represent, exactly, REALITY. But it
was great for money-making and attention; the otherwise insipid thoughts of Malthus would never have even survived
the penny dreadfuls.
We're still struggling with the crackpot economic "theories" of Ricardo, predatory free trade based on
Bentham's calculus of pain for the few vs. pleasure for the many.
So now we are plagued with the "PEAK OIL" alarmists, authors and lecturers. Predicting the imminent end
of civilization based on the "peril" that we will run out of oil. There's a whole industry of PEAK OIL,
conferences, books, lectures, etc.
IF ONLY!!
Turn it around. What we NEED is a $5/gallon gas tax! And PRODUCTION of existing EVs, combined with rooftop solar
systems. Instead of government hostility to solar power and EVs, we need government support of solar power and
an end to support for gas-guzzling cars. If only it were true. Our problems would be solved; the price of oil
would rise, and more sustainable, cheaper, alternative fuels and sources of energy would take the place of increasingly
expensive oil.
To think that the problem is oil depletion, or "the end of oil", is charmingly naive. Oil is the enemy
-- as is coal, natural gas, and other forms of burning stored Carbon. Those hating the Plasticising of the Ocean
should realize it's all due to oil -- without cheap oil, there would be no plastic-choked North Pacific Gyre, or
the thousands of discarded drift nets choking sea life to death.
"Historicism," as ridiculed by Popper, is the belief that some result is inevitable: for example, Communism
arising out of the "internal contradictions" of Capitalism. Popper's point is that if it's truly inevitable,
why are you making money (and often killing people) to make it happen?? Historicism arose out of the beclouded
imagination of the obscurantist G.W. Hegel, and has plagued us ever since.
So if "the end of oil" is inevitably going to happen, well, let it be.
It's just not intellectually honest, if you believe it to be inevitable, to make a lot of money selling books proclaiming
the end of civilization in a fiery mass of oil wars. Heck, we've had oil wars for generations, and it hasn't hurt
our economy at all.
We can't even get an oil tax passed!
Heck, we can't even get "an end to oil subsidies", our Taxpayer-funded money handed to oil companies
that are already making BILLIONS per quarter in profits!
A rise in the price of gas to $5 per gallon is impossible in the current political climate: detractors talk about
"how can people afford the gas to go to work". Not mentioning that they have, at the behest of Big Oil,
eliminated all alternatives.
But raise the price of gas to $7/gallon, and it's no more than in Japan or Europe, where in response, the cars
get up to 70 mpg and there are electric trains.
Raise it to $15/gallon, and you will find some changes in transportation policy being demanded. Yet $15/gallon
only corresponds to a price per barrel (42 gallons plus cracking and tax) of about $700/bbl. Try $1500/bbl., if
oil ever became really scarce, and you will see human ingenuity at work, devising battery technology that makes
Toyota's 10-year NiMH research look only preliminary.
The point is that PEAK OIL plays on the same doomsayer mentality that led Malthus to put a too-simple mathematical
model onto very complicated economic and real-world structures around food production/population. Obviously, however
obvious it appeared at the time to Malthus and his followers, "PEAK FOOD" has not (yet) occurred. In
fact, we now have an ongoing FOOD GLUT, too much food, which has led to continual population expansion (as noted
by Malthus; but that expansion has only started!). The FOOD GLUT continues, leading to a continuing and devastating
fall in the price of food, and a correspondingly devastating rise in world population, a very dangerous and real
problem (and one interpretation of Malthus' ideas, to give him credit).
Those gullible enough to spend a lot of time either propounding or debunking "PEAK OIL" are wasting their
time: if it's inevitably going to happen, you are not going to stop it.
Doug |