The following is the introduction to a new book that is nearing publication.
Andrew McKillop
Willingly or not the world will learn what Peak Oil means. The major underlying theme of this book, it means we are entering a period of accelerated oil and gas depletion, unstoppable price rises for oil and gas, and increased conflict for remaining reserves. Several articles provide detailed figures, and reference sources on the accelerating depletion of cheaply producible oil and gas.
Peak Oil will become an accepted fact within as little as 5 or 6 years. The CEO of ExxonMobil Exploration in September 2003 gave his corporation’s estimate of how much new oil production capacity must be found, proven, developed or upgraded to cover yearly losses of about 3.25 Million barrels/day due to both economic + geological depletion. Exxon’s estimate is that 36 Million b/d must be developed by 2015 to cover depletion. This is “four new Saudi Arabias”, or “twelve new Venezuelas”. In 11 years.
This is at the least unlikely to be possible. All the world’s biggest oil and associated gas fields were found before 1969 – no more ‘super giants’ are likely to be found. New discoveries are smaller sized, more difficult to find and access, and always more expensive and often slower to develop. When these facts becomes admitted and widely known it will in some ways be too late. Transition to renewable energy and to low energy economic, habitat and social organization, which is the ultimate solution, will take time and itself need massive financing. This argument is posed, and discussed by several contributors, from different perspectives.
Conversely, Oil Wars are likely to become a permanent part of the scene, until there is a very big change in popular culture and political attitudes. The rising bellicosity that is the hallmark of the current Bush administration likely reflects the very dire situation of US proven oil reserves – these are equivalent to four years national consumption. Because the US consumes about 26% of the world’s entire oil production the realities of the US predicament should be known by all. Several articles discuss the US oil and gas situation in detail.
Present ‘conventional energy solutions’ to the demise of world oil and gas supplies feature nuclear power and ‘the hydrogen economy’ based on nuclear electricity, or on renewable sources of electricity, however inefficient. This book does not cover these fantasy solutions, but one article does cover the essential fact that nuclear power plants – which are not being built in vast numbers – are intrinsically linked with nuclear weapons production, as India, Pakistan and North Korea have amply proven. Using the case of France, this article also underlines the fantastic costs of this already fading “answer to expensive or depleting oil and gas”.
The so-called ‘hydrogen economy’ exists only on paper and in the minds of its proponents. It can be asked why such ‘attractive’ solutions to current fossil fuels have not been massively developed and do not exist now, given the hysteria, crisis, and conflict that are particularly associated with oil? The fossil fuel economy, however, does exist and does provide enough food for about 5.4 Billion people out of the world’s 6.3 Bn total population, growing at about 85 – 90 Million per year. Some 900 Million persons do not eat enough. As several articles note, some in detail, world economic development institutions are at the least ingenuous to pretend that fossil energy based economic growth on the ‘classical’ urban industrial model can bring solutions to mass poverty. Achieving world-wide growth of the Asian Tiger type (as China and India are now doing) would simply wipe out remaining world oil and gas reserves yet faster. A single figure shows this: one year’s increase of world population, if those persons consumed oil at the same rate as Americans in 2003, would require around 6 Million barrels/day of new capacity – or about two-thirds of Saudi Arabia’s maximum sustainable production capacity.
Real solutions are of course ‘impossible’ in our present economic, political and cultural context. They feature abandonment of the so called growth economy and urban-industrial ‘development’, and creating sustainable, lower energy, semi autarchic economic and social organisation.
If we shift the clock forward to 2035 we can maybe better understand our predicament. By 2035 oil production will likely be 75% down on the coming peak, and gas production about 60% down. Entire ‘new oil provinces’ like the North Sea will have disappeared at least 10 years before, not even remaining as small, residual production zones. By 2035 US domestic oil and gas production will be practically inexistant. By 2035 the maximum rate of oil production, even in today’s large producer countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia, will have declined significantly. For Russia its output will only be a fraction of current production. Well before 2035 many current oil exporters with large populations, or whose domestic oil demand is growing fast, and whose production capacity is near or beyond peak will be simply forced to curtail all export of oil. For countries such as Iran, Indonesia, Venezuela, and Nigeria such decisions, with inevitable and unstoppable upward oil price impacts, could come in just the next 10 years. Underlying this supply pinch is that demand potential is virtually unlimited. Rather than nuclear power and the ‘Hydrogen Economy’ real solutions to the final energy crisis include: population control, de-urbanisation, and economic restructuring for a sustainable, lower energy economy and society.
Currently we are totally or near totally dependent on artificially cheap, but inevitably depleting oil and gas. An ‘industry of denial’ exists to pretend no limits exist, this act of denial itself being due to inherent cultural and doctrinal patterns and concepts. Some date from the recent past, some from the ancient past, as discussed in certain articles of this book. Yet each and every industrial product or commercial service supplied or consumed, starting with food supplies, requires fossil energy support. Such ‘surprising’ commodities as uranium ore giving ‘fuel’ for operating nuclear power stations also require heavy fossil energy subsidy, as do nuclear waste reprocessing plants. No large city of today, we should note, would be livable – or survivable – without fossil fuels. At the same time, the burning of around 8 Bn tons a year of carbon containing fossil fuels, producing about 30 Bn tons of CO2 accelerates the unstoppable climate change that Fossil Energy Civilization will bequeath to coming civilizations for several hundred, or even thousands of years after the last barrel was produced and burned. By ignoring all warnings, and refusing facts the net result is to shorten the timeframe for change, and further reduce carrying capacities after fossil energy depletion forces change to a low energy society. For many countries, as examined by one article in this book, sustainable population levels will likely be at least 33% below those of today, and sometimes much below one-half of today’s levels.
Buying time for restructuring and the development of energy conserving, and renewable energy based infrastructures and activities should be a major priority. At the time of writing, in early 2003, hoping for such moves would be as reasonable as expecting The Pope to call for worldwide birth control. This leaves the major ‘default option’ of military solutions to geological problems. At present the victims of this – notably Iraq – are small and certainly do not have Weapons of Mass destruction. This will soon change. The growing superpowers of China and India are very much on track to enter into rivalry with other oil-hungry superpowers, especially the US and Europe. This of course suggests apocalyptic endgame rivalries quickly turning to nuclear war as dying Titans struggle for the last drops of world oil.
No secret is possible concerning the distribution and scale of world oil and gas reserves and the production ‘profiles’ these permit; after the last great peak of discovery, in the 1960s for world oil, the peak of production can only follow a few decades later. For natural gas the world’s peak discoveries were made in the later 1980s, and absolute peak production, with an energy equivalence of about one-half of today’s oil production, may be attained by about 2020. For oil and in 2003 we are very near its absolute production peak for narrowly defined ‘conventional oil’ which excludes deep sea production (now below 9000 feet undersea), and oil that has essentially to be mined but is called ‘heavy oil’ and ‘shale oil’. From about 2008 world oil production can only decline, as in the USA since 1970, in the North Sea province since the later 1990s, and in Indonesia and 23 other oil producer countries since the period of 1975-2002. In all, the world’s Oil Age will have lasted about 180 years from its start in the 1860s. After Peak Oil there will be a short period in which natural gas (‘stranded’ or unassociated with oil) can or might maintain overall energy supplies at a level close to those of today in terms of total energy content, but for a world population that by then (around 2025) could be close to or over 8 Billion.
The starkness of the real situation of course explains the vigour of the ‘energy limit denial industry’, but as ever the sequels of denial are firstly economic crisis, leading to the risk of widespread civil strife, followed by rising likelihood of international war. It should be no surprise at all that Oil War (a present variant is called regime change in Baghdad) is a permanent headline subject, of course without mention of the oil linkage, in most parts of the world since shortly after IX/XI or Sept 11th 2001. There is no difficulty in forecasting near-term and growing risk of nuclear armed dispute for remaining oil and gas. Those who do not want that kind of endgame non choice to become the only default may have only a maximum of about 10 years in which to act. If there is any underlying message in this book, and as discussed in several articles, this emerging ‘final solution’ should be taken as the most important, energy-related threat we will face.
Basically we have a choice between using ‘stock’ or ‘flow’ resources of energy, that is accumulated fossil fuels and fissile nuclear materials, or renewable flow resources. The renewables, and energy conservation will either supply less and at higher cost relative to fossil energy, and/or their utilisation will need very extensive or even total restructuring and reorganization of the energy economy and society, and extreme de-urbanization. These real but of course difficult solutions are discussed by several articles in this book. Logically, if the denial industry, inertia and lack of courage prevent any movement towards the solutions sketched in this book this impasse will result in a sequence of bigger and bigger world stock exchange crises, as oil prices rise and as oil war damage mounts, followed by a new Great Depression, like that of the 1929-36 period. One sure winner of this process will be the rising hegemonic power of China, while the USA’s newfound dominance crumbles, as one article in this book suggests will take place.
Throughout this book, several contributors return us to the real crux of the matter: faced with increasing evidence of an unsustainable society operating an unsustainable economy, flouting all environmental limits, and ignoring or denying the fact of fossil fuel depletion, leaderships of most rich nations have already gone down the road of military solutions to geological problems. Underpinning this root-and-branch ignorance, there is the certainty that they act, or rather react without the merest comprehension of thermodynamic laws and geological limits.
Under any scenario we are entering a time where rapid depletion of remaining oil and gas reserves will increasingly dictate events. It will become so evident that denial – of geological limits and the imperious necessity for population control and economic restructuring backed by social and cultural change – will become impossible. Only after the acceptance of not only geological, but environmental, demographic and other limits can we move forward, making root-and-branch change a part and parcel of our evolving and adapting existence. If not, the Easter island paradigm mentioned in several articles may well apply to us all: we decided there was a final energy crisis after all, but we accepted the facts a lot too late.
© 2003 Andrew McKillop
Andrew McKillop is an economist, environmentalist, journalist, and technical translator. He is working on a new book about the fossil fuel depletion —global warming crisis. He is a frequent contributor to the Energy Resources Yahoo Group, and occasionally writes for CommUnity of Minds, and other internet journals. He has traveled and lived throughout the world, but currently resides in West England. He is presently seeking employment opportunities in North America. You can read more about Andrew McKillop, or contact him by email.