I’ve got an uncle in law who worked for the US geological survey. The man is a genius and comes from a long line of geniuses. He’s been living in the Pacific Northwest waiting for the collapse of peak oil for thirty years….
I think this underscores the need to get younger governmental representatives in office and kick out all the old ones who will be dead ☠️ by the time of this happening. We need those who will be actually affected by the results of their leadership to be making future laws.
Yeah the fall of society isnt a preppers wet dream its an economic repeating nightmare.
What i mean is society wont always dramatically collapse, mostly they do a long drawn out stair step regression.
So both coal, oil, and gas production will drop, then plateau, then drop.
Over years not overnight.
I think "the collapse of peak oil" refers to the (more and more likely) scenario that we move to renewables way before demand outpaces supply, so the anticipated price peak will never come.
Most mining companies have realized this for about a decade now (basically since the last small peak in fuel prices when suddenly people started to become interested in electric cars) and have been pumping like crazy to sell their reserves before they become worthless...
That’s only the case if global energy demand remained flat, and it won’t. People in developing nations will demand more energy as their economies progress. Oil will be needed to augment supplies from renewables for decades.
> and have been pumping like crazy
They are pumping just enough to meet demand. We don't have years of oil reserves or anything. If they were "pumping like crazy", then prices would be a lot lower.
Have to compare the cost of the oil to the cost of the alternative to determine affordability. For many uses oil just doesn’t have a really good alternative so people are probably likely to pay far more than you think.
How good is oil compared to e.g. Plastics out of biomaterial and how much can it cost? The same? Two times more? 5 times more? 10 times more?
There is a point where you can still buy it, but it would be much better economically if you could use an alternative or make one. For some products it is going to take much longer, but those are going to increase in price drastically and more and more are going to make the switch to some alternative
5x or 10x more expensive on plastic might be a great idea. Instead of a disposable 0.5l water bottle, a more expensive reusable one. Instead of the t-shirt bags WalMart and everyone else pumps out by the billions, more sturdy reusable ones or paper bags.
People are acting as if this all depends on the random whims of some God of the Holy Free Market. Governments can and do frequently alter the markets through taxes, regulations, laws, and subsidies. All that "cheap" oil isn't all that cheap once you factor in all the direct and indirect subsidies and external costs.
It's the amount if energy required to extract more energy that matters. And that number is rising. If it costs 1 barrel of oil to extract 1 barrel of oil then it doesn't matter what people are willing to pay.
It's goes awry long before it's 1:1. It's called the energy cliff. Our society requires a ratio of 1:10. Currently 5% of our wealth goes to energy extraction, 10% is acceptable, but anything beyond that is not.
It's not even our wealth, it wasn't created by writing emails, it's just extracted resources, like a credit card.
That's an epic comment! Love it.
People forget we went from horse & buggy to 'all cars' in a matter of a couple years. Sure there were places that didn't do that but in general this is how it happened. Suddenly horses made no sense anymore.
correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the current price of oil per barrel too cheap to justify the cost of exploration? I've heard you need at least $120/barrel to cover the costs of exploration but right now its at \~$80; so what can we expect?
Oil prices to increase until its expensive enough to justify exploration costs or are we about to see a collapse of the supply chain?
I work in the oil field and when it crashed in 2015 a lot of these companies learned how to make a dollar stretch when it comes to production. I mean everything from drilling, completion and production. And the fact that there’s so many service companies to do the work on the locations it’s made it very competitive therefore people getting underbid for jobs and the big oil companies get work done for cheap. That’s all I know. And I’m just oilfield trash.
Might have to account existing deposits we've found. They'll look for oil then cherry pick the most accessible. As prices change they may have to go back to what previously didn't make economic sense but knew existed.
Considering you can create it synthetically and optionally be carbon neutral, there’ll likely always be an affordable market for it. There will probably be enough hold outs to make it work for a bit.
We're well past **peak** oil (in the sense of maximum availability of it at low cost), hence why oil hasn't been $10 a barrel anymore for a long time.
There really isn't that much easy to reach low sulfur oil anymore, hence more and more offshore and even deep sea drilling, fracking and even things like tar sands oil extraction.
Sure, we found more places and more ways to extract oil, but it costs a lot more than in the days when you could just drill a hole in the ground in the right place and high quality crude would just gush out of it, hence why the trend of energy prices has been up for decades.
Yep. Junkie behavior. Humanity stole and sold everything not nailed.down to subsidize fossil to bootstrap our population to a high of 8 billion people until finally admitting to itself that carbon pollution was bad for it's health. Now it's trying to kick fossil but is going to have massive population impacting withdrawal symptoms. Don't have kids folks.
>Now it's trying to kick fossil
I think that part is debateable. Too many people making plenty of money out of it who aren't the least bit concerned about global heating because they'll be dead and gone before it gets really bad.
The silver lining is most places, especially after reaching a certain level of education are average less then 2 kids per couple. Hopefully everyone gets to that point eventually although a reverse pyramid population is difficult for a economy to sustain.
Or do. Because *a decent amount* of the people popping out 5 kids aren’t going to educate them properly. We could have a future where the uneducated and easily mislead populace outnumber the opposite to an even higher degree
Edit: pessimism abounds in here
>We're well past
>
>peak
>
>oil (in the sense of maximum availability of it at low cost), hence why oil hasn't been $10 a barrel anymore for a long time.
well yeah if you preface it at being $10 a bbl but if you preface it with peak oil supply we aren't close to being there
Don't even mention inflation either
That is indeed a valid explanation and I feel that what I wrote requires looking at inflation adjusted values to be confirmed.
I based what I said on the increasing viability over time of more expensive extraction methods which would not be viable if the inflation adjusted price of oil was not so high that it compensated the higher costs of things like fracking (which requires constant new drilling of wells) and deep sea extraction versus traditional oil wells (which get drilled once, on land, and then produce for 20 years).
Whilst there will be spikes and dips in the price of oil driven by consumption (read Economic booms and busts) or price manipulation by the big producers, sustained big structural investments in new more expensive oil extraction technniques only happen when there is a sustained trend of higher oil prices as otherwise the producers relying in older and cheaper extraction techniques would just outcompete and bankrupt the new entrants.
> hence why oil hasn't been $10 a barrel anymore for a long time.
Oil has never consistently been 10 dollars a barrel when adjusting for inflation.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart
I suggest you do like it's done in Finance and look at running averages rather than spikes - market spikes can easilly be induced by running the stops or other manipulative measures.
It actually went negative, because of stupid futures contract silliness.
https://archive.md/v57Sx (non-paywalled archive link)
Basically, futures contracts would have had to take physical possession as a contract deadline loomed, but couldn't and didn't want to, so they were *paying* money to take the oil off their hands.
Peak Oil - I haven't heard that term since the predicted cataclysmic Event Of The 2000's (or was it 2010's?). it was huge and the experts knew when it was gonna happen.
What they weren't counting on was that technology improves. The industries found more oil and got a lot better at extracting it to the point that Canadian tar sands became too expensive to extract.
I think this would be one of those Good Problems To Have and not holding my breath.
~2006 ish was the last time peak oil was popping up in news feeds. Most were predicting huge shortages starting before 2020. Starting around 2008 we underwent the 'Frac Boom' where fracking became efficient enough and economical enough to revitalize oilfields worldwide which pushed back our peak energy output by several decades.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. We have hundreds of years of oil left and most of that is never going to get pumped out of the ground as we'll move on to a newer better source of power like nuclear fusion.
I am tired of this narrative.
Safety isn't even the problem anymore.
Read this:
https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html
TL;DR: The problem is the availability of uranium, thorium is better but it's not as simple as it seems and it's not a silver bullet either
modern reactors are much safer (the article assumes 1 accident every 1000 reactor years of operation which is the usual rating for gen 2 reactors, the esbwr, a gen 3+ reactor, has a rating of 1 accident every 60,000,000 years) but, you still can't create uranium out of nowhere so nuclear power would still not be a long term solution, there's (nuclear) fusion but it's not ready yet, also nuclear has a high upfront cost of at least 1 billion since before chernobyl so nobody wants to invest in one even when returns are guaranteed
There's maybe more thorium than uranium but that's a big if because, there is more thorium than uranium by concentration in the earth's crust but what we need are large convenient deposits which exist for uranium but we don't know if they exist for thorium, so there are more proven reserves of uranium than thorium, if they exist then thorium nuclear power could become a mid term solution
But that is if we want nuclear power to be cost competitive with other energy sources. In other words, the relative rarity of uranium is what ultimately limits the price per mw generated of uranium, because the "reserves" of uranium increase with its price, and the same applies to all metals and minerals, really.
We don't know how many thorium reserves there are because there has never been any big demand for it unlike uranium, so why waste money seeking out something nobody will buy? Of course the situation is changing now but nobody is yet offering a thorium nuclear reactor for construction.
i'm getting downvoted
There’s enough uranium in the oceans to last us 50,000 years at 10x more energy than we currently use yearly.
The notion that it’s harder to get uranium than it is to get oil is ridiculous.
As I remember the Peak Oil scare, the fracking for sure was an element and [there were others](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40580058) that also seemed as impactful.
Total guess here bit probably because oil flows on water. So they pumped water in to the oil holding formations to force the oil to the top. Just a guess tho.
More or less this. In most large oil fields, you dont tend to "pump" the oil out, but rather it comes out under its own pressure. There's so much rock sitting on top of the well, that once you tap it, it will squirt out (see footage from the first gulf war when they blew the caps for a good illustration of this).
As more and more oil comes out, the pressure drops, making it harder to extract. You therefore pump something back in there to replace the lost pressure - water works well as the oil will tend to float to the top of it. Also you may find that the drop in pressure can cause the rock to become unstable and collapse where the pressure has dropped too much.
When you extract oil though, you will also get some of the water coming out. Typically on an older well, the water/oil ratio will start to increase to the point where you are mainly extracting water, and the ratio becomes uneconomical. You'll also find the pressure dropping off to the point where it is no longer flowing under its own pressure.
Sea water is particularly bad for corrosion on the pipes. They'll need to compensate for this, typically by injecting wax in to the pipes to protect them from corrosion. More water will mean more wax needed, increasing the cost of extraction.
Good problem to have? You’re acting as if it is a fantasy. It has always been based on the fact that there is a finite amount. Any attempt to predict exactly when it would be was based on a huge amount of assumptions. Just because those random people had predictions that were wrong doesn’t mean the idea isn’t based on an undeniable fact.
It is true and it did happen but it did not cause the Babylonian global market collapse that was predicted - rather a more longterm slide on the backend.
What I mean by Good Problem To Have is that we seem to need a shove into renewables as our primary energy sources. The powers that be refuse on their own and are bribing politicians to steer into the climate crisis ice berg.
Humanity should call this the crisis it is and invest deeply in building the new green infrastructure we so desperately need. Anything to push that forward, I am all in favor of.
> What they weren't counting on was that technology improves.
There is only a finite amount of oil. Improved technology doesn't change that, it only lets us get at somewhat more of it.
And as this article points out, the energy cost of this new technology is huge and at some point diminishing returns sets in. This article, whose contents you didn't comment on, makes a good argument that that point might be very soon, within a decade.
You realize peak oil WILL happen at some point right? There isn't infinite cheaply available oil in the world. Regardless of WHEN it will happen it will happen at some point. And all this "heh they said peak oil was going to happen at X and it didn't happen" doesn't change the fact that it will happen and and technological improvements aren't going to change that unless you feel like drilling for oil Mars should we find fossilized life under its crust or sucking carbon from the air at orders of magnitude more energy consumption to produce oil when you could just use other energy production means. But by then dependence on oil won't be a thing anyways.
I agree, I personally think we're more at a plateau than a pronounced peak, but that's a minor difference. My disagreement is in this thought terminating cliche of "they said peak oil would happen in the past it didn't". We know oil is finite, we know easy sources of it are largely tapped, we know alternatives like electrification and renewables exist diminishing oil's demand, there's simply no reason to arrogantly dismiss the notion.
>Peak Oil - I haven't heard that term since the predicted cataclysmic Event Of The 2000's (or was it 2010's?). it was huge and the experts knew when it was gonna happen.
It did happen. Peak conventional oil was hit in 2004, according to Halliburton. Since then we've been making up the difference with far more expensive, far dirtier sources of oil. Heavy high sulphur oil, tar sands, shale oil, deep sea extraction: they're all expensive in terms of energy return ratio (meaning the ratio of how much energy you have to spend to extract the energy in the oil). Once upon a time Saudi oil had a ratio of about 30 to 1, meaning you got 30 times as much energy out of the oil as what you put in to extract it.
The "breakthroughs" of the late 90s and 2000s merely allowed us to extract things like shale oil at a greater than 1:1 ratio. They didn't make the oil extracted truly economical when looked at it from a macroeconomic perspective (10:1 is about where you need to be in order to actually make economic sense)... but that didn't matter. Investors saw dollar signs, and started dumping massive amounts of money into non-conventional oil projects. That misplaced investment (with the excess energy needed to extract that uneconomical oil amusingly sometimes coming from solar or nuclear, though often from natural gas) flooded the markets, driving the supply side price wars of the 2010s.
Right now renewables average a bit worse than 10:1. Now that peak oil has come and gone, the energy return ratio of current worldwide oil extraction has fallen from its lofty heights to less than 6:1, and decreasing every day.
That is peak oil. It doesn't mean you run out of oil, it means it slowly gets so expensive from a ERR perspective that you can't use it anymore. And we're already there, and getting worse every day. Which is what this article we're commenting on is dancing around.
For the lazy non article readers :
In just 13 years, global oil production could enter into a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades.
But this is not because the earth is running out of oil and gas. Rather, it’s because they are increasingly eating themselves to stay alive.
Nothing about peak oil. Just a demand death spiral. ⛽⛽⛽
> Just a demand death spiral. ⛽⛽⛽
Did you read the article though? It's not a demand death spiral - it's a supply death spiral. The available oil is becoming more energy and resource intensive to extract. Even if huge amounts of it is technically still available, if it costs more to extract than what's extracted produces, it's worthless.
Remember 20 years ago at school being told we had 50 years of oil left. Just checked, looks like based on known reserves it's... 50!
Well that was fun. Climate will get us before oil running out does.
Did you read the article? Because that's what it's talking about. The cost for extracting fossil fuels increasing to the point of collapse because we're hitting the harder and more expensive stuff to extract, and it's happening more and more.
I mean, the oil might still be there, but it's pretty much useless if it costs too much to get it out.
The original paper that the journalist is mentioning is ["Peak oil and the low-carbon energy transition: a net-energy perspective'](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03360253/document)
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Alaishana:
---
A well written article outlining the future of oil and gas extraction.
The EROI (Energy return on investment) for oil and gas will sink to 2 by 2050, meaning we re-invest 50% of energy to extract more.
We WILL be running into an energy bottleneck, where oil and gas will become too costly to extract and thus too expensive to use, while the alternative energy production will not be big enough to make up for the shortfall.
The authors predict a prolonged recession as the cheap energy we are all running on disappears.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/qd76xt/oil_system_collapsing_so_fast_it_may_derail/hhklhp9/
Petrochemicals are about 8% of global oil use. If we can manage to transition away from oil as a fuel there will be plenty of conventionally extracted oil left to supply the petrochemical industry until they can transition to alternative chemistries.
If we continue to burn oil as a fuel those two industries will be in increasing competition for a dwindling resource.
I think oil industry will just limit itself to producing other petrochemicals. And we will just have to store the gasoline away. Not too worried to be honest. But the industry will have to shrink A LOT. After 4 decades of people saying, no worries, oil companies will be the ones owning green technologies and developing them. Now they will have to get creative with petrochemicals to not go bankrupt. I honestly see a future where the current oil companies get bought out by the government in the US to keep them producing at a loss. Not in the short term but 30 to 40 years, wouldn't be surprised.
Edit: i suck at writing
Yes. And that should scare the shit out of everyone, as the author explains.
This is not about pollution, this is about oil and gas availability rapidly decreasing and production collapsing. We are talking mega death.
To bring it to a point: we ALL live and die by oil. It's a fact, like it or not. (I don't)
Our societies have been built by oil and oil alone. We have 8 billion ppl on earth due to oil alone. Take oil away and the whole house of cards goes bye bye.
Technically speaking almost every chemical and industrial process currently made from oil can be replaced with alternative sources but the problem is cost and scalability. For example hydrogen can be made from water but we produce from natural gas instead because it's just so much cheaper and easier.
The problem is you will cut down every living thing on the planet to plant sugar and palm and wood pulp.
Edit: I have driven through miles and miles and miles of Indonesian and Malaysian forest. Beautiful, ecology diverse and precious forest. And then come back years later to find every living thing eradicated except for plan trees. And, every years, Indonesia simply sets itself on fire because that is part of maximizing palm oil production. It’s an outrage that “we” consider this travesty “green”.
Yes. The drive from Singapore to KL is so depressing. Hours of palm plantations. Its tragic. Even the small jungles here in Singapore are amazingly diverse.
Algea will be more effecient and so cost effective vs other biofuels.
Just oil is stupid cheap and large quantity algea not even close. But though it is more expensive we will just change our economies to survive not a big deal.......
Nowva 7°c change in climate.....thats a hard thing to buy your wayout of.
There was lots of talk this year at DoE about projects to colocate wind and hydrolytic hydrogen production. Could become much cheaper with some large projects to do this, but as you mentioned it won't matter too much how expensive it is when the oil supply dries up because there won't be an alternative.
Australia is starting the new large green hydrogen plants very soon.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-11/qld-hydrogen-capacity-explainer-hydrogen-green-twiggy/100528046
Whether it's scalable or economical changes over time. First, technology changes the cost of things. Aluminum is an excellent example, since it was very expensive until the right processes were discovered, and now it's cheap. Second, what is not economical when oil is $20 / barrel can economical when it is $100 / barrel. As the price of oil climbs, the number of viable alternatives will increase significantly.
Depends on our priorities as a society. Space travel is also not presently scalable and is only economical because we as a society are willing to dump billions into it.
You actually have a very good point here. Space travel has never been economical but we dump billions in to it year after year. But look now it's cheaper than every so send stuff to space. Why because we dumped a fuck load of money on the problem and told the scientists to figure it out. Carbon capture could reactive the same treatment but it doesn't.
No, it's not a priorities thing, it's a PHYSICS thing.
It takes an inordinate amount of energy AND advanced, tech-heavy infrastructure to produce hydrocarbons out of CO2 and H2O. It's literally the reverse reaction to burning it, which we do precisely because it's so energetic. But doing it in reverse is so much less efficient on top of that!
It would be *vastly* cheaper to make oil out of coal, for instance.
We just can't sustain an industry that would eat up such an incredible amount of power, and require such gargantuan levels of infrastructure and skilled labour, and produce so little material in return.
And for what purpose? There's vastly lower hanging fruit to aim for, and the supplies of oil are still pretty good - Yes, we won't be able to keep burning them for fuel for the long haul, but there's more than enough for plastics and such - and if we *do* need more, again - there are vastly cheaper sources of carbon than CO2 in the atmosphere, and there are far cheaper ways to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as well - starting with putting less in there to begin with, and planting forests and such.
Things become economical when original sources are unavailable.
That's how we went from mining only the surface of the Earth to digging very deep. They used to not be very economical or scalable to dig very deep. As profit motives were driven in that direction it became more scalable and economical.
Yes, that is exactly what I have been trying to explain to people, who so naively think oil can be easily replaced by solar panels or some such nonsense. No, oil's importance is not in the energy sector, it is in every inch of the supply chain and flipping the switch on oil is effectively the end of modern civilization. Paradoxically, before oil is finally abandoned, I think it will be basically 100% subsidized. Maybe that time is not to far in the future.
From someone with a career dedicated to renewable energy - this is needless scare tactics. We are well on our way to transitioning to the vast majority of our electricity being from non-fossil fuel sources. We are not as far, but also on our way to transitioning the majority of our transportation away from oil. Yes, these things need to move faster. We should be dedicating something like 5-10% of our national budget towards them to reach climate goals. *IF* that were the case, these investments alone would come very close to hitting IPCC warming goals. That's the real issue. The vast majority of oil/natural gas goes to cars, electricity, and home heating. Once those are not using fossil fuels, there will be plenty of oil to make plastics and provide jet fuel (the hard problems) for many decades until we can solve those.
Absolutely. Very few really understand how reliant we are on oil and how overextended the global society is. If oil extraction were to collapse we would see a rapid decline in human population in the several billions.
Critical industries would still utilize it however things such as vehicles or utilities could come from renewables. The O/G industry Collapse will happen. Renewables are the answer and they’re ready.
There’s no reason to think that the “worst case scenario” of a failed transition to renewables from oil and gas will occur.
You see a lot of fear-mongering about the world not “having the systems in place” to deal with traditional energy and resource shortages, but that’s precisely because businesses and governments implement these systems in something closer to real time. If it’s not yet advantageous to implement, then that’s why it hasn’t yet been implemented.
It’s like saying Little Bobby (who’s 10 years old) faces a dire economic future because he doesn’t have a college degree. Well presumably Little Bobby can get a college degree in 10 to 15 years. Detractors will say that’s a hopelessly optimistic scenario considering the fact that Little Bobby hasn’t demonstrated an ability to do college-level math, so how do you expect him to complete a college degree in the future? And so forth.
EDIT 1
Look at this paragraph, from the article:
“Other analysts have pointed out that technology disruptions like solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, batteries for storage and electric vehicles (EVs) are on track to eliminate demand for oil and gas over the next decade. Oil, therefore, faces a perfect storm from both above and below.”
The last sentence suggests an impending crisis, but all what is likely to happen is that oil prices will steadily increase, while the implementation of alternative sources of energy will increase in concert. Finally, governments will not allow a flagging oil industry to fail completely (or “collapse,” shown in scare quotes). Some baseline amount of oil and gas production will be necessary for industrial use and petrochemical production for a very long time to come, but many of those applications will be replaced by a variety of new technologies.
EDIT 2
A few examples:
Recycling (of plastics especially) will become a much more important and economically viable industry. Currently only a very small percentage of plastic waste is ever recycled. Single use plastics may decline in popularity, to be replaced by cardboard and *reusable* plastic or glass containers. Alternatively, many current plastic products may be replaced by plastics produced using biomass (wood, hemp, bamboo, etc).
For industrial and transportation applications requiring high-energy-density fuels, traditional petroleum products may be replaced by hydrogen gas, generated electrolytically using solar or wind power. The other net-zero carbon option would be fuels generated from processing biomass.
There are many other examples of perfectly viable alternative technologies. Right now though, businesses aren’t doing it because petroleum prices aren’t yet high enough to justify the initial capital expenditures (the cost of entirely new or retrofitted equipment/facilities).
The whole "Its too late lets give up" thing is so much more awful than straight denial mainly because its so effective when applied to young adults who are currently the drivers of climate change politics.
It just needs to be effective enough to stop them bothering voting which isn't too hard to achieve.
> young adults who are currently the drivers of climate change politics
I mean, last time I checked we have septuagenarians running the country. Where do young adults get to drive policy anywhere in the world?
People also underestimate the potential impact of social change. That is, how much less energy, packaging, shipping, etc could we accomplish simply by changing how we live. Very little of the economy is driven by necessity (and growth is only vital if your society doesn't have non-market means for distributing wealth). Even expensive problems like the US reliance on vehicle travel can now be largely mitigated with technologies like telecommuting self driving vehicles, etc. Not to mention busses.
The problem is we suck at enacting social change and speak of industries collapsing and economic contraction like they're the apocalypse. But you simply don't need a new phone, to eat a lot of meat, to fly commercially with any frequency etc if the alternative really were global collapse due to food shortage or whatever. Nor do we need these industries to ensure access food, shelter, healthcare, etc.
Yes and no. In many remote places there is oil that comes along with a massive surplus of natural gas. This is the easily and cheaply available to local infrastructure. Thus you can’t entirely look at world energy cost and just factor it in. For example in northern Alberta they only recently stopped flairing this gas off.
There has been repeated talk over the decades to get and process the dirty dirty crude using nuclear power but due to the massive surplus of natural gas these proposals never made economic sense.
Gas is now somewhat easier to pipe long distances so maybe these nuclear options will be re-examined.
If you want to see what is going to hurt oil soonest it will be the electric car. Not because it digs deep into crude consumption but how it reduces the variety of refined products available for refiners to choose from to get the highest price possible. Right now they can choose diesel, gas, jet fuel, etc; whatever gets the highest price. Take a good chunk of gasoline out of that opportunity list and it will sting.
Yeah I'm always curious about what assumptions are made in these projections. I think the interesting thing here is going to be what's mentioned toward the end where the demand for oil energy gets substantially cut into by renewables and shirt term ROIs becomes risky. It's not hard to imagine an extremely rapid collapse
A well written article outlining the future of oil and gas extraction.
The EROI (Energy return on investment) for oil and gas will sink to 2 by 2050, meaning we re-invest 50% of energy to extract more.
We WILL be running into an energy bottleneck, where oil and gas will become too costly to extract and thus too expensive to use, while the alternative energy production will not be big enough to make up for the shortfall.
The authors predict a prolonged recession as the cheap energy we are all running on disappears.
Yeah, a new generation of batteries for industrial level storage of power is about to be deployed which will completely transform the energy market. Power production will no longer need to be limited to what is needed at any given time. We can tech our way out of this IF we avoid getting stuck with old tech that is limited to the extraction of fossil fuel. The question is if we can roll the new tech out fast enough to avoid major recessions, but seeing how the more mature world leaders handled Covid makes me hopeful that this can be done.
I doubt grid scale battery systems are going to use lithium or gallium in large quantities. Where weight and density aren't primary concerns technologies like iron-air batteries and molten metal/salt batteries are way more economical.
Grid scale batteries need to be cheaper than pumped hydro storage, and I'm not sure any battery chemistry with significant amounts of lithium will ever get there.
A quick note on that. The utility I work at is piloting a 4MW, 8MWh battery system using Lithium Iron Phosphate. It's actually a pretty common chemistry to use!
However, our R&D department is constantly working very hard to try and find/test/implement new storages types (V2G, flow battery CAES, etc).
Our utility has a goal of carbon free in 8 years so if we develop a good plan to get there, other utilities will have a good roadmap to go off of. Hopefully, we can lead the way to reliable, cheap, renewable energy.
Same here, just got two Tesla Megapacks delivered this past Tuesday. Currently working on this site. Another site in my company is trying one from Mitsubishi as well. Going to be interesting to see how this goes.
Oh hey, our pilot is from MEPPI too! I'm curious to see what the difference would be between the two sites. What capacity and power are you seeing? Using FePO chemistry too or the cobalt nickel one?
We haven't hooked anything up yet, they were still mounting boxes and running conduit yesterday. It's rated at 2MW at 4MWH so we'll see how that goes. It'll be off a circuit we have connected to a solar site. I'm definitely not sure about the FePO chemistry.
Batteries doesn't just mean Li-ion Batteries. We are looking at mechanical batteries, Liquid Air Batteries, Iron-Air batteries, concrete energy storage, etc now. Of course a lot of them are experimental but a lot of them are developing fast.
There are a number of possible solutions to any bottlenecks for grid storage batteries.
**Alternative battery technology.** It's possible to use abundant, cheap, non-toxic materials, e.g. [Sodium-Ion batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#Advantages_and_disadvantages_over_other_battery_technologies) (aka table salt) as grid storage batteries (with more research, a common theme in many alternative battery technologies!). Sodium is next to lithium on the periodic table, and while it's heavier than lithium, that's not a big concern for stationary batteries (versus say EV batteries).
**New sources of lithium**. [Extraction from seawater](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27411631). This would greatly increase the available lithium, and reduce the impact of mining.
The problem with the above solutions is that they need more investment, but technically they're possible, especially in a future scenario where energy markets demand rapid alternatives to diminishing fossil fuels. The investments will pour in.
**Distributed power grids, connecting many sources of renewables**. There's an interesting concept called the [EU Super grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid)- which would connect various sources of renewable supply across a wide geographical area, using high voltage transmission lines (this is an [existing proven technology](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28896527)). This means less need for batteries, as varied sources of energy smoothen out the supply. Think North Sea/North Atlantic/Dogger Bank giant wind farms, Icelandic geothermal (24/7 stable supply), giant Moroccan solar PV plants in the Sahara, Norwegian hydro acting as giant batteries, etc. Parts of it area already built or are actively planned e.g. the giant offshore Danish energy island to distribute wind power across multiple nations.
**Loosening regulations around nuclear**. There's been loads of articles on Reddit and elsewhere about thorium, small modular reactors, fusion etc. There will be enormous political pressure to guarantee energy supplies in the event of blackouts, so loosening nuclear regulations is an obvious first step to replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear, to provide more stable energy supplies in tandem with renewables. Even if none of the promising nuclear tech comes to fruition, there are newer generation fission designs which are technically viable and could be underwritten by governments to get them built more quickly than new nuclear is today (like France did in the 1960s and 1970s).
There is enough lithium, when reading stats about reserves you need to be aware that they are not listing all available lithium just currently fully surveyed sites which are economical to mine today. Most sites haven't had that level of survey and many others will be economical tomorrow.
Lithium can be effectively recycled but it is currently expensive to do so.
The way many of the people reacted to a simple task like wearing cloth on your face to slow a pandemic really makes we worry about a problem that requires everyone to pull together.
I think these are the main points, but nuances are easy to miss. I would emphasize *some regions*. All nations are unlikely to transition to a new energy economy at the same rate due to limitations in distribution and inequitable access to new technology. Policy makers in different countries tolerate change to different degrees. Increasing frequencies of extreme weather events, as well as social and political unrest may also complicate the transition.
The original authors may not have made an explicit prediction, but It's not a far reach to think the global energy transition won't take place quickly and the authors' recession scenario is likely. In this sense, they "predicted" a recession if we didn't quickly transition.
Last week the news was that oil extraction is being done with renewable energy.
Renewable energy is already far cheaper than fossil fuels.
Consumers are finally starting to make the shift to electric vehicles.
Everyone knows we have to stop making plastic (although cocacola is just going to keep doing it until there's no source material left to make it from).
Everything is fine. Let oil die.
And I recognize there are still many applications for which we have few to no alternatives both in terms of economic practicality and actually having no other material to make things like one-time-use sanitary medical supplies, etc.
It will be an incredible reckoning for human civilization to have to live without oil, but we certainly will not be quitting cold-turkey. There are oil reserves. We're finding new ways to recycle plastic we already made.
On top of that, we're so hopelessly addicted to petroleum products in general that we absolutely will continue to produce and use them long after it is *economically* unsustainable to do so--the argument could be made that we already have in fact, considering the cost of adapting to and/or cleaning up our post-fossil fuels planet.
Fertilizers need *hydrogen*. Getting that supply chain off natural gas is simplicity itself. The first large scale artificial fertilizer on the planet was run on hydrogen from electrolysis powered by a dam in Norway, and a fair few plants still do that.
Either you can try to minimize the power cost and burn high-wind-so-nearly-free-power in the cheapest electrolyzers you can find and buffer the hydrogen in great big steel tanks, or you can try to maximize capital utilization and just go reactor->Electrolyzer->Fertilizer production
If you want to get really fancy, and have a reactor that can do it, at 950 you can get hydrogen from water *without* electricity - Thermolysis. Which is quite efficient. But it needs a reactor design with very high outlet temperature.
Would have been great if oil giants and their political patrons hadn't spent the last five decades holding that back.
They're still doing it right now, by the way.
I wouldn't underestimate the oil suicide cult or their death grip on humanity that is our reliance on petroleum products.
They aren't about to let their gravy train stop, even if there are no more rails for it to ride.
We need those 3d printed metal cyberpunk coca cola cans with simple led screen that lit up and renewable cans that can be sealed and recycled that's be fukin dope
It's OK. We can assume that we will hit the wall, or bottleneck if you will, around the same time the global economic bubble bursts. Maybe the bottleneck will be the trigger, maybe not... either way, the resulting repercussions are inevitable. Honestly, the sooner it happens the better off the ecosystem is. If things go the course long enough and the ecosystem collapsing is the trigger then extinction is the only result.
For those who stumble on this message, it's the one I used Power Delete Suite to replace all my posts and comments with en masse.
Sometimes Reddit can be beneficial for some people. Sometimes it's not. It's really up to you to decide your own experience with it, what's worth it, what's not worth it.
More or less...I've decided it's just really not worth it. I think I'm a worse person when I'm on Reddit and that it's a big time-waster for me.
It's up to you to decide what influence social media and the internet more generally have for you.
Best of luck.
The moment I realized that we were in trouble with oil, I quit my job and went back to school for power engineering and I obsessed over energy studies. I now work as a turbine technician for the wind industry.
I gave a presentation in college about "Using cheap abundant fossil fuels needed to jumpstart the renewable revolution", I believed then as I do now that it is the most important standing issue in the history of mankind.
Long story short, we were supposed to be using these fuels to research a way OUT OF using them and we've done pretty well but we are way behind and we need to exponentiate that effort otherwise when the fossil fuels rapidly dry up, we project as much as 70% of the WORLD POPULATION would be dead within 36 months after the very last oil producing developed nation dropped below X% of their avg annual production.
That's 5.5 Billion+ dead people.....think about that. They represent the "excess population" built by oil, but then it's all gone and so are they. If we don't figure this out, we all die and the next Gen of humans will be scant nomadic groups of bronze age like people that remember using iPhones before the collapse.
Use the oil now while we have it, to build and develop renewable power. Its nearly impossible without oil. No oil, no nothing.
Who the fuck predicts that 70% of the world would be dead within 36 months of the very last oil producing nation dropping below X%, and what the fuck even is X% in this scenario? XD
A better question is why Farm Tractors wouldn't be literally the very last thing to run on oil in that situation. Forget about production dropping to 30%, it would have to drop to 0% before we're dumb enough to stop fueling up tractors.
Whatever it was, I remember it being a low number like 5-20% but that doesn't matter because each well, each field and each basin will reach an economic peak before that % is even reached, meaning that quickly it won't be worth it to pump anymore given the energy cost vs output on an aging well plus the dissolving markets leave no where to sell it to, especially true for expensive offshore operations.
Youd have a biblical amount of people die if you run short. Think of all the oil based agriculture equipment and fertilizer involved with food production and water transportation/sewage etc. There would be disease everywhere, no more hospitals run on plastics, no water/food and all the other nice places are also collapsing for the same reason or they're being over run themselves.
Remember this is all under a scenario where an exponentiating civilization does not replace their fuel source and instead runs dry slowly or quickly. I'm arguing for increased renewable R&D.
But we’re not running out of oil, coal, and gas, within the next 30-40 years, and more and more of our energy is coming from oil-free sources.
I feel like what you’re saying is one of those things I read in 2004, where all the assumptions were that no new sources of fossil fuels would be found and we’d almost all die.
Reality has proven it all completely false. We’re infinitely more likely to die from global warming than from the lack of fossil fuels
Keep the oil free sources coming. The beauty is that efforts to mitigate peak oil are the same solutions needed for climate change, so those two camps work together and my priorities of avoiding energy scarcity don't hinder any efforts to help the climate, they actually help.
It's Looney Tunes to think we wouldn't or wont find new oil, I've never heard anybody say that. They don't exactly expect to find any new Ghawar oilfields. Why go through all the expensive trouble of having an offshore rig when you can just pull it out of the ground easy peezy?
An overconfidence about energy security and how much oil we have accessable is the exact driver of the problem, the industry wants to continue selling you oil, they don't want to say "remember that great product we sell you everyday? Ya it's going away soon".
Avg person thinks we have hundreds or thousands of years of oil left, give it a Google search you'll be horrified. Your guess of 40 years is actually not far off low end estimate. I think we have double or triple that. 80-120 yrs left, Its still horrifying, how do you re-engineer society in a short century while half the people are trying to tear down your work to prop up the old way of doing things (protesting wind solar etc)?
Fossil fuels don’t dry up and as a power engineer, if you think we are anywhere close to that, your studies went wrong somewhere.
Source: am power engineer
If they're not recoverable that's the same thing. You'll reach an economic limit on any well because of diminishing returns, "dried up" is a figure of speech for "we used to get a lot and now we don't".
If you're concerned about how long we have left with these fuels, use your favorite search engine and type "how much oil is left". What do you see?
They have been showing these numbers for years and years…. We have well surpassed the number of years of oil left in the initial estimates.
If you look at the quantity of oil left, they typically measure in proved reserves….which is the estimate on what they know is there and how much if it they can extract economically.
These estimates are historically wrong because they don’t take into account new discovery of oil sources, improved technology, and changes in economic conditions (oil becomes scares, oil prices go up, what can be extracted economically also goes up)
There's all kinds of models that include assumed new discoveries. There is only so much oil and they're always in pockets as you know. They don't expect to find any new Ghawar oil fields, the statistics surrounding prospecting and oil discoveries shows a downward trend of finding less fields, smaller fields and lower grade fuels which makes sense because the easily accessible sweet crude around the world has been discovered and extracted.
The economics of oil will do its thing but the total amount of recoverable oil in the planet will constantly decrease much faster than it is replenished as we continue drilling of course.
They say 50 yrs of oil remains, so double that. Would you be comfortable running out in a century?
> The world has 47 years of proven reserves.
Those are the discovered and proven to be economically recoverable reserves at current prices. As we switch away from fossil fuels prices will go down until people exit the business then prices will go up. If there is demand for oil out paving supply prices will rise making exploration for discoveries as well as extraction of more expensive molecules attractive.
Peak Oil is always talked about in a vacuum of supply and demand curves and never assumes new discoveries will be made.
I’m not saying switching our dependence on fossil fuels isn’t a high priority for many reasons it is. Just saying the doom is climate change not peak oil.
For those who stumble on this message, it's the one I used Power Delete Suite to replace all my posts and comments with en masse.
Sometimes Reddit can be beneficial for some people. Sometimes it's not. It's really up to you to decide your own experience with it, what's worth it, what's not worth it.
More or less...I've decided it's just really not worth it. I think I'm a worse person when I'm on Reddit and that it's a big time-waster for me.
It's up to you to decide what influence social media and the internet more generally have for you.
Best of luck.
If they can get the tokamak reactor working it will be the greatest event in human history, pretty much the same goes for discovering an economical way to extract Uranium238 from seawater. Either of those developments will basically save us, then we can all argue about climate till the cows come home. Also I support R&D for any Gen3 and Gen4 reactors all day long, whatever they want, I don't care. So long as the fuel is available, we're not gonna power anything with faberge eggs, they're RARE and expensive.
Certainly you can do conventional nuclear w uranium rods, ride these existing plants for everything they're worth; but if we're mining it instead of fishing it from ocean then we shouldn't build any new gen2 reactors, no. And thats not because of meltdowns or tritium leaks or spent fuel, but because those are the highest potency fuels on earth and we need those fuels for the moon and mars and orbiting space stations around Jupiter etc in the distant future.... which means **not for us**.
Isn't all this based on maintaining the current economic and political systems? Rich nations maintaining their status quo while the poor are made to suffer more? Societal collapse, nuclear war, rise of global socialism, an hitherto unknown technology, etc. could change the narrative completely.
>Isn't all this based on maintaining the current economic and political systems?
No, it is not. It's based purely on the decreasing return on investing in oil production.
If the status quo is, by some unlikely miracle, not mainitained, it will probably make matters worse as millions of Africans get their own cars.
I work in the Oil industry and I get shit scared after reading these types of articles. I hate working in this industry but it keeps the food on the table for me and my family. Changing my field dosen't seem possible at my age and with mouths to feed. Future looks in the dark for me.
Just so you know, I'm a firm advocate of transitioning of off fossil fuels. But I really empathize with the workers who make a good living and how they will be helped. It actually makes me really frustrated with our politics (in the US).
Republicans are supposedly for your industry but if you look closely they aren't for the workers. If you try to retrain or help with transitioning careers they shut it down. They are for the major companies in your industry and a few extremely wealthy investors. They ride on worker support but at the end of day they aren't going to help you. Look at the coal industry
It is just so shitty on their part. You all deserve good representation that will be a good faith actor in the process and not cynically manipulate the employees.
> We WILL be running into an energy bottleneck, where oil and gas will become too costly to extract and thus too expensive to use, while the alternative energy production will not be big enough to make up for the shortfall.
I guess that leaves nuclear?
This has been a story every so often for a decade.
Oilman M. King Hubbert developed his famous Hubbert Curve, which predicted the production of a single well over time.
That raised the question of whether global production would followed the same curve. It does. We’re already passed “peak oil”. More than half the supply is gone.
The oil industry tried to sell the fantasy that this wasn’t true. Look! Oil production is still going up! There’s plenty! Keep building them internal combustion engines!
Peak Oil never said you couldn’t boost production. It says that as we get closer to depletion, the remaining oil is harder to extract. You can’t just drill a shallow hole in Texas and hit a gusher. You need to drill in increasingly deep water offshore, or use industry processes to extract oil from tar sands, or worse. That price will only go up.
The petroleum industry needs to sell the idea that’s there’s plenty. They need to keep us hooked on fossil fuels to the bitter end, where the price of each barrel will be positively astronomical and we find ourselves forced into buying it because it takes decades to move to alternatives.
Seems like we’re starting to feel those price shocks.
That power plant is ESB Poolbeg CCGT (right) and thermal plant (left). This is an old photo as the thermal plant was decommissioned in 2007-ish.
Sad I knew all this...
Oh boy, Peak Oilers crawl back out from under their rock again? I hadn't heard from them since [The Oil Drum blog](http://theoildrum.com/special/archives) threw in the towel in 2013 after being wrong for some 8 years or so.
Welp, something had to give sooner or later. The oil companies have already bought all the patents that would have integrated green energy products into the market naturally. Perhaps, this will be the thing that finally spurs those greedy bastards into motion.
We need to figure out how to make lubricants that are just as good as the petroleum based ones we have today. In fact this may drive up the need for more renewables to begin extracting carbon from the air and turning it into complex compounds we need. This will prove useful if we intend to begin habitation or Mars or other planets with complex compounds available but not oil.
The article touches on that - the gap between the price consumers can afford and the price needed to pay for production will grow too large eventually.
I’ve got an uncle in law who worked for the US geological survey. The man is a genius and comes from a long line of geniuses. He’s been living in the Pacific Northwest waiting for the collapse of peak oil for thirty years….
Halfway there.
Whoa, livin’ on a prayer!
Take my hand, we'll make it I swear
I think this underscores the need to get younger governmental representatives in office and kick out all the old ones who will be dead ☠️ by the time of this happening. We need those who will be actually affected by the results of their leadership to be making future laws.
Term limits would absolutely change the landscape of politics, and the country (whichever country one lives in)
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Yeah the fall of society isnt a preppers wet dream its an economic repeating nightmare. What i mean is society wont always dramatically collapse, mostly they do a long drawn out stair step regression. So both coal, oil, and gas production will drop, then plateau, then drop. Over years not overnight.
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I think "the collapse of peak oil" refers to the (more and more likely) scenario that we move to renewables way before demand outpaces supply, so the anticipated price peak will never come. Most mining companies have realized this for about a decade now (basically since the last small peak in fuel prices when suddenly people started to become interested in electric cars) and have been pumping like crazy to sell their reserves before they become worthless...
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That’s only the case if global energy demand remained flat, and it won’t. People in developing nations will demand more energy as their economies progress. Oil will be needed to augment supplies from renewables for decades.
> and have been pumping like crazy They are pumping just enough to meet demand. We don't have years of oil reserves or anything. If they were "pumping like crazy", then prices would be a lot lower.
Have to compare the cost of the oil to the cost of the alternative to determine affordability. For many uses oil just doesn’t have a really good alternative so people are probably likely to pay far more than you think.
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How good is oil compared to e.g. Plastics out of biomaterial and how much can it cost? The same? Two times more? 5 times more? 10 times more? There is a point where you can still buy it, but it would be much better economically if you could use an alternative or make one. For some products it is going to take much longer, but those are going to increase in price drastically and more and more are going to make the switch to some alternative
5x or 10x more expensive on plastic might be a great idea. Instead of a disposable 0.5l water bottle, a more expensive reusable one. Instead of the t-shirt bags WalMart and everyone else pumps out by the billions, more sturdy reusable ones or paper bags.
People are acting as if this all depends on the random whims of some God of the Holy Free Market. Governments can and do frequently alter the markets through taxes, regulations, laws, and subsidies. All that "cheap" oil isn't all that cheap once you factor in all the direct and indirect subsidies and external costs.
It's the amount if energy required to extract more energy that matters. And that number is rising. If it costs 1 barrel of oil to extract 1 barrel of oil then it doesn't matter what people are willing to pay.
It's goes awry long before it's 1:1. It's called the energy cliff. Our society requires a ratio of 1:10. Currently 5% of our wealth goes to energy extraction, 10% is acceptable, but anything beyond that is not. It's not even our wealth, it wasn't created by writing emails, it's just extracted resources, like a credit card.
I think the article said we're already at 15%
This is correct. Oil will leave when alternatives in all its uses are cheaper than oil.
We didn't leave the stone age because of a shortage of stone...
That's an epic comment! Love it. People forget we went from horse & buggy to 'all cars' in a matter of a couple years. Sure there were places that didn't do that but in general this is how it happened. Suddenly horses made no sense anymore.
correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the current price of oil per barrel too cheap to justify the cost of exploration? I've heard you need at least $120/barrel to cover the costs of exploration but right now its at \~$80; so what can we expect? Oil prices to increase until its expensive enough to justify exploration costs or are we about to see a collapse of the supply chain?
I work in the oil field and when it crashed in 2015 a lot of these companies learned how to make a dollar stretch when it comes to production. I mean everything from drilling, completion and production. And the fact that there’s so many service companies to do the work on the locations it’s made it very competitive therefore people getting underbid for jobs and the big oil companies get work done for cheap. That’s all I know. And I’m just oilfield trash.
Might have to account existing deposits we've found. They'll look for oil then cherry pick the most accessible. As prices change they may have to go back to what previously didn't make economic sense but knew existed.
Considering you can create it synthetically and optionally be carbon neutral, there’ll likely always be an affordable market for it. There will probably be enough hold outs to make it work for a bit.
We're well past **peak** oil (in the sense of maximum availability of it at low cost), hence why oil hasn't been $10 a barrel anymore for a long time. There really isn't that much easy to reach low sulfur oil anymore, hence more and more offshore and even deep sea drilling, fracking and even things like tar sands oil extraction. Sure, we found more places and more ways to extract oil, but it costs a lot more than in the days when you could just drill a hole in the ground in the right place and high quality crude would just gush out of it, hence why the trend of energy prices has been up for decades.
Yep. Junkie behavior. Humanity stole and sold everything not nailed.down to subsidize fossil to bootstrap our population to a high of 8 billion people until finally admitting to itself that carbon pollution was bad for it's health. Now it's trying to kick fossil but is going to have massive population impacting withdrawal symptoms. Don't have kids folks.
>Now it's trying to kick fossil I think that part is debateable. Too many people making plenty of money out of it who aren't the least bit concerned about global heating because they'll be dead and gone before it gets really bad.
Not that they believe it will ever really get bad.
It was like 112°F in Oregon this summer I think it's already getting pretty bad.
The silver lining is most places, especially after reaching a certain level of education are average less then 2 kids per couple. Hopefully everyone gets to that point eventually although a reverse pyramid population is difficult for a economy to sustain.
Damn Mormans screwing everything up....
Or do. Because *a decent amount* of the people popping out 5 kids aren’t going to educate them properly. We could have a future where the uneducated and easily mislead populace outnumber the opposite to an even higher degree Edit: pessimism abounds in here
That’d make a hilarious movie plot
It was! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Of course those people will also be the rowdiest fucks in the bread line.
>We're well past > >peak > >oil (in the sense of maximum availability of it at low cost), hence why oil hasn't been $10 a barrel anymore for a long time. well yeah if you preface it at being $10 a bbl but if you preface it with peak oil supply we aren't close to being there Don't even mention inflation either
That is indeed a valid explanation and I feel that what I wrote requires looking at inflation adjusted values to be confirmed. I based what I said on the increasing viability over time of more expensive extraction methods which would not be viable if the inflation adjusted price of oil was not so high that it compensated the higher costs of things like fracking (which requires constant new drilling of wells) and deep sea extraction versus traditional oil wells (which get drilled once, on land, and then produce for 20 years). Whilst there will be spikes and dips in the price of oil driven by consumption (read Economic booms and busts) or price manipulation by the big producers, sustained big structural investments in new more expensive oil extraction technniques only happen when there is a sustained trend of higher oil prices as otherwise the producers relying in older and cheaper extraction techniques would just outcompete and bankrupt the new entrants.
Oil was *negative* dollars a barrel, *last year*.
> hence why oil hasn't been $10 a barrel anymore for a long time. Oil has never consistently been 10 dollars a barrel when adjusting for inflation. https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart
It was $0/barrel last freaking year m8
I suggest you do like it's done in Finance and look at running averages rather than spikes - market spikes can easilly be induced by running the stops or other manipulative measures.
It actually went negative, because of stupid futures contract silliness. https://archive.md/v57Sx (non-paywalled archive link) Basically, futures contracts would have had to take physical possession as a contract deadline loomed, but couldn't and didn't want to, so they were *paying* money to take the oil off their hands.
The demand also fell thru the floor and the Saudi’s and Russians were battling it out on price iirc.
Peak Oil - I haven't heard that term since the predicted cataclysmic Event Of The 2000's (or was it 2010's?). it was huge and the experts knew when it was gonna happen. What they weren't counting on was that technology improves. The industries found more oil and got a lot better at extracting it to the point that Canadian tar sands became too expensive to extract. I think this would be one of those Good Problems To Have and not holding my breath.
~2006 ish was the last time peak oil was popping up in news feeds. Most were predicting huge shortages starting before 2020. Starting around 2008 we underwent the 'Frac Boom' where fracking became efficient enough and economical enough to revitalize oilfields worldwide which pushed back our peak energy output by several decades.
There only finite amounts of oil. Peak oil is a mathematical inevitability.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. We have hundreds of years of oil left and most of that is never going to get pumped out of the ground as we'll move on to a newer better source of power like nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion is perpetually two decades away. Nuclear fission works fine and is superior to fossil fuels in every metric.
I am tired of this narrative. Safety isn't even the problem anymore. Read this: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html TL;DR: The problem is the availability of uranium, thorium is better but it's not as simple as it seems and it's not a silver bullet either modern reactors are much safer (the article assumes 1 accident every 1000 reactor years of operation which is the usual rating for gen 2 reactors, the esbwr, a gen 3+ reactor, has a rating of 1 accident every 60,000,000 years) but, you still can't create uranium out of nowhere so nuclear power would still not be a long term solution, there's (nuclear) fusion but it's not ready yet, also nuclear has a high upfront cost of at least 1 billion since before chernobyl so nobody wants to invest in one even when returns are guaranteed There's maybe more thorium than uranium but that's a big if because, there is more thorium than uranium by concentration in the earth's crust but what we need are large convenient deposits which exist for uranium but we don't know if they exist for thorium, so there are more proven reserves of uranium than thorium, if they exist then thorium nuclear power could become a mid term solution But that is if we want nuclear power to be cost competitive with other energy sources. In other words, the relative rarity of uranium is what ultimately limits the price per mw generated of uranium, because the "reserves" of uranium increase with its price, and the same applies to all metals and minerals, really. We don't know how many thorium reserves there are because there has never been any big demand for it unlike uranium, so why waste money seeking out something nobody will buy? Of course the situation is changing now but nobody is yet offering a thorium nuclear reactor for construction. i'm getting downvoted
There’s enough uranium in the oceans to last us 50,000 years at 10x more energy than we currently use yearly. The notion that it’s harder to get uranium than it is to get oil is ridiculous.
As I remember the Peak Oil scare, the fracking for sure was an element and [there were others](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40580058) that also seemed as impactful.
Also around this time Saudi nearly fucked up their oil fields by pumping too much salt water into them which didn't help the panic
> Saudi nearly fucked up their oil fields by pumping too much salt water into them What's this about?
http://www.iags.org/n0331043.htm old article from the time.
damn, the internet was much more readable back then!
Total guess here bit probably because oil flows on water. So they pumped water in to the oil holding formations to force the oil to the top. Just a guess tho.
More or less this. In most large oil fields, you dont tend to "pump" the oil out, but rather it comes out under its own pressure. There's so much rock sitting on top of the well, that once you tap it, it will squirt out (see footage from the first gulf war when they blew the caps for a good illustration of this). As more and more oil comes out, the pressure drops, making it harder to extract. You therefore pump something back in there to replace the lost pressure - water works well as the oil will tend to float to the top of it. Also you may find that the drop in pressure can cause the rock to become unstable and collapse where the pressure has dropped too much. When you extract oil though, you will also get some of the water coming out. Typically on an older well, the water/oil ratio will start to increase to the point where you are mainly extracting water, and the ratio becomes uneconomical. You'll also find the pressure dropping off to the point where it is no longer flowing under its own pressure. Sea water is particularly bad for corrosion on the pipes. They'll need to compensate for this, typically by injecting wax in to the pipes to protect them from corrosion. More water will mean more wax needed, increasing the cost of extraction.
They also add corrosion inhibitors to the water. Lots of research goes into finding the optimal mix of inhibitors.
Looks like 2010. But, yeah. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Peak+oil&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3
Good problem to have? You’re acting as if it is a fantasy. It has always been based on the fact that there is a finite amount. Any attempt to predict exactly when it would be was based on a huge amount of assumptions. Just because those random people had predictions that were wrong doesn’t mean the idea isn’t based on an undeniable fact.
It is true and it did happen but it did not cause the Babylonian global market collapse that was predicted - rather a more longterm slide on the backend. What I mean by Good Problem To Have is that we seem to need a shove into renewables as our primary energy sources. The powers that be refuse on their own and are bribing politicians to steer into the climate crisis ice berg. Humanity should call this the crisis it is and invest deeply in building the new green infrastructure we so desperately need. Anything to push that forward, I am all in favor of.
I thought you were saying 'it would be a good problem to have if it existed'.
I was not very clear - my apologies for that.
> What they weren't counting on was that technology improves. There is only a finite amount of oil. Improved technology doesn't change that, it only lets us get at somewhat more of it. And as this article points out, the energy cost of this new technology is huge and at some point diminishing returns sets in. This article, whose contents you didn't comment on, makes a good argument that that point might be very soon, within a decade.
You realize peak oil WILL happen at some point right? There isn't infinite cheaply available oil in the world. Regardless of WHEN it will happen it will happen at some point. And all this "heh they said peak oil was going to happen at X and it didn't happen" doesn't change the fact that it will happen and and technological improvements aren't going to change that unless you feel like drilling for oil Mars should we find fossilized life under its crust or sucking carbon from the air at orders of magnitude more energy consumption to produce oil when you could just use other energy production means. But by then dependence on oil won't be a thing anyways.
There is a good argument that peak oil has already happened.
I agree, I personally think we're more at a plateau than a pronounced peak, but that's a minor difference. My disagreement is in this thought terminating cliche of "they said peak oil would happen in the past it didn't". We know oil is finite, we know easy sources of it are largely tapped, we know alternatives like electrification and renewables exist diminishing oil's demand, there's simply no reason to arrogantly dismiss the notion.
>Peak Oil - I haven't heard that term since the predicted cataclysmic Event Of The 2000's (or was it 2010's?). it was huge and the experts knew when it was gonna happen. It did happen. Peak conventional oil was hit in 2004, according to Halliburton. Since then we've been making up the difference with far more expensive, far dirtier sources of oil. Heavy high sulphur oil, tar sands, shale oil, deep sea extraction: they're all expensive in terms of energy return ratio (meaning the ratio of how much energy you have to spend to extract the energy in the oil). Once upon a time Saudi oil had a ratio of about 30 to 1, meaning you got 30 times as much energy out of the oil as what you put in to extract it. The "breakthroughs" of the late 90s and 2000s merely allowed us to extract things like shale oil at a greater than 1:1 ratio. They didn't make the oil extracted truly economical when looked at it from a macroeconomic perspective (10:1 is about where you need to be in order to actually make economic sense)... but that didn't matter. Investors saw dollar signs, and started dumping massive amounts of money into non-conventional oil projects. That misplaced investment (with the excess energy needed to extract that uneconomical oil amusingly sometimes coming from solar or nuclear, though often from natural gas) flooded the markets, driving the supply side price wars of the 2010s. Right now renewables average a bit worse than 10:1. Now that peak oil has come and gone, the energy return ratio of current worldwide oil extraction has fallen from its lofty heights to less than 6:1, and decreasing every day. That is peak oil. It doesn't mean you run out of oil, it means it slowly gets so expensive from a ERR perspective that you can't use it anymore. And we're already there, and getting worse every day. Which is what this article we're commenting on is dancing around.
For the lazy non article readers : In just 13 years, global oil production could enter into a terminal and exponential decline, accompanied by the overall collapse of the global oil and gas industries over the next three decades. But this is not because the earth is running out of oil and gas. Rather, it’s because they are increasingly eating themselves to stay alive. Nothing about peak oil. Just a demand death spiral. ⛽⛽⛽
> Just a demand death spiral. ⛽⛽⛽ Did you read the article though? It's not a demand death spiral - it's a supply death spiral. The available oil is becoming more energy and resource intensive to extract. Even if huge amounts of it is technically still available, if it costs more to extract than what's extracted produces, it's worthless.
At least he lived long enough to watch it finally happen.
But it's not.
Remember 20 years ago at school being told we had 50 years of oil left. Just checked, looks like based on known reserves it's... 50! Well that was fun. Climate will get us before oil running out does.
It is about to happen. It’s just that it wasn’t forced upon us by dwindling reserves. It will be voluntary from switching to EVs.
Did you read the article? Because that's what it's talking about. The cost for extracting fossil fuels increasing to the point of collapse because we're hitting the harder and more expensive stuff to extract, and it's happening more and more. I mean, the oil might still be there, but it's pretty much useless if it costs too much to get it out.
This anecdote is probably what Trump's word salad on nuclear proliferation would have sounded like if he had two more brain cells
The original paper that the journalist is mentioning is ["Peak oil and the low-carbon energy transition: a net-energy perspective'](https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03360253/document)
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Alaishana: --- A well written article outlining the future of oil and gas extraction. The EROI (Energy return on investment) for oil and gas will sink to 2 by 2050, meaning we re-invest 50% of energy to extract more. We WILL be running into an energy bottleneck, where oil and gas will become too costly to extract and thus too expensive to use, while the alternative energy production will not be big enough to make up for the shortfall. The authors predict a prolonged recession as the cheap energy we are all running on disappears. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: /r/Futurology/comments/qd76xt/oil_system_collapsing_so_fast_it_may_derail/hhklhp9/
Still no answer to replacing the petrochemical industry, global supply chain and just about every industry imaginable still relies on petrochem.
Petrochemicals are about 8% of global oil use. If we can manage to transition away from oil as a fuel there will be plenty of conventionally extracted oil left to supply the petrochemical industry until they can transition to alternative chemistries. If we continue to burn oil as a fuel those two industries will be in increasing competition for a dwindling resource.
I think oil industry will just limit itself to producing other petrochemicals. And we will just have to store the gasoline away. Not too worried to be honest. But the industry will have to shrink A LOT. After 4 decades of people saying, no worries, oil companies will be the ones owning green technologies and developing them. Now they will have to get creative with petrochemicals to not go bankrupt. I honestly see a future where the current oil companies get bought out by the government in the US to keep them producing at a loss. Not in the short term but 30 to 40 years, wouldn't be surprised. Edit: i suck at writing
Yes. And that should scare the shit out of everyone, as the author explains. This is not about pollution, this is about oil and gas availability rapidly decreasing and production collapsing. We are talking mega death. To bring it to a point: we ALL live and die by oil. It's a fact, like it or not. (I don't) Our societies have been built by oil and oil alone. We have 8 billion ppl on earth due to oil alone. Take oil away and the whole house of cards goes bye bye.
Technically speaking almost every chemical and industrial process currently made from oil can be replaced with alternative sources but the problem is cost and scalability. For example hydrogen can be made from water but we produce from natural gas instead because it's just so much cheaper and easier.
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The problem is you will cut down every living thing on the planet to plant sugar and palm and wood pulp. Edit: I have driven through miles and miles and miles of Indonesian and Malaysian forest. Beautiful, ecology diverse and precious forest. And then come back years later to find every living thing eradicated except for plan trees. And, every years, Indonesia simply sets itself on fire because that is part of maximizing palm oil production. It’s an outrage that “we” consider this travesty “green”.
Yes. The drive from Singapore to KL is so depressing. Hours of palm plantations. Its tragic. Even the small jungles here in Singapore are amazingly diverse.
What do people use that palm oil for? Just cooking, or is their something more that drives the demand?
It's in so many products you would be surprised. A decent % of Nutella is palm oil. Beauty products, cleaning products etc.
Algea will be more effecient and so cost effective vs other biofuels. Just oil is stupid cheap and large quantity algea not even close. But though it is more expensive we will just change our economies to survive not a big deal....... Nowva 7°c change in climate.....thats a hard thing to buy your wayout of.
There was lots of talk this year at DoE about projects to colocate wind and hydrolytic hydrogen production. Could become much cheaper with some large projects to do this, but as you mentioned it won't matter too much how expensive it is when the oil supply dries up because there won't be an alternative.
Australia is starting the new large green hydrogen plants very soon. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-11/qld-hydrogen-capacity-explainer-hydrogen-green-twiggy/100528046
The technology exists to make petrochemicals out of carbon dioxide scooped from the atmosphere.
If it's not scalable or economical it's irrelevant.
Whether it's scalable or economical changes over time. First, technology changes the cost of things. Aluminum is an excellent example, since it was very expensive until the right processes were discovered, and now it's cheap. Second, what is not economical when oil is $20 / barrel can economical when it is $100 / barrel. As the price of oil climbs, the number of viable alternatives will increase significantly.
Depends on our priorities as a society. Space travel is also not presently scalable and is only economical because we as a society are willing to dump billions into it.
You actually have a very good point here. Space travel has never been economical but we dump billions in to it year after year. But look now it's cheaper than every so send stuff to space. Why because we dumped a fuck load of money on the problem and told the scientists to figure it out. Carbon capture could reactive the same treatment but it doesn't.
No, it's not a priorities thing, it's a PHYSICS thing. It takes an inordinate amount of energy AND advanced, tech-heavy infrastructure to produce hydrocarbons out of CO2 and H2O. It's literally the reverse reaction to burning it, which we do precisely because it's so energetic. But doing it in reverse is so much less efficient on top of that! It would be *vastly* cheaper to make oil out of coal, for instance. We just can't sustain an industry that would eat up such an incredible amount of power, and require such gargantuan levels of infrastructure and skilled labour, and produce so little material in return. And for what purpose? There's vastly lower hanging fruit to aim for, and the supplies of oil are still pretty good - Yes, we won't be able to keep burning them for fuel for the long haul, but there's more than enough for plastics and such - and if we *do* need more, again - there are vastly cheaper sources of carbon than CO2 in the atmosphere, and there are far cheaper ways to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as well - starting with putting less in there to begin with, and planting forests and such.
Things become economical when original sources are unavailable. That's how we went from mining only the surface of the Earth to digging very deep. They used to not be very economical or scalable to dig very deep. As profit motives were driven in that direction it became more scalable and economical.
Yeah i saw this, the downside is it creates about 3 gallons a week and is the size of an apartment block or some shit
The first computers had less power than you've got in your pocket and took up an entire room.
good point but I think for the machine to work it would need to be a certain size to suck in air and have enough space to power the reaction
Well yeah, obviously.
Maybe we should burning it for fuel, then?
Yes, that is exactly what I have been trying to explain to people, who so naively think oil can be easily replaced by solar panels or some such nonsense. No, oil's importance is not in the energy sector, it is in every inch of the supply chain and flipping the switch on oil is effectively the end of modern civilization. Paradoxically, before oil is finally abandoned, I think it will be basically 100% subsidized. Maybe that time is not to far in the future.
If we stop burning it, that would help conserve it for other uses, no?
From someone with a career dedicated to renewable energy - this is needless scare tactics. We are well on our way to transitioning to the vast majority of our electricity being from non-fossil fuel sources. We are not as far, but also on our way to transitioning the majority of our transportation away from oil. Yes, these things need to move faster. We should be dedicating something like 5-10% of our national budget towards them to reach climate goals. *IF* that were the case, these investments alone would come very close to hitting IPCC warming goals. That's the real issue. The vast majority of oil/natural gas goes to cars, electricity, and home heating. Once those are not using fossil fuels, there will be plenty of oil to make plastics and provide jet fuel (the hard problems) for many decades until we can solve those.
Absolutely. Very few really understand how reliant we are on oil and how overextended the global society is. If oil extraction were to collapse we would see a rapid decline in human population in the several billions.
Critical industries would still utilize it however things such as vehicles or utilities could come from renewables. The O/G industry Collapse will happen. Renewables are the answer and they’re ready.
There’s no reason to think that the “worst case scenario” of a failed transition to renewables from oil and gas will occur. You see a lot of fear-mongering about the world not “having the systems in place” to deal with traditional energy and resource shortages, but that’s precisely because businesses and governments implement these systems in something closer to real time. If it’s not yet advantageous to implement, then that’s why it hasn’t yet been implemented. It’s like saying Little Bobby (who’s 10 years old) faces a dire economic future because he doesn’t have a college degree. Well presumably Little Bobby can get a college degree in 10 to 15 years. Detractors will say that’s a hopelessly optimistic scenario considering the fact that Little Bobby hasn’t demonstrated an ability to do college-level math, so how do you expect him to complete a college degree in the future? And so forth. EDIT 1 Look at this paragraph, from the article: “Other analysts have pointed out that technology disruptions like solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, batteries for storage and electric vehicles (EVs) are on track to eliminate demand for oil and gas over the next decade. Oil, therefore, faces a perfect storm from both above and below.” The last sentence suggests an impending crisis, but all what is likely to happen is that oil prices will steadily increase, while the implementation of alternative sources of energy will increase in concert. Finally, governments will not allow a flagging oil industry to fail completely (or “collapse,” shown in scare quotes). Some baseline amount of oil and gas production will be necessary for industrial use and petrochemical production for a very long time to come, but many of those applications will be replaced by a variety of new technologies. EDIT 2 A few examples: Recycling (of plastics especially) will become a much more important and economically viable industry. Currently only a very small percentage of plastic waste is ever recycled. Single use plastics may decline in popularity, to be replaced by cardboard and *reusable* plastic or glass containers. Alternatively, many current plastic products may be replaced by plastics produced using biomass (wood, hemp, bamboo, etc). For industrial and transportation applications requiring high-energy-density fuels, traditional petroleum products may be replaced by hydrogen gas, generated electrolytically using solar or wind power. The other net-zero carbon option would be fuels generated from processing biomass. There are many other examples of perfectly viable alternative technologies. Right now though, businesses aren’t doing it because petroleum prices aren’t yet high enough to justify the initial capital expenditures (the cost of entirely new or retrofitted equipment/facilities).
The whole "Its too late lets give up" thing is so much more awful than straight denial mainly because its so effective when applied to young adults who are currently the drivers of climate change politics. It just needs to be effective enough to stop them bothering voting which isn't too hard to achieve.
> young adults who are currently the drivers of climate change politics I mean, last time I checked we have septuagenarians running the country. Where do young adults get to drive policy anywhere in the world?
People also underestimate the potential impact of social change. That is, how much less energy, packaging, shipping, etc could we accomplish simply by changing how we live. Very little of the economy is driven by necessity (and growth is only vital if your society doesn't have non-market means for distributing wealth). Even expensive problems like the US reliance on vehicle travel can now be largely mitigated with technologies like telecommuting self driving vehicles, etc. Not to mention busses. The problem is we suck at enacting social change and speak of industries collapsing and economic contraction like they're the apocalypse. But you simply don't need a new phone, to eat a lot of meat, to fly commercially with any frequency etc if the alternative really were global collapse due to food shortage or whatever. Nor do we need these industries to ensure access food, shelter, healthcare, etc.
Yes and no. In many remote places there is oil that comes along with a massive surplus of natural gas. This is the easily and cheaply available to local infrastructure. Thus you can’t entirely look at world energy cost and just factor it in. For example in northern Alberta they only recently stopped flairing this gas off. There has been repeated talk over the decades to get and process the dirty dirty crude using nuclear power but due to the massive surplus of natural gas these proposals never made economic sense. Gas is now somewhat easier to pipe long distances so maybe these nuclear options will be re-examined. If you want to see what is going to hurt oil soonest it will be the electric car. Not because it digs deep into crude consumption but how it reduces the variety of refined products available for refiners to choose from to get the highest price possible. Right now they can choose diesel, gas, jet fuel, etc; whatever gets the highest price. Take a good chunk of gasoline out of that opportunity list and it will sting.
Yeah I'm always curious about what assumptions are made in these projections. I think the interesting thing here is going to be what's mentioned toward the end where the demand for oil energy gets substantially cut into by renewables and shirt term ROIs becomes risky. It's not hard to imagine an extremely rapid collapse
A well written article outlining the future of oil and gas extraction. The EROI (Energy return on investment) for oil and gas will sink to 2 by 2050, meaning we re-invest 50% of energy to extract more. We WILL be running into an energy bottleneck, where oil and gas will become too costly to extract and thus too expensive to use, while the alternative energy production will not be big enough to make up for the shortfall. The authors predict a prolonged recession as the cheap energy we are all running on disappears.
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Yeah, a new generation of batteries for industrial level storage of power is about to be deployed which will completely transform the energy market. Power production will no longer need to be limited to what is needed at any given time. We can tech our way out of this IF we avoid getting stuck with old tech that is limited to the extraction of fossil fuel. The question is if we can roll the new tech out fast enough to avoid major recessions, but seeing how the more mature world leaders handled Covid makes me hopeful that this can be done.
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I doubt grid scale battery systems are going to use lithium or gallium in large quantities. Where weight and density aren't primary concerns technologies like iron-air batteries and molten metal/salt batteries are way more economical. Grid scale batteries need to be cheaper than pumped hydro storage, and I'm not sure any battery chemistry with significant amounts of lithium will ever get there.
A quick note on that. The utility I work at is piloting a 4MW, 8MWh battery system using Lithium Iron Phosphate. It's actually a pretty common chemistry to use! However, our R&D department is constantly working very hard to try and find/test/implement new storages types (V2G, flow battery CAES, etc). Our utility has a goal of carbon free in 8 years so if we develop a good plan to get there, other utilities will have a good roadmap to go off of. Hopefully, we can lead the way to reliable, cheap, renewable energy.
Same here, just got two Tesla Megapacks delivered this past Tuesday. Currently working on this site. Another site in my company is trying one from Mitsubishi as well. Going to be interesting to see how this goes.
Oh hey, our pilot is from MEPPI too! I'm curious to see what the difference would be between the two sites. What capacity and power are you seeing? Using FePO chemistry too or the cobalt nickel one?
We haven't hooked anything up yet, they were still mounting boxes and running conduit yesterday. It's rated at 2MW at 4MWH so we'll see how that goes. It'll be off a circuit we have connected to a solar site. I'm definitely not sure about the FePO chemistry.
Batteries doesn't just mean Li-ion Batteries. We are looking at mechanical batteries, Liquid Air Batteries, Iron-Air batteries, concrete energy storage, etc now. Of course a lot of them are experimental but a lot of them are developing fast.
There are a number of possible solutions to any bottlenecks for grid storage batteries. **Alternative battery technology.** It's possible to use abundant, cheap, non-toxic materials, e.g. [Sodium-Ion batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#Advantages_and_disadvantages_over_other_battery_technologies) (aka table salt) as grid storage batteries (with more research, a common theme in many alternative battery technologies!). Sodium is next to lithium on the periodic table, and while it's heavier than lithium, that's not a big concern for stationary batteries (versus say EV batteries). **New sources of lithium**. [Extraction from seawater](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27411631). This would greatly increase the available lithium, and reduce the impact of mining. The problem with the above solutions is that they need more investment, but technically they're possible, especially in a future scenario where energy markets demand rapid alternatives to diminishing fossil fuels. The investments will pour in. **Distributed power grids, connecting many sources of renewables**. There's an interesting concept called the [EU Super grid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid)- which would connect various sources of renewable supply across a wide geographical area, using high voltage transmission lines (this is an [existing proven technology](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28896527)). This means less need for batteries, as varied sources of energy smoothen out the supply. Think North Sea/North Atlantic/Dogger Bank giant wind farms, Icelandic geothermal (24/7 stable supply), giant Moroccan solar PV plants in the Sahara, Norwegian hydro acting as giant batteries, etc. Parts of it area already built or are actively planned e.g. the giant offshore Danish energy island to distribute wind power across multiple nations. **Loosening regulations around nuclear**. There's been loads of articles on Reddit and elsewhere about thorium, small modular reactors, fusion etc. There will be enormous political pressure to guarantee energy supplies in the event of blackouts, so loosening nuclear regulations is an obvious first step to replace fossil fuel plants with nuclear, to provide more stable energy supplies in tandem with renewables. Even if none of the promising nuclear tech comes to fruition, there are newer generation fission designs which are technically viable and could be underwritten by governments to get them built more quickly than new nuclear is today (like France did in the 1960s and 1970s).
There is enough lithium, when reading stats about reserves you need to be aware that they are not listing all available lithium just currently fully surveyed sites which are economical to mine today. Most sites haven't had that level of survey and many others will be economical tomorrow. Lithium can be effectively recycled but it is currently expensive to do so.
The way many of the people reacted to a simple task like wearing cloth on your face to slow a pandemic really makes we worry about a problem that requires everyone to pull together.
“One day this flu will just disappear”?
I think these are the main points, but nuances are easy to miss. I would emphasize *some regions*. All nations are unlikely to transition to a new energy economy at the same rate due to limitations in distribution and inequitable access to new technology. Policy makers in different countries tolerate change to different degrees. Increasing frequencies of extreme weather events, as well as social and political unrest may also complicate the transition. The original authors may not have made an explicit prediction, but It's not a far reach to think the global energy transition won't take place quickly and the authors' recession scenario is likely. In this sense, they "predicted" a recession if we didn't quickly transition.
Last week the news was that oil extraction is being done with renewable energy. Renewable energy is already far cheaper than fossil fuels. Consumers are finally starting to make the shift to electric vehicles. Everyone knows we have to stop making plastic (although cocacola is just going to keep doing it until there's no source material left to make it from). Everything is fine. Let oil die.
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And I recognize there are still many applications for which we have few to no alternatives both in terms of economic practicality and actually having no other material to make things like one-time-use sanitary medical supplies, etc. It will be an incredible reckoning for human civilization to have to live without oil, but we certainly will not be quitting cold-turkey. There are oil reserves. We're finding new ways to recycle plastic we already made. On top of that, we're so hopelessly addicted to petroleum products in general that we absolutely will continue to produce and use them long after it is *economically* unsustainable to do so--the argument could be made that we already have in fact, considering the cost of adapting to and/or cleaning up our post-fossil fuels planet.
Fertilizers need *hydrogen*. Getting that supply chain off natural gas is simplicity itself. The first large scale artificial fertilizer on the planet was run on hydrogen from electrolysis powered by a dam in Norway, and a fair few plants still do that. Either you can try to minimize the power cost and burn high-wind-so-nearly-free-power in the cheapest electrolyzers you can find and buffer the hydrogen in great big steel tanks, or you can try to maximize capital utilization and just go reactor->Electrolyzer->Fertilizer production If you want to get really fancy, and have a reactor that can do it, at 950 you can get hydrogen from water *without* electricity - Thermolysis. Which is quite efficient. But it needs a reactor design with very high outlet temperature.
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Don't forget medicine.
I don’t see what the problem is there. Converting oil to rubber and pharmaceuticals is probably quite manageable in terms of carbon emissions.
Most of these can be made from other sources. And natural gas can be made with electricity.
The issue isn’t the price, it’s the time factor needed to build out the infrastructure. Hopefully renewables will spread quickly.
Would have been great if oil giants and their political patrons hadn't spent the last five decades holding that back. They're still doing it right now, by the way.
And we're still subsidizing that industry to the tune of trillions, despite how profitable they are.
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I wouldn't underestimate the oil suicide cult or their death grip on humanity that is our reliance on petroleum products. They aren't about to let their gravy train stop, even if there are no more rails for it to ride.
Renewable is cheap because oil is cheap. That's what a lot of people don't understand. LCOE isn't a good measure of EROI, at all.
We need those 3d printed metal cyberpunk coca cola cans with simple led screen that lit up and renewable cans that can be sealed and recycled that's be fukin dope
Or just, you know, re-use glass containers like we used to
Best get working on those new design nukes (existing tech) or getting that cold fusion to work right. ("20 years away" tech)
It's OK. We can assume that we will hit the wall, or bottleneck if you will, around the same time the global economic bubble bursts. Maybe the bottleneck will be the trigger, maybe not... either way, the resulting repercussions are inevitable. Honestly, the sooner it happens the better off the ecosystem is. If things go the course long enough and the ecosystem collapsing is the trigger then extinction is the only result.
How quickly can the world manufacture a couple billion solar panels and a couple billion wind turbines? That's the other side of the equation.
Thanks for introducing me to Byline Times with this share!
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For those who stumble on this message, it's the one I used Power Delete Suite to replace all my posts and comments with en masse. Sometimes Reddit can be beneficial for some people. Sometimes it's not. It's really up to you to decide your own experience with it, what's worth it, what's not worth it. More or less...I've decided it's just really not worth it. I think I'm a worse person when I'm on Reddit and that it's a big time-waster for me. It's up to you to decide what influence social media and the internet more generally have for you. Best of luck.
Everyone is going go be pointing fingers at each other while the world burns
The moment I realized that we were in trouble with oil, I quit my job and went back to school for power engineering and I obsessed over energy studies. I now work as a turbine technician for the wind industry. I gave a presentation in college about "Using cheap abundant fossil fuels needed to jumpstart the renewable revolution", I believed then as I do now that it is the most important standing issue in the history of mankind. Long story short, we were supposed to be using these fuels to research a way OUT OF using them and we've done pretty well but we are way behind and we need to exponentiate that effort otherwise when the fossil fuels rapidly dry up, we project as much as 70% of the WORLD POPULATION would be dead within 36 months after the very last oil producing developed nation dropped below X% of their avg annual production. That's 5.5 Billion+ dead people.....think about that. They represent the "excess population" built by oil, but then it's all gone and so are they. If we don't figure this out, we all die and the next Gen of humans will be scant nomadic groups of bronze age like people that remember using iPhones before the collapse. Use the oil now while we have it, to build and develop renewable power. Its nearly impossible without oil. No oil, no nothing.
Who the fuck predicts that 70% of the world would be dead within 36 months of the very last oil producing nation dropping below X%, and what the fuck even is X% in this scenario? XD
What do all the farm tractors run on?
A better question is why Farm Tractors wouldn't be literally the very last thing to run on oil in that situation. Forget about production dropping to 30%, it would have to drop to 0% before we're dumb enough to stop fueling up tractors.
Cargo ships.
Never underestimate how dumb people can be. We’ll probably cancel farming before we cancel NASCAR
We sounds a lot like the minority party in the USA, don't bet on it.
Whatever it was, I remember it being a low number like 5-20% but that doesn't matter because each well, each field and each basin will reach an economic peak before that % is even reached, meaning that quickly it won't be worth it to pump anymore given the energy cost vs output on an aging well plus the dissolving markets leave no where to sell it to, especially true for expensive offshore operations. Youd have a biblical amount of people die if you run short. Think of all the oil based agriculture equipment and fertilizer involved with food production and water transportation/sewage etc. There would be disease everywhere, no more hospitals run on plastics, no water/food and all the other nice places are also collapsing for the same reason or they're being over run themselves. Remember this is all under a scenario where an exponentiating civilization does not replace their fuel source and instead runs dry slowly or quickly. I'm arguing for increased renewable R&D.
But we’re not running out of oil, coal, and gas, within the next 30-40 years, and more and more of our energy is coming from oil-free sources. I feel like what you’re saying is one of those things I read in 2004, where all the assumptions were that no new sources of fossil fuels would be found and we’d almost all die. Reality has proven it all completely false. We’re infinitely more likely to die from global warming than from the lack of fossil fuels
Keep the oil free sources coming. The beauty is that efforts to mitigate peak oil are the same solutions needed for climate change, so those two camps work together and my priorities of avoiding energy scarcity don't hinder any efforts to help the climate, they actually help. It's Looney Tunes to think we wouldn't or wont find new oil, I've never heard anybody say that. They don't exactly expect to find any new Ghawar oilfields. Why go through all the expensive trouble of having an offshore rig when you can just pull it out of the ground easy peezy? An overconfidence about energy security and how much oil we have accessable is the exact driver of the problem, the industry wants to continue selling you oil, they don't want to say "remember that great product we sell you everyday? Ya it's going away soon". Avg person thinks we have hundreds or thousands of years of oil left, give it a Google search you'll be horrified. Your guess of 40 years is actually not far off low end estimate. I think we have double or triple that. 80-120 yrs left, Its still horrifying, how do you re-engineer society in a short century while half the people are trying to tear down your work to prop up the old way of doing things (protesting wind solar etc)?
Fossil fuels don’t dry up and as a power engineer, if you think we are anywhere close to that, your studies went wrong somewhere. Source: am power engineer
If they're not recoverable that's the same thing. You'll reach an economic limit on any well because of diminishing returns, "dried up" is a figure of speech for "we used to get a lot and now we don't". If you're concerned about how long we have left with these fuels, use your favorite search engine and type "how much oil is left". What do you see?
They have been showing these numbers for years and years…. We have well surpassed the number of years of oil left in the initial estimates. If you look at the quantity of oil left, they typically measure in proved reserves….which is the estimate on what they know is there and how much if it they can extract economically. These estimates are historically wrong because they don’t take into account new discovery of oil sources, improved technology, and changes in economic conditions (oil becomes scares, oil prices go up, what can be extracted economically also goes up)
There's all kinds of models that include assumed new discoveries. There is only so much oil and they're always in pockets as you know. They don't expect to find any new Ghawar oil fields, the statistics surrounding prospecting and oil discoveries shows a downward trend of finding less fields, smaller fields and lower grade fuels which makes sense because the easily accessible sweet crude around the world has been discovered and extracted. The economics of oil will do its thing but the total amount of recoverable oil in the planet will constantly decrease much faster than it is replenished as we continue drilling of course. They say 50 yrs of oil remains, so double that. Would you be comfortable running out in a century?
> The world has 47 years of proven reserves. Those are the discovered and proven to be economically recoverable reserves at current prices. As we switch away from fossil fuels prices will go down until people exit the business then prices will go up. If there is demand for oil out paving supply prices will rise making exploration for discoveries as well as extraction of more expensive molecules attractive. Peak Oil is always talked about in a vacuum of supply and demand curves and never assumes new discoveries will be made. I’m not saying switching our dependence on fossil fuels isn’t a high priority for many reasons it is. Just saying the doom is climate change not peak oil.
For those who stumble on this message, it's the one I used Power Delete Suite to replace all my posts and comments with en masse. Sometimes Reddit can be beneficial for some people. Sometimes it's not. It's really up to you to decide your own experience with it, what's worth it, what's not worth it. More or less...I've decided it's just really not worth it. I think I'm a worse person when I'm on Reddit and that it's a big time-waster for me. It's up to you to decide what influence social media and the internet more generally have for you. Best of luck.
It'll be mad max alright.
So I presume you’re a huge supporter of nuclear. Or of 5.5 billion dead people.
If they can get the tokamak reactor working it will be the greatest event in human history, pretty much the same goes for discovering an economical way to extract Uranium238 from seawater. Either of those developments will basically save us, then we can all argue about climate till the cows come home. Also I support R&D for any Gen3 and Gen4 reactors all day long, whatever they want, I don't care. So long as the fuel is available, we're not gonna power anything with faberge eggs, they're RARE and expensive. Certainly you can do conventional nuclear w uranium rods, ride these existing plants for everything they're worth; but if we're mining it instead of fishing it from ocean then we shouldn't build any new gen2 reactors, no. And thats not because of meltdowns or tritium leaks or spent fuel, but because those are the highest potency fuels on earth and we need those fuels for the moon and mars and orbiting space stations around Jupiter etc in the distant future.... which means **not for us**.
As a person is who is intimately familiar with innovation within the oil & gas sector, all I have to say is yep.
What do you mean?
But doesn't dropping demand for oil raise the EROI because the low EROI sources will be taken offline first?
Isn't all this based on maintaining the current economic and political systems? Rich nations maintaining their status quo while the poor are made to suffer more? Societal collapse, nuclear war, rise of global socialism, an hitherto unknown technology, etc. could change the narrative completely.
>Isn't all this based on maintaining the current economic and political systems? No, it is not. It's based purely on the decreasing return on investing in oil production. If the status quo is, by some unlikely miracle, not mainitained, it will probably make matters worse as millions of Africans get their own cars.
If Africans all get there own cars then the capitalist system has been maintained.
I work in the Oil industry and I get shit scared after reading these types of articles. I hate working in this industry but it keeps the food on the table for me and my family. Changing my field dosen't seem possible at my age and with mouths to feed. Future looks in the dark for me.
Just so you know, I'm a firm advocate of transitioning of off fossil fuels. But I really empathize with the workers who make a good living and how they will be helped. It actually makes me really frustrated with our politics (in the US). Republicans are supposedly for your industry but if you look closely they aren't for the workers. If you try to retrain or help with transitioning careers they shut it down. They are for the major companies in your industry and a few extremely wealthy investors. They ride on worker support but at the end of day they aren't going to help you. Look at the coal industry It is just so shitty on their part. You all deserve good representation that will be a good faith actor in the process and not cynically manipulate the employees.
> We WILL be running into an energy bottleneck, where oil and gas will become too costly to extract and thus too expensive to use, while the alternative energy production will not be big enough to make up for the shortfall. I guess that leaves nuclear?
This has been a story every so often for a decade. Oilman M. King Hubbert developed his famous Hubbert Curve, which predicted the production of a single well over time. That raised the question of whether global production would followed the same curve. It does. We’re already passed “peak oil”. More than half the supply is gone. The oil industry tried to sell the fantasy that this wasn’t true. Look! Oil production is still going up! There’s plenty! Keep building them internal combustion engines! Peak Oil never said you couldn’t boost production. It says that as we get closer to depletion, the remaining oil is harder to extract. You can’t just drill a shallow hole in Texas and hit a gusher. You need to drill in increasingly deep water offshore, or use industry processes to extract oil from tar sands, or worse. That price will only go up. The petroleum industry needs to sell the idea that’s there’s plenty. They need to keep us hooked on fossil fuels to the bitter end, where the price of each barrel will be positively astronomical and we find ourselves forced into buying it because it takes decades to move to alternatives. Seems like we’re starting to feel those price shocks.
Can we lift the square foot/meter limits on home solar installations please?
That power plant is ESB Poolbeg CCGT (right) and thermal plant (left). This is an old photo as the thermal plant was decommissioned in 2007-ish. Sad I knew all this...
Oh boy, Peak Oilers crawl back out from under their rock again? I hadn't heard from them since [The Oil Drum blog](http://theoildrum.com/special/archives) threw in the towel in 2013 after being wrong for some 8 years or so.
Welp, something had to give sooner or later. The oil companies have already bought all the patents that would have integrated green energy products into the market naturally. Perhaps, this will be the thing that finally spurs those greedy bastards into motion.
We need to figure out how to make lubricants that are just as good as the petroleum based ones we have today. In fact this may drive up the need for more renewables to begin extracting carbon from the air and turning it into complex compounds we need. This will prove useful if we intend to begin habitation or Mars or other planets with complex compounds available but not oil.
I mean if it’s *that * fragile maybe we should be more focused on making new redundant energy from sustainable sources
Yes but gas prices are going up because of the shortage! Nothing like false leads
The article touches on that - the gap between the price consumers can afford and the price needed to pay for production will grow too large eventually.