Years ago I wrote about the scam that was "peak oil".
"Peak oil" prognosticators have painted pictures of everything from a calm development of alternatives to calamitous shortages, panic and even social collapse as the world reaches its peak of oil production -- and then supplies fall.
But according to the study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California-Santa Cruz, those scenarios assume that an increasingly wealthy world will use all of the oil pumped out of the ground.
Instead, the historical connection between economic growth and oil use is breaking down -- and will continue to do so -- because of limits on consumption by the wealthy, better fuel efficiency, lower priced alternative fuels and the world's rapidly urbanizing population.
"There is an overabundance of concern about oil depletion and not enough attention focused on the substitutes for conventional oil and other possibilities for reducing our dependence on oil," said study co-author Adam Brandt, assistant professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford's School of Earth Sciences.
The study, published in Environmental Science & Technology,describes a variety of mechanisms that could cause society's need for oil to begin declining by 2035. Several earlier studies have suggested that passenger land travel has already plateaued in industrialized countries and is no longer hitched to economic growth. Passenger land travel now accounts for about half of the global transportation energy demand.
Even in developing countries, economic growth has been less oil-intensive than was seen in the West during the past century. China, for example, sells 20 million electric scooters to its citizens each year as part of the government's policy to reduce air pollution. That exceeds total U.S. passenger vehicle sales annually.
"We've seen explosive growth in car ownership in countries such as China," said co-author Adam Millard-Ball, an assistant professor in the Environmental Studies Department at UC-Santa Cruz. "However, those cars will be more efficient than those of the past, and travel demand will eventually saturate as it has in rich countries such as the United States."
Lower oil dependence
Freight and air travel have shown no such break from economic growth. Rich people may not drive more beyond a certain income level, but they do fly more and buy more belongings, as do people moving out of poverty. Even in air travel and freight, though, energy efficiency has begun to improve after decades of stagnation, lowering oil dependence, according to the new study.
"A major uncertainty is whether demand to move goods around the world will eventually saturate, as we've seen in the case of passenger transport," said Millard-Ball.
Price-competitive alternatives to conventional oil are another factor behind the peak in demand. Competition comes from increasing quantities of fuel from oil sands, liquid fuels from coal, natural gas, biofuels, hydrogen and electricity generated from renewable sources.
Technological advances and the high price of oil are helping most such alternatives compete on price. In 2010, the world produced 1.8 million barrels a day of biofuels, six times the amount in 2000. In Argentina, natural gas fuels 15 percent of all cars, due to policies meant to favor the domestic natural gas industry.
The researchers did not try to forecast peak demand's impact on oil prices. But even if oil prices spend much time above the historical upper range of $140 a barrel, the peak in demand will only come sooner than they forecast.
"If prices rise above their current levels for an extended period, we're likely to see even more efforts to improve efficiency and exploit alternatives to conventional oil," said Millard-Ball. "That would hasten the onset of a demand-driven peak."
Impacts of alternatives
The new research, though encouraging, does not describe a transportation future free of worry. Instead, the researchers recommend a shift in attention to the various alternatives to conventional oil.
Policymakers should not rely on oil scarcity to constrain damage to the world's climate. The alternatives to conventional oil emit varying amounts of greenhouse gases, while large-scale production of biofuels could have a disruptive impact on food prices and on local ecosystems where the plants are grown.
"If you care about the environment, you should care about where we are getting these fuels, whether we use the oil sands or biofuels," said Brandt. "Our study is agnostic on what mix of oil substitutes emerges, but we do know that if we don't manage them well, there will be big consequences."
The study forecasts global oil demand through 2100 under a variety of scenarios for economic growth, population, efficiency gains and fuel substitution. Interested parties can use the study's model, inputting their own set of assumptions athttp://pangea.stanford.edu/researchgroups/eao/research/oil-substitution-and-decline-conventional-oil.
Steven Gorelick, Stanford professor of environmental Earth systems science, and Matthew Ganser, director of engineering at Carbon Lighthouse, are the study's other co-authors.
This is what I wrote in 2006.
Okay, I'm not a scientist or a geologist, or an oil executive.
And I don't think that, what with the earth heating up, we can go on using fossil fuels for all of our energy.
But I don't believe most of the hype about peak oil. First off, this con has been played before. George H. W. Bush, when he was leaving his job as head of the CIA back in 1976, left a report on incoming President Carter's desk saying that the Soviet Union was about to run out of oil. If you know anything about the CIA, it has historically been wedded to the oil industry. Agents and executives have historically passed back and forth. If there had been an official wedding of the CIA and the oil industry George H. W. Bush would have been the little plastic groom on top of the wedding cake.
Since JFK was gunned down in Dallas in 1963 our foreign policy has been all about oil. I'm still not sure how Vietnam fits into all this, but I suspect that someday soon there will be huge deposits announced in the area. Professor Peter Dale Scott identified four coups in 1964 that were backed by the U.S., and they all had something to do with oil. That is, there was oil, the American oil industry wanted it, and the locals were getting uppity.
Well, oil and drugs.
So this is what I know about the oil industry.
When I was back east last fall visiting my 80 year-old mother, one of our tasks was to close an old safety deposit box she'd kept in a bank in the town where she used to live. There wasn't much of value in the box, but there was a letter to my mother from her parents in Mississippi right after the birth of my older sister. This was 1948. My mom's father had sold the oil rights for a piece of property and an oil company had put in a well. In return my mother and her brothers and sisters would share in royalties for any oil pumped from the property.
Well, for most of the rest of the century that well was capped. Figure fifty years that oil was just sitting there. Then a few years ago they started pumping. And they are pumping a lot now.
I know it's one well, one person's observation. But there was always oil there. It was just time to uncap the well and start getting the stuff out of the earth.
We know there are oil deposits all over the place. As I write there are plans for extracting oil out of huge deposits of gunky sand up in western Canada. Back in the 1930s the Germans and the Standard Oil swapped different patents with the Germans ending up with the coal gassification patent. In fact, the Germans did produce quite a bit of their fuel from coal during WWII. So there's a lot of oil that isn't even oil. There's all sorts of processes for making diesel-grade fuel from carbon-based organic garbage. So there's oil in stuff that isn't even oil.
And they keep finding oil. Just last week they announced a big oil find in, believe it or not, Afghanistan! My guess is that you can find oil just about any place around the globe where you find American soldiers.
So what does it mean that much of Iraq's oil production has been offline since the first Gulf War? What does it mean that a war with Iran might shut down the entire region's oil supply? It means that every barrel is that much more expensive. Just imagine them capping all those wells for future pumping.
Remember, Exxon and the other oil companies don't pay for the bills that the U.S. armed forces are racking up. American taxpayers do, or more accurately, their children and grandchildren will. Oil companies may just have another country's army working for them when all the bills come due.
And then they can uncap all those wells that have been sitting around for fifty years or so.
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