Peak oil is an event so momentous it will turn society as we know it on its head. Every citizen, every community, every business will be affected. We owe it to ourselves to understand the issues and how to build resilience into our lives and into the communities around us. Click here to see more learning resources.
At last here’s an Australian produced video “What the Economic Crisis Really Means – and what we can do about it “ that expounds in just 12 minutes the depth of the human predicament and what can be done about it.
Expertly produced with neat hand drawing animation, this educational video explains the slowly disintegrating global economy and its relationship with oil depletion (= rising energy prices).
Please circulate to those who may be interested…. ahem… or who ought to be interested!
Here’s a snapshot of oil prices on the global market. This one is for one of the oil markets, Brent Crude. Australia is tied to Tapis Crude, but from this chart you can see general trends in prices that are affecting us over time.
The chart speaks for itself. Note that by clicking on the four options below the chart you can see how oil prices are changing over different periods time frames. The spike in 2008 coincides with the global financial meltdown and this is followed by a steady but inexorable growth in price.
(Note that this chart updates automatically so you can refer to it any time.)
Our Peak Oil forum in Hobart in July attracted much interest, especially from people interested how peak oil relates to local government and local communities.
The video clip below gives an excellent overview of Peak Oil, it’s consequences and government and community responses – with a particular focus on Tasmania.
The presentation was delivered (by Todd Houstein) at the Peak Oil forum. Other sessions from the forum can be viewed by clicking HERE.
The oil that is used to make our petrol and other transport fuels is a finite resource – literally a ‘fossil’ fuel created millions of years ago.
Modern society, as we know it, is powered by oil. Oil has been the key resource that has delivered phenomenal economic growth. And as our society has grown, so has oil consumption. Around the world we are now using approximately 83 million barrels of it per day. Now our entire systems of production have become totally dependent on it. Without oil and our society would collapse very quickly.
Peak Oil does not mean that oil will suddenly run out. It does mean that the era of cheap oil is over. Simply put, Peak Oil is the point in history when maximum oil production is reached – beyond that point, less and less oil is produced as the major oil reserves run down, leaving a growing gap between supply and demand.
A supply gap like this inevitably results in sharply increasing prices. The graphic below shows this in pictorial form. The yellow area represents oil demand that can’t be met. The ramifications for human society will be very profound.
Why can’t we just increase oil production?
Sounds easy, but oil production is not an easy game.
The problem is, the easy-to-reach cheap oil was discovered and extracted first. This was the land-based oil found near the surface, under pressure and easy to refine. The remaining oil tends to be off shore, deep underground, far from markets, in smaller fields and of lesser quality. This requires more money and energy to extract and refine. And so, the rate of extraction falls.
To make matters worse, all oil fields eventually reach a point where they become no longer viable. Once it takes the energy of a barrel oil to extract a barrel of oil, then there’s no point producing it.
When will Peak Oil happen?
This is not a theoretical future event. It is with us right now. In recent times the debate about peak oil has switched from Will it happen? to When will it happen?
What is definitely known is that for about 30 years the world has been finding less oil than it has been consuming. The rate of discovery of new oil fields actually peaked in the 1960s. Around 50 oil producing countries have already peaked and now produce less and less oil each year – including the major USA and the North Sea oil fields.
The red bars in the above graph shows how oil discoveries peaked way back in the 1960s. The green bars show the rate of oil discovery that we can expect from now on. The black line shows actual growth in consumption.
Every year since 1984 less oil has been discovered than has been consumed. Today, only one barrel of oil is being discovered for every four consumed. Time’s running out.
A number of projections that have been made about the precise ‘peak oil moment’. There is now a growing consensus amongst analysts that is has already peaked’ (July 2008 is a commonly agreed date) or will do so within the next five years – although the oil industry itself projects a much more optimistic 2035.
The chart above is based on actual production and expected oil output from all sources, including non traditional resources such as tar sands.
What does Peal Oil mean for the future?
Whatever the date, society is simply not prepared. Our whole society depends utterly on a single commodity for nearly all of its production, including essential transport and food supplies. It takes decades to change over infrastructure and clearly we don’t have decades to do it.
Peak Oil will firstly translate into higher prices for both food and fuel and this will cause immense stresses on the not so well off. It will wreak havoc on poor developing nations.
In the longer term everyone will be seriously affected. There is no response to Peak Oil other than a total restructuring of our economies and means of production. The earlier we address these problems the less stressful it will be.
This website is dedicated to exploring the likely impacts of peak oil on Tasmania and how we ought to be responding to it.
In recent years a number of influential government and businesses agencies have issued reports warning of the consequences of peak oil and the need to respond with urgency.
You can download some of these reports by clicking on the links below.
The information and opinions that they contain are unequivocal – business as usual is no longer a viable option for the planet.
The Australia Institute’s report Running on Empty says:
…skyrocketing oil prices are likely to result in severe disruption to economies, with central banks raising interest rates to slow runaway inflation, people out of work, famine, hunger and serious civil unrest. It is a scenario that governments and their constituents should be attempting to avoid at all costs but so far very little has been done to prepare for or contend with the eventuality.
Lloyds of London’s report Sustainable Energy Security (white paper) says:
International oil prices are likely to rise in the short to mid-term due to the costs of producing additional barrels from difficult environments.
Britain’s Peak Oil Taskforce’s report The Oil Crunch says:
Oil shortages, insecurity of supply and price volatility will destabilise economic, political and social activity potentially by 2015
The Queensland government EPA report Towards Oil Resilience says:
Oil is the key raw material for petrol, diesel, jet fuel, industrial oils, numerous chemicals and most plastics. Many industries are dependent on oil in ways that are not immediately apparent… our systems for producing and distributing food rely on oil, not only for fuel for farming machinery and transport, but also as a raw ingredient for agrichemicals, fertilisers, packaging plastics…
The International Energy Agency’s report World Energy Outlook 2010 says:
…if governments do nothing or little more than at present, then (oil) demand will continue to increase, supply costs will rise, the ecnomic burden of oil use will grow, vulnerability to supply disruptions will increase and the global environment will suffer serious damage.
The Robert Hirsch (US) report The inevitable peaking of world oil production says:
The era of plentiful, low-cost petroleum is approaching an end. Without massive mitigation the problem will be pervasive and long lasting.
The New Zealand parliament’s research paper on Peak Oil The next oil shock? says:
There is a risk that the world economy may be at the start of a cycle of supply crunches leading to price spikes and recessions, followed by recoveries leading to supply crunches.
by Chris Harries
Question: Which is the more serious problem: climate change or peak oil?
Some say it is peak oil, because that issue will impact much sooner – especially on the poor who won’t be able to afford skyrocketing costs. Others say it is climate change because we are threatening to take the planet’s climate system beyond the tipping point, and then the whole planet will suffer.
Clearly there is no right answer. It’s far more constructive to treat both peak oil and climate change as equally critical. Both can lead to collapse.
Climate change makes it essential that we reduce carbon pollution. Peak oil makes it inevitable that we do. Climate change tells us that we need to act, whereas peak oil may take any choice out of our hands. Peak oil may even motivate politicians to act on climate change, because there is no way of squirming out of it.
In truth, climate change and peak oil are both very serious in their own right, but the two issues are joined at the hip. Only by coupling peak oil and climate change can human society succeed in switching to a sustainable future. If we respond to either without looking at the other then we can just make things worse.
By way of example, if we try to respond to the depletion of world oil supplies by converting our huge coal reserves to liquid fuels, then we may (temporarily) keep all our cars and trucks on the road but that ‘solution’ will put more pollution into the atmosphere and only worsen the climate change problem. (The huge tar sand mines in Alberta, Canada is a gruesome real-life example of this folly.)
Conversely, if we respond to climate change by trying to make renewable energy supply as much energy as coal and oil does, then we will quickly find that such a conversion is impossible because the conversion itself requires immense investment in declining fossil fuel energy that we don’t have. Catch 22! (Manufacturing bio-fuels from crops is a real-life example of this folly – generally speaking it deprives us of land-for-food resources and increases the demand for petro-chemical fertilisers.)
Both problems boil down to energy problems—and energy is essential to the maintenance of agriculture, transportation, communication… and just about everything else that makes up our modern global economy. Fossil fuels are ingrained in our entire infrastructure.
The only way to bridge both peak oil and climate change is to develop a culture shift away from our heavy reliance on fossil fuels and develop what is called the ‘post-carbon economy’. Energy efficiency and deep cultural change have to be the dominant responses to both issues.
To put things in a nutshell, peak oil can be thought of as a ‘what’s in the tank?’ problem and climate change as ‘what comes out of the tail pipe?’ problem (quoting Richard Heinberg). Both of them are to do with the energy we use, both of them require us to look at where we get our energy from, what we use it for and how much we use.
Most importantly, the solution to both problems is a fundamental ‘energy transition’ – that is, a set of policies that reduce both carbon emissions and oil dependence.
The neat logo at left represents the duality that exists between these two critical issues. Interestingly, the logo was devised by David Holmgren, a Tasmanian based initiator / inventor of the huge global Permaculture movement.
Reference:
See Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Activism by Richard Heinberg.
There are a lot of basic primers on the web. If you would like to learn more about how world oil is peaking and what it means then try these.
