(This is Part 21 of a series. Go back to Part 20.)
To understand the secondary effect it's well to recall that the fossil fuels that the human race is now prodigiously consuming were fashioned by nature over eons of time and are irreplaceable. Forget about energy—our plastics, our pharmaceuticals, our fertilizers, roads, buildings and countless other things are all made from petrochemicals.
Yet we are consuming fossil fuels at a prodigious speed. At the present rate the human race will have consumed in little more than a century what nature took millions of years to produce. This is the fundamental reason why the age of industrialism is built upon a shaky foundation.
A good indication of future oil production is the amount of new oil reserves being discovered. And of course in recent decades very sophisticated new techniques have been used in the search for oil. Yet U.S. oil discovery peaked in the 1930s and has declined ever since. And
world oil discovery peaked in the 1960s and has declined ever since.
Even giant oil fields are winding down. Two giant fields were discovered in 1967, Alaska's Prudhoe Bay and Siberia's Samatlor. Twelve years ago they produced five million barrels a day; today that number is only 800,000 barrels a day. It's a fact that, of the oil produced today,
80% is from fields discovered before 1973.
The current price of oil at $55 per barrel is not due to artificial restrictions in supply as it was in the oil shocks of the 1970s. No, everybody's producing flat out. This time the situation is fundamentally different: Price is rising because world demand is outstripping supply.
Energy use has increased 70 times since the beginning of the fossil fuel era and the world's oil needs are increasing at 2% a year, yet according to experts there is almost no spare production capacity anywhere in the world.
Not so long ago the world was consuming four barrels of oil for each new barrel discovered. But in the last five years, while discovering 3 billion barrals of oil, the world consumed 27 billion barrels. How long can this go on?
The geologist M. King Hubbert was apparently the first person to ask that question. He studied the production of oil worldwide and showed that it followed a bell-shaped curve, a curve now known as "Hubbert's Peak":
That is, production from a given well or reservoir starts out slowly and then expands rapidly as the easiest sources are discovered. However, what remains becomes more and more difficult to extract and at some point production begins to decline. It then follows a course downwards similar to its ascent upwards, finally tapering off to zero.
What Hubbert discovered is that the peak of production tends to come at a point when almost exactly half of the oil in the reservoir has been extracted. In other words, the peak of production and subsequent decline comes long before the well or reservoir is actually near depletion.
In 1956 Hubbert, having carefully studied U.S. reserves and production figures, made the prediction that U.S. production of oil would also follow a bell-shaped curve and reach a peak sometime between 1966 and 1972.
At the time geologists, economists and federal agencies were all unanimous in considering the peak of U.S. oil production to be far, far in the future—and ridiculed the prediction. Yet U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 and in spite of intense efforts has been declining ever since.
Then Hubbart turned his attention to world oil production and predicted that the global peak would come sometime around the end of the 20th century. Since Hubbert's death this forecast has been updated by others of like mind and
the peak in world oil production is now predicted to come between the years 2004 and 2009.
But considering that the first sign of "the big rollover" (as it's sometimes called) would be strongly rising oil prices, and considering that the price of oil has risen 70% in the past year, we may already be at or past the peak in world oil production. What then?
(This is the end of Part 21. Go to Part 22.)
—jim sloman, 10.17.04 for Jun 16
|
