The price of oil will rise greatly in 2010-2012
International Energy Agency’s latest report says that the price of oil will rise greatly in 2010-2012, confirming the basic idea of peak oil. If the price temporarily falls in 2008-2009, governments will face the tempation to give people a quick fix of cheap gasoline. What they ought to do is increase taxes to provide impetus for conservation, so that the blow won’t hit as hard. Which do you think the US will do?
Emailing that to some friends who are much more focused in their interest in this than I, Stephen Stretton said:
So the oil price is going to go much higher than expected… so we accelerate the technological development of oil shales, tar sands and at over $100/barrel and we will have lots of coal-to-liquids too, and maybe even biofuels…. :((( Of course if oil/gas prices go high enough they might encourage us to switch to electricity, in theory pushing us towards renewables. If we were 10 years ago I would say the only way to solve the problem is to eliminate some safety systems/shielding on nuclear reactors until they become cheaper than coal (and cope with a melt down every 100,000reactor years. Now we have passively safe systems which are safe without expensive multiple backup. But we’re not yet building them on a large enough scale for them to be really cheap. No-one is doing CCS on a large scale yet either. If you have optimistic assumptions about altruism then this is a a crucial technology too. I’m also very pro-solar. I think cheap solar can invalidate the difficult-to-evaluate argument that ‘you can’t deny nuclear to others if you are doing it’. People who have sun can have solar. People who don’t can have nuclear. But sadly coal (for electricity) stands in the way again. There’s lots of coal. We need a electricity technology that’s cheaper than coal IN CHINA… That’s the only way the world can be saved.
A sobering thought.
The The price of oil will rise greatly in 2010-2012 by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
August 11, 2007 |
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I expect there’ll be more than one oil “peak”.
I’m also not sure there’s anything particularly special about the point where global production of oil starts to decline, if there is indeed such a single point. If (say) vehicle efficiency improved 25% around that time, wouldn’t (say) 10% lower oil production go further than the peak level? Thereby deferring the end of civilization!