What “Peak Oil” REALLY means. It is not about “running out.”
I went to the Poole Agenda 21 AGM last week and heard Laurie Michaelis, an expert IPCC scientist, say that peak oil is “about oil running out.”
This is a total misunderstanding, and it is common.
Peak oil is about growth in oil production and supply running out.
Plenty of oil is left when growth runs out completely. Looking at a simple bell curve makes this visible:
There is visibly half remaining to the right of the center peak line. The reality is more complex than this abstract smooth line, though, so perhaps it is less than half. But it is still plenty :-)
I expect that some people who communicate the misunderstanding are confused, and some are trying to confuse. Politicians and energy company executives are more likely to understand themselves but attempt to confuse others about the issue.
For example when asked about peak oil, the chief economist of BP said “there will never be a moment when the world runs out of oil.” That statement is true, but it contains the assumption that this is about the world running out of oil. That is not the problem at all.
What is the problem?
- An economy is a bunch of businesses lumped together.
- The global economy is all the businesses in the world lumped together.
- A business does things.
- A successful business is a growing business.
- A business uses oil-dependent processes to do things, like transport its materials in and its produce out.
- A growing business uses more oil to do more things.
- Growing a business means growing oil use.
- Growing oil use means growing oil supply.
- Growing oil supply means growing oil production.
- Oil is essential; it would takes many years to switch liquid fuel processes to electric ones.
- Therefore, no more growth in global production of oil means no more growth in global production of anything else.
Michaelis said that this idea was “preposterous,” and that was pretty much the end of our conversation :-(
Plenty of reporting about peak oil explains the idea like this. In October 2007, the Guardian wrote that:
[Peak oil is] defined as the moment when maximum production is reached … “The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy” “The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system.”
However, Michaelis’ concern with peak oil is that is takes away focus from the absolute fact that global oil production has to decline sharply anyway to save our lives from climate disaster. He seems concerned that a focus on a natural shortage of “easy oil” will simply encourage us to burn “hard to get oil.” The development of Canadian tar sands is a clear example of this.
But abruptly stopping oil use because of climate change presents the same ‘preposterous’ problem: The end of a growth-based economy.
What businesses work without growth?
The What “Peak Oil” REALLY means. It is not about “running out.” by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments
Leave a Reply
