What is the most rational view of Peak Oil and its near term consequences?

DavidPlumpton

To me the following points seem hard to argue against:

Oil is harder and harder to find every year (we already took the easy stuff, nobody finds super-giant fields anymore)
The peak production year was 2005 with 73.7 million barrels produced
The amount of oil produced each year is declining
The price of oil (and therefore energy) rises
All the alternatives that were supposed to fill the gap are failing to deliver
Even oil that's harder to get (e.g. in deep water) doesn't help much as it is generally produced at a slow rate
Available energy production rate (i.e. power) drops
Since nearly everything needs power to create/mine/produce prices rise
Food for example becomes more expensive as fertilizer prices rise
The average person is mystified as the price of everything seems to rise at once
Business and whole national economies are squeezed by rising prices
As businesses fail unemployment increases
Politicians are powerless, so promise general feel-good nonsense like "energy independence". Nobody even tries to tackle the problem.
Everything continues to get worse, and at an increasing rate
Within the near future the lights start to go out.

Sure there's a possibility that a form of nuclear fusion/thorium/cold fusion/zero point energy that is safe and cheap to build and operate might be invented tomorrow, but given that such things usually take a decade or so from inception to delivery it looks like there's no practical alternative on the horizon. Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress. Work out the energy in 73 million barrels of oil, and figure out how many wind farms are needed to offset a 5% decline. And then another decline the next year. Even uranium prices are rising as demand outstrips supply for just the current set of reactors.

The more we examing the situation the worse it seems to be. Some early wells had a enormous energy return on investment, e.g. for the energy of burning one barrel of oil we could pump 100 barrels from the ground. Now we are pumping wells that produce only about 5 barrels. This is known as EROEI (energy return on energy investment). EROEI is falling everywhere as all the low hanging fruit was plucking decades before, and only the difficult stuff is left. The net result is that it is ever harder to increase production rates.

Civilization runs on the constant supply of power. If that power declines 5% every year we are back to the middle ages before very long, and it's hard to develop a Friendly AI on an abacus.

One thing I've noticed a lot is reports about "Oil Sands", "Oil Shale", "Vast new possibilities of X barrels from biodiesel/microbes/algae/thermal depolymerization" etc. and none of these reports *ever* mention the *rate* of production that is expected (and years later they seem to have delivered nothing). The production rate is far more important than anything else; if the entire Earth was made of oil but we could only pump a million barrels a year for technical reasons then the total amount is pointless.

Please read at least the Peak Oil Wikipedia article before commenting. I'd rather not see a bunch of comments about "they don't even look for oil when there's 30 years of supply waiting in the ground".

So... what are my cognitive biases?

To me the following points seem hard to argue against:

Oil is harder and harder to find every year (we already took the easy stuff, nobody finds super-giant fields anymore)
The peak production year was 2005 with 73.7 million barrels produced
The amount of oil produced each year is declining
The price of oil (and therefore energy) rises
All the alternatives that were supposed to fill the gap are failing to deliver
Even oil that's harder to get (e.g. in deep water) doesn't help much as it is generally produced at a slow rate
Available energy production rate (i.e. power) drops
Since nearly everything needs power to create/mine/produce prices rise
Food for example becomes more expensive as fertilizer prices rise
The average person is mystified as the price of everything seems to rise at once
Business and whole national economies are squeezed by rising prices
As businesses fail unemployment increases
Politicians are powerless, so promise general feel-good nonsense like "energy independence". Nobody even tries to tackle the problem.
Everything continues to get worse, and at an increasing rate
Within the near future the lights start to go out.

Civilization runs on the constant supply of power. If that power declines 5% every year we are back to the middle ages before very long, and it's hard to develop a Friendly AI on an abacus.

So... what are my cognitive biases?

I'm stating that he's assuming that the people of tomorrow/yesterday shared his same beliefs as to what "easily accessible" or "hard to reach" meant in the arena of oil production. In other words; he was saying that "hard to access" is a fixed point rather than simply being his current belief.

Oh. I see I misinterpreted what you meant since I interpreted what he was saying differently. It seemed like you were talking about projection growth and difficulty into the future, and it seemed to me that he was talking about the difficulty of obtaining oil comparatively (that is some oil is more difficult to extract than other oil and even with research that will still be true, it is just then less difficult.)

When people talk about "Peak Oil" what they're talking about is a catastrophic scenario where the production of oil-related energy reaches a crescendo and declines at exactly or analogously similar rate to which it ramped up. THAT, and nothing else, is "Peak Oil".

Arguing over definitions is not useful. Maybe distinguish between two distinct notions of Peak Oil, Peak Oil(1), in which there will be a peak and then a rapid decline and Peak Oil(2) which makes no strong claim about the decline rate? Note that from an economic growth standpoint definition 2 might still be a cause for worry even if one doesn't think that there will be a definition 1 type of issue

But those aren't problems, mainly, related to existential risks to civilization related to energy supply, so much as they are to moral quandaries related to specific choices of energy production.

I would see them more as economic rather than moral concerns but I agree that they don't substantially impact existential risk.

Another viable criticism, by the way, of the F-T process is its environmental impact due to CO2 offgassing. (F-T has a large CO2 footprint)

Yes, but my impression is that it should allow for comparatively easy carbon sequestration although not much direct research has been done on this matter. So I'm not sure that this is too much of a concern.

Arguing over definitions is not useful.

Arguing over definitions is foundationally necessary to discourse. If we cannot agree on what terms mean, communication is impossible.

Maybe distinguish between two distinct notions of Peak Oil,

When you capitalize Peak Oil you are invoking the body of rhetoric, lore, and history associated with the term. That term has a specific meaning, which invokes a catastrophic economic failure scenario derived from discussions of Hubbard's Peak.

Note that from an economic growth standpoint definition 2 might still be a

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What is the most rational view of Peak Oil and its near term consequences?

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What is the most rational view of Peak Oil and its near term consequences?

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