Oil Crisis

 

Will natural resource limitations cause severe fuel price increases for your family, your friends and yourself? How were oil and natural gas deposits created?  This book is widely regarded as the very best source available.
You can hear an interview with the author C. J. Campbell by using FREE RealPlayer software.

Most serious analysts do not contest that the peaking of world conventional oil production will occur within the relatively near future, which means sometime between now and 2020. The term “near future” applies to this seemingly long time horizon because preparation may require at least 20 years if the world is to avoid serious economic damage.

Will mankind make the right choices and take the right actions in time? You can help to lead a successful transition by using less fossil fuel and relying more on renewable energy.

"The first step is to improve energy efficiency, which frees up the necessary oil to begin building the new infrastructure, like biodiesel refineries."
       — Vinay Gupta

Energy: It's Time to Get Real
      — Ronald E. Cooke

"Our country's leaders have three main choices:  Taking over someone else's oil fields until they are depleted; carrying on until the lights go out and Americans are freezing in the dark; or changing our life style by energy conservation while heavily investing in alternative energy sources at higher costs."
      — Charles T. Maxwell

More than 60% of the oil used in the USA is imported. In the USA, about 25 barrels of oil per person are consumed each year, and 16 of those barrels are imported. At an average cost of $90 per barrel, imported oil costs the average person in the USA about $1,400 per year. The USA has just 3% of the known world oil reserves, yet we currently use about 25% of the world's annual oil production.  In order to end our country's addiction to oil and combat global warming, we must focus on real solutions like increasing the energy efficiency of our homes, increasing vehicle fuel efficiency and increasing our sources of clean, renewable energy.

Germany Acts to Eliminate Need for Imported Energy 

The future is not beyond our control if we act wisely and in time. The first step is to know the truth.

“For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing
 to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.”
    — Patrick Henry (1776)

Exxon Accepts Peak Oil

"Conventional petroleum production will soon ? perhaps in five years, ten at best ? no longer be able to satisfy demand. For their part, American consumers would do well to take a cue from their Western European counterparts, who enjoy a comfortable lifestyle despite a per capita use of petroleum that is half of that in the United States. The sooner the United States begins this transition away from oil, the easier it will be."

Source: http://www.peakoil.ie/newsletters/577

2006 Conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil -- USA

A short Video Summary of the ASPO-USA 2006 Boston Conference can be seen at:
http://www.aspo-usa.com/fall2006/presentations/ASPO_USA_Promo2.mov

Complete coverage of the Boston Conference is available in a boxed set of nine DVDs with integrated
PowerPoint presentations at www.aspousa.org.

Oil consumption by and for each person

 Country  Barrels of oil  per
 person annually
 United States  25
 Japan  14.0
 Spain  13.8
 Mexico  6.0
 Brazil  3.5
 China  1.5
 India  0.8

• Source: Simmons & Company International

Peak Oil: An Outlook on Crude Oil Depletion

C. J. Campbell, February, 2002

“The oil-drilling rig count over the last 12 years has reached bottom. This is not because of low oil price. The oil companies are not going to keep rigs employed to drill dry holes. They know it but are unable ... to admit it.  The great merger mania is nothing more than a scaling down of a dying industry in recognition that 90% of global conventional oil has already been found.”
    — Goldman Sachs, Energy Weekly, August 11, 1999

   To enlarge a picture, click on it.

Rational National Energy Policies

by Colin J. Campbell, April 29, 2000

So far as I can find out, virtually no government is properly aware of the growing energy crisis, still less making any serious plans. For some strange reason they have all become concerned about the climate issue and have at least addressed it, however limited their actual response. It is not clear either that many of the senior management in oil companies truly perceive their own situation: most of them are forced to sing to the short term stock market. They do however make oblique references. For example BP now describes itself as a gas company also concerned with oil and renewables (The CEO on the BBC), the CEO of Exxon-Mobil speaks of being excited by technology, but confesses that it does not change the raw resource, the CEO of Shell says he agrees with the USGS, which itself puts out the message in heavy camouflage.

I think the Japanese are the most aware of the position. The Indians too are worried. Norway in earlier years did have a policy of restraint and good management, but has become corrupted by easy money like everyone else. They pretend to be cutting production to support OPEC, but in reality they are just watching the depletion of their old fields. The last government fell over an issue of the CO2 emissions from gas to generate electricity. I think that the Germans are becoming aware, and may prove to lead Europe. They are however tangled up with the Green movement wishing to close nuclear stations, and find it difficult to admit that they will need nuclear in the face of an oil crisis. I think that the US, UK and European Commission are all quite useless on this issue, understanding little and doing less.

Not a promising picture!

Best regards;

Colin J. Campbell

Will We React in Time to Avoid a Severe Energy Crisis?

"We're dealing with a cultural problem — 200 years of exponential growth culture. Rapid growth is a transient, temporary phenomenon.

Are we failing to adequately prepare for the inevitable fuel shortages because we don't know exactly when they will begin?

Were we a rational society, a virtue of which we have rarely been accused, we would reduce waste of our remaining fuel supplies and institute a program comparable to the Manhattan Project. We already have the technology and should begin while we still have enough fuel, metal, time and other resources to succeed.

At the same time, it probably requires a spiral of adversity.  In other words, things have to get worse before they can get better.  The most important thing is to get a clear picture of the situation we're in and the outlook for the future ... an appraisal of where we are and what the time scale is. The time scale is not centuries, it's decades".

—  M. King Hubbard

 

Mankind's Annual Oil Consumption = more than one cubic mile


Global oil use = 31.5 billion barrels per year
One barrel oil = 42 U.S. gallons
One cubic foot = 7.48 U.S. gallons
One cubic mile = 147.2 billion cubic feet

So, the volume of oil consumed by mankind annually
=  (31.5 x 42) / (7.48 x 147.2)
= 1.2 cubic miles of oil per year.

Estimated worldwide oil reserves at the beginning of 2006 = 32 cubic miles.

The problem, however, is not “running out of oil” as much as it is “running out of cheap oil”, which is the resource upon which every aspect of industrial civilization is built. Oil plays such a fundamental role in the world economy that we need not “run out” of the stuff before we run into a crisis of untold proportions.

"We have a very tight energy supply-and-demand balance these days, and the smallest shifts lead to large swings in prices", said John Felmy, economist for the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group in Washington.

Demand for energy is increasing dramatically. In January, the International Energy Agency estimated that worldwide demand is growing by nearly 2 percent per year. In February, ExxonMobil predicted that worldwide energy demand will have grown by 40 percent by 2020. In short, more and more people on planet Earth are vying for fewer and fewer resources. The surge in demand is coming primarily from two of the fastest growing countries on Earth: China and India. As people move into the middle class, they want to buy cars, TVs, air conditioners, and other products that use oil and electricity.  If mankind continues to increase oil consumption more than 2% each year, then a more realistic estimate for the useful life of existing oil reserves may be a paltry 24 years.

The recent jump in oil prices "reflects a realization that 2005 has the potential to be an even tighter year than 2004," said Kevin Norrish, an analyst at Barclays Capital in London. "People are very worried that OPEC might make some production cuts."

Strong growth in demand coupled with concerns that supplies were lagging have pushed oil prices up 49 percent over the last year. Crude prices in New York rose to a record $55.67 a barrel in October.

While most analysts expect demand to slow this year from the record pace of 2004, high prices are not prompting China and the United States, the two main contributors to growth in the market, to significantly reduce their consumption. Global demand is expected to grow 1.8 percent, to 84 million barrels a day this year. Last year, demand rose by 3.4 percent, to 82.5 million barrels a day, the strongest pace of growth in nearly three decades.

Greater demand means greater reliance on OPEC supplies. The group's 11 members account for about a third of the world's production and nearly half of global exports. The International Energy Agency, in a report earlier this month, cut its forecasts for Canadian and Russian production and warned that the output from producers outside of OPEC would slow this year.

There is an irony about depleting a finite resource : the better you do the job; the sooner it ends.

Oil Consumption and Depletion

Americans use 25 barrels per capita yearly (BCY). Japanese and Italians consume 10-12 BCY. The global average is less than 4.7 BCY. China, and to a lesser extent India, are following the US in rapidly expanding their economies using the technologies of cheap oil. The high prices for oil today are a creating a widespread awareness that there isn't enough oil being pumped today to supply everybody. Poor Third World countries are already priced out of the market.

Humans, with a few notable exceptions, have not yet demonstrated willingness and desire to make any sacrifice to assure a successful transition to renewable energy sources before fossil fuels become extremely scarce and expensive.

The best depiction of the past 100 years of human endeavor is exponential growth of the world's population based on an exponentially growing world economy based on the utilization of  incredibly cheap fuel. What happens when there isn't enough oil to keep growing or maintain the current human population?

Please Don't be Fuelish!

Our nation's oil production has been declining since 1970 due to natural resource limitations. Closing our eyes won't make the threat of oil shortages go away. On the contrary, denial will only lead to delay and increase the probability of a major disaster.

If we really want to protect ourselves and future generations against energy shortages and higher energy prices, then we need to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of fuel. Fuel shortages may occur again at any time due to hostile actions by foreign nations and they will occur because growing populations are competing with us for the rapidly dwindling remainder of fossil fuels.

Reducing the potentially catastrophic accumulation of greenhouse gasses would be a side benefit of using fossil fuels much more efficiently. Reducing fuel consumption will also reduce emissions of toxic mercury, lead, arsenic, nitrous oxides, and other pollutants that are released into our environment during combustion of fossil fuels.

Here are a few of the things we can do now:

  1. Update and enforce building codes so that buildings will require much less energy while having very good indoor air quality.
  2. Increase the use of solar and wind energy before we run short of the materials and energy needed to produce them.
  3. Increase the use of cogeneration systems in buildings to provide electricity, hot water, absorption cooling and space heating. This is much more efficient than building additional central power plants that waste more than 60% of the fuel’s energy during generation and transmission.
  4. Stop using tax dollars to subsidize the fossil fuel industry (let fossil fuels compete in a free market against energy efficiency and renewable energy sources).

NOTE: Eliminating government subsidies for fossil fuels would encourage fuel conservation and the timely development of enough renewable energy systems to sustain us in the post fossil-fuel era.

Our nation's addiction on oil and gas has entangled us in the long-contentious Middle East, whose oil fields Western countries continue to try to dominate, at great cost in lives and fortunes. It has added to the greenhouse-gas pollution that many blame for global warming. Everyone acknowledges that fossil fuels have a limited future.

       
To enlarge an image, click on it.

The United States would be far better off weaning itself from non-renewables and plunging its wealth and expertise into developing alternatives such as fuel cells, wind, energy systems, solar heating and electrical systems, and more.

By taking vigorous actions now to reduce fuel consumption, we can become less vulnerable to wartime shortages, peacetime embargoes, and the inevitable shortages of fossil fuels as remaining supplies become exhausted.

As mankind turns to other forms of energy — in part because of dwindling oil supplies but mainly because of the mounting and unimpeachable evidence that we have a profound carbon problem on our hands; that even if we discover billions of new barrels of oil in the ground, we cannot keep burning them — and pumping vast amounts of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — without potentially catastrophic consequences. According to the latest findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in order to stabilize greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global emissions must be reduced to at least 60 percent below 1990 levels. That is a radical change in the way the world uses energy. And to accomplish that, many people feel, will require nothing less than a new industrial revolution, an overwhelming retreat from society's mass reliance on the carbon fuels — oil, gas and coal — that have powered the global economy for more than a hundred years.

The personal choices that you and other Americans make in the marketplace and the voting booth will determine whether or not our nation  will successfully prepare for the coming fossil fuel shortages and price increases. Our actions, not our words, will determine how many of us will be able to survive after most of the remaining fossil fuels have been consumed.

Additional Sources of Information:

"My father rode a camel. I drive a car.
My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
—  A Saudi saying,

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or
the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
— John Adams

"If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astonish ourselves."
— Thomas Edison

"It is a stupid society that runs an experiment to see what its breaking points are."
— Henry David Thoreau

"The multitudes remained plunged in ignorance of the simplest economic facts,
and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them."
— Winston Churchill

 "For a successful environmental policy, reality must take precedence
over wishful thinking, for nature cannot be fooled."
— Richard Feynman

"All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
 — Schopenhauer

 

NOTE: You can reduce energy costs and improve air quality in your home. Use a ventilation system to bring in fresh filtered air, seal air leaks in the building's envelope, and control indoor air pressure. This will discourage mold growth, improve comfort, and improve energy efficiency. It will also make your home a safer shelter if a terrorist, or an accident, releases chemical, biological or radiological agents in your area.

Wisdom is knowing what should be done.  Virtue is doing it.

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift (maybe that is why we call today the present).

Please send your comments, suggestions, and questions  to Jon Traudt  ( jtraudt@tconl.com )

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