Monday 7 March 2011

Why we won't "run out of oil"

One of the things that baffles me the most about people is this constant fear of "peak oil" or running out of oil completely.

There are masses of oil reserves out there. The USA is apparently possessed of oil reserves that dwarf those of the Middle East. The reason they don't drill for them is that they're in a different kind of rock structure that existing drilling technology doesn't make cost-justifiable. But when the price of oil increases enough to make the investment in improving drilling technology viable, you just know they're going to be all over it. And who knows, it may even lead to cheaper oil.

But I'm fairly sure that at some point, we will actually "run out" of oil. There will be oil out there, but it simply will not be cost-effective to get it out. And then the price of oil will go so high that alternatives will demand to be investigated and found. People are working on alternatives, but with the massive amounts of oil available at cost-effective levels, there's no great incentive to make them happen.

It's not a conspiracy by "Big Oil", it's just rational behaviour. Oil is cheap enough and provides us with highly effective energy. Even if someone did find a way to make cold fusion a reality, we'd have to dick around with our infrastructure so much that it would cost us more than just carrying on with oil, at least in the medium term.

Another thing that I keep getting told is that we need to conserve oil to delay that dark and frightening day from arriving.

This is an irrational point of view. Wealth creation and human progress depends on cheap and readily available energy. The availability of cheap energy has led to a massive improvement in the quality of life all round the planet over the last 100 years.

Trying to curtail energy use simply means that progress will slow or stop and we will never get wealthier which means that we will stagnate where we are now, rather that further improving our quality of life.

That's fine for us if we take a short-term view, but it's a huge blow to those people who are behind us on the development curve. It also predicates a poor future for our children.

Increased wealth and prosperity for the generations to come will also allow them to absorb the costs of any changes to the environment or whatever much more easily than we can, in the same way that we can cope with these much more easily than the Romans or the Victorians did.

You cannot predict what the future will bring. There is no point in throttling our progress for something that may never happen. And throttling our progress might also mean that we never find the way around whatever crisis or cataclysm that may genuinely exist in our future.

While I am happy to endorse careful husbandry of resources and efficiency, the idea of crippling our progress in the name of some vague and unspecified fear of what might happen is stupid.

9 comments:

bill said...

Peak oil has nothing to do with how much oil is in the ground. Its all about the production rates, or how quickly you can get it out of the ground. And world production peaked in 2005, so its already here.

Get 2 bottles of wine. The first take the top off and pour yourself a glass. Filled the glass in seconds. With the second bottle of wine put a pin hole in the top and now pour yourself another glass of wine. It will take a week to fill the glass this time.

Or to put it another way 60 years ago any dumbass could drill a hole in the desert and oil came gushing out. With tar sands you have to strip mine the oily sand, then steam clean the oil out and put the clean sand back into the hole.

But feel free to bury your head in the sand, everyone else has. I'm sure you will enjoy tilling the fields with the bunny huggers in 20 years time. I'm really going to enjoy taking the piss out the global warmists in 20 years time.

View from the Solent said...

I've yet to see a better explanation than this
http://remittanceman.blogspot.com/2008/02/mineral-reserves-and-resources-what.html?zx=1303705a63b6dd17

Michael Fowke said...

By the time the oil runs out, the human race will have developed a new technology of some kind. So I'm not worried.

Anonymous said...


That's fine for us if we take a short-term view, but it's a huge blow to those people who are behind us on the development curve.


Plenty of those are never going to catch up. Whatever we do. And I do mean we, they arent going to do it on their own - ever.

Jed Rothwell said...

You wrote: "Even if someone did find a way to make cold fusion a reality, we'd have to dick around with our infrastructure so much that it would cost us more than just carrying on with oil . . ."

That is incorrect. Cold fusion does not require an infrastructure. Worldwide energy production with cold fusion would consume 6,200 tons of heavy water, which can be installed in the motors and engines at the time of manufacture, and replaced every few years, similar to the way battery acid is put into cars. The average automobile would consume about 1 gram of fuel per year.

Cold fusion would require that automobile plants and other facilities be rebuild. They are rebuilt every 10 or 20 years anyway.

For more information on cold fusion, please see:

http://lenr-canr.org/

Waste Collection said...

Love clowns :)

Joe Public said...

Bill said:

"Or to put it another way 60 years ago any dumbass could drill a hole in the desert and oil came gushing out. With tar sands you have to strip mine the oily sand, then steam clean the oil out and put the clean sand back into the hole."

That's simply the reason we now pay more per barrel than 60 years ago.

"Known" reserves now, are about what they were 60 years ago.

Tomrat said...

2 things.

1. We have an efficient system of husbandry which is currently being fannied around with by all & sundry skewing results bug time: the price system.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process
We may run out of fuel, possibly; my guess is that there will come a point when other energy generation techniques are used to generate hydrocarbons (remember they are not explicitly used for combustion: drug synthesis, plastics, construction etc.) and a healthy medium will be found.

Lincolnshire Recycling said...

Don't worry guys Solar and wind power will take over the world, or if not nuclear.