Predicting an End to Oil . . . Again
Reuters featured a long article on author Richard Heinberg who has written a book guaranteed to attract attention — he’s the latest in a long line of folks predicting that this time the world really is about to run out of oil and all sorts of catastrophes will ensue.
According to Heinberg,
The party, which is the past 200 years of fossil fuels use, is coming to an end, and we have the choice as to how to bring that party to an end. Either we do it voluntarily or it will be thrust upon us.
Heinberg, of course, envisions industrial countries “run[ing] the movie of globalization in reverse” with some sort of ecotopia where urbanization declines, people buy their power from cooperatives that utilize solar power, and everyone abandons cars for bikes and walking. Ugh.
Heinberg, like others before him, insists that otherwise there will be a calamity. Remember, like the calamitous transition from coal to oil in the 19th century. Why do these environmental types always assume that transitioning away from oil will of necessity be calamitous? As Ron Minsk, an economist who worked for the Clinton administration, points out
(An alternative to oil) is presumably going to cost more, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be catastrophic and it doesn’t meant that the change is going to be abrupt, it could be a smooth transition.
In fact it will likely be a smooth transition. Despite Heinberg’s claims, oil is likely to persist at relatively low prices for the rest of this century. But there are numerous other efforts to find alternative fuel sources in progress. These will likely be adopted initially where they offer some sort of benefit to a specific application that oil or other traditional power generation methods lack. As mass production there gears up, the price will come down and the oil alternative will begin to gain ground where previously oil had an advantage.
This is already beginning to happen with fuel cells. Fuel cells aren’t close to being competitive with oil yet, but there are some applications where fuel cells have a clear advantage over other methods of providing power. For example, there are efforts to create a fuel cell laptop battery. What’s the advantage of using a fuel cell-based system? It could last about 10 times as long as a standard lithium ion battery before requiring recharging. Even if it’s more expensive, that’s a benefit that many people would be willing to pay for. And as such products lead to mark, inevitably new innovations and techniques in using the technology will appear that have application in other areas.
Finally, Heinberg uses a very misleading claim about oil exploration. Heinberg quotes geologist Colin Campbell as claiming that, “We now find one barrel of oil for every four we consume.”
But with oil today hovering at $26/barrel and only recently coming out of a period when the price of oil hit record lows, there’s not exactly a lot of incentive to invest heavily in oil exploration. That we consume more oil than we find at the moment says more about the current state of the world oil market than about how much oil is left in the ground waiting to be discovered.
Source:
The oil-consumption party is over, author warns. Reuters, May 13, 2003.
The Predicting an End to Oil . . . Again by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Tags: Uncategorized