Peak Oil and Climate Change

[Tom_Mazanec]

A Sense of Déjà Vu
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/

What we are facing instead, at some point in the next few years, is another brush with peak oil supply, and thus another spike in the price of petroleum.  If it happens while the Biden administration is in office, to judge by the response of Biden’s handlers to the latest round of economic wobbles, we can probably expect a reprise of the 1970s strategy of expanding the money supply, and thus another round of stagflation followed by sky-high interest rates. If it happens under the next president, that’ll depend on which of the available range of bad options appeals most to Number 47 and his or her inner circle. One way or another, we can certainly expect serious economic and political troubles. We can also expect renewable energy advocates to bring another flurry of poorly conceived energy projects to market, and the apocalypse lobby to rediscover its fondness for petroleum depletion and fill the internet with another round of proclamations of imminent doom.
A few years further down the road, in turn, some new source of liquid fuels will be brought online in response to the higher prices then availble, most of the renewable energy products will vanish from the market because they don’t make economic sense, and the apocalypse lobby will forget all about petroleum depletion again in its eagerness to embrace the latest and most fashionable reason why we will all surely be dead by next Thursday—no, seriously, this time for real!  Thereafter, only a handful of people will remember that petroleum is a finite resource, and they will of course once again be dismissed as cranks by all right-thinking people—until the next price spike hits.

I therefore expect the next decade of so of politics and culture in the United States to be twisted into strange shapes by the frantic efforts of the downwardly mobile to claw their way back up to positions of privilege that aren’t there any more. Politicians and pundits will doubtless come up with any number of ways to exploit those efforts. In the end, however, it’ll all be wasted breath, because the process of decline cannot be reversed.

[oren]

A sense of deja vu indeed. Energy apocalypse can't happen without renewables being a failure, and rating can't be high without energy apocalypse. What to do? Obviously, primary energy to the rescue - bloating the weight of fossil fuels and undercounting renewables - and ignoring what happened since 2018, thus hiding the ongoing changes and hopefully the inflection point of renewables indeed becoming cheaper.

First of all, as the chart above shows, petroleum consumption has been increasing far more quickly than renewable energy sources have been coming online.  This is one of the reasons why I remain distinctly suspicious of claims currently being flung around by green-energy advocates that solar and wind power have become the cheapest source of grid electricity. If they really were that cheap, utility companies—which are after all in business to make a profit—would be piling into them on their own nickel, replacing expensive natural gas plants right and left with solar and wind plants. Now in fact utility companies are expanding their solar and wind plants in a much more cautious way, and by and large seem to be doing so only to the extent that government mandates or subsidies push them into doing so, so it’s pretty clear that the rosy figures being brandished by green-energy advocates have about as much in common with reality as does any other kind of glossy advertising.

[oren]

Another way at looking at the data, focusing just on electricity as the quoted claim has to do with grid electricity and utility companies, using the same source (BP) and advancing another year in the chart.

Share of global electricity generation by fuel (percentage)

If they really were that cheap, utility companies—which are after all in business to make a profit—would be piling into them on their own nickel, replacing expensive natural gas plants right and left with solar and wind plants.

Well it seems utilities are indeed "piling into" renewables, replacing coal (and oil) for now though. It seems pretty certain looking at this data that a renewable revolution is indeed undergoing.

[interstitial]

us electricity - petroleum is about 2 twh a month not really significant here.

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renewable energy does not compete directly with oil until a significant portion of the population drive electric vehicles.
Mostly renewable energy competes for electricity production. In the US in 2020 solar added 15 gw wind added 14 gw NG added 6 gw and coal closed 11 gw. This growth in renewables occurred under a president who was pro coal and anti wind. Utilities bought 83% renewable generation and only 17% natural gas. So clearly renewable generation is competitive. The only reason any natural gas is built is batteries are too expensive right now. Battery prices are falling as utilities start to build gw sized battery projects.


As you can see from generation wind barely registered before 2005 and solar barely registered before 2014. Before that were only token projects. Solar is the cheapest form of energy out there. DOE has launched a program to decrease solar costs an additional 60% in ten years. DOE has been successful with similar programs in the past.

[trm1958]

Is The Earth Actually Running Out Of Oil? | The Struggle For Oil | Spark

Recently the Colonial Pipeline in Texas was hacked by cyber-criminals that shutdown fuel and gasoline supplies in America. Oil is precious commodity that is essential to human society but as the planet looks towards ecological alternatives, how in danger are we are running out of oil before it's too late?

[etienne]

If somebody is looking for info about peak oil, the best book I know is
Oil, Power, and War
A Dark History
By Matthieu Auzanneau

Wether oil is "renewable" (anabiotic or biological origin), it is probably both, is the wrong question, because any ressource that is consumed faster than the production rate is non renewable, this is also valid for wood.

Peak oil won't save us of climate change. The problem is coal. There is some common agreement that conventional oil peaked around 2005 and is at the origin of the very high prices we had for a few years. Well I attached the world coal production graph I found on Wikipedia, we just switched from oil to coal for our growth. Maybe this is also the dark side of EV in China (and why not in Europe, we also have more coal than oil).

Added: if we really have anabiotic oil on earth, quantities must be very small because no anabiotic oil field has ever been found. In the film, they talk of "traces of oil".

[etienne]

The world natural gas production graph is also interesting.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_gas_production_by_region,_OWID.svg

[Zeug Gezeugt]

There is some common agreement that conventional oil peaked around 2005 and is at the origin of the very high prices we had for a few years.

Yes, depending on how you measure it conventional oil apparently peaked globally 2005 while conventional and condensate peaked 2008/9. US shale oil plays paid for by their QE easy credit then accounted for ~90% IIRC of the increase in global production vs decline over the last decade. However, all liquids last peak was in 2018 falling over 2 million barrels a day before the COVID crisis destroyed demand.

It’s been over 3+ years now and there’s a bit of chatter on peak oil forums that if US shale oil can’t ramp back up, which is definitely possible given the geology, and the rest of the world extraction remains flat (Saudis) or declining (pretty much everyone else) then the fabled global peak in oil extraction is perhaps upon us. As always, it’s a rear view mirror peak.

Either way, EROI is still declining with the increasing share of unconventional oil, discoveries are way below replacement, and the only way forward is renewables and nuclear … plus coal and gas!

But peak is just peak, with a more or less rapid decline after that, but that’s ‘rapid’ in relation to the century of oil extraction that led us here. I think the big problem is how to replace diesel for all the heavy machinery that does most of our agricultural, shipping, mining, industrial and bulk transport work. Hopefully we have a couple of decades to sort that out while helping the global south not burn through the approx 1000GT of coal left in the ground while the climate and ecological crises accelerate.

And yes, I’ve always thought, at least for the last 30 yrs, that the sooner peak oil happens and forces humanity into renegotiating it’s non-fossil fuelled contract with the biosphere that sustains all life on the planet … the better.

[trm1958]

North Sea and Norway gone by 2032, most or all fields gone by 2040.
Maybe Peak Oil will save us after all?

Global Oil Depletion | Alister Hamilton
12,055 views  Apr 3, 2024

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[size=0px]North Sea and Norway gone by 2032, most or all fields gone by 2040.[/size][/size][size=0px]Maybe Peak Oil will save us after all?Global Oil Depletion | Alister Hamilton12,055 views  Apr 3, 2024


What an absolutely horrible interview. He was just about to explain how he came to the conclusions he did and she cut him off and redirected him to his conclusion. Without at least a general explanation of what he was looking at how can decide if his premise is reasonable? What I got was he is trying to determine how much energy is used to extract oil based on well temperatures. That does not even began to make sense. If you correct for other things it might get you an estimate of work done but that is not as critical as just determining what your actual real life energy inputs are. If he is claiming which it sounds like he is it takes a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. That is certainly not true. First you would need massive energy inputs to if it were. The total amount of renewable energy available globally is nowhere close to the amount of energy we get from oil. Very little renewable energy is used to extract let alone process and deliver oil to markets. The projects out there are token amounts not significant to the total energy expended.


I expect that the amount of energy expended to extract process and deliver oil is increasing for each barrel of oil generally but it is simply not possible for it to be anywhere near one to one globally even if you consider some of the energy inputs come from natural gas and renewables. [/size]

[etienne]

North Sea and Norway gone by 2032, most or all fields gone by 2040.
Maybe Peak Oil will save us after all?

It could be true if oil was the only fossil fuel. But if you look at the data regarding coal, you see a totally different picture.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-total-coal-production-1971-2020
You clearly see that coal production increased around the year 2000, when the oil market became tighter.
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart
And in the US, a lot of coal is replaced by natural gas, probably as long as gas is available. It's not a no return move.
I have long been convinced that a lot of the climate change policies were peak oil policies, because politicians didn't want (still don't want) to talk about peak oil, which was seen as a bigger threat for our consumption habits than climate change.

Sorry I didn't watch the video. I would say too long for my age.

Added : just found this article https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/11/worlds-coal-power-capacity-rises-despite-climate-warnings