Fairly balanced, though I'm a little disappointed with this part:
"It's fear mongering, sensationalist crap," said Fadel Gheit, a senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer.
Gheit says there's plenty of oil out there, it just needs to get to a price where it's profitable to extract.
"We have so far consumed one trillion barrels" in all of history, he said, pointing to a 2000 study from the U.S. Geological Survey that made predictions based on rising prices, technology advances and assumed new discoveries based on past finds. "There are three trillion more to go."
The three trillion estimate includes things like tar sand and oil shale, which aren't oil at all, and which require vast amounts of energy and effort to produce. Obviously we aren't going to yield as much energy from them as we get from the easy to get oil we used up. It's that EROEI thing again. That earliest oil in the 1800's was giving us 100 units of energy for every 1 unit used to extract it. Today we're getting around 30 units for each unit we put in. Up there in Canada they aren't pumping out the crude any more. No, they are removing vast tracts of ancient forest so they can strip mine a combination of clay, sand, water, and bitumen, a heavy black viscous oil. They haul it in enormous trucks and then use vast quantities of water (2 to 4 barrels of water per barrel of bitumen) and natural gas (1000 cubic feet per barrel) to get the bitumen out so it can be processed. It takes the energy equivalent of 2 barrels of oil to get 3 out. That's a return of 1.5 units for 1 unit invested. If you are generous you could call it 2. Either way, it's a far cry from 30. Better extraction technology might even result in a 100% increase in efficiency of production, getting you up to 4 or even 5 to 1. You're still going to have to use 6 barrels of tar sand oil to get the same net energy as contained in one barrel of conventional oil. How's that 3 trillion barrels looking now?
Consider that it took a bit less than 200 years to consume that first trillion barrels, with an average energy return of maybe 50 to 1. Consider that for the first 100 years of that time we used a relatively small quantity of that oil. The rate of use is growing, which means that the consumption curve is exponential. While it may have taken 150 years to use the first trillion, we are currently using 85 million barrels per day. At that rate it would only take 30 yes for the next trillion, assuming that it provides the same energy per barrel, and that we stop increasing the rate of consumption. Of course, both of those assumptions are wrong.
Since we are after energy, not barrels, and each barrel nets us less energy, we will have to consume many more barrels to get the same quantity of energy. So, assuming that there really are 3 trillion more barrels of recoverable oil out there, and that they net us a very generous average EROEI of 7 to 1 (remember, tar sands are currently close to 1.5:1 and we cannot yet extract shale oil for a net energy gain), we would need 4 barrels to match the net energy in one barrel of conventional crude. So instead of 85 million barrels of oil you're talking about 340 million barrels per day energy equivalent. That's about 24 years to burn through all 3 trillion barrels.
Now obviously I'm talking energy equivalent here, you can use a variety of energy sources to produce tar sands for example, geothermal, nuclear, maybe methane hydrate if we can figure out how to mine it. The point is that we're getting less for our effort, but we're still growing the rate at which we consume it. It is easy to see that within our lifetimes we are going to see some pretty serious limitations to the quantities of this resource that are available.
If you take a look around you can see that nearly everything we have is built on the availability of cheap oil. Sure, a good number of these things we could do with other energy sources too, though not as cheaply, and therefore not as often. But do you see an infrastructure for doing those things with those other energy sources? It doesn't exist. The boat we are in is made of oil. We could make it out of something else, but we have not done so, and we don't know all the necessary details to do so. It would take a lot of time to learn how and even more time to build the boat. If the oil disappears and leaves us bobbing around in the sea we won't have the tools to build a new boat, even if we know it is possible.
That's the main problem, we have an idea of what needs to be done, but we don't know how to do it, and the window of opportunity during which we have the technological, economic and social capacity to do it is rapidly coming to an end.
It'll be an interesting ride, at least you'll have an idea of why it is happening.
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