Richard Heinberg: This is what the end of the oil age looks like

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      By Richard Heinberg

      Lately I’ve been reading the excellent coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill at TheOilDrum.com, a site frequented by veteran oil geologists and engineers. A couple of adages from the old-timers are worth quoting: “Cut corners all you want, but never downhole” and “There’s fast, there’s cheap, and there’s right, and you get to pick two.”


      Richard Heinberg discusses whether or not the public understands the reality of peak oil.

      There will be plenty of blame to go around as events leading up to the fatal rig explosion are sorted out. Even if efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed sooner rather than later, the damage to the Gulf of Mexico environment and to the economy of the region will be incalculable and will linger for years, if not decades.

      The deadly stench from oil-soaked marshes, as spring turns to hot, fetid summer, will by itself ruin tens or hundreds of thousands of lives and livelihoods. Then there’s the loss of the seafood industry: we’re talking about more than the crippling of the economic backbone of the region. Anyone who’s spent time in New Orleans (my wife’s family all live there) knows that the people and culture of southern Louisiana are literally as well as figuratively composed of digested crawfish, shrimp, and speckled trout. Given the historical political support from this part of the country for offshore drilling, and for the petroleum industry in general, this really amounts to sacrificing the faithful on the altar of oil.

      But the following should be an even clearer conclusion from all that has happened, and that is still unfolding: this is what the end of the oil age looks like. The cheap, easy petroleum is gone; from now on, we will pay steadily more and more for what we put in our gas tanks—more not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet.

      The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway as a result of resource depletion and economic, environmental, and military ruin: end our dependence on the stuff. Everybody knows we must do this. Even a recent American president (an oil man, it should be noted) admitted that “America is addicted to oil.”

      Will we let this addiction destroy us, or will we overcome it? Good intentions are not enough. Now is the moment for the president, other elected officials at all levels of government, and ordinary citizens to make this our central priority as a nation. We have hard choices to make, and an enormous amount of work to do.

      Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of several books, including Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. He maintains a personal Web site at RichardHeinberg.com.

      Comments

      12 Comments

      Benjamin Gorman

      May 25, 2010 at 7:52pm

      The question remains: how to penetrate the consumer-culture fog that envelopes American culture? With mass media hideously disfigured by the corporate spin docs, it's ironic how hard it is, in this electronic age, to get out a rational message-- such as the obvious fact: infinite growth in a finite world is impossible. Those in the know, such as Mr. Heinberg, must continue to proclaim from the rooftops-- ear by ear, eventually (and perhaps in time to avert the worst disasters) we can get the attention of the populace and turn this juggernaut around-- or at least onto a new, safer course.

      TransLink hears you ...

      May 25, 2010 at 9:03pm

      TransLink hears you and is ordering more diesel buses for its hydro-electric trolley buses routes right now! There's cheap, there's fast and then there's TransLink, the dumb and cheap!

      seth

      May 26, 2010 at 9:00am

      Actually there is a simple, easy, cheap solution to the entire energy/peak oil/ climate warming problem. The roadblock is our corrupt politicians bought and paid for by Big Oil making sure the gravy train keeps on rolling.

      We start by using the current surplus of natural gas for CNG auto fuel and NG derived methanol and dimethyl ether (propane). The latter would replace ethanol in current E85 flex fuel vehicles and diesel in trucks and locomotives.

      Our gas utility could easily sell natural gas vehicle fuel at your home delivery rate of 30 cents a liter equivalent instead of the ripoff 75 cents now available from the TBoone Pickens' "Clean Energy" operation which has purchased the Gordo and his cronies. Honest politicians - a very rare thing - in Utah have the public utility there selling CNG for 30 cents a liter equivalent and mass produced conversion and home fill kits would likely be under $2K installed in your average vehicle. Almost all of our gasoline/diesel usage would be eliminated saving hundreds of billions annually financing nuclear construction, auto gas, service station and home electric heat conversions.

      At the same time as the oil to NG conversion, we start wilh a conversion from coal and NG electricity and heating applications to mass produced nuclear power.

      The current cost of the enhanced Candu 6 is less than $2B/Gw and both AECL and Westinghouse are predicting less than half that for their new Gen 3+ units when production levels get into the scores.

      http://www.cnnc.com.cn/tabid/168/Default.aspx

      Candu's in China (Qinshan) are now running quite nicely burning nuclear waste from the light water reactors (American style) as fuel at a zero net cost.

      seth

      ScottieUBD

      May 26, 2010 at 10:18am

      I certainly hope you ride a bike to work

      US, IEA, peak oil and the transition

      May 26, 2010 at 12:23pm

      For those interested in political meddling related to the global energy supply here's a fascinating essay looking at the efforts of the US (and Canadian) government to limit the International Energy Agency in identifying a global oil production crisis and delay a transition to a low carbon future: http://www.peakoil.net/headline-news/how-the-global-oil-watchdog-failed-.... Dirty, dirty stuff. Just like oil.

      PS - I hope that the Straight is considering doing a cover story on this topic. The MSM is asleep at the switch and people need to know about this problem. It is going to affect all of us. Thanks!

      Travis Lupick

      May 26, 2010 at 1:40pm

      @US, IEA, peak oil and the transition,

      Actually, the <em>Straight</em> has covered peak oil and issues related to the decline of easily accessible oil for a long time.

      We published our first cover story on peak oil in October 2005, years before the concept began to be discussed in the mainstream media. That story was called <a href="http://www.straight.com/article/running-on-empty">Running on empty</a> and featured none other than Richard Heinberg, the author of this commentary.

      Since then, we've published dozens of articles discussing peak oil, including <a href="http://www.straight.com/article-116431/prof-says-politicians-blinkered-o... says politicians blinkered on peak oil</a> (November 2007), <a href="http://www.straight.com/article-141231/preparing-peak-oil">Preparing for peak oil</a> (April 2008), and, as I mentioned, many others.

      Shepsil

      May 26, 2010 at 8:43pm

      Peak Oil

      = Tar Sands - pollutes more water & air - land based oil spill.
      = Deep Sea - expensive rigs - (Gulf Coast) costly spills.
      = Ultra Deep Sea - more expensive rigs - more costly spills.
      = Arctic Drilling - expenses unknown (more than all others).
      = End of the Age of Oil, new infrastructure required?

      Best of luck!

      PS. Cost of oil at gas stations to go up, cost of oil at the well head may go down. Dirty &/or heavy (tar sands & Venezuela) oils cost much more to refine. Yes, refining costs are increasing.

      Rob

      May 27, 2010 at 11:10am

      Will we let this addiction destroy us, or will we overcome it?

      - I think it will destroy us. It's hard enough for an East Hastings junkie to kick the habit, but when an entire civilization acting as a parasitic swarm over the surface of the planet is addicted to oil there's no chance, in my view, of rational thinking imposing itself over this virus-like behavior.

      Small comfort can be drawn from the fact that no matter what we do, it is probably impossible that we will destroy all life - thus the Earth will regenerate itself (just as it did in previous mass extinction events) after we humans are done with our mess and killed ourselves off in the process.

      It may take a few thousand years, but that's nothing in the time scales of the Earth.

      What goes up must come down?

      May 27, 2010 at 1:13pm

      The question that keeps coming up in my head is how gov'ts will manage this in terms of what seems to have become our modus operandi: growth. There is roughly a 1:1 relationship between global oil supply expansion and GDP growth so as oil production peaks and then declines we are facing years of persistent economic decline (http://goo.gl/yqCx). The key will be how fast the supply declines. Can and will gov'ts turn on a dime and all of a sudden focus on another metric? France is currently exploring the the Happiness Index (http://goo.gl/9nIP) as an alternative to focusing on GDP but I can't see Stephen Harper and other market fundamentalists shifting in such a direction.

      Frankly

      May 29, 2010 at 2:20pm

      It's easy to point to the problems, but there are no solutions in the anti-everything movement.

      We cannot erase the oil economy overnight
      Wind and solar will not meet even half of our energy needs for another 50 years.
      The tar sands are less of a problem than underwater drilling.

      And the environmental movement is a corporate/libertarian plot to destroy the Canadian economy.