The peak oil crowd may be headed for the same fate as the dinosaurs:
Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming.
What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong?
As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable “shale gas” or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.
Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.
The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable “tight oil,” thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum.
June 1st, 2011 | 9:32 am
Natural gas isn’t a renewable energy source, but it’s at least an alternative energy source. The peak-oil crowd is not saying that it has to be renewable energy (although that would be nice), but things cannot continue as is. The days of getting gas in the USA for $1.50 a gallon are gone.
June 1st, 2011 | 10:15 am
Peak-oil refers to global production rates, not to remaining reserves. That is to say, peak oil is the point at which the total daily production rate of oil maxes out and enters permanent decline.
At the point of peak oil, there’s still plenty of oil left to extract. For example, the U.S. reached peak oil production in the early 1970′s. We’re still extracting oil in the U.S. to this day, just not at rates close to what we had in the ’60′s and ’70′s.
I certainly hope that the time of “peak fossil fuels” is very far in our future. But the main question that this article doesn’t answer concerns not the possibility of NG recovery through fracking, but the efficiency of that recovery. The ultimate question is one of energy return on energy investment, or EROEI. That is, how much energy does it take to extract 1 unit of natural gas, versus how much energy that 1 unit is capable of producing?
According to the figures I’ve seen, at the beginning of the oil industry the EROEI on oil was about 50:1. Nowadays, it’s more like 5:1. I would think that production of NG and unconventional oil reserves through fracking probably has a lower EROEI than this.
That doesn’t mean it’s useless. It can certainly be a useful method of energy extraction. Technological advances can raise EROEI by making extraction more efficient, and advances in consumption technology (like higher-MPG vehicles) can make each unit of energy use more economically beneficial.
But I have serious doubts that better NG/oil extraction alone will make renewable energy unnecessary for the next couple of hundred years, especially given current rates of global economic growth. For that, we’ll need a lot more nuclear power.
June 1st, 2011 | 10:29 am
@Jeremy: Things never continue as is. Change is a constant. But what change should we be pursuing? That is a different question. A key point the article makes is that solar insolation and wind power cannot increase in availability. They are limited as well, if in a different direction.
As to prices, welcome to inflation. I remember gas at 25 cents a gallon.
June 1st, 2011 | 10:58 am
The problem with the peak oil crowd is that they have a track record in making predictions as to the future of oil and gas production. That track record is 100% wrong. It makes perfect sense that fossil fuels are a finite resource and that renewable resources should be pursued. But the over-hyped hysterical doomsaying of much of the environmental movement undermines their own credibility. Fossil fuel use isn’t going away anytime soon and will increase for the foreseeable future. That is just a fact.
June 1st, 2011 | 11:16 am
I never took Michael Lind for a reasonable “progressive.” Guess (at least in this regard, at least) I was wrong.
June 1st, 2011 | 1:55 pm
“According to the figures I’ve seen, at the beginning of the oil industry the EROEI on oil was about 50:1. Nowadays, it’s more like 5:1. I would think that production of NG and unconventional oil reserves through fracking probably has a lower EROEI than this.”
Much lower. There are other very significant drawbacks to the fracking process.
Hydrofracking is not the magic bullet. It has its role
June 1st, 2011 | 2:03 pm
“The problem with the peak oil crowd is that they have a track record in making predictions as to the future of oil and gas production. That track record is 100% wrong.”
I don’t think that’s true. I recall hearing that the mid-23rd century is the drop-dead point for hydrocarbon fuels. I know we haven’t reached that century yet.
American energy business is a product of its culture: short attention span, play for immediate gratification–they are the classic Aesop grasshoppers. They bleed the economy of jobs, then send desperate people to blow up shale for a trickle. And of course they don’t want competition.
It makes political sense for the US to run away from oil as fast as it can. Plan and research now. Be golden in a century. Thanks to Republican adventurism in southwest Asia, we’ve already handed a tarnished economic legacy to our non-wealthy children. Why not put something in the bank for them?
June 1st, 2011 | 3:30 pm
Fossil fuels are of great importance because they can be burned (oxidized to carbon dioxide and water), producing significant amounts of energy per unit weight.The invention of the internal combustion engine and its use in automobiles and trucks greatly increased the demand for gasoline and diesel oil, both made from fossil fuels.so, all we need is find something new to replace fossil fuels, like solar cells.
June 1st, 2011 | 4:05 pm
Todd,
“I recall hearing”…wow, what precision. Every time the peak oil crowd has predicted a decline in available oil and gas reserves they have been wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
June 1st, 2011 | 6:57 pm
@Steve Billingsley:
Citations? “Every time…” is, I guess, more precise, but I want to know how accurate.
June 1st, 2011 | 10:30 pm
““I recall hearing”…wow, what precision.”
This is a blog, not a paper. It’s not any more or less precise than “Every time the peak oil crowd …” Every time? Every one? Really? Do you have several hundred links to back that up, or are we just talking about your liberal sister-in-law here?
I think it was in Scientific American or something in the late 70′s. It charted the end-dates for things like gold, silver, coal, oil, and such given current rates of consumption.
I’ve never seen any prediction of the end of fossil fuels before the 2200′s.
June 2nd, 2011 | 7:10 pm
I have a friend who says frakking is the the worst thing ever and will destroy the world.
June 3rd, 2011 | 9:54 pm
Regardless of the time-frame within which oil production will ‘peak’, the fact remains that fossil fuels, having been generated only during one of Earth’s periods (the Carboniferous) WILL eventually be depleted to the point at which it will no longer be affordable to most.
‘Non-renewable’ (a tag that is often attached to fossil fuels) means exactly that – once it’s gone, it will be gone forever, and the sooner viable alternatives are found (ex. nuclear) the better. Any discussion about switching to natural gas will, at best, merely delay the inevitable. The author of this article is grasping at straws.
June 4th, 2011 | 11:42 am
We will NEVER run out of fossil fuel. At some point, it will eventually become really expensive, when the energy required to extract that last drop of oil exceeds the energy we get from burning it. But by that point, we will have long since switched to a cheaper alternative. When hydrocarbons reach that point of depletion, we’ll hardly care because we’ll be using something else. Up until now and for the next several decades, there hasn’t been a strong enough incentive to switch. Yes, we should regulate how cleanly we burn the stuff, but it is not short sighted to keep on using fossil fuels. It’s just the sensible thing to do, scientifically and economically, and I argue it’s the ethical thing to do because it helps people rise out of material poverty.
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