Oilout
Ever seen that word before? Maybe not, and maybe it won't catch on and you won't see it again. But as the world is rather rapidly running out of oil, maybe it will become familiar. It's a date, or rather, a series of dates. It's the day when you or your region or your country or the world can no longer get oil or afford any, whichever of the two comes first. For some of us, it is already here. The upside is, it does not, like Groundhog Day in that American movie, keep recurring. You get it once and mostly, that's it. No more oil. Ever.
For humanity to survive its own amazing success, we now need a good grasp of reality. That we clearly do not have, as a large part of the human race thinks the universe is controlled by supernatural sky beings, while the rest think they are deluded. Both sides can't be correct, one must be living in cloud-cuckoo land. Take your pick as to which one.
However, both sides should be able to register the simple fact that the world is running rapidly out of oil. When it does, unless we have made some very substantial changes to how we live beforehand, the result is going to be chaos. If the industrial system comes unstuck, it's back to square one, no doubt via a fair bit of the usual shooting, looting and bombing, and we may be a long time getting back to the Bronze Age. We have plenty of stones lying about on the surface, but believe me, I've been well paid to look for the stuff, all the high-grade copper ore is long gone. When we have used up the scrap, that will be that. You cannot mine 0.5 percent copper with a pick and everything richer has already been mined.
For 6 billion of us to survive, the big ships, trains and trucks have to run. At present, most of those run on oil. No good being despondent or planning to go hide in the bushes. We are in this together, so we better start changing things. Asap.
James Howard Kunstler, in Rolling Stone in 2005, wrote:
“It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.”
For “Americans,” I would substitute “First-worlders.”
Perhaps the world running out of oil is a new idea to you. Watching the petrol and diesel prices rise at the pumps, maybe you think it is merely because someone is speculating on oil stocks, or some government is being truculent or greedy, or some oil company is grabbing extra money, and that that prices will soon all go back down again. That is most probably not going to happen, and geology and oil field production history are why.
First, the geology. Oil in the ground is not that common. It formed mainly in two geological periods when the earth was very warm and small plants and animals thrived in shallow seas. You need porous rocks, an impervious cap, usually of shale, and trap structures, usually anticlines (domed folds) or sealed faults. Those combinations are not that common. Crystalline rocks do not hold oil, unless it leaked there. So, the deep ocean basins, floored with basalt, hold no oil - only the shallow continental shelves do. And the volcanic and granitic areas of the continents hold none either, except for leakage.
Why don’t we just go look in the right sediments till we find more? Market forces, supply and demand, all that? Push up the price and folk will go looking and simply find more and pump lower grade oil? Well, a very big, very rich and very competent industry has been out there searching for decades now, and has not found a major oilfield since the 1960's. The costs of exploration are considerable and the rewards for finding a big new field are vast. Lots of new fields have been found, but despite the popular press trumpeting each new one as the planet's savior, they have all turned out to be rather small. Production is declining in almost every major oilfield. And, mining oil is not like mining gold or copper. With metals, you make ever bigger mines and mine ever lower grade ores, using economies of scale and price rises to see you through. But with oil, it is either there or it is not, more or less. The exceptions are oil shales and tar sands. Those will help, certainly, but probably not enough.
Something else now cuts in. It used to be, they sank a production well, or a set of them, and straight off started pumping. Not now. They sink pressurization wells and pump up the whole field, or at least a whole lot of it, before they start up the first production well. Nothing wrong with that, time is big money in oil production, particularly on offshore fields, so the quicker you get the oil out the less it costs. Also, you get more oil out. But it happens a whole lot quicker, so your new field is gone pretty fast.
Hence oilout. It is inevitable.
If you have lived in or visited almost any city in the world recently, the numbers or cars and trucks and buses on the roads you've seen might have set you wondering. I live near Brisbane, a pretty obscure city in Australia. We probably have half a million oil burners on the roads every day. Sydney and Melbourne have far more. Add the smaller cities and towns. And that is just Australia, a backwater when it comes to oil consumption. All up, the world is using about 85 million barrels of oil a day (an oil barrel is 159 litres or 42 US gallons or 35 imperial gallons). How long can that go on, even if we give up being imperial?
At the absolute outside, the way we are going, a hundred years from now nobody will be driving an oil burner, except those with large aircraft carriers at their or their daddy's personal command. But long before that, you will have reached your personal or local or national oilout date. Embargoes are why.
There has been debate since the 1970's about peak oil, also a date, but not so useful to you or me. That is when the production from a well, an oilfield, a country or the world, will peak or has peaked. Important if you run an oil company or invest in oil shares, but not much use, if you just want to fill your tank to get to work or play. The problem is, the peak does not tell you when it will run out. The slope of the downside of the graph depends on a lot of things. For Texas, long past its peak, the tail of production has been long. They have lots of competent drillers and plenty of old gear and folk who are content to squeeze a few barrels out of old wells and make a living. In the North Sea, the seals are not interested, and they are the closest realtives to a Texas oil driller who feels at home there. So the production decline rate there is very rapid.
The world peak oil date is hotly debated. There seem to be two camps. They may both be wrong, but they do exist. The optimists, say we will reach the world peak oil in about 2022. The second lot say peak oil for this planet was reached in 2006. Under huge market demand and very high prices, world production declined slightly in 2007. It is too early to tell, but both the Saudis and Exxon-Mobil seem unable to raise production.
I am not writing this to spread gloom and despondency. The idea is to get folk thinking about what we can do and doing it. It is serious. If we do zip until oilout, it will not help you through to simply grow vegetables in your backyard, or move to the backwoods and live off berries. In both cases, you will be stomped flat in the rush. Also, to get through until what? till more oil forms in sedimentary rocks? Till Jesus Christ returns as the admiral of a fleet of cosmic supertankers? We need alternatives, and quicksmart.
Start small. When I saw the figures outlined above, I rang Neil across the creek, told him, and then asked if his very generous offer to give me all the lpg gas conversion gear on his old taxi still stood. He graciously said yes, and then helped me get it off the car. I have not installed it in mine yet, but at least it is here. But, lpg comes from oil also. Whether the system, modified, will cope with natural gas, of which we have a huge supply here in Queensland, I don’t yet know. One step at a time. This is the next one. I have been trying to get our state energy minister on the phone, which should not be a big deal, as he is our local parliamentarian, but no luck. The idea is to ask if we have plans in sleepy old Queensland to get ourselves a coal and gas-to-liquids plant, and if not, should we not, and pronto?. No response for a fortnight. Still, I will get there. Have to try practise the preaching. You too, may I suggest?
Contrary to what an august German think tank is presently telling the world, we do have a hell of a lot of coal. They claim that coal resources are being revised steadily downwards, but they are a bit short of coal exploration geologists. Stockmarkets, to prevent fraud, now require that you grid drill coalfields before you can claim reserves or resources, all very sensible. But on paper that disappears many a perfectly real coalfield that no-one has bothered to grid drill. Like the one third of Queensland, (at a rough estimate, based on desktop a study of old artesian bores that I once did), that is underlain by about ten stacked coal seams. So we need to learn to burn coal cleanly, if we mean not to be either gone (95% of us and our descendants) or hunter-gathers (the other 5%) by just after 2100.
We need to make a lot of serious changes now, to ensure that we are not left with a useless world transport fleet and no food. Most of our ships run on bunker oil. Most of our trucks and many of our trains run on diesel. Most of our cars run on petrol or diesel.
So behind oilout comes its ugly step-sister foodout, pretty rapidly. And foodout, if not sufficient to jerk you off the palnet unaided, almost always means war. As we are going, as someone watching this problem wrote recently, we are cheerfully commiting collective suicide.
What's to do? We all need to think hard, because this is unprecedented. We are supposed to be a thinking species, that is what the tumour on the end of the spimne is for. So all six billion of us better get to it. Solutions can come from anywhere, and a very great number of solutions and new systems are needed.
A ditty:
"The seagulls take the bread cleanly,
with no thought and no thanks for the giver.
But we dreamers, we are not seagulls,
and forams don't care for our river.
So finish the coffee, finish the beer,
wish all the fishes G'day.
Put the dreamtime back in the hamper.
and the head once again into gear."
In this essay, there are no graphs. Best to hunt down your own and then do your own estimates. If you like and can, Google "peak oil" and then follow your nose. Also try "Exxon and the implications of 8%”, for a sobering essay by Stuart Staniford, lots of comments and some graphs. And maybe also Google the 2005 essay quoted above, by James Kunstler, that he called “The Long Emergency. Some of that debate is now three years old, but reality has mostly got a bit harsher since. If you care to Google "publicfoodtrees," that will get you to my website, with another ramble on oilout and some ideas as to what to do about it.
Good luck all, and go for it your own way.
Peter Ravenscroft,
Closeburn, Queensland,
p.s.ravenscroft@gmail.com. if you care to email.
Oilout
With 2/3 of American oil still in the ground and more viable methods of recovery emerging we will not run out of oil for some time yet.There are also some promising results from recent exploration.The days of cheap oil are gone but oil wether animal vegetable or mineral will be around for a while yet.
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