The End of Oil is Coming Fast

One leg of the race of the catastrophes

A reader recently sent me this article, which deals with the coming end of the age of oil. I became familiar with Peak Oil theory in 2003, immediately after reading some of Bucky Fuller’s work. Fuller said that if oil was priced at the benefit that humanity derived from it, it would cost $1 million per barrel. When Winston Churchill converted the British navy from coal to oil in 1911, the Middle’s East’s fate was sealed. Several years later, the British and French conspired to tear apart the Ottoman Empire, where all the oil was, and turn it into puppet nations. Everything that the West has done in that region ever since has always had oil as its top priority. Everything else is noise, as Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize.

I want to discuss some of the data that that article referred to, beginning with this one, on oil production. When M. King Hubbert made his prediction on Peak Oil in the USA, he was referring to what is called conventional oil today, and he nailed it, as it peaked in 1970, just as he predicted. But if you look at that graph in that article, you see that the USA is the greatest oil-producer on Earth. But that has little to do with Hubbert’s accurate prediction. The spike in the USA’s production, which began in 2008, is not in conventional oil, but is because of the fracking boom. Fracked oil is not conventional oil, and is best seen as the dregs of the USA’s oil deposits. It is like vacuuming up the last drops in the bottom of the barrel and its sides. The fracking boom was only possible with the Federal Reserve’s low-interest-rate policies, which began in 2008 during the financial crisis. Cheap money fueled the effort to mine the dregs of the USA’s oil deposits. That boom will run out soon.

The article that I led this post with was not too bad on the realities of what mining the dregs are. Another concept that can make it easier understand is called “Energy Return on Investment” (“EROI”). A century ago in East Texas, for every barrel of oil invested in oil wells, 100 barrels of oil were extracted, for an EROI of 100. By 1970, when Peak Oil was reached, the EROI had fallen to around 30. Fracked oil has an EROI of about seven and Canada’s tar sands of about four (see this article by one of the inventors of the EROI idea). What that means in practice is that as the easy oil is gone, the rest is harder to extract, which takes more energy and effort to obtain. EROI is plummeting globally, which is what sucking at the dregs looks like. Here is another article that that initial article referred to, which shows that there are 1.5 trillion barrels to be mined, but it includes the dregs, such as the USA’s shale oil and Canada’s tar sands. So, these statistics have strayed far past Hubbert’s original definition of peak oil. Hubbert’s peak happened globally in 2005. In 2016, the world consumed 35 billion barrels of oil per year, and this running statistic shows less than 50 years of oil left, including the dregs. The inventors of the EROI concept thought that societies with EROIs of less than ten were not viable. We are fast approaching it.

I wrote some on the abiotic oil idea, which is widely considered to be a failed theory, once the rise of plate-tectonic theory rose in the 1960s (and even if valid, won’t help us in this century). I have seen right wingers embrace abiotic oil theory while simultaneously dismissing Global Warming as some kind of elite hoax. Neither position has anything to do with carefully considered evidence, but is because those theories align with their self-interest, so that they can believe that their actions have no consequences: we can burn oil forever with no environmental impact. It is hard to get more deluded than that.

The fact is that burning hydrocarbons raises the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide content, which makes the atmosphere warmer. It is really simple. Do we run out of oil before we turn Earth into a sauna? This is part of the race of the catastrophes. Do we have World War III over the remaining oil? The West has perpetrated serial oil-control genocides already. As Brian O’Leary said, all of the conventional alternatives are too little and too late.

This is one of several ways in which we have our toes over the edge of the abyss. I know a way out of all of our existential risks, but I can’t do it alone.