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> “We may well be at that critical point in history where people will say that this is the point where the oil industry reached its peak and began to decline.”

> “We may well be at that critical point in history where people will say that this is the point where the oil industry reached its peak and began to decline.” No article about the industry is complete without a reference to "peak oil". Do people realize there's a much harder problem to solve than alternative sources of energy? Namely: How do we make all the other compounds essential to modern life which currently originate in an oil well? We won't be able to quit oil for a long fucking time.

nerdponx 9y ago
Wait, isn't "peak oil" about running out of oil reserves? Or am I getting my hyperbolic predictions confused?
- jacquesm 9y ago
  It's about the halfway mark where half of all the fossil oil that will (presumably) ever be produced has been produced. The problem is that as the oil price goes up oil that was not economically viable in the past suddenly becomes viable and so peak oil will shift a little bit into the future. Eventually it will run out though, it is a finite resource after all.
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    I don't think 'peak' implies half, just that it won't be any higher again. One side of a mountain peak can have a shorter approach than another can't it?
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Right, you are correct.
  - Someone 9y ago
    Not necessarily the halfway mark. Peak oil is about the point where oil production (weird word for moving it from below ground to above ground, but part of it is refining) is largest. We would be fortunate if that ends up being near the half way mark, as that would likely mean that production wouldn't fall abruptly. Also: I hope we will never run out of oil. Ideally, alternative energy will get so cheap that it will become uneconomic to get out the last x%.
- HCIdivision17 9y ago
  It's the barrier point that we can't haul it out of the ground as fast as demand requires. It's sort of like how people were concerned we were going to hit peak food: we very well could, but we need a lot more people to hit that point. There is also a finite amount of oil in the ground. It's stupendously useful and rich in chemistry. We still don't know where all the reserves are, and there is a lot of oil still in the ground. But that oil comes at a cost: inconvenient, excessively deep, politically untenable. But we'll be able to get oil for a long time (just at ever increasing costs).
- fnordfnordfnord 9y ago
  It's running out of oil reserves that are easy to get at. There will always be more oil, but some portion of it will always cost more to extract than it is worth.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    Technology changes that point, though. Much of the oil we're pulling out today in the US was considered too expensive to be worth the extraction costs just a few decades ago.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      There's energy-cost in vs. energy-cost out. Put another way, you can, for a crude estimate, divide national GDP by petroleum consumption to arrive at the net economic gain per barrel of oil consumed. In the U.S., that's about $1,000. For India and China, it was about $400 - $500 as of a couple-three years ago. For much of Europe, about $1,500, peaking with Switzerland at about $3,000/bbl. Put another way, figure what you spend to get a barrel of oil, and subtract that from what you gain by it. Or divide to get a multiplier. At $10/bbl cost and $1000/bbl value, the US gains $100 for each dollar spent on petroleum. At $100/bbl cost, that falls to $10 per dollar. For countries with lower value per barrel, those gains are even smaller. A couple of other perspectives: * In India and China, there are low-value activities enabled by energy usage which would be driven out by higher energy costs. * There is the question of total net energy. It's one thing to say "but we've got $10/bbl oil". But if there are only, say, 10 billion barrels/year of $10/bbl oil, vs. the 35 billion barrels consumed annually, well, that's 25 billion barrels/year you've either forgone or need to substitute by other means. And our substitutes for petroleum, most especially in transport, are exceedingly limited. * There's substitutability, generally. Passenger vehicle traffic may be electrifiable. Transit and cargo freight as well. Marine freight not so much, and commercial air travel almost certainly not at all. Options for alternative liquid fuels are at best highly problematic. Some exacerbate current problems, most create new ones. But answering your point: what's changed isn't the amount of fuel, or the benefit gained per use. Rather, market price has climbed (and fallen, and climbed, but that's another story, unless you owe or hold loans based on market price assumptions...) to the point that previously noneconomic reserves are now economically viable. The limit of energetically viable deposits is, however, a hard cap, and barring some massive developments in technology, are unlikely. There's that little emissions problem as well. Hydrofracking is a technology which was first developed in the 1940s and 1950s. It wasn't used until the past decade simply because it wasn't necessary or viable. And while there've been some select specific technological improvements in application, the fundamental concept is as it was first conceived.
- Mz 9y ago
  Peak oil is about the fact that after you remove half or so of the oil from a particular oil well, removing what is left gets very expensive. We aren't running out of oil, but we are unlikely to ever again see oil that is as cheap as it once was. We are running out of cheap oil, and that is game changing. Most reserves have already hit or passed that point. Most oil today is more expensive than it was, say, in the 70s because you have to inject water to force it to the surface and things like that. Just digging a hole and watching it gush skyward from internal pressure is a thing of the past, basically.
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
Are there any industrial feedstocks that aren't easily generated with the same processes (e.g. pyrolitic cracking) on natural products (e.g. heavy plant resins/oils) instead of crude oil/coal?
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  Lego plans to transition entirely to plant-based plastics by 2030 - they've spent $150 million on a new sustainable materials research center, and will employ 100 people to work on the problem. Add onto that a similar R&D effort among their suppliers, it hardly qualifies as "easily".
maxerickson 9y ago
Plants. Or given sufficient energy just rip the atoms out of the atmosphere.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Both cases mean much more expensive plastics.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I took the question to be existential rather than economic.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      Everything becomes an economic problem. Having water in the middle of the desert is existential, but making sure you have it is based on economics.
r00fus 9y ago
Bioplastics have existed for decades and can now be feasible for most plastic usages. On another note, many things are plastic that should instead be glass, hemp, or other material.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  'Bioplastics exist but are way more expensive to make on large scale than regular oil based plastics. How about fertilizers too ?
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Nitrogen fertilizers are already made from hydrogen from natural gas and air. So that can be replaced with electrolysis (of course that requires greater energy inputs, but not to such an extent that civilization will hinge upon it).
    - gozur88 9y ago
      Yes, if you have practically free energy you can make hydrocarbons and everything you make with hydrocarbons. But the numbers are so large that's really only going to be possible with fusion, so we're talking generations from now.
the8472 9y ago
Chemical feedstock is a much smaller fraction compared to heating and transportation. And they might not even release carbon into the atmosphere. Plastics for example don't release their carbon for a long time.
api 9y ago
Petrochemicals and plastics are only a small fraction of oil demand. The vast majority is used as fuel. So no, we won't totally eliminate the need for oil for a long time. We also won't totally run out of oil for a very, very long time. But we can eliminate the need for 50-75% of current oil demand in this century, possibly the first half of this century.
bsder 9y ago
> We won't be able to quit oil for a long fucking time. That's true. But if you remove transportation as a consumer of oil, suddenly our oil stocks will for more than 3x the amount of time. http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/ http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/ Once you remove transportation from the mix, the affected industries have a lot more time to move themselves from petroleum as a feedstock.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
azernik 9y ago
Peak Oil is not about quitting oil entirely; it's the point at which oil extraction stops rising and begins to decline. Yes, there will probably always be a place for oil as a source for chemicals, but without its use as a fuel that becomes a much smaller market.
- gozur88 9y ago
  It's axiomatic for a nonrenewable resource you're going to have a point in time in which you're extracting the most of that resource. But then there's "Peak Oil" as an apocalyptic theory with imploding economies and starving billions. That's just... not going to happen.
  - dbcurtis 9y ago
    Do you actually think the transition to non-fossil fuels will be painless? Or do you think it won't be necessary? I'd like to see your math on how you plan to feed all the planet's people and give all the newly wealthy Chinese the cars they will want. Economic pain is a distinct possibility.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      Giving people all the cars they want and feeding the planet are two different subjects. Yes, I expect over time we'll all be a bit less wealthy than we would have been if our supply of oil was endless. But I do not believe the price of oil is suddenly going to shoot up to some astronomical value overnight and cause mass die-offs, which is something you hear every time the price of oil goes up a bit.
pavement 9y ago
Plastics are pretty bad for the world, and not so much impossible to replace, as much as they are plentiful cruft that's merely incidentally practical. Synthesizing organic compounds sounds pretty reasonable given our modern advanced awareness of chemistry, the liklihood that we'll be able to use renewable energy to offset the overhead of synthesis. Just so long as we don't write checks on these kinds of ideas before we can actually cash them.
yongjik 9y ago
Another way to look at it is that we have cheaply accessible, ready-made source of hydrocarbon compounds buried in the earth. And we dig it up and burn it off. It's basically the same shortsightedness that led us into hunting whales to (near-)extinction for lamp oils. At least less animal cruelty is involved, I hope.
- samstave 9y ago
  +1 Also, planned Obsolescence should be illegal - or at least thought of, socially, as immoral. The thing is, that the need for replacing vast majority of things that you use regularly do to the disposable nature of profit-only-driven markets is typically built around supporting components in a product which are made out of plastic - but the useful aspect of the item can often be a re-usable material. Take Razors as a prime example... Overall plastic is bad, regardless of the ephemeral convenience it currently provides - i has stifled innovation, its short-sighted and its detrimental effects will last for generations...

nerdponx 9y ago

Wait, isn't "peak oil" about running out of oil reserves? Or am I getting my hyperbolic predictions confused?

jacquesm 9y ago
It's about the halfway mark where half of all the fossil oil that will (presumably) ever be produced has been produced. The problem is that as the oil price goes up oil that was not economically viable in the past suddenly becomes viable and so peak oil will shift a little bit into the future. Eventually it will run out though, it is a finite resource after all.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  I don't think 'peak' implies half, just that it won't be any higher again. One side of a mountain peak can have a shorter approach than another can't it?
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Right, you are correct.
- Someone 9y ago
  Not necessarily the halfway mark. Peak oil is about the point where oil production (weird word for moving it from below ground to above ground, but part of it is refining) is largest. We would be fortunate if that ends up being near the half way mark, as that would likely mean that production wouldn't fall abruptly. Also: I hope we will never run out of oil. Ideally, alternative energy will get so cheap that it will become uneconomic to get out the last x%.
HCIdivision17 9y ago
It's the barrier point that we can't haul it out of the ground as fast as demand requires. It's sort of like how people were concerned we were going to hit peak food: we very well could, but we need a lot more people to hit that point. There is also a finite amount of oil in the ground. It's stupendously useful and rich in chemistry. We still don't know where all the reserves are, and there is a lot of oil still in the ground. But that oil comes at a cost: inconvenient, excessively deep, politically untenable. But we'll be able to get oil for a long time (just at ever increasing costs).
fnordfnordfnord 9y ago
It's running out of oil reserves that are easy to get at. There will always be more oil, but some portion of it will always cost more to extract than it is worth.
- gozur88 9y ago
  Technology changes that point, though. Much of the oil we're pulling out today in the US was considered too expensive to be worth the extraction costs just a few decades ago.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    There's energy-cost in vs. energy-cost out. Put another way, you can, for a crude estimate, divide national GDP by petroleum consumption to arrive at the net economic gain per barrel of oil consumed. In the U.S., that's about $1,000. For India and China, it was about $400 - $500 as of a couple-three years ago. For much of Europe, about $1,500, peaking with Switzerland at about $3,000/bbl. Put another way, figure what you spend to get a barrel of oil, and subtract that from what you gain by it. Or divide to get a multiplier. At $10/bbl cost and $1000/bbl value, the US gains $100 for each dollar spent on petroleum. At $100/bbl cost, that falls to $10 per dollar. For countries with lower value per barrel, those gains are even smaller. A couple of other perspectives: * In India and China, there are low-value activities enabled by energy usage which would be driven out by higher energy costs. * There is the question of total net energy. It's one thing to say "but we've got $10/bbl oil". But if there are only, say, 10 billion barrels/year of $10/bbl oil, vs. the 35 billion barrels consumed annually, well, that's 25 billion barrels/year you've either forgone or need to substitute by other means. And our substitutes for petroleum, most especially in transport, are exceedingly limited. * There's substitutability, generally. Passenger vehicle traffic may be electrifiable. Transit and cargo freight as well. Marine freight not so much, and commercial air travel almost certainly not at all. Options for alternative liquid fuels are at best highly problematic. Some exacerbate current problems, most create new ones. But answering your point: what's changed isn't the amount of fuel, or the benefit gained per use. Rather, market price has climbed (and fallen, and climbed, but that's another story, unless you owe or hold loans based on market price assumptions...) to the point that previously noneconomic reserves are now economically viable. The limit of energetically viable deposits is, however, a hard cap, and barring some massive developments in technology, are unlikely. There's that little emissions problem as well. Hydrofracking is a technology which was first developed in the 1940s and 1950s. It wasn't used until the past decade simply because it wasn't necessary or viable. And while there've been some select specific technological improvements in application, the fundamental concept is as it was first conceived.
Mz 9y ago
Peak oil is about the fact that after you remove half or so of the oil from a particular oil well, removing what is left gets very expensive. We aren't running out of oil, but we are unlikely to ever again see oil that is as cheap as it once was. We are running out of cheap oil, and that is game changing. Most reserves have already hit or passed that point. Most oil today is more expensive than it was, say, in the 70s because you have to inject water to force it to the surface and things like that. Just digging a hole and watching it gush skyward from internal pressure is a thing of the past, basically.

xkcd-sucks 9y ago

Are there any industrial feedstocks that aren't easily generated with the same processes (e.g. pyrolitic cracking) on natural products (e.g. heavy plant resins/oils) instead of crude oil/coal?

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
Lego plans to transition entirely to plant-based plastics by 2030 - they've spent $150 million on a new sustainable materials research center, and will employ 100 people to work on the problem. Add onto that a similar R&D effort among their suppliers, it hardly qualifies as "easily".

maxerickson 9y ago

Plants. Or given sufficient energy just rip the atoms out of the atmosphere.

ekianjo 9y ago
Both cases mean much more expensive plastics.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  I took the question to be existential rather than economic.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    Everything becomes an economic problem. Having water in the middle of the desert is existential, but making sure you have it is based on economics.

r00fus 9y ago

Bioplastics have existed for decades and can now be feasible for most plastic usages. On another note, many things are plastic that should instead be glass, hemp, or other material.

ekianjo 9y ago
'Bioplastics exist but are way more expensive to make on large scale than regular oil based plastics. How about fertilizers too ?
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Nitrogen fertilizers are already made from hydrogen from natural gas and air. So that can be replaced with electrolysis (of course that requires greater energy inputs, but not to such an extent that civilization will hinge upon it).
  - gozur88 9y ago
    Yes, if you have practically free energy you can make hydrocarbons and everything you make with hydrocarbons. But the numbers are so large that's really only going to be possible with fusion, so we're talking generations from now.

the8472 9y ago

Chemical feedstock is a much smaller fraction compared to heating and transportation. And they might not even release carbon into the atmosphere. Plastics for example don't release their carbon for a long time.

api 9y ago

Petrochemicals and plastics are only a small fraction of oil demand. The vast majority is used as fuel. So no, we won't totally eliminate the need for oil for a long time. We also won't totally run out of oil for a very, very long time. But we can eliminate the need for 50-75% of current oil demand in this century, possibly the first half of this century.

bsder 9y ago

> We won't be able to quit oil for a long fucking time. That's true. But if you remove transportation as a consumer of oil, suddenly our oil stocks will for more than 3x the amount of time. http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/ http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/ Once you remove transportation from the mix, the affected industries have a lot more time to move themselves from petroleum as a feedstock.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

azernik 9y ago

Peak Oil is not about quitting oil entirely; it's the point at which oil extraction stops rising and begins to decline. Yes, there will probably always be a place for oil as a source for chemicals, but without its use as a fuel that becomes a much smaller market.

gozur88 9y ago
It's axiomatic for a nonrenewable resource you're going to have a point in time in which you're extracting the most of that resource. But then there's "Peak Oil" as an apocalyptic theory with imploding economies and starving billions. That's just... not going to happen.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  Do you actually think the transition to non-fossil fuels will be painless? Or do you think it won't be necessary? I'd like to see your math on how you plan to feed all the planet's people and give all the newly wealthy Chinese the cars they will want. Economic pain is a distinct possibility.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    Giving people all the cars they want and feeding the planet are two different subjects. Yes, I expect over time we'll all be a bit less wealthy than we would have been if our supply of oil was endless. But I do not believe the price of oil is suddenly going to shoot up to some astronomical value overnight and cause mass die-offs, which is something you hear every time the price of oil goes up a bit.

pavement 9y ago

Plastics are pretty bad for the world, and not so much impossible to replace, as much as they are plentiful cruft that's merely incidentally practical. Synthesizing organic compounds sounds pretty reasonable given our modern advanced awareness of chemistry, the liklihood that we'll be able to use renewable energy to offset the overhead of synthesis. Just so long as we don't write checks on these kinds of ideas before we can actually cash them.

yongjik 9y ago

Another way to look at it is that we have cheaply accessible, ready-made source of hydrocarbon compounds buried in the earth. And we dig it up and burn it off. It's basically the same shortsightedness that led us into hunting whales to (near-)extinction for lamp oils. At least less animal cruelty is involved, I hope.

samstave 9y ago
+1 Also, planned Obsolescence should be illegal - or at least thought of, socially, as immoral. The thing is, that the need for replacing vast majority of things that you use regularly do to the disposable nature of profit-only-driven markets is typically built around supporting components in a product which are made out of plastic - but the useful aspect of the item can often be a re-usable material. Take Razors as a prime example... Overall plastic is bad, regardless of the ephemeral convenience it currently provides - i has stifled innovation, its short-sighted and its detrimental effects will last for generations...