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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Has peak oil come about yet? Its like 20 years overdue at this point. There is only so many times you can claim a doomsday scenario is approaching before people start to doubt it.

I have a very loose loose understanding of all this stuff, because experts on "peak oil" have consistently been able to talk circles around me for two decades, and yet have also been consistently wrong. This makes me unwilling to wade into their scientific papers.

These are my loose understandings:

  1. We don't really need to discover new oil fields. There are large known reserves of marginal and harder to harvest fields of oil. Same situation as fracking two decades ago. Until the price of oil goes up enough, no technology will be developed to harvest these fields. As long as no technology is developed to harvest these fields they will appear to have a negative EROI.

  2. Solar, Tidal, and Hydro could cover a huge chunk of energy needs. But they are expensive relative to oil, so why bother? Especially if the price will get undercut as soon as new oil extraction tech comes along. Governments and massive corporations can afford to invest in these energy options as a hedge against the price of oil.

  3. We have a moonshot option in the form of fusion energy. Its moving along at a snails pace, but decent chance of getting it before 2050.

  4. Thorium reactors are also a mostly underutilized form of nuclear energy. Also doesn't really have the same fuel limitations as other nuclear options. Same problem as everything else though, why bother when oil is so cheap?

  5. Most of the hate directed towards oil is due to climate concerns. Scientists that work in this field either don't care about these concerns and go make bank in the private oil sector, and never write many papers or communicate with the public. The scientists that do care about climate a bunch stay in academia and think tanks and write all the papers. Fundamental imbalance in the field. Same thing happens in other academic fields, Economics is littered with unemployable Marxist cranks, while the pro-free-market types can go make bank on wall street.

  6. Energy density of hydrocarbons means they will still be used for a long time. Especially in things like jet fuel. But hydrocarbons can be synthesized. It is expensive to synthesize at current energy prices. If price of oil goes up that changes.

  7. Prices have adjusted in the past, new technologies have come about as oil prices increased. The shift will be gradual if it ever needs to actually happen. There will be no collapse of civilization from a lack of oil.

  8. The scientists/activists that hate oil for climate change reasons would LOVE for the economy to collapse from oil related problems. And they strive to make it happen by making oil as expensive as possible to extract, and trying to tax and regulate us back into the stone age.

TL;DR: Oil is still too cheap for any meaningful change to happen in the energy sector. Certainly not change on the level of 'civilization collapse'.

Has peak oil come about yet?

Yes, in 2019.

This is only a half tongue-in-cheek response. I haven't been able to find exact numbers for 2022. Though I did find this, suggesting the 2019 peak is still unsurpassed.

Thats peak demand not peak (potential) extraction. 2019 was pre covid. In fact we might well have hit peak oil demand - with renewables taking over more and more.

Edit: the IEA says we hit peak gasoline demand in 2019, not all oil.

I'm having trouble finding a good chart with recent data, this one ending 2000 shows the pattern I want to discuss: oil usage per capita was on an exponential increase until 1970 and then flattened out (with a downstep in the late 1970s). As this chart is per-capita, it does not mean oil usage has flattened out, only that it's rising no faster than the population. Either 4.5 barrels per year is the optimal amount of oil per person to be using and there just isn't much to be gained by using more. Or, more likely, the availability of oil/energy is limiting our economy/wealth as a society.

This is definitely weaker than the peak oil claim. And, optimistically, the fact that we are ramping up renewables may be taken as evidence that the economy is able to adjust to oil slowly running out, and that oil is running out slower than the pessimists predicted.

ISTR that hydro is pretty tapped out, in the First World. It's such a great energy source in so many ways that we quickly put up dams everywhere that made sense, and so least in North America and Europe we started running out of places that made sense 50 years ago. It's still growing strong in the developing world, though, which takes a little pressure off the growing demand for power there.

Tidal isn't tapped out, but it has a relatively low cap.

Solar could cover a huge chunk of energy needs if only it could be paired with cheap energy storage and transmission. Fission and coal are practically meant for base load, but solar gets at least twice as expensive if you have to rely on it in less sunny places and less sunny times. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of battery chemistry breakthrough handle the "less sunny times" part of that, though. We've been optimizing high power and low density for years, but "big heavy cheap batteries" are now becoming a design target for just this reason.

Boring old uranium nuclear won't be hitting fuel limitations for centuries. Thorium might have other advantages, but the big disadvantages of nuclear right now are "would-be plant operators don't trust the government and public to not quintuple the price with regulatory costs" and "the government and public don't trust would-be plant operators to maintain safety and handle waste with any lower regulatory costs". Thorium doesn't really help there, and fusion will only be a little help.

Boring old uranium nuclear won't be hitting fuel limitations for centuries.

Yes, nuclear power really is the silver bullet solution to energy insufficiency. So far we're largely keeping that bullet chambered, but start enormous electricity price increases or widespread shortages, and you'll see how quickly opinion turns.

Right now new nuclear plants take several years to complete. Opinion might turn quickly but that doesn't turn the lights back on quickly.

Hopefully mass production of microreactors will change this situation before the change becomes necessary.

There are also the issues with inertial response that might mean that we want to keep some traditional non-neglible baseload around even if batteries got cheap and possible to scale.

There’s wrong and then there’s wrong. The strong form of Peak Oil, where we wake up one day and can’t get anything out of the ground, has failed to materialize. The weak form is more a claim that we are on the cusp of a downward trend, which I think is much more defensible.

Tech advancements like fracking complicate the issue. Half of US oil is fracked. In the counterfactual where fracking isn’t possible, how much of that supply is developed? How much higher are prices?

I expect future tech to be harder than fracking. I don’t expect demand to decrease. Therefore, supply won’t keep up with demand. The weak theory is still on the table.

You are wrong on demand. It’s probably peaked or close to it.

Wait, why?

I see @cjet79's comment that it did, in fact drop during COVID. But all the growth factors are still present: increasing population, industrialization and electrification of developing countries, macro-scale shipping. How many countries haven't reached China's level of industry?

Yes.I misread something in the IEA report - gasoline demand has peaked not oil, although the rate of increased demand is slowing there.

Well there are also two reasons why peak oil might happen. One is a demand side drop the other is a supply side drop. 2020 saw the first decline in oil production, but it was obviously a demand side drop.

And eventually oil production will drop off if some better energy technology replaces it.

So the weak version of peak oil is guaranteed to happen. But the reason why it happens matters a lot. And I think an eventual supply side drop is far less likely than an eventual demand side drop.

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