Analog SFF, January-February 2007 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2010-12-15T07:07:43.723000+00:00

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Science Fact: After Gas: Are We Ready for the End of Oil?

by Richard A. Lovett

"Growth, growth, growth—that's all we've known ... World automobile production is doubling every 10 years; human population growth is like nothing that has happened in all of geologic history. The world will only tolerate so many doublings of anything—whether it's power plants or grasshoppers.”

—M. King Hubbert, 1975[*]

[* From a blog post by Ron Schuler, rsparlourtricks.blogspot.com/2005/10/m-king-hubbert.html, October 5, 2005]

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In 1956, an oil-company geologist named M. King Hubbert made a bold prediction. U.S. oil production outside of Alaska would peak in the early 1970s and decline forever after. In 2001, Princeton University geophysicist Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a former colleague of Hubbert's, took the analysis a step further, predicting that world production would do the same sometime between 2004 and 2009.[1] Three years later, in a lecture at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, he asserted that the peak would come sooner rather than later. In fact, we may already be past the peak by the time you read this.[2]

[Footnote 1: I reviewed his book, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, for Analog in September 2002.]

[Footnote 2: That lecture is expanded in a second book: Beyond Oil: the View from Hubbert's Peak, published in 2005.]

Then, in his 2006 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush drew headlines by announcing that America is “addicted to oil” and that the time had come to do something about it. He pledged to invest in alternative energies (including ethanol and hydrogen fuels) and to reduce Middle Eastern oil imports by 75 percent by 2125. He also promised increased funding for alternative energy, including hydrogen-powered cars.

In combination, these announcements raise two alarming questions: (1) Are we about to run out of oil? (2) What are we going to do about it if we are?

Let's start with the “are we?"

The short answer is “no.” We may run low, but not “out.” That's because as oil gets scarcer, price rises will force us to cut back. At least a modicum will remain in the ground for a long time.

A better question is when we will be forced to cut back. Conventional wisdom says that we can figure out how much oil we have left by dividing the amount that remains by the annual rate of consumption, with fudge factors for anticipated growth, both in demand and supply. Right now the world has about a trillion barrels of known reserves and is using somewhere around 30 billion per year.[3] That sounds like a thirty-plus year supply, but to Hubbertians it's not. There comes a point, they say, when the oil gets harder and harder to pump out of the ground. Even if there's several more years’ supply there, we simply can't get it out fast enough.

[Footnote 3: These are 2004 statistics. Many of the figures in this article are taken from Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, by George A. Olah, Alain Goeppert, and G.K. Surya Prakash

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