I have a book on the topic "Beyond Oil - the view from Hubbert's Peak" by the geologist Kenneth Deffeyes in my bookshelf. When it became clear oil/gas from shale deposits was beginning to have a significant impact on the market, I asked him to come on the RNZ Nights radio show I was then hosting. He never replied. But the story of "Peak Oil" is one of the reasons I am a little skeptical about changes to transport policy based on mitigating climate change: people will pay to keep what doing what they like (driving and flying) and that money will fuel (whoops - bad pun) investment in technology that will allow them to do so (electric vehicles, planes, biofuel etc). For me, investment in public and active transport is more about having transport choice; cars are terribly convenient until we all use them at the same time, and I get sick of being part of the "congestion problem" in a traffic jam, when I would happily take a train/bus if the service was good enough. However, we should perhaps be wary of the story of "peak oil" leading to complacency; for me, the single biggest threat of climate change is what happens if it cuts into the production of a staple food crops: even inflation caused by a drop in grain production could be pretty distabilising, let alone serious famine; how the world handles those potential blips, could be the biggest challenge humanity faces this century. I'm all for doing what we can now to potentially smooth those bumps out.
Scientists have a dim view of Economists and squirm when the latter describe what they do as a "science" - however, I found your post interesting and was further impressed by your other activities. Two things:
1. It seems that our modern technological "civilisation" can't continue without diesel fuel - and no matter how much renewables replace other carbon fuels, I can't see them having much success replacing diesel.
2. As an ex-biologist I think it is true to say that The World's Sixth Mass Extinction is accelerating and is likely now unstoppable - combined with rising expenditures on the Military Industrial Financial Intelligence Media Complex (mostly in the US) is causing / will continue to cause cascading environmental Tipping Points and exacerbating #1.
These two facts suggest we are doomed - at least as a functioning technological society - but possibly also as a species - leaving the planet to the extremophiles.
Energy Return on Energy Invested is key here. We are fast approaching the point where extracting the next marginal barrel of oil costs the same in energy terms as the energy embodied in the barrel. This is because much of the newly discovered reserves being located in hard to extract places, such as deep offshore reservoirs.
This is a subtly different peak than peak supply/demand.
Energy Return on Energy Invested is important, but only a limit if technology cannot be further improved. If someone finds a way to extract oil using less energy per unit extracted, then the limit shifts accordingly. It would similarly shift with a more efficient combustion process, one that liberated more useful energy per unit burnt.
There are some true physical limits. Solar panels cannot become more that 100% efficient, for example. (Commercially available panels are currently around 23% efficient, so there is still lots of room for improvement!)
It’s important to distinguish limits with a basis in physics from those that implicitly assume technological improvement is unlikely or impossible. For me, one lesson from the peak oil story is how easily the two can be confused.
I totally agree, and these are often conflated. I guess the hard physical limit that applies is the energy contained in a barrel - if energy costs for extraction, shipping and refining approaches that limit (absent external inputs) then it's not worth it and the EROEI is trending towards 0. There's likely some point before 0 where it becomes worthless too. Combustion also trends towards hard physical limits due to the Carnot cycle, size of the engine, thermal environment it operates in etc.
The writing I have seen on peak oil is a physics thing - declining energy returned for energy invested for oil extraction. Which is what is happening as one would expect.
Regarding the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth modelling. This modelling and its predictions are regularly revisited and the model's trends compared to what is actually happening. This reviews confirm the limits to growth modelling was pretty accurate, notably for the business as usual modelling - a summary of reviews is set out in the 'Legacy' section of the Wikipedia entry for Limits to Growth. (The Limits to Growth modelling covered a range of scenarios.)
Interestingly, while on the topic of peaks, it looks like China has hit peak oil demand: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/10/11/chinas-oil-gas-giant-sinopec-says-peak-oil-demand-already-happened-in-china/
I have a book on the topic "Beyond Oil - the view from Hubbert's Peak" by the geologist Kenneth Deffeyes in my bookshelf. When it became clear oil/gas from shale deposits was beginning to have a significant impact on the market, I asked him to come on the RNZ Nights radio show I was then hosting. He never replied. But the story of "Peak Oil" is one of the reasons I am a little skeptical about changes to transport policy based on mitigating climate change: people will pay to keep what doing what they like (driving and flying) and that money will fuel (whoops - bad pun) investment in technology that will allow them to do so (electric vehicles, planes, biofuel etc). For me, investment in public and active transport is more about having transport choice; cars are terribly convenient until we all use them at the same time, and I get sick of being part of the "congestion problem" in a traffic jam, when I would happily take a train/bus if the service was good enough. However, we should perhaps be wary of the story of "peak oil" leading to complacency; for me, the single biggest threat of climate change is what happens if it cuts into the production of a staple food crops: even inflation caused by a drop in grain production could be pretty distabilising, let alone serious famine; how the world handles those potential blips, could be the biggest challenge humanity faces this century. I'm all for doing what we can now to potentially smooth those bumps out.
Scientists have a dim view of Economists and squirm when the latter describe what they do as a "science" - however, I found your post interesting and was further impressed by your other activities. Two things:
1. It seems that our modern technological "civilisation" can't continue without diesel fuel - and no matter how much renewables replace other carbon fuels, I can't see them having much success replacing diesel.
2. As an ex-biologist I think it is true to say that The World's Sixth Mass Extinction is accelerating and is likely now unstoppable - combined with rising expenditures on the Military Industrial Financial Intelligence Media Complex (mostly in the US) is causing / will continue to cause cascading environmental Tipping Points and exacerbating #1.
These two facts suggest we are doomed - at least as a functioning technological society - but possibly also as a species - leaving the planet to the extremophiles.
Energy Return on Energy Invested is key here. We are fast approaching the point where extracting the next marginal barrel of oil costs the same in energy terms as the energy embodied in the barrel. This is because much of the newly discovered reserves being located in hard to extract places, such as deep offshore reservoirs.
This is a subtly different peak than peak supply/demand.
Thanks Dougal.
Energy Return on Energy Invested is important, but only a limit if technology cannot be further improved. If someone finds a way to extract oil using less energy per unit extracted, then the limit shifts accordingly. It would similarly shift with a more efficient combustion process, one that liberated more useful energy per unit burnt.
There are some true physical limits. Solar panels cannot become more that 100% efficient, for example. (Commercially available panels are currently around 23% efficient, so there is still lots of room for improvement!)
It’s important to distinguish limits with a basis in physics from those that implicitly assume technological improvement is unlikely or impossible. For me, one lesson from the peak oil story is how easily the two can be confused.
I totally agree, and these are often conflated. I guess the hard physical limit that applies is the energy contained in a barrel - if energy costs for extraction, shipping and refining approaches that limit (absent external inputs) then it's not worth it and the EROEI is trending towards 0. There's likely some point before 0 where it becomes worthless too. Combustion also trends towards hard physical limits due to the Carnot cycle, size of the engine, thermal environment it operates in etc.
The writing I have seen on peak oil is a physics thing - declining energy returned for energy invested for oil extraction. Which is what is happening as one would expect.
Regarding the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth modelling. This modelling and its predictions are regularly revisited and the model's trends compared to what is actually happening. This reviews confirm the limits to growth modelling was pretty accurate, notably for the business as usual modelling - a summary of reviews is set out in the 'Legacy' section of the Wikipedia entry for Limits to Growth. (The Limits to Growth modelling covered a range of scenarios.)
The work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre on planetary boundaries is, I suggest, further (alarming) support for the Limits to Growth modelling conclusions. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
While physics might have inspired the peak oil story, it became about economics as soon as it started making predictions about prices.