Running out of gas: Assuming the current theory of peak oil is true, what can some basic arithmetic tell us about the future?
Posted by OGSyedIsEverywhere@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 48 comments
OGSyedIsEverywhere@reddit (OP)
Submission statement: As far as theories of collapse go, peak oil has waned in popularity by a lot in the last couple decades in favor of climate change, civil war, regular war, competence loss and breadbasket failure. However, some believers persist and they say that most of the present problems such as resurgent fascism are symptoms of peak oil having finally arrived, unnoticed, in the background of society.
I recently saw an OGJ article about the Permian basin, the most successful American shale basin, having already peaked and I figured that the people here would appreciate an overview of the story so far. Even with the best modern green technology, there is still no way to smelt ore at a reasonable price, drive a tractor or increase a developed country's median purchasing power, since we all effectively detritovores - using the corpses of dead marine protists to make our food.
steppingrazor1220@reddit
Add the haber-bosch process to the list of things we can't do without fossil fuels. This is the chemical reaction used to create nitrogen fertilizers.
jbond23@reddit
It's not that we can't do it using green renewable power and green hydrogen from electrolysis. It's that it's not yet economic to do it. And so nobody does, at scale.
mem2100@reddit
If we treated this like the moon launch - we'd be electrifying our highways - for trucks first - cars second. Expensive - sure. Compared to the 1.5 Trillion/year we spend on defense - not that expensive. Compared to the staggering cost that 2C is going to inflict on the US every year - definitely not expensive. Compared to the mass death of humans in hotter/less developed places - very inexpensive. We'd be upgrading our grid to HVDC - which makes is possible to wheel renewable power across time zones with far less loss.
jbond23@reddit
Instead of / as well as, the highways, building electric high speed railways with freight on a second line, that took standard shipping containers. With solar panels along the side of the line to power it and the surroundings. Cycle tracks next to it for the E-Bikes. And no level crossings on the main lines.
HVDC? Yes. Every $1 spent on renewable energy generation needs to be matched with $1 on each of : the grids, wide area HVDC interconnects, storage, dispatchable demand, electrification of fossil systems, demand reduction (eg insulation).
That's how we keep BAU going for as long as possible for a bigger peak. And a harder crash.
LaurenDreamsInColor@reddit
Well there is an alternative but we westerners would likely never adopt it. Recycling urine. I've started doing this in my garden along with the usual composting and weed teas. It could be deployed on a community scale. It's well documented and has been used since the beginning of agriculture.
steppingrazor1220@reddit
I pee in the compost piles more then the toilet. Growing legumes and tilling them into the soil before planting is also a natural easy way to get more nitrogen into the soil, but ties up the land for a bit. I've been a hobbyist farmer for a while now. The one thing I struggle with is getting nitrogen from pure organic sources. I broke down several years ago and started using prilled urea nitrogen. It's so cheap and easy, I can see why it's so widely used in large scale agriculture.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
You dont know how it works if you think that.
steppingrazor1220@reddit
Are there any large ammonia plants that are not using natural gas? Except for small pilot plants and laboratories, it's the main input right?
CorvidCorbeau@reddit
It requires hydrogen. Which is typically sourced from natural gas, but it's not a hard requirement. Hydrogen is pretty abundant.
rdwpin@reddit
I am completely baffled. We will all be dead before we run out of fossil fuels to burn as we have at least 50 years worth, enough to get us to our heat extinction. The very very least of our problems.
change_the_username@reddit
Unfortunately, humanity is caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side, we need to burn fossil fuels to keep our economy going; otherwise, riots will break out. On the other side, each gallon of gasoline burned puts about 20 lbs of CO2 into the atmosphere, which on average causes a net negative environmental result.
Riokaii@reddit
we created the rock by not doing anything in the 50 years before now. We could have transitioned our economy away from fossil fuels almost entirely by now, if we had actually be motivated to, short term cost for long term massive benefit.
rdwpin@reddit
I hear you. Everyone, and I mean everyone, should have responsibility to be paid to crash course convert the world's infrastructure from fossil fuel burning to non-fossil fuel power. And others paid to distribute minerals to weather CO2 to spike as much of that as possible and draw down and sequester CO2 from the ocean. And grow and sequester CO2 absorbing plant life in every possible nook and cranny, while also sequestering dead wood in forests and otherwise preventing forest fires,
There is no profit to any of this, it is pure cost to save human civilization. Either now or by terrified people when it's too late.
LaurenDreamsInColor@reddit
The upside is the automatic and proportional decline in carbon emissions as fuel becomes scarce.
Grand-Page-1180@reddit
It isn't about running out of fossil fuels in their entirety, it's about running out of easily recoverable, economically viable to extract fossil fuels. No, we won't literally run out of fossil fuels, but what happens when the fossil fuels we do have access to are too expensive to exploit?
Ready4Rage@reddit
Unless you own a well and a refinery, or are a Saudi prince, we have zero years left. How much others have, and at what price they're willing to sell it to us (if at all) is ehat is relevant. So far they're willing, but we are at their mercy
Somebody_Forgot@reddit
lol…Thank you for that! Laughter is very important for mental health.
MySixHourErection@reddit
The theories about peak oil are almost all BS. Oil will get more expensive but it won’t run out in any of our lifetimes.
Ancient-Laws@reddit
agreed, my dear Priapus. As a dumb college kid i thought 2007 was gonna be the end according to the trash websites i was reading. It seriously threw off my life.
Known_Leek8997@reddit
I don’t think anyone credible argues that we’ll completely run out of oil, just that it will become more expensive to extract like you said.
jbond23@reddit
Timescales. We absolutely will burn through the 1TtC of accessible fossil fuel until it's all gone. The only question is when. The only thing that will stop us is if society collapses first so there's nobody left to burn the last 10%.
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
If you understood what you are talking about instead of trying to run down others to make your own perspective seem superior, you'd understand the Peak Oil "theories" make exactly the same claim. The point is it a large plateau and slow tail-off. It's happening now, the impacts are already being felt.
EROI on oil continues to drop and when it close enough 1, that's all there is folks.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-crude-oil-output-peak-by-2027-eia-projects-2025-04-15/
Termin8tor@reddit
That's what peak oil is... Production is on a bell curve and as production starts to decline, prices start to increase. It doesn't mean that we go from one day producing billions of barrels to the next, producing none.
Gumbode345@reddit
Please go see someone to be informed about the century we live in and a healthy approach to technology. There is nothing we can’t do with some form of renewables, although in so-called hard to abate sectors it is still very expensive. Your statement about smelting ore is also incorrect. It can and is already being done, the main constraint is enough green electricity. And as someone said below, the absolute least priority problem right now is running out of fossils.
jbond23@reddit
Is there enough fossil fuel left, and can we afford to burn it and turn it into CO2, to get to the point where we don't need it any more?
Yes, we need a Grand Electrification of Everything (GEE) to go with the rapid roll out of renewable generation, improving the grid, dispatchable supply and demand, storage and all the rest. And we need to make all these things more economic and competitive.
And yet for example, nitrogen fertiliser production is still much cheaper using fossil fuel hydrogen and fossil fuel energy.
Gumbode345@reddit
Yeah indeed, and we’re already completely on track to achieve warming by about 3C, not the 1.5 that makes life possible under conditions that somewhat resemble today, so adding more CO2 because we are unwilling, not unable but unwilling! to invest in technology to de carbonize so-called hard to abate sectors is the best we can do? In not sure whether you’re trolling or are just clueless. The exact same argument was made about renewables like wind and solar 15 years ago. And now, they outcompete every single other energy source on price, and to the extent that there are countries that source 100%of their electricity from renewables on a good day, and 70% on average. Your argument is ridiculous on two counts. 1. We’re already on track to change, for much much worse, life conditions on earth. So adding more CO2 is literally suicidal and as overall costs go far more expensive than getting rid of it. 2. Even considering that we leave only these sectors unabated, we have so much fossil left that we’d have ceased to exist as a species, because of global warming, before it runs out. The whole debate is absurd. Oh and before I forget : not even a mention ccs or ccus?
jbond23@reddit
Whatever,
CCS is a boondoggle. It doesn't scale.
Gumbode345@reddit
Ok, sure bud. You’re clearly the expert.
OGSyedIsEverywhere@reddit (OP)
It certainly is doable to smelt any metal with just electricity at a massive expense. If you want to avoid multiplying the price per ton of metal by twenty, however, green tech isn't there yet.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
Even a low carbon global economy still has a massive (global) footprint, so less consumption due to higher prices hardly sounds like a bad thing from a perspective of preventing collapse
Gumbode345@reddit
It’s not by 20, there are companies already doing it and they use h2. Please stop with this nonsense that decarbonisation is too expensive ; every single prediction about the evolution of renewables as expensive has been crushed over the past 15 years.
Few_Ad6516@reddit
There’s plenty of oil, it’s just the return on energy invested gets less and less. It used to be for 1 barrel of oil used in production you could get 100 barrels back. Now it’s something like 15 and falling. The low hanging fruit is mostly finished and with that gone food production gets more expensive. Combined with climate change we see crop yields falling and food getting more expensive. Not a problem for 1st world countries where obesity is our main challenge but disastrous for 3rd world nations and their development. Cue mass migration and the massacres that will inevitably arise. Enjoy this time you have, it is peak human civilisation. There is only downside and fragmentation.
J-A-S-08@reddit
I think we're past peak human civilization to be honest. Late 90's-early 00's was it ( for white 1st worlders anyway). After 9/11 and 2008 crash, the ball started rolling downhill.
Zestyclose-Ad-9420@reddit
In terms of cheap energy the peak was already in 1970 for the USA.
Grand-Page-1180@reddit
Pretty much my own conclusions. I don't think we're ever really recovering from the last couple of decades. Best we can do at this point is damage control.
OGSyedIsEverywhere@reddit (OP)
It's actually about 1 barrel in to around 6 barrels out now, a figure low enough that water-saturated lignite is once again a competitive source of grid power.
gobeklitepewasamall@reddit
G&r have been saying this for a few years now, even Goldman started last year.
Granted G&r are a bunch of climate denying kooks but their Permian data is valid…
madcoins@reddit
Everybody seems wildly confused and conflicted about this but I have read peak oil was 2018 and still is. Chevron has stated we will lose about 15% of reserves every year going forward. Just what I have read
ttystikk@reddit
Energy is a problem that absolutely can be solved with technology; last month, more energy was generated from solar in Europe than any other source. That's real progress.
It will also not stop global warming, which has now passed 1.5 and is well on track to hit 2 degrees C by 2050.
It will not stop arable land degradation.
It will not stop pollution.
Humanity has a long way to go and not much time to get there.
Erick_L@reddit
You're talking electricity, which is a fraction of all energy use. Europe also exports an awful lot of their emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
CorvidCorbeau@reddit
But most European countries are shown in red, as net importers of CO2?
Erick_L@reddit
Yeah, sorry. Import/export is confusing. Nobody uses the same meaning.
Red means someone else does the dirty work for them. Their real emissions are higher. International shipping and air travel isn't included.
CorvidCorbeau@reddit
It's all good. Just wanted to clear that up.
freesoloc2c@reddit
I have been following peak oil for decades and it's something I was very concerned about. But there's so many new battery and electric motors coming out that I think we can make it to an electric economy with coming tech advances.
tenantofthehouse@reddit
Great to see John Titor discourse coming back... it is truly still 2003
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/OGSyedIsEverywhere:
Submission statement: As far as theories of collapse go, peak oil has waned in popularity by a lot in the last couple decades in favor of climate change, civil war, regular war, competence loss and breadbasket failure. However, some believers persist and they say that most of the present problems such as resurgent fascism are symptoms of peak oil having finally arrived, unnoticed, in the background of society.
I recently saw an OGJ article about the Permian basin, the most successful American shale basin, having already peaked and I figured that the people here would appreciate an overview of the story so far. You should definitely see the horrific punchline at the nine and half minute mark, even if you skip the rest of the video.
.
Even with the best modern green technology, there is still no way to smelt ore at a reasonable price, drive a tractor or increase a developed country's median purchasing power, since we are all effectively detritovores - using the corpses of dead marine protists to make our food.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1lrpkyl/running_out_of_gas_assuming_the_current_theory_of/n1cjljs/
Additional-Ad-7956@reddit
Declining return on investment will lead to more expensive energy costs. Higher energy costs will lead to price increases across the board. Learn to live happily while being poor.