- The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government
approved the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory
for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge"
find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline.
You begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when
you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world
with oil for five and a quarter days.
-
- Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that
the resource upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't
talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
-
- Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains
is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves
peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we find.
All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels
in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling in the 1970s.
Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the
better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field
is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.
-
- The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections
are the ones produced by the US department of energy, which claims that
this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information agency
has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has based
its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand, perhaps
in order not to sow panic in the financial markets.
-
- Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist
Colin Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010.
In August, the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he
was "99% confident" that the date of maximum global production
will be 2004. Even if the optimists are correct, we will be scraping the
oil barrel within the lifetimes of most of those who are middle-aged today.
-
- The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will
not. Today we will burn 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels
a day, after which projected demand accelerates. If supply declines and
demand grows, we soon encounter something with which the people of the
advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage. The price of oil
will go through the roof.
-
- As the price rises, the sectors which are now almost
wholly dependent on crude oil - principally transport and farming - will
be forced to contract. Given that climate change caused by burning oil
is cooking the planet, this might appear to be a good thing. The problem
is that our lives have become hard-wired to the oil economy. Our sprawling
suburbs are impossible to service without cars. High oil prices mean high
food prices: much of the world's growing population will go hungry. These
problems will be exacerbated by the direct connection between the price
of oil and the rate of unemployment. The last five recessions in the US
were all preceded by a rise in the oil price.
-
- Oil, of course, is not the only fuel on which vehicles
can run. There are plenty of possible substitutes, but none of them is
likely to be anywhere near as cheap as crude is today. Petroleum can be
extracted from tar sands and oil shale, but in most cases the process uses
almost as much energy as it liberates, while creating great mountains and
lakes of toxic waste. Natural gas is a better option, but switching from
oil to gas propulsion would require a vast and staggeringly expensive new
fuel infrastructure. Gas, of course, is subject to the same constraints
as oil: at current rates of use, the world has about 50 years' supply,
but if gas were to take the place of oil its life would be much shorter.
-
- Vehicles could be run from fuel cells powered by hydrogen,
which is produced by the electrolysis of water. But the electricity which
produces the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. To fill all the cars
in the US would require four times the current capacity of the national
grid. Coal burning is filthy, nuclear energy is expensive and lethal. Running
the world's cars from wind or solar power would require a greater investment
than any civilisation has ever made before. New studies suggest that leaking
hydrogen could damage the ozone layer and exacerbate global warming.
-
- Turning crops into diesel or methanol is just about viable
in terms of recoverable energy, but it means using the land on which food
is now grown for fuel. My rough calculations suggest that running the United
Kingdom's cars on rapeseed oil would require an area of arable fields the
size of England.
-
- There is one possible solution which no one writing about
the impending oil crisis seems to have noticed: a technique with which
the British and Australian governments are currently experimenting, called
underground coal gasification. This is a fancy term for setting light to
coal seams which are too deep or too expensive to mine, and catching the
gas which emerges. It's a hideous prospect, as it means that several trillion
tonnes of carbon which was otherwise impossible to exploit becomes available,
with the likely result that global warming will eliminate life on Earth.
-
- We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we
lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry
the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation
collapses.
-
- The only rational response to both the impending end
of the oil age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities,
our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political
pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People
tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less.
Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival
of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.
-
- In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq
had nothing to do with oil is simply preposterous. The US attacked Iraq
(which appears to have had no weapons of mass destruction and was not threatening
other nations), rather than North Korea (which is actively developing a
nuclear weapons programme and boasting of its intentions to blow everyone
else to kingdom come) because Iraq had something it wanted. In one respect
alone, Bush and Blair have been making plans for the day when oil production
peaks, by seeking to secure the reserves of other nations.
-
- I refuse to believe that there is not a better means
of averting disaster than this. I refuse to believe that human beings are
collectively incapable of making rational decisions. But I am beginning
to wonder what the basis of my belief might be.
-
- - The sources for this and all George Monbiot's recent
articles can be found at www.monbiot.com.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html
-
-
- Comment
- From Michael Shore
- 12-4-3
-
- What's to worry??? Run cars on WATER. This technology
already exists and can be developed even further with a few billion bucks.
-
- Running cars on water cuts out air pollution too.
- No more WARS FOR OIL!!!
- WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR???
-
- http://www.layo.com/
- http://www.ecwa.asn.au/info/oilprice.html
- http://www.fuellesspower.com/water.htm
-
- Cars can also run on HEMP OIL. The USA and other countries
can GROW their own oil.Plus there are over 50,000 different uses of the
HEMP plant. You can make strong plastics out of hemp too.In the 1930's
Ford built a car that was made from HEMP and the car ran on HEMP OIL. HEMP
also does not pollute like fossil fuels.
-
- The industrial HEMP plant is illegal to grow in America.
Guess you can understand why; because the fossil fuel oil industrialists
don't want hemp to compete with fossil fuels.
-
- WHY HAVE WE ALLOWED A GOVERNMENT TO OUTLAW A PLANT???
-
- There are many alternative energy products being withheld
from the market and the people are letting the oil industrialists rule
their lives with fossil fuels unnecessarily
-
-
- Comment
- From Jim Mortellaro
- 12-4-3
-
- It was 1958 and I was in the 9th grade at Mount St. Michael
Academy in the Bronx, NY. It was some sort of earth science class. There
are two things I remember about that class, and two things only.
-
- What is strange is how certain things remain in the memory.
Why this little fact? Why this one moment in my 60 years? Oh sure, there
are many such moments. However this moment stands out. For at the time
this moment occurred, there was no reason for me to remember it.
-
- Rather than continue to speak in circles, here is the
story. I remember the teacher's face and his breath. He was known for not
having exactly a pristine breath. In fact, he was a heavy smoker and back
in those days, teachers did not smoke. At least not between classes. This
one did and he stank of that sour effluvium oft referred to as "smoker's
breath."
-
- That was one of the two things I remember. The second
was that he said, and I can quote him verbatim, "By 1985 we will be
out of oil."
-
- Woof!
-
- But 1985, well, that was a hundred years away. In fact,
I would be so old by then, I probally wouldn't mind being out of oil. Twenty-eight
years.
-
- By the time 1985 came along, we were not out of oil.
New finds, new methods of getting it out, delayed this inevitable time
by maybe, 20 years. I think, even at the time, I imagined that this would
be a momentous event. This must be the reason. In some obscure manner,
I knew this was an important fact. Perhaps it was the way that Brother
said it. Perhaps it was his bad breath.
-
- Or, it could have been that sports car I was gonna buy
in 1963 that I lusted after in 1958. No gas?
-
- Nah!
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