How to save the world? A global journey into making our lives better…

A storm is coming, and some say that it will wipe our civilisation off the earth¹. I am talking about the progressive disappearance of oil.

I have been thinking and investigating the issue called “peak oil” for over a year now, and it is one of the reasons which started me writing this blog. Peak oil is defined as the moment where the maximum oil is being produced and the production starts it final decline.

There are indications that peak oil is either imminent or even may have passed a few years ago. Although the consequences won’t be immediate after the peak, on the long term they will be dire. We will discuss what the possible solutions to peak oil are in a moment but first, what are we talking about? Let’s start by a few facts:

• There is only a limited amount of oil on the planet – because the planet is round.
• The world’s first commercial oil well was drilled in Poland in 1853, and global production reached 4 million barrels a year in the 1860s² (one barrel is about 159 litres).
• Today’s production hovers just above 70 million barrels a day³.
• 2005 was an all-time high at 73.72 million barrels a day³. Production is nearly flat since.
• The Industrial Revolution brought a better understanding of how to use energy and allowed global population to increase ten times compared to what has been constant over millennia^4a, 4b. It is quite clear that our population would never have reached this level without access to all the cheap energy sources we currently have.
• Our industry, food system and economy have become wholly dependent on cheap fuel.
• India and China demand for oil is set to quadruple by 2030⁵.
• Some 64 million barrel per day of additional gross capacity – the equivalent of almost six times the daily output of Saudi Arabia today – needs to be brought on stream between now and 2030 (World Energy Outlook 2008⁶)

So if the amount of oil we have is limited, if our demand is exponentially growing and if production has been stationary for 5 years, how much oil have we left?

First we have to realise there aren’t any massive oil field discoveries those days. It is estimated that the peak of oil production lags behind the peak of oil field discoveries by 30 to 40 years depending on the urgency with which new fields are brought on line. The graph below shows the rate of discoveries of conventional oil field:

Second, according to the EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration) itself^7a, 7b, we are on the verge of a downward slope. See this graph:

The graph above was submitted at an U.S. Department of Energy roundtable in April 2009. You can find the presentation document of this roundtable on the Department of Energy website. As you can see the only line going up is the demand. It is to be noted that over the next 5 years the amount required to meet demands equates to 10 million barrels a day, which is the daily production of Saudi Arabia, the largest producer on earth. Bear in mind that it takes least 7 years to get any new oil project running⁸ so if we were to meet oil demand in 7 years we will need to get 20% of our oil from yet-unidentified projects. Therefore we are already behind schedule by quite a long way.

The fact is that there is no cheap replacement for oil, and most of what we consider granted in the western world is based on its availability. If peak oil hasn’t passed yet, all the above facts suggest that peak oil is imminent (definitely less than 10 years, probably less than 5), after which we will start to see an irremediable decline in production. Sometime peak oil is defined as when demand outstrip supply, which in my opinion has already come to pass for a few years, given the current prices of crude and flat production despite international growth.

I’d like to stop a moment to let this sink in and consider what actually depends on oil.

• Most of our transportation: cars, planes, boat, trucks.
• Commercial shipment: bringing food to the supermarket, shipping building material, most of the industry.
• Tyres: It takes 3.6 billion gallons of crude oil to produce tyres for all of the cars in the U.S. and 7 gallons of crude to produce one tire^9a, 9b. Therefore should we all run on electric cars we would still have a problem.
• Mining equipment¹⁰, farming and forestry equipment. The energy density of any commercially available battery makes it very heavy to move around and therefore a poor replacement of liquid fuels¹¹.
• Most plastics¹². Plastics are everywhere. Look around you, starting by your computer and your phone, and the chips inside of them, and then try to imagine a world without plastics.
• Many pesticides are derived from petroleum^13, 14. Fertilizers are derived from natural gas, which ultimately will be confronted to the same issue.
• Motor’s lubricating oil¹⁵.
• Asphalt¹⁶.
• Our entire food production and distribution network is heavily dependent on oil and fossil fuels¹⁷. It is estimated that for every calories you eat, 10 calories of fossil fuels (mainly from oil and gas) is being used¹⁸.

There is no need to panic: we have only consumed half of the amount of oil there is on the planet. However there is clearly a case to seriously rethink our way of life. We will discuss the consequences and myths of peak oil in a soon to be released post.