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

In our previous post about peak oil I introduced the concept of finite resources which may be a limit to growth, and described how important oil has become to our civilisation. What will happen if dramatic actions are not taken in order to address the increasingly limited availability of oil and other fossil fuels? The consequences of scarcity of oil will be dire. Basic market laws of supply and demand indicates that the decrease in production will lead to higher oil prices, and therefore higher price on all of the goods and service which heavily depend on oil, as I detailed in one my precedent posts.

As cost will keep rising and consumer’s disposable income will keep decreasing, we will witness slower growth at first, followed by foreclosures, recession, depression, inverted rural flight and a potential collapse of governments and financial systems.

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?