Do you have any idea, any idea at all, what fossil fuels mean to the world? Of course you don’t. I’m in chemical engineering, it was all in the freakin’ brochure and I still didn’t get it. But I do now. Listen up.
This is not a rant about oil prices, Iraq, global warming, or the shitty old car I’m tired of refilling post-Katrina. It’s about the safe, saccharine set of assumptions that keeps the economy afloat and the grocery shelves stocked, creates jobs and underlies any vision of how you thought you were going to live your life.
First things first: oil and gas prices are a lot more than “pain at the pumps.” Take a second to really consider how our modern, specialized economy actually works, how everything gets done. Every import or export—every Pez dispenser from China, fruit salad from California, or fair trade coffee bean from Nicaragua—takes oil to get it into stores. As does any attempt to build so-called energy alternatives—turbines and nuke plants don’t raise themselves. Most plastics, chemicals and packaging are made from oil and/or natural gas. That computer you type all those essays or labs on—well, that computer used 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels to build. Thanks to the green revolution in agriculture—modern farming that lets one farmer feed 120 people—we now use 10 calories of fossil fuel to grow a single calorie of food. It’s the fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and tractors that hybridized, mechanized agriculture requires, which allows us to produce 130 bushels of corn per acre, instead of 30. Having so few farmers and so many cities really is a temporary anomaly.
With this in mind, let’s talk timelines. The sad fact is, most of the “reserve growth” in the last few decades is not new discovery. Because of legally binding stock exchange rules, companies conservatively understate the size of oil and gas finds, and slowly bump up the numbers as they develop a field. Unfortunately, it’s helped to obscure the fact that worldwide oil and North American natural gas discovery maxed out in the ’60s. These days, 80 per cent of our oil comes from fields older than Watergate and Vietnam, and we only find about one new barrel for every four we burn. This is a decades-long, worldwide trend, persisting through new technology, record prices and demand that grows two to three per cent each year.
And as oil fields deplete, the pressure drops and it becomes harder and harder to remove the oil. This means that even if we have “40 years of oil left,” supply starts falling long before then. Many experts calculate world oil production will reach its maximum sometime within the next decade, even with tar sands, deep-water recovery technology and other possibilities. Then an unavoidable, permanent decline will begin. World natural gas will likely peak between 2020 and 2040, but North America is facing a gas crisis today that even imports from other continents can’t resolve.
We are facing a slowly and constantly declining supply of energy within our lifetime, possibly even before we graduate. Every proposed government or civilian solution out there takes an absolute minimum of 20 years to get rolling. Creating a commercially-ready hydrogen alternative will take at least two decades—even building a nuclear plant every two days would not be enough to do it. Nor would expanding wind and solar power generation a thousand-fold. Given the magnitude of what is involved, it’s almost impossible to argue any combination of alternatives will produce as much energy—or as large an economy—as what we have today. That means something’s gotta give.
Post-peak, given our lack of alternatives, oil prices should explode at least to $150 per barrel. There will be confusion, debt, economic contraction, and possibly rationing. Prices will rise on everything shipped, which in today’s “efficient” economy is everything. Since we soon won’t be able to increase oil supply, and we can’t make substitutes fast enough, the real question now is how to adapt to a lifestyle of much less transportation, construction, medicine and plastics? How do we build up local economies with shorter shipping lines? How do we make a massive shift to chemical-free, labour-intensive agriculture that studies suggest can probably only feed two billion people? No one has been grooming us for a life of austerity and contraction, but that’s what it looks like will actually happen. Sorry, but it’s time to reorient your expectations of life.
This is not a problem that’s going to go away. As a community, we need to shake off the reckless, child-like faith in the notion that hydrogen, “or something,” will step in, that markets can recover from anything and that the future will always be pretty much the same thing as the past. We need to take some interest in this issue. I encourage you to do some research and get a feel for what “peak oil” and “natural gas crisis” actually mean, to you personally.
I’m not dumb enough to set a date, but the sweeping trends are clear. This is absolutely our generation’s crisis. Wake up. Please.
Jason Zakaib is a fourth-year chemical engineering student.
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