When Will It All End?

The doom-and-gloom crowd always sees a problem:

• Malthus foresaw us outrunning our food resources and all starving. Solution: control the poor to prevent them from breeding.


• The Eugenics crowd saw us breeding ourselves into imbecility. Solution: control the genetically inferior to keep them from breeding.


• Oswald Spengler saw the West in decline. Solution: bring in a strong leader, a guy like Hitler, to shake things up.


• The Population Bomb people told us we were breeding ourselves into a global disaster: let the government impose a one-child policy and of course give the rich and famous an exemption because they are naturally superior. (OK, the last bit wasn't explicit in the policy, but this is typically the thinking of this crowd, i.e. they write rules for others but not themselves.)


• The Club of Rome people yelled that resources would soon run out and we would all descend into brutes fighting over scraps. Solution: go back to the presumed golden age when we lived in harmony with nature by doing hunting and gathering so that we would not be a burden on Mother Earth.


• The Global Warming crowd sees the heat death of earth as we load up so many greenhouse gases that we cook ourselves in our own waste heat. Solution: give up carbon-based energy and live only using renewable resources and, of course, force a cutback on carbon emissions even if this guts the economy. (There is an implicit assumption that technology is the enemy and not part of the solution.)

The Peak Oil people are disappointed today. There is a big new Tiber oil field discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, 3 billion barrels of oil. The doom-and-gloom crowd see it as more evidence that the end is near. The glass-is-half-full crowd see it as proof that ingenuity will continue to allow goodies to rain down on us.

Here's a bit from Geoffrey Styles' blog posting:

1. There's still life in the old dog. While the US has been drilled like a pincushion for 150 years, we have still not found every barrel of oil that nature provided us. Don't be misled by proved reserves data that seem to show that we have less than 12 years of oil left at current production rates. In point of fact, the US has produced a cumulative 200 billion barrels of oil from reserves that never exceeded 40 billion barrels. Not only do we continue to find new resources in the manner of Tiber-1, but we continually learn how to extract more oil from the reservoirs we've already found, revising their reserves steadily upward over time.


2. A discovery like Tiber doesn't mean we've merely added two weeks worth of production to reserves. US oil production, like global production, is comprised of the contributions from thousands of oil fields and hundreds of thousands of oil wells, with the most productive 20% or so accounting for roughly 87% of output. If initial guesses of recoverable oil are right, then the Tiber field could yield on the order of 100,000 bbl/day of oil for 20 years--2% of US production for a generation. If we turn up our noses at that, then we surely ought to think twice about wind power. In 2008 all the wind turbines in the US generated 52 billion kilowatt-hours, backing out natural gas power generation equivalent to just 245,000 bbl/day of oil, or 5% of US oil output.

Geoffrey Styles will not be popular with the gloom-and-doomsters. He tries to thread a middle way through the contending factions:

Although finding more oil may look problematic from a greenhouse gas perspective, oil is not our worst fuel, and it remains the hardest to displace, because of its unique combination of energy density and portability. I share the vision of many for a future made up of electrified cars and low- or no-emission power plants, but we're going to burn hundreds of billions of barrels of oil getting there. For reasons including national security, national pride, and our balance of trade, it matters whose oil it will be, as we make the long transition to a more sustainable energy economy. If we ignore that principle, we're likely to end up even more reliant on unstable foreign suppliers, before we arrive at the elusive promised land of energy independence.