RE: Peak Oil?
November 10, 2021 at 10:49 am
(This post was last modified: November 10, 2021 at 10:53 am by Alan V.)
According to what I have read from various scholarly experts:
We’ve been running out of fossil fuels for some time now, though we have extended what we can recover by new methods like fracking. While new reserves may be discovered, resources always go down. New discoveries would have to be big to maintain the rate of consumption. A part of the problem is our increasing rate of demand from the developing world, and especially from such countries as China and India. Demand is projected to grow 50% by 2050. Yet one estimate is that we will see oil production peak and then begin to slowly decline by 2030. Venezuela, Russia, and the U.S. have already peaked. Coal and natural gas will peak before 2040.
Fossil fuels become more expensive to extract over time. This is because we picked the low hanging fruit first, the best-quality and cheapest, leaving the more expensive to refine and the harder to access for later. And later is coming fast.
It requires energy to produce energy. The Energy Returned On Investment (EROI) number keeps getting lower and lower until, at last, more energy would have to be spent than the amount which could be recovered by spending it. Even before that point, the energy will no longer be economical to extract. This means that we will never burn all of our proven reserves. By one author’s estimate, it will be unlikely for supply problems to crop up until the second half of this century, though there may be price problems before then. However, the dropping costs of renewables like solar and wind power will likely spell the end for fossil fuels long before that happens.
By 2100, economical oil and gas will be gone. They will last us for 40 to 70 years, depending on our rate of consumption. Much of what will be left in our reserves, in oil shales, tar sands, and under the oceans, will be too costly to recover. They will become what are called stranded assets. Minable coal reserves have been substantially overestimated. U.S. coal production could peak in the next decade.
Today we are burning over 90 million barrels of oil a day. With a business-as-usual scenario, that number could increase significantly by 2100 – if we had it to burn. Because of accelerating demand, a business-as-usual scenario will likely cause us to run out of economic fossil fuels in this century. So we are headed toward renewables one way or another.
We’ve been running out of fossil fuels for some time now, though we have extended what we can recover by new methods like fracking. While new reserves may be discovered, resources always go down. New discoveries would have to be big to maintain the rate of consumption. A part of the problem is our increasing rate of demand from the developing world, and especially from such countries as China and India. Demand is projected to grow 50% by 2050. Yet one estimate is that we will see oil production peak and then begin to slowly decline by 2030. Venezuela, Russia, and the U.S. have already peaked. Coal and natural gas will peak before 2040.
Fossil fuels become more expensive to extract over time. This is because we picked the low hanging fruit first, the best-quality and cheapest, leaving the more expensive to refine and the harder to access for later. And later is coming fast.
It requires energy to produce energy. The Energy Returned On Investment (EROI) number keeps getting lower and lower until, at last, more energy would have to be spent than the amount which could be recovered by spending it. Even before that point, the energy will no longer be economical to extract. This means that we will never burn all of our proven reserves. By one author’s estimate, it will be unlikely for supply problems to crop up until the second half of this century, though there may be price problems before then. However, the dropping costs of renewables like solar and wind power will likely spell the end for fossil fuels long before that happens.
By 2100, economical oil and gas will be gone. They will last us for 40 to 70 years, depending on our rate of consumption. Much of what will be left in our reserves, in oil shales, tar sands, and under the oceans, will be too costly to recover. They will become what are called stranded assets. Minable coal reserves have been substantially overestimated. U.S. coal production could peak in the next decade.
Today we are burning over 90 million barrels of oil a day. With a business-as-usual scenario, that number could increase significantly by 2100 – if we had it to burn. Because of accelerating demand, a business-as-usual scenario will likely cause us to run out of economic fossil fuels in this century. So we are headed toward renewables one way or another.
