Again with the Peak Oil
So what’s the relationship between “peak oil” and climate change? Is there one? After all, with less of the stuff to burn, there’ll be less “greenhouse gas” emissions. Right? Does fossil fuel depletion have a silver lining?
Well. No. I’m afraid not. Leastways if there is a silver lining on peak oil’s cloud, it’s not an antidote to anthropogenic climate change.
But you knew I was going to say that right? After all, I’m always soooo negative. But it’s not like I want to be a harbinger of doom. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than announcing; “hey! y’know all that peak oil malarky? Turns out it’s a bunch of arse. Magic pixie dust from space-land will sort everything out!”
One day I’ll have some good news for you. I promise. But statistically speaking it’s unlikely to be today.
Less oil = More emissions. Huh?
I know, I know. Counter-intuitive or what? But the world is a lot like that. It’s rarely as it seems. And even when it is, chances are you’re looking at it wrong. It’s a bit like Oliver Kamm walking into a room containing other people and not being punched repeatedly in the face by all present. Common sense insists it shouldn’t happen. Yet apparently it does.
The first thing that I want to stress is that there’s a fundamental sloppiness with the term “peak oil”. In reality, when I (and most informed people) use the term, we are using it as a shorthand for “peak oil and natural gas”. Even ASPO uses the shorthand… the name of the organisation is actually “Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas” but they clearly realised that ASPOaG isn’t the catchiest of acronyms.
There’s now data to suggest that conventional crude oil production peaked late last year. Dr. Colin Campbell has made it clear that total oil production will peak within 5 to 15 years of conventional crude. His analysis also suggests that we’ll reach a peak in natural gas production within a few years of peak oil production. Gas, however, has an entirely different depletion profile to crude oil (often referred to as the natural gas “cliff” to distinguish it from the relatively gentle Hubbert “curve” of oil depletion) and production rates plummet rapidly soon after hitting peak.
Unfortunately, as any free-market-economist-type person will tell you, even if oil and gas were to begin depleting (a scenario many of them will actually deny… insisting that greater demand will lead to greater investment leading to greater supply; what I refer to as “The Spoilt Child Hypothesis”), the market will merely switch to supplying alternatives. The demand isn’t for oil per se, but – more abstractly – for the uses that oil can be put to.
At this point some economists will use the phrase, “the infinite transformability of units of production”. However they’ll use it out of earshot of me as I’ve a tendency towards violence when I hear it.
Economists: Right about one thing
Well, they’re probably right about slightly more than one thing. But in this case they’re right about people not wanting oil for oil’s sake (or gas). They want something that’ll make their car go, or something that’ll generate the electricity for their homes, or something that’ll keep them warm in the winter and cook their food.
Unfortunately there are no adequate substitutes for either oil or gas. But there are plenty of inadequate ones. Which is where the carbon emissions problem raises its sooty head.
If the market is given free rein to attempt to fill the supply shortfall as demanded by consumers of the high-energy lifestyle, then we will see an inevitable return to coal-fired power plants. Replacing gas power generation with coal would see a massive increase in carbon emissions. Don’t believe that guff about “clean coal”… it’s sleight-of-hand, like the electric car; merely moving the emissions away from the end user. The atmosphere doesn’t distinguish between emissions from a “clean coal” processing plant and those from burning “dirty coal” in your fireplace.
And it doesn’t end there.
A reduction in fossil-fuel availability will inevitably result in an increase in wood-burning and consequent increase in deforestation. As any school-child will tell you, trees are the planet’s natural solar-powered carbon sequesters. With fewer trees, less of our carbon emissions will be recycled out of the atmosphere. And this is part of a particularly vicious positive-feedback loop. Less trees begets less trees. Just ask the Easter Islanders.
And then there’s the staggeringly destructive idea of automobile biofuels. People don’t demand petrol, they merely demand that their cars work. And if palm oil will make them work, then they’ll fill up with palm oil. During the past 20 years, more than 85% of the deforestation in Malaysia was carried out to clear land for palm oil plantations for the export market. Not only did this involve the displacement of indigenous peoples and mass slaughter of wildlife, but also the drainage of large areas of swampland.
Anyone paying attention in biology class knows the problems associated with draining swamp and bogs… as the peat and mosses dry out they decompose releasing huge quantities of greenhouse gasses. Palm oil, it seems, is almost as big a contributor (barrel for barrel) to anthropogenic climate change as its fossil counterpart.
Not a supply-side problem
This is the crux of the matter. And it’s something that perpetual-growth capitalists just can’t get their head around. The problem we face is not how to replace oil and gas to meet the demands of energy-hungry consumers. The problem is how we manage the demands of those consumers so that they become less energy-hungry and more responsible.
I don’t know the precise solution to that problem. But I do know that it can’t be provided by free markets.
Strange that you don’t mention that as the cheap [light-sweet] oil runs out we will have to start exploiting the heavier tar-sand crude which requires more energy to extract and refine. Resulting in more CO2 emissions. That’s the real problem because there’s quite a lot of it.
June 6th, 2006 | 1:11pm
by Wolfie
Indeed Wolfie. The exploitation of tar sands and shale oil could well create a major increase in emissions. However I’m actually of the opinion that we’ll not get very far down that road.
Unlike coal, shale oil and tar sands both require massive quantities of fresh water and significant quantities of natural gas to extract into a usable product. Indeed I’m aware of two separate heavy oil mining operations (and it is “mining” as opposed to “drilling” in the case of oil shales) in Canada which have been halted due to the depletion of the local water table.
I believe that we’ll see an increase in heavy oil production, but that coal will be a much more likely and far more prevalent replacement for many of the uses we currently put conventional crude to. And I also believe that we’ll see a significant economic collapse resulting in a major scaling back of industrial activity long before the coal runs out and heavy oils get exploited on a large scale.
However, that’s speculation. And I’m the first to admit that. But, if anything, the exploitation of heavy oils is worse than coal from an environmental perspective. I just think it’s a slightly less likely option from a practical standpoint.
Nonetheless, it’s an important point well made. I’ve written about heavy oils before but should have included a line or two about them in the above piece.
June 6th, 2006 | 2:31pm
by Jim
Hey Jim
Clarify the situation regarding your stance on oil and ford cars
Is it a problem or not
June 6th, 2006 | 3:47pm
by wayne
In his recent article on hydrogen economy, Monbiot argues for using natural gas to create hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cells. In light of your points about gas peak it seems to be a rather absurd proposal.
Also interested in your thoughts on the hydrogen economy as I’ve not read much critical stuff about it, except
Merrick’s article.
Also Corporate Watch has recently launched a new blog – have a look xxxx
June 6th, 2006 | 3:52pm
by claire
No wayne, it’s not a problem at all. Ford cars are just fine. It’s all the other manufacturers that are ruining everything.
Ever since Ford started using magic pixie dust from space-land to power their production facilities and run the engines of their cars, they’ve been part of the solution, not the problem.
June 6th, 2006 | 3:53pm
by Jim
Hey Claire, that’s weird… I was just talking about you (well, Gyrus was saying he was heading over to visit you soon and I was saying “how is Claire?” and such).
Regarding the hydrogen thing, Merrick’s piece pretty much sums up the main issues. I could get all litigious about the fact he nicked some of my best lines for the article, but the whole Da Vinci Code / Holy Blood Holy Grail lawsuit demonstrated that’s a dead end (so I’ll probably just resort to publishing dodgy photos of him).
The basic points are:
1) Natural gas is depleting almost as fast as oil, and that will accelerate if we’re dumb enough to convert a load of it into hydrogen for cars.
2) Hydrogen is a bastid to deal with. You need all manner of expensive infrastructure to cope with the pressurisation and cooling; none of which we have and all of which will require major resource investment to build.
3) Hydrogen is inefficient. You can already run cars on liquified pressurised natural gas (LPG), though they’re renowned as deathtraps and tend to turn into fireballs when rear-ended. Converting gas into hydrogen involves energy losses (I’ve read estimates which suggest that 30% of the original energy in the gas is lost during the conversion process). So essentially hydrogen cars are a method of running cars on natural gas but deliberately pissing away a third of that gas before you even turn the ignition key.
4) Extracting hydrogen from other sources (water for instance) is an energy intensive process. You need to expend more energy breaking the bond between the H2 and the O than you get from recreating that bond when you burn the H2. In a utopia where fusion reactors provide us with infinite clean electricity, the idea of using hydrogen fuel cells for specific applications may be worth investigating. Here on planet earth though, it’s a white elephant.
I was pretty surprised myself when I read Monbiot’s article on the subject. He’s the best writer in the mainstream media at the moment, but that piece demonstrated that even he is fallible.
Thanks for the link to the Corporate Watch blog. I’ll put it in my blogroll right away (which will ensure I check it regularly).
Take care.
June 6th, 2006 | 4:32pm
by Jim
Hi Jim,
I just read that Yellowstone National Park has 8 times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.
We’re saved! If the oil companies can just get backing for the destruction of a rather fragile area of natural beauty (which getting at this oil would presumably involve), it’ll be business as usual until climate change puts a halt to economic activity entirely, by the sound of things.
June 7th, 2006 | 8:40am
by Ryan
Anyone else think that Wayne’s post was actually an advert in disguise? Or did I miss something?
June 7th, 2006 | 11:03am
by Doormat
Ryan: Doesn’t this fit into Jim’s point though? This is shale oil, so it requires a big energy input to get energy out (you first have to mine the material, and then heat it, and I think do some basic chemistry to get something we might call “oil”). All this will release carbon if (and presumably this is so) the energy input comes from fossil fuels.
However, worryingly, I would bet that as oil prices skyrocket in the next 10-50 years, there will be a massive amount of pressure to start to develop such shale oil sources…
June 7th, 2006 | 2:27pm
by Doormat
On the subject of oilshales, there’s an excellent summary by petrogeologist, Dr. Colin Campbell, in a recent paper, The Availability of Non-Conventional Oil and Gas (Download PDF)…
“Strictly speaking, the shale in Shale Oil is not a shale at all but an immature normal organic rich source rock that has not been heated enough in Nature to give up its liquids. Such deposits have been exploited locally for hundred of years, with one of the larger undertakings being in Estonia, where the product was used as a boiler fuel. Widespread interest was rekindled at the time of high oil prices in the early 1980s, especially in the United States, where several attempts to develop viable operations were attempted. None succeeded, and a later scheme in Queensland, Australia, has suffered the same fate, despite government subsidy.
Oilshales occur in many countries, and known world resources are estimated to be capable of yielding about 160 Gb, assuming viable economic conditions, although the net energy yield is low, if not negative. The process involves mining the deposit and retorting it at temperatures ranging from 350 to 1000 degrees C: the higher the temperature the lighter the products of distillation. One of the serious obstacles has been the disposal of waste product which consists of a toxic fine powder that exceeds the volume of the original shales and is extremely difficult to manage in environmental terms. In situ methods of combustion have also been tried, but so far without success.
One remarkable new project has been recently unveiled by Shell which plans to heat a mountain of oilÂshale in Colorado with electric energy produced by a dedicated coal burning plant. The mountain, when heated for a year or so, is expected to yield synthetic oil through boreholes drilled into it. On the face of it, the project would appear to provide a negative net energy yield, but may be viable in the sense that the liquid hydrocarbons derived from the shales are more useful and valuable than the coal used to generate the electricity. That Shell should undertake such a project says much about the future of its other sources of oil supply, especially in North America.
In general, it seems most unlikely that oilshale will provide any significant share of future world production, but may again have local application. The progress of Shell’s project, which at least appears to solve the worst of the environmental hazards, carbon dioxide emissions apart, deserves to be watched with interest.”
June 7th, 2006 | 3:09pm
by Jim
I think we’re going to get huge investment in all manner of electricity generation in order to make vehicle fuel.
It’s not just Malaysian forest/palm oil plantations that give off emissions as bogs are drained. Several UK wind farm sites have done the same thing. Cefn Croes in Wales and the approved new on in Lewis entail huge drainage. And as well as the emissions, there’s the loss of rare habitiat and its rare wildlife.
Additionally, wind farms often entail a load of tree felling too (Cefn Croes a case in point again). For fucks sake, let’s put em on frigging golf courses.
One you didn’t mention was hydroelectricity, which is often touted as environmentally sound.
The plantlife they submerge decays without oxygen, so it gives off methane. This is serious stuff – methane’s impact on the greenhouse effect is more than 20 times that of CO2.
This inital emission means the dam is dozens of times worse for greenhouse gas emissions than if the same electricity were generated from burning oil.
Even after the initial flooding of the land, methane production continues as seasonal drops in reservoir levels allow plants to grow which are later submerged.
So, for example, a study of the greenhouse effect emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Brazil showed that, even more than a decade after filling, it was nearly four times worse than if the same amount of electricity had been generated from burning oil.
The World Commission on Dams – despite being paid by the largest funder of dams the World Bank – said, ‘there is no justification for claiming that hydro-electricity does not contribute significantly to global warming’.
June 8th, 2006 | 7:27pm
by Merrick
Jim, This is a bit off topic, but I was taken aback by this when I heard it on the news: BP chief talks crap:
Lord Browne, the chief executive of oil firm BP, has said he expects crude prices to fall from current near-record levels as more supplies are discovered.
“But is very likely that oil prices will range in the medium term around an average of $40,” he continued. “In the long run it could even be $25 to $30.”
This sounds like pure distilled cool-aid to me: how are prices going to roughly half in a window of 10 years as demand keeps increasing, while there is basically no-where else to look on Earth to find serious amounts of new oil…
What thinks you?
June 11th, 2006 | 6:42pm
by Doormat