Strike Three… The finality… Mad Max is upon us…
Quick Links to Updated Material
- Peak American Oil (updates Wednesdays), with a hindsight peak week in 12/06 2024 of 13,631 thousand barrels per day.
Introduction
It seems to me that we are at, or just past Peak Oil 3.0 and there won’t be a forth.
There are a few ways of breaking this down, and a few ways of counting things, but I expect in a few short years (probably less than 5) I expect it will all be academic, and people will just wonder:
- “Wait, what?”
- “Why didn’t anyone warn us?”
- “Why were we all so stupid?”
- “How was this kept secret?”
Entire books have been written on this topic (most in the early 2000s, around what I’ll call peak oil 2.0) and of them I suggest this one. However, if you would prefer to watch a fantastic, if somewhat dated documentary about the author Colin Campbell and Peak Oil, old though it be, this one is very informative. Colin is the horses mouth when it came to peak oil 2.0, which I’ll get to below.
A few definitions are worth knowing.
Peak Oil: means peak production of oil. For any oil field, or collection of oil fields (the largest collection being all of them on earth). Typically when an oil field is found, you sink a well, get a lot of oil, sink more wells into it and get oil out ever faster. However, there is a point, usually around the half way point, where no matter how many more wells you sink, or how hard you pump, you start getting less oil back. That turning point is the peak.
Conventional Oil: means the regular oil that you think of and more or less just pump out of the ground. Generally this is cheap, easy to get oil, however as the conventional oil wells become depleted, getting the last bits out become more expensive and difficult. If you read Colin’s book, he predicted “peak oil” in 2005-2006, and hit the nail on the head. In his books he clearly stated that when he talked about peak oil, he was referring to the world peak in conventional oil, what I’m calling Peak Oil 2.0.
Non-conventional Oil: (it’s worth knowing that conventional and non-conventional is a bit of a simplification and a sliding scale), but non-conventional oil would be things like:
- ethanol (made from corn)
- natural gas liquids
- fracked oil (not pumped from a reservoir, but exploded from stone, then pumped with pressure)
- tar sands (that is more mined than pumped)
- deep water oil (from deep in the ocean, that is in fact conventional oil, but is so difficult to get that it’s generally lumped in with non-conventional
Peak Oil 1.0: This is my term for peak United States conventional oil, that hit in 1970, as accurately predicted in the 1950s by L. King Hubbart. I’m told that nobody believed him, but he was right, and Peak Oil 1.0 triggered the oil crisis of the 1970. You can download and read his original paper for free here. It’s quite good. And I think there is a lot to be gained by reading the actual scientists work, and not mere summaries.
Whereas I mentioned conventional oil is easy and fast to get, non-conventional oil is slower, more difficult, and more expensive. Such that nobody in their right mind would go after it, if conventional oil were still there to be found in sufficient quantities.
Now it is true, to some extent, that neoliberal economics controls supply and demand, and that when supply becomes short, demand increases, and some substitution or new technology gets us access to greater supplies. And this most recently happened around 2010 as fracking technology took off and increased oil supply (in the USA at least) faster than expected, such that Peak Oil 2.0 (in 2006) had a blunted impact. Still, a lot of you might notice that everything (including the 2008 financial crisis) has kinda sucked since then.
Peak Oil 1.0
- 1970, Peak “United States “conventional” oil, precipitates 1973 oil crisis, and inspires Mad Max, The Road warrior…
Peak Oil 2.0
- 2005-2006: Peak World “conventional” oil
Peak Oil 3.0
- November 2018: Peak “all world oil” to include non-conventional oil.
- You might notice
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