Friday, December 05, 2003
Do we have a pending oil crisis? And does it matter?
British academic and columnist George Monbiot claims in a detailed article that the world is running dangerously short of oil, but we don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
Here's an extract from his article:
"Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year, we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago... Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.
"The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are the ones produced by the US Department of Energy, which claims that this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information agency has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has based its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand, perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial markets. Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010. In August the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he was "99 per cent confident" that the date of maximum global production will be 2004."
Is Monbiot right, and if so, does it matter?
Monbiot draws some fairly pessimistic conclusions from his research, which may not be warranted. For a start, he ignores a large body of research being carried out worldwide into alternative forms of energy, which do not rely on fossil fuel technology or nuclear sources. The biggest problem may not be harnessing this energy, but rather finding a distribution system that large corporations or governments don't hijack.
An article which outlines some of the "free energy" systems being explored can be found here.
British academic and columnist George Monbiot claims in a detailed article that the world is running dangerously short of oil, but we don't talk about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
Here's an extract from his article:
"Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every year, we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago... Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil will peak before long.
"The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are the ones produced by the US Department of Energy, which claims that this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information agency has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has based its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand, perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial markets. Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010. In August the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he was "99 per cent confident" that the date of maximum global production will be 2004."
Is Monbiot right, and if so, does it matter?
Monbiot draws some fairly pessimistic conclusions from his research, which may not be warranted. For a start, he ignores a large body of research being carried out worldwide into alternative forms of energy, which do not rely on fossil fuel technology or nuclear sources. The biggest problem may not be harnessing this energy, but rather finding a distribution system that large corporations or governments don't hijack.
An article which outlines some of the "free energy" systems being explored can be found here.
