Analyzing the Energy Scarcity Myth

As pointed out in the lectures, we need oil not just for energy but also for petrochemicals. Thus, the problem isn't just energy scarcity but material scarcity, especially given petrochemicals.

Heavy oil has lower energy returns, and we will likely need more than what is available. A more serious problem is the extraction rate, not reserves.

The same goes for natural gas. That is why the IEA forecasts around a 9 pct increase in production for the next two decades from all oil and gas sources worldwide put online. Unfortunately, in order to maintain economic growth (or even increase the rate given a growing global middle class in BRIC and emerging markets), demand has to go up around 2 pct a year.

Similar problems can be seen in particular areas. For example, the most optimistic scenario for North America is a 6-mb/d addition to oil and gas for the next two decades. That's a very good number, except that global demand has to go up around 2 mb/d to maintain growth. And given a global capitalist system, this will be important. In general, the IEA states that we will need the equivalent of one Saudi Arabia every seven years to accomplish such.

With that, all sources of energy will have to be put online just to meet necessities. Whether or not they will be able to meet demand needed for growth in the long term will be another matter.

And when conventional oil production starts dropping, then we face two problems: declining conventional production pulling down total energy output coupled with rising energy demand.

And then bring in the effects of environmental damage and global warming on crop damage, mining and manufacturing disruption, etc., not to mention the lag time needed to switch from an oil-based global economy to one that uses much less of it.

Fast? The extraction rate is either higher or low, not fast or slow.

According to the Citigroup report, at best all additional oil and gas resources in North America will add 6 mb/d to production for two decades. Global demand has to go up 2 mb/d a year to maintain economic growth.

No, I compared world resources to demand. Read my first post.

Sorry, it's not a myth. The fact that you refer to using other sources of energy proves energy scarcity. The problem is EROEI, availability of petrochemicals, etc.

According to the IEA, we will need the equivalent of one Saudi Arabia every seven years to maintain economic growth, and it has to be oil because global manufacturing and even mechanized agriculture are heavily geared towards the use of oil.

We can retool the whole process to use less oil, but it will take decades. See the article "It will Take 131 Years to Replace Oil" from Business Insider, for example.

Searching for a quick fix to oil involving more fossil fuels and nuclear energy strikes me as a bit similar to Ben Bernanke's reaction of always throwing more money at every financial problem. What's the end result? If you follow this line of thinking through to a conclusion you know we will end up right back to where we are now but with even greater challenges. So why not face reality now and stop borrowing against our future to pay for today? I know clean renewable energy isn't currently an equal replacement to oil but it has something else that puts it light years ahead of oil, its clean and renewable! This isn't just about making sure we have fancy cars to drive to the mall for the rest of our lives, or picking the next great energy stock, its about having clean air and water too. I'm not saying fossil fuels aren't needed to play a role in the transition but that should be the only role. They are old dinosaurs that need to be replaced, literally.

"We can't solve problems by using the same line of thinking we used when we created them." Albert Einstein.

I want to second SolarSean's comment: regardless of whether alternatives exist or not to the energy predicament of our time, if we don't change our core philosophy of limitless growth, we're going to run into trouble. We'll just end up at peak thorium, peak heavy oil and peak nat gas at some point down the road all in the name of maintaining an unsustainable system. We must keep in mind all the costs of progress, including the damage done to the environment, which robs future generations of useful capital.

I highly suggest, redrob, that you listen to Chris' podcast with John Michael Greer. Greer provides a very balanced, and historically proven, view of the predicaments we face. The core message is that we need to accept that there are limits we cannot ignore, no matter how much we'd like to. It really is a paradigm shift in humanity's worldview that we can't grow indefinitely. Since that's unlikely to happen without first bearing the painful repercussions of our wasteful actions, it's wise to assume that we, collectively, will take the least effective path in that transition.

This site is quite inetersting to me, as I have been pondering about the limits of growth for some time.

Here is an interesting fact:  Assuming that exponential growth of energy use will continue on the same trajectory as it has in past, then based on a total world power consumption of 26 TW as of today, we will use the the entire energy of the sunlight hitting the earth in about 350-400 years.  That would mean, were we able to capture all this sunlight, that the earth would be black when looking at it from space.  Furthermore, it would be interesting to estimate the temperature of the earth should this happen.  This is hard to calculate, but estimates put it at around 100 degree centigrade. 

I think this quite impressively demonstrates the limits of exponential growth.

Why are we celebrating the possibility of continuing to burn oil, natural gas, and coal?  Over the long term, even over the medium term, our consumption of these products can only hurt us.  We DO need to regard our energy sources with caution -- by how many more degrees would we like to heat up the planet?  For an alternative to these overly cheerful comments, I suggest reading Bill McKibben's article in a recent issue of Rolling Stone. In it, he explains why we can't afford to burn even the oil that's easy to get, why we need to leave these dubious assets in the ground. Its title:  Global Warming's Terrifying New Math. 

cg1 said:

"So the question is:  How can a sustainable economic system work without growth?  Any answers to that?"

There are a bunch of people who have been thinking about and trying to answer that question for many years, cg1.   It's surprising there aren't a lot more given the obvious insanity of the notion that you can infinitely grow population, economy and consumption eternally in a resource limited world.   A ecological economist named Herman Daly, associated with the group in the link below, edited a book about it in 1973 called "Toward a Steady State Economy."   Of course, there is an aspect of capitalism creates our current, unsustainable ponzi scheme and helps maintain our intentional blindness to its unsustainability, so the powers that be, including the Ronald Raygun administration zapped the feeble nacent impulses of the Carter administration and others to recognize limits to energy consumption - or any limits after the '70's energy crisis.   We haven't heard much about steady state economics in the ~40 years since from Democrats, Republicans, or anyone here in the US, have we?  The Europeans took the energy crisis a bit more to heart and revamped their energy efficiency and public transportation across western Europe - though they still seem far from a sustainable, steady-state social welfare/demographic economy as the continent implodes financially due to low to negative growth.

Here's the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy website page on envisioning what that would be like:

http://steadystate.org/discover/envisioning-the-good-life/

It answers some questions and not others, but at least gives a starting point for visualizing and thinking about the idea.