Peak oil occurred around 2005
"Peak oil" is Malthusian mythology. World crude oil production was at 84.5 million bpd in 2005. After dipping in 2009 -- which was because of reduced demand, not any "peak" in either production or supply -- it's surged to 2010 in 87 million bpd, and over 89 million bpd in 2012. If you read projections from the U.S. EIA, OPEC is expected to produce less in 2014, but it's a voluntary cutback to keep oil prices from falling. There's still a lot of oil being produced by conventional means.
since then the price of gas/oil per barrel has been on the up.
Actually, crude oil prices are considerably lower than their 2008 peak, and U.S. gas prices are lower than the 2008 peak. While prices are higher than in 2007, it's perfectly explained by growth in the Chinese and Indian economies, and the tremendously inflationary practices by the major central banks. You can't go by price alone as evidence of a "peak."
I am not as optimistic as you. Unfortunately prior to the use of oil, the world's population stood at less than 2 billion, it had been that way for centuries. The coming of the oil age has seen the world's population skyrocket to now being over 7 billion. And is projected to be over 9 billion by 2050. In 1950, less than 70 years ago, the world's population was only 2.5 billion. Oil has been used for intensive agriculture, the machinery used to grow and transport crops in huge monopolies and mass farming, the so called 'green revolution'. Highly industrialized . The bulk of pesticides/fertilizers are a product of oil, and are relied on to produce the food in these industrialized farms. There is nothing on the horizon to replace oil for tractors, oil for pesticides, oil for transporting farm produce, oil in the production of steel, rubbers, etc etc to manufacture the tractors to use in the first place, the list goes on and on. It takes 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce 1 calorie of food. What happens when this fossil fuel (95% oil) is unavailable. You tell me.
When so much of the population growth is in Third World countries, whose people don't use as much energy, there isn't as much of a concern about population growth. And as a testament to human ingenuity, our efficiency in drilling, pumping, transportation, refinement and usage has also increased. Even the trucks delivering to gas stations have more efficient engines than years past, because it makes economic sense.
Oil is not going to disappear overnight. Your talk of "There is nothing on the horizon" for replacement is what people said two centuries ago about limits. Yet mankind found more coal. Mankind discovered crude oil. It's the big thing right now, and I judge by human history since industrialization that we'll find the next big thing in plenty of time.
A collapse of the oil economy has impacts much greater than just transport,
And a nuclear war in my back yard tomorrow would be the end of things too. There's a lot more chance of that happening than oil suddenly going away, overnight or 10 years from now. Be worried more about the disappearance of honeybees than oil going away within your lifetime.
there are no alternatives for the bulk of processes currently gained from oil. You can always find one example of something to use for the odd process or product, however in the scale of what oil does in all it's derivatives nothing comes close to the EROEI that oil has given mankind.
You're acting like there's a full stop in human inventions. Once upon a time, humans worried about the cost of making and cleaning glass containers. Then we invented disposable plastics. You don't know what the future holds, when someone will make a breakthrough. I've used bioplastics that aren't quite there, but a few more years and they could be.
If oil suddenly becomes so scarce, prices will go up, and using metal and glass will again become economically viable. Have you ever been to countries where even fast food restaurants offer metal utensils, and soft drinks come in glass bottles? Personally I ask if they have plastic ones, because I don't know how well a fork was washed. Some places simply don't, because labor is so cheap that washing metal and glass is overall cheaper than disposable plastic. Western economies still don't have to worry about going back to that, because we'll find the next disposable material to accommodate our fast lifestyles. There's always an alternative.
Originally it was 1 unit of energy invested to obtain 100 units of energy ie 100:1 now that same calculation due to the cost of exploration, the fact that oil fields are in ever more inaccessible regions or non standard fields (ie gulf of Mexico 5 miles down, ring any bells, Canadian Tar sands etc) and bringing fields to production puts the EROEI down to 20:1, ie it takes 1 unit of energy to get 20 units. I think the EROEI on the tar sands is something like 5:1 at best and some deeper areas 2.9:1, even worse, and is highly environmentally damaging. Either way just on oil, it is 1/5 of what it was 80 years ago. This equation gets worse every year.
You're again making big assumptions. That's with today's technology, but how do you know we won't have better means to harvest energy with greater returns? Just a century ago, nobody could have drilled so deep, or easily flown non-stop to a third of the way around the world. Going to the moon was very much still science fiction, except to visionaries like Goddard (this year marks a full century since his pioneering rocket designs).
You need to remember that a degrading rate of return is natural for certain production industries. It's easy to scoop water near the top of a well. It takes more effort to lower and raise a bucket that must get water 20 feet deep. As various oil spots are tapped, continually deeper drilling is necessary to get at additional oil in the same deposit. This wouldn't be a problem if more lands were opened up to easy, cheap drilling, but right now there's an administration firmly in the way of new permits (and yet tries to take credit for increased U.S. oil production that's come from private drilling).
The Twilight Zone episode "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" didn't make this point explicitly, but it's an important observation: in a matter of mere decades, deep-drilling became possible, and in just several years, self-starting car engines were put into commercial prodution. With more people on the planet, especially First Worlders with the imagination, education and monetary ability to make things happen, don't doubt what we can continue to create. I wasn't impressed by the mere fact that Apple created its iPad. The concept wasn't new. I was impressed, however, that they made it a rather light form factor, and at such a price affordable to many people.
You could do better than citing Chicken Little websites. Do you realize just how old that data is, and that it hasn't been updated with the huge findings of the last few years? Do you know what BP announced just a month ago?
Sure you can have bio fuel/ethanol all generated as by products of agriculture, ie corn etc, however to replace oil with bio fuel gives you the choice, to use your land/machinery to make fuel for cars or produce food to feed the people, you will not be able to do both. You mentioned algae above, well I have read the studies on this promising alternative, however when you read them you need to read the words like 'has the potential' in other words the technology and knowledge is still in fledgling stages and will require years and years before it is in any way a possible replacement, and even then they talk of it having the potential to supply between 15 & 20% of CURRENT oil usage, what happens to the other 75-80% unaccounted for not including the added extra for what economist are always after a 'growing economy'. On that basis only one in five of us who currently drive will be able to do so.
The bulk of alternative technologies wind, solar, nuclear generate electricity not oil. 95% of current transportation requires oil. 70% of oil in the US is used for transport. There is no alternative technology anywhere even close to supplying even 5% of the oil requirement for transport alone, yet alone for everything else that is a requirement for the way we currently live, computers, plastics,medicines, cosmetics etc, even to harvest sustainable woods in this day and age requires a huge fossil fuel input for transportation etc etc.
Do you realize that two centuries ago, people said the same about coal? "What will we do when coal runs out? How will we heat our homes? How will we cook food when all the forests are cut down?" The old song "Bonny Portmore" laments the cutting down of Irish trees, which was true at the time, but look what's happened since: the new and better technologies of industrialization made obsolete the industries that needed rampant deforestation for fuel and materials.
People will find alternatives. The last two centuries were filled with many enterprising minds who thought of better ways of doing things, and always in time before we "ran out" of a major commodity. AM frequencies had their limitations in quality and spectrum, until someone imaginative and knowledgeable made FM broadcasting feasible. People once fretted about hitting the limit of 1200 baud on modems (2400 if copper and conditions were good), until someone devised modulation to send more bits per baud. I laughed at the same mindset that thought in the early 1990s that we'd hit a data bottleneck with 56K modems, and then in the mid-1990s that Internet usage was increasing faster than fiberoptic lines could support. An Australian co-worker once remarked that they could tell when Americans were waking up and signing on, because their access would slow down. Where's the worry today? In more recent years, it's been the limitation of IPv4 addressing. No big deal: humans found ways to expand, and we will with energy.
We have the technology/knowledge to surmount some of these things, but the implementation of them and the requirement to be able to ramp up the infrastructure to use it is pretty much non existent, both in production terms and in terms of financing. You hear all the time about just switching to electric or hydrogen cars, this is ludicrous as how many millions of gas stations would need to be retrofitted to change from fuel to electricity or gas. Oh and we have a peak gas crisis too if you want to look at natural gases. It would cost absolutely billions and billions of dollars. Do you consider the current state of the American economy is in any fit state to handle this kind of mass infrastructure refit?
Again, you don't know what the future holds. Once upon a time, the notion of gas stations all around us -- the notion of being able across the continent in an ordinary car on fully paved roads -- was unimaginable to nearly everyone. "It would have cost billions and billions of dollars!" was the same worry then.
If it's important enough, the $16 trillion U.S. economy can and will absorb the costs of new endeavors. How many people 20 years ago would have paid the inflation-adjusted equivalent of triple digits every month for portable phone access? Basic $17 monthly access to a worldwide data network, never mind high-speed access, wasn't in most Americans' minds. Such costs are a drop in the bucket to a lot of people now.
It is far too late given the current state of the oil fields and the will of politicians who are more concerned with re-election on 4 to 8 year terms than long term risk management and implementation of such.
As I said, I have been studying this topic for over ten years and can rant on about it til the cows come home, although I generally don't bring it up anymore as the majority of people don't want to know. I am glad I do not have children, and feel sorry for those generations ahead of our wasteful generation. We have squandered everything for the future generations in less than 100 years.
cheers.
And I've been studying this for 23, since my first paper on oil production. Nothing personal, but the difference between is that you seem to have given up. I see an even more marvelous world ahead of me to leave for generations to come. Sometime, go check out the scanned Compute! magazines at archive.org, especially the ads. I was recently trying to find an old article and unintentionally got a refresher on how far we've come, at how many names disappeared, at a few familiar names still around because they adapted. Some thought the modern personal computer itself was finished after many video game publishers went belly-up in 1983.
