Life without oil

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Among the global marker turmoil (GMT?) of yesterday. An important development was lost. Reuters reported that Dick Cheney (still VP, still surviving, dicky ticker and all) on a tour of the Middle East said that crude oil at $100 a barrel reflected market conditions. The charmingly named 'light sweet crude' was $50 in 2005. Cheney continued more startlingly, saying: "One of the problems we've got now obviously is that there is not a lot of excess capacity worldwide."

He said statistics from a Washington energy consulting group had shown that "there's just not a lot out there, and some of that excess capacity represents high sulphur crude for example, it's not very attractive and not easily marketed" There had been a dramatic increase in demand from China and India, he said.

Whatever you might say about Cheney, he knows what he is talking about. The Federal Building in Casper, Wyoming, is named after him due to his work lobbying for the region's oil and coal industries. This is why his remarks are so startling. Basically, the Bush Governmnent, the oil Government, in its twilight days, is admitting that it, that we, have a massive problem on our hands: we are running out of cheap oil. And, oil being unrenewable ... well, that's it.

This may not be news to you. I had completely forgottten about the '50 years remaining' that I read about in my chemistry text book in 1994 in between repeating bits of Monty Python's Flying Circus to James Perry. It's certainly not news to those who have been following the alarm about peak oil (where supply outstrips demand or oil becomes more expensive to tap than its price) which has been providing a strange counterpoint to global warming fears for the last five year or so. A conspiracy theorist could even imagine that the latter was dreamt up to shock humanity into dealing with the former. But I admit I didn't know that our life was about to be turned on its head. On its head?  Watch A Crude Awakening, 2006' controversial film. In discussing the mechanics of the problem, it reminds us that oil is not just used as fuel, but used to make pretty much everything we use, including fertilizer to grow food, and also that:

• 10,000 nuclear reactors would be needed to replace our current use of oil and we would run out of uranium in 20 years
• China's oil consumption has been rising by 8% a year since 2002
• No major new oil fields will be found
• The Middle East is the last underexplored region, so more wars are in the (ahem) pipeline.
• Darfur is the first real war purely about oil (there's oil in South where the ethnic cleansing is happening)
• An oil peak can happen suddenly without warning (several regions have already peaked, including parts of Russia and Cuba) The effects on this to the global economy would be alarming.
• A barrel of oil does the work of 25,000 men
• Large parts of the US - and suburbia elsewhere - are completely dependent on the car.
• The internet uses 10% of the US' energy 

Too late to mitigate global warming, life without cheap oil would be more local, colder, less disposable, more dangerous, older ... unimaginable. It might sound like a paradise to some. We might realise we were living in Paradise now. Certainly, with Peak Oil in mind, we seem to be living at the high point of civilisation from a purely material perspective.

There have been many arguments made against the idea that peak oil is happening now (supply will rise with demand, the high price is due to the futures market - a barrel of oil costs just $55) but I've not heard many suggesting that oil will last forever or that we will be able to live like we do now without it.

With Cheney's announcement yesterday, those arguments, only about when, not if, will be dealt another blow and the precipice into which we waltz seems deeper and steeper still.

Comments

[Michael Ejercito]

Uranium is more common than gold.

And nuclear fuel can be refined from thorium, which is more common than uranium.