The Consequences of Peak Oil
What would a Permanent Decline in Oil Production Mean for the World?
If we are approaching a future of increasing oil scarcity, the ramifications could be dire for both our standard of living and world stability as a whole.
Peak oil is the theory that oil production reaches a peak, and then declines. Many critics believe that the world has or is about to reach its peak. What are the consequences of such a decline?
Oil's Bounty
Oil is essential to our lives. Most people understand this to mean transportation: we use oil when we drive our cars. However, there are few aspects of our lives in which oil is not somehow involved.
Crude oil itself it not very useful until it is refined into petroleum products, the best known being gasoline, or petrol. Here is a short overview of the by-products of crude oil:
• Lubricants and asphalt (used in road paving)
• Naphtha, gasoil, LPG and ethane are derived from crude oil, and then used in the production of petrochemicals, of which there are 4000 different products, including ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, ammonia and methanol
• The end-products of these petrochemicals are plastics, synthetic fibres, synthetic rubbers, detergents and chemical fertilizers
In short, crude oil is used in a vast number of products that we are not always aware of, like perfume and other cosmetic products, all the plastic found in a hospital, and basic food crops grown with the aide of insecticides and fertilizers. Without it, our lifestyles would be changed drastically.
Population and Politics
World population has ballooned in the last century. In 2008, the world's population is believed to has reached over 6.6 billion. That's 5 billion more than it was at 1900. At current rates of growth, it is expected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050.
Pair such growth with the booming economies of countries like China and India, whose citizens are looking to emulate our Western lifestyle, and a conflict arises. Given that the Western lifestyle depends so heavily on oil and its by-products, and there is a dwindling supply of oil available, the realm of geo-politics will become increasingly absorbed with grabbing up what's left, as the American invasion of Iraq attests to.
Solutions to Peak Oil
The world faces a difficult dilemma: dwindling oil supply and increasing demand. The logical solution would be to decrease our dependence on oil, replacing oil with non-renewable energy sources such as wind farms, solar energy and bio-fuels.
However, as many supporters of peak oil explain, these sources can only provide a fraction of the concentrated energy of oil. As Richard Heinberg explains in his book "The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies," "the energy in a single gallon of gasoline is roughly equivalent to the energy expended by a human being working hard...for a month, and an American working at a minimum-wage job can purchase a gallon of gasoline for about 20 minutes of labor."
Heinberg uses the metaphor of a winning lottery ticket to put this incredible return on a relative small investment into perspective. The discovery of oil early in the 20th century and its subsequent development into a myriad of products was the equivalent of winning the lottery, which our society has promptly spent in an unprecedented period of material growth and consumption.
As Heinberg and many other critics have concluded, we may now be facing bankruptcy.
To learn more about peak oil researchers and supporters read An Introduction to Peak Oil Theory. For information about those who disagree with the theory, go to The Peak Oil Debate.
