Our modern lives are greatly dependent on petroleum; as President George W. Bush phrased it in his 2006 State of the Union Address, “America is addicted to oil.” Nowhere is his cliché more applicable than in agriculture. Starting in the the 1940s, the Green Revolution introduced hybrid cereal crops to farming. Known as high yielding varieties, these plants are only part of the transformation from agriculture to agribusiness. To produce these higher yields the crops need more energy, yet the sun shines no brighter and the soil’s wealth only diminishes. Hydrocarbon fertilizers provide this energy.
“Food is oil,” insists Richard Manning in Harper’s Magazine, “every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten.” Industrial agriculture also relies on vast amounts of petroleum for pesticides, irrigation, farming equipment, transportation, and food processing. Depending on fossil fuels for our food supply means that the United States is trusting petroleum exporting countries to keep us fed.
The idea that oil will someday run out is as old as the first oil well, but Peak Oil is a much younger concept. Peak Oil’sconcern is running out of cheap oil as demand continues to rise while the supply steadily drops. As a proper noun, it refers to the point at which the Earth reaches its maximum oil production capacity. This world event is both the definition and focus of Peak Oil, but oil can peak on a lesser scale as well. An oil well’s production typically follows a bell curve, slowly building in capacity until it reaches peak production and then tapers off.
M. King Hubbert, a geophysicist with Shell Oil in the 1940s and ’50s, studied fossil fuel prospecting and production. Through his research he found that individual oil field discoveries, when combined together as a reserve, also formed a bell curve. The discovery curve of those oil reserves mimicked the eventual production curve of the oil fields. Hubbert soon applied his curve theory to fossil fuel reserve data from all around the world. In 1956 he compiled his findings in a paper titled: Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels. Hubbert predicted in his paper that oil production in the United States would “culminate at about 1965 and then must decline at a rate comparable to its earlier rate of growth”.
Ultimate United States crude oil production.
Hubbert’s research was soon validated. The Energy Information Administration(EIA) lists the U.S. daily production rate at nearly 7 million barrels in 1956. By 1970, U.S. oil production had peaked at over 9 million barrels per day. From there U.S. production began its slow descent down the opposite slope.
The Yom Kippur War raged as a post-peak United States saw its first spike in oil imports. To dissuade the U.S. and its allies from supporting Israel, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries(OAPEC) began an oil embargo. So began the 1973 oil crisis. The oil embargo would last only six months, but its effects would be far reaching.
Oil prices doubled—twice. Long lines formed at the pump and gasoline was rationed. Speed limits were lowered and thermostats turned down. On Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange took a serious hit. The U.S. was beset: inflation, unemployment, and recession. But the other shoe would not drop until 1979; the Iranian Revolution would spark a second oil crisis.
Americans would soon forget these crises as the 1980s began and Reaganomics took hold. Europeans reacted differently to the 1970s oil shocks, investing in alternative energies, primarily nuclear and wind power. They also reduced their fossil fuel needs through increased sustainable agriculture. Huge investments were made in mass transit and Europe’s towns have largely remained focused on the pedestrian. This all adds up to a more self-reliant economy that may better insulate itself from fluctuating energy prices on the world market. Are Americans equally prepared to weather such storms?
Human beings—globally—consume 84 million barrels of oil on a daily basis according to the EIA. Here in the United States we account for 21 million barrels, one fourth of total world oil consumption, yet we only produce 5 million barrels domestically. This leaves the U.S. as a net importer in a global market that has an ever tightening margin between supply and demand.
Ultimate World crude oil production.
Hubbert’s paper also prognosticated Peak Oil “at about the year 2000”. His world estimate has proved to be less accurate than his U.S. estimate. Undoubtedly the ’70s oil crises played a significant role in this, slowing oil production growth, thereby stalling the world peak. His global data was also less reliable. In 1956 the U.S. had been more thoroughly prospected than other regions of the world. Hubbert’s failure to more accurately predict Peak Oil has left a power vacuum with scientists, con-artists, activists, and politicians all vying to fill his shoes.
Many Peak Oil proponents are ignored by the mainstream media as little more than cranks akin to wild-eyed men wearing sandwich boards proclaiming that “THE END IS NIGH”. And not without reason. Peak Oil’s ranks are filled with Luddites, conspiracy theorists, and survivalists. These doomsayers predict a litany of cataclysmic events: depression, famine, war, and die-off. Author Jim Kunstler, himself an ex-Y2K nut, refers to life after Peak Oil as the “Long Emergency” for which “Americans are woefully unprepared”.
Credible voices are starting to emerging though; voices that cannot be so easily derided. “There’s a good chance that these people who made a living all these years studying petroleum deposits know what they’re talking about,” Bill Clinton acknowledged on MPR, “and we may not have as much oil as we think.” At a World Environment Day speech, Al Gore asserted that “we almost certainly have reached so-called Peak Oil.” Yet this is a non-partisan problem whose strong political supporters extend beyond the left.
Although he suggests in Harper’s Magazine that Peak Oil is “a liberal apocalypse,” Bryant Urstadt admits that ”true right-winger,” Congressman Roscoe Bartlett is Peak Oil’s staunchest political ally. On May 2nd, 2006, Representative Bartlett spoke before Congress:
I think [a program] needs three qualities if we are going to make this transition in any acceptable way. First, we must have everybody involved, a total commitment like World War II….It needs to have the technology focus of putting a man on the moon, because we are going to have to have a lot of technology breakthroughs and applications here if we are going to make it. Thirdly, it needs to have the intensity of the Manhattan Project….We should have begun 26 years ago.
The Congressman believes that a serious level of effort will be needed to overcome the problems that will arise out of Peak Oil. The United States, as a post-peak nation, will have an even greater difficulty meeting this new global challenge.
Bartlett’s opinion is echoed by the U.S. Department of Energy. In February of 2005 the DOE released a report titled: Peaking of World Oil Production. The report suggests that “problems associated with…peaking will not be temporary, and…oil peaking deserves immediate, serious attention, if risks are to be fully understood and mitigation begun on a timely basis”. The Department of Energy cautions that “without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented”. Three mitigation scenarios were considered in the report. In the first scenario mitigation starts at peak and causes a global energy shortfall for over two decades. Starting a decade prior for the second scenario halves that shortfall to a decade. Scenario number three starts mitigation two decades before Peak Oil and “appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall”. So there may be a workable solution to these problems, but it will require substantial effort well in advance of Peak Oil.
Time is the true adversary. Only sometime after global oil production has peaked will it become apparent. By then it will be too late for action. Europe started nearly thirty years ago, Representative Bartlett thinks the U.S. should have started over twenty years ago, and the DOE advises that the U.S. prepare twenty years in advance. But do we even have twenty years left? “A number of competent forecasters project peaking within a decade,” the DOE report states, “others contend it will occur later”. This projection is most unsettling.
Is Peak Oil a serious problem, and if so, whose? Placing the peak at 2000 makes it something our parents should have dealt with, if that peak falls closer to 2050, it becomes the responsibility of our children. But if that peak is coming in the 2010s and ’20s—it’s our job. Doomsayers and Pollyannas aside, it isn’t unreasonable to expect a petroleum shortage to negatively effect the economy. Peak Oil, at the very least, could spur a global recession on par with the Great Depression.
And from this revelation comes the stark reality that all these other problems shrink to insignificance when faced with the prospect of starvation. “The age of the three thousand mile Caesar salad,” Jim Kunstler emphasizes, “will soon be over.” Can we refuel the Green Revolution, or will the Information Age expire as well?