Orbis non sufficit
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Peak Oil and the Future of Humanity
I was considering making an essay out of this, maybe I will later, but for now I'll just talk about it here.
So peak oil is coming, that's a certainty, and probably reasonably soon. At this time the global amount of oil left in the ground will have passed halfway and it will start to be harder to extract. As it becomes more difficult to extract, even though we'll have a lot left in total, production will decrease and we will start to experience a shortfall between global oil production and demand. A shortfall of around 5% in the 70's caused oil prices to quadruple. Our problem will not be temporary and will in fact become steadily worse as production slowly dies off. Pretty much all the experts agree on this much.
Now enough of the background info. The thing I find much more concerning than the fact that our entire society may collapse around us is the fact that it would probably never recover, or at least we would never again reach our current level of technology. It seems highly unlikely that we would ever again reach into space and have a chance of exploringing the universe. We would be trapped forever on our lonely planet in a vast cosmos.
The amount of oil it takes to lift a spacecraft into orbit is fairly gigantic, though I'm sure it's only a tiny fraction of the total usage. Clearly we can't do things this way forever, but for now it's all we have and if oil-driven society collapses before we figure out another way to do it then it seems to me that we would never again have the resources to produce such sophisticated pieces of technology as would surely be involved.
Lets just hope somebody can think of a global energy solution that can be implemented in time to save us from this fate. Too bad the world hasn't managed to unite by now, if we had we could implement draconian measures to quash all unnessecary oil usage and give ourselves a bit more time. There aren't really any solutions at the moment, biofuels, solar, wind etc. don't have anything like the energy output required, and take so much oil to construct and implement that the energy returns are fairly minimal anyway. Nuclear may help for a while but again it takes plenty of oil to build nuclear power plants and mine and refine uranium. Also that'd only be temporary, having enough power plants to power the world and all the machinery required to support itself without oil (electric bulldozers and mining machines?) would start to drain uranium deposits just like any other natural resource and leave us with enormous amounts of radioactive waste.
I guess with more development biofuels are the way to go, supposedly the CO2 produced on burning them is counteracted by the CO2 absorbed by the plants from which they are produced as they grow. We'd need a total fuckload of biofuel plants though.
Fusion would be nice if it worked. Solve just about everything.
So the world will go on burning many millions of barrels of oil every day because we don't know what else to do. We waste so much of it too, no-one lives near where they work, we move a tonne or so of metal around along with one person to get places, we cut down trees in tasmania, ship them to china where they make paper that gets shipped back here...
The commercial world must be rather screwed up for such things to be the cheapest options.
I don't want my descendants to be stuck on this planet forever.
I was considering making an essay out of this, maybe I will later, but for now I'll just talk about it here.
So peak oil is coming, that's a certainty, and probably reasonably soon. At this time the global amount of oil left in the ground will have passed halfway and it will start to be harder to extract. As it becomes more difficult to extract, even though we'll have a lot left in total, production will decrease and we will start to experience a shortfall between global oil production and demand. A shortfall of around 5% in the 70's caused oil prices to quadruple. Our problem will not be temporary and will in fact become steadily worse as production slowly dies off. Pretty much all the experts agree on this much.
Now enough of the background info. The thing I find much more concerning than the fact that our entire society may collapse around us is the fact that it would probably never recover, or at least we would never again reach our current level of technology. It seems highly unlikely that we would ever again reach into space and have a chance of exploringing the universe. We would be trapped forever on our lonely planet in a vast cosmos.
The amount of oil it takes to lift a spacecraft into orbit is fairly gigantic, though I'm sure it's only a tiny fraction of the total usage. Clearly we can't do things this way forever, but for now it's all we have and if oil-driven society collapses before we figure out another way to do it then it seems to me that we would never again have the resources to produce such sophisticated pieces of technology as would surely be involved.
Lets just hope somebody can think of a global energy solution that can be implemented in time to save us from this fate. Too bad the world hasn't managed to unite by now, if we had we could implement draconian measures to quash all unnessecary oil usage and give ourselves a bit more time. There aren't really any solutions at the moment, biofuels, solar, wind etc. don't have anything like the energy output required, and take so much oil to construct and implement that the energy returns are fairly minimal anyway. Nuclear may help for a while but again it takes plenty of oil to build nuclear power plants and mine and refine uranium. Also that'd only be temporary, having enough power plants to power the world and all the machinery required to support itself without oil (electric bulldozers and mining machines?) would start to drain uranium deposits just like any other natural resource and leave us with enormous amounts of radioactive waste.
I guess with more development biofuels are the way to go, supposedly the CO2 produced on burning them is counteracted by the CO2 absorbed by the plants from which they are produced as they grow. We'd need a total fuckload of biofuel plants though.
Fusion would be nice if it worked. Solve just about everything.
So the world will go on burning many millions of barrels of oil every day because we don't know what else to do. We waste so much of it too, no-one lives near where they work, we move a tonne or so of metal around along with one person to get places, we cut down trees in tasmania, ship them to china where they make paper that gets shipped back here...
The commercial world must be rather screwed up for such things to be the cheapest options.
I don't want my descendants to be stuck on this planet forever.
Comments:
Yeh oil shortages would suck. Also, this is why bikes are cool :D Why lug aroud a ton of car when u only have to lug the person plus a hundread or so kilos of bike?
We probably wont actually *run out* of oil for many thousands of years to come, but within the next 5-10 prices will definately sky rocket and after that it'll prolly be so expensive to get oil that only governments will do it... so as for using it to go into space and what not i think we might be ok, but everything else needs an alternative. They are there... just not quite ready yet... if only we had a bit more oil and therefore a bit more time.
Appartenly biofuels at current production levels could support less than 1% of australia alone's demand.
Hyrdogen, both in burning and using in chemical reactions to make electricity (fuel cells) seems to be our best bet, but the infrastructure isn't there.
We need the god damn oil companies to pull their heads out of the sand and start realising if they want to keep making money they might have to become hydrogen companies.
We probably wont actually *run out* of oil for many thousands of years to come, but within the next 5-10 prices will definately sky rocket and after that it'll prolly be so expensive to get oil that only governments will do it... so as for using it to go into space and what not i think we might be ok, but everything else needs an alternative. They are there... just not quite ready yet... if only we had a bit more oil and therefore a bit more time.
Appartenly biofuels at current production levels could support less than 1% of australia alone's demand.
Hyrdogen, both in burning and using in chemical reactions to make electricity (fuel cells) seems to be our best bet, but the infrastructure isn't there.
We need the god damn oil companies to pull their heads out of the sand and start realising if they want to keep making money they might have to become hydrogen companies.
Yeah, we have to replace our entire industry base with electric alternatives of some kind, right down to the mining and farming equipment that is pretty much the starting point of everything. As for using oil for space exploration, yeah we'll probably be able to do that, but my concern is more about society collapsing and there not being enough easily accessible energy left around for it to rise again to a high enough technology level allow space exploration.
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