It’s been a while since we’ve heard about peak oil—the point at which we use up half the world’s reserves and see production terminally decline—but it’s happening. And yet, we still have enough oil left to burn our way to climate catastrophe.
In a paper released at the end of July, Sir David King, the British Foreign Office’s Special Representative on Climate Change, and his co-author, Oliver Inderwildi of Oxford University’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, refute what they call “a common misperception about peak oil”: that fossil fuels are growing scarce.
Rather, they argue, peak oil means it’s getting more difficult and costly to get oil out of the ground—and there’s less of the cheaper, easy oil available.
The age of easy oil is over
Plummeting oil prices in the wake of the US shale boom have led many to dismiss peak oil as little more than a doom-mongering myth.
In his study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Frontiers in Energy, King agrees with critics that the planet is swimming in oil. But he warns that peak oil proponents are still right to warn of oil’s growing economic and environmental costs:
Haliburton fracturing operation. Image: Joshua Doubek/Wikipedia
“We are not running out of oil, but we have reached a plateau in easy, inexpensive conventional oil production, which will be followed by a fall in production…Novel unconventional oil reserves are abundant, but are more costly to produce, provide less net energy and cause more GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions.”
Up until 2005, economic growth was enabled by exponentially rising production of cheap conventional oil. But since then, conventional production has stopped rising. To keep the economy chugging along we’ve started using more expensive forms of unconventional oil—which are worse for the environment, and require more energy just to get out the ground and become usable.
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