{"id":21612,"date":"2016-09-10T17:44:57","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T22:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21612"},"modified":"2016-09-10T17:45:21","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T22:45:21","slug":"welcome-to-the-age-of-crappy-oil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21612","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Age of Crappy Oil"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Welcome to the Age of Crappy Oil<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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It’s been a while since we’ve heard about\u00a0peak oi<\/a>l<\/a>\u2014the point at which we use up half the world\u2019s reserves and see production terminally decline\u2014but it’s happening. And yet, we still have enough oil left to burn our way to climate catastrophe.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0paper<\/a>\u00a0released at the end of July, Sir David King, the British Foreign Office\u2019s Special Representative on Climate Change, and his co-author, Oliver Inderwildi of Oxford University\u2019s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, refute what they call \u201ca common misperception about peak oil\u201d: that fossil fuels are growing scarce.<\/p>\n

Rather, they argue, peak oil means it\u2019s getting more difficult and costly to get oil out of the ground\u2014and there\u2019s less of the cheaper, easy oil available.<\/p>\n

The age of easy oil is over<\/strong><\/p>\n

Plummeting oil\u00a0prices<\/a>\u00a0in the wake of the US shale boom have led many to dismiss peak oil as little more than a doom-mongering myth.<\/p>\n

In his study published in the peer-reviewed journal,\u00a0Frontiers in Energy<\/em>, 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\u2019s growing economic and environmental costs:<\/p>\n

\"\"Haliburton fracturing operation. Image:\u00a0Joshua Doubek\/Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe 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\u2026Novel unconventional oil reserves are abundant, but are more costly to produce, provide less net energy and cause more GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve started using more expensive forms of unconventional oil\u2014which are worse for the environment, and require more energy just to get out the ground and become usable.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the Age of Crappy Oil It’s been a while since we’ve heard about\u00a0peak oil\u2014the point at which we use up half the world\u2019s reserves and see production terminally decline\u2014but it’s happening. And yet, we still have enough oil left to burn our way to climate catastrophe. In a\u00a0paper\u00a0released at the end of July, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[140,14248,11654,2092,588,595,617,846],"class_list":["post-21612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-climate","tag-david-king","tag-motherboard","tag-nafeez-ahmed","tag-oil","tag-oil-production","tag-peak-oil","tag-us-shale-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21612"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21615,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21612\/revisions\/21615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}