The
World Is Running Out Of Oil
By George Monbiot
The Guardian
02 December , 2003
The
oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the development
of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for at least
10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find,
which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You
begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when
you discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world
with oil for five and a quarter days.
Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource
upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about
it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.
Oil itself won't
disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever more difficult
and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in the 1960s. Every
year we use four times as much oil as we find. All the big strikes appear
to have been made long ago: the 400m barrels in the new North Sea field
would have been considered piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies
depend on the discovery of small new deposits and the better exploitation
of big old ones. No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt
that the global production of oil will peak before long.
The only question
is how long. The most optimistic projections are the ones produced by
the US department of energy, which claims that this will not take place
until 2037. But the US energy information agency has admitted that the
government's figures have been fudged: it has based its projections
for oil supply on the projections for oil demand, perhaps in order not
to sow panic in the financial markets.
Other analysts are
less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin Campbell calculates that
global extraction will peak before 2010. In August, the geophysicist
Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he was "99% confident"
that the date of maximum global production will be 2004. Even if the
optimists are correct, we will be scraping the oil barrel within the
lifetimes of most of those who are middle-aged today.
The supply of oil
will decline, but global demand will not. Today we will burn 76m barrels;
by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels a day, after which projected demand
accelerates. If supply declines and demand grows, we soon encounter
something with which the people of the advanced industrial economies
are unfamiliar: shortage. The price of oil will go through the roof.
As the price rises,
the sectors which are now almost wholly dependent on crude oil - principally
transport and farming - will be forced to contract. Given that climate
change caused by burning oil is cooking the planet, this might appear
to be a good thing. The problem is that our lives have become hard-wired
to the oil economy. Our sprawling suburbs are impossible to service
without cars. High oil prices mean high food prices: much of the world's
growing population will go hungry. These problems will be exacerbated
by the direct connection between the price of oil and the rate of unemployment.
The last five recessions in the US were all preceded by a rise in the
oil price.
Oil, of course,
is not the only fuel on which vehicles can run. There are plenty of
possible substitutes, but none of them is likely to be anywhere near
as cheap as crude is today. Petroleum can be extracted from tar sands
and oil shale, but in most cases the process uses almost as much energy
as it liberates, while creating great mountains and lakes of toxic waste.
Natural gas is a better option, but switching from oil to gas propulsion
would require a vast and staggeringly expensive new fuel infrastructure.
Gas, of course, is subject to the same constraints as oil: at current
rates of use, the world has about 50 years' supply, but if gas were
to take the place of oil its life would be much shorter.
Vehicles could be
run from fuel cells powered by hydrogen, which is produced by the electrolysis
of water. But the electricity which produces the hydrogen has to come
from somewhere. To fill all the cars in the US would require four times
the current capacity of the national grid. Coal burning is filthy, nuclear
energy is expensive and lethal. Running the world's cars from wind or
solar power would require a greater investment than any civilisation
has ever made before. New studies suggest that leaking hydrogen could
damage the ozone layer and exacerbate global warming.
Turning crops into
diesel or methanol is just about viable in terms of recoverable energy,
but it means using the land on which food is now grown for fuel. My
rough calculations suggest that running the United Kingdom's cars on
rapeseed oil would require an area of arable fields the size of England.
There is one possible
solution which no one writing about the impending oil crisis seems to
have noticed: a technique with which the British and Australian governments
are currently experimenting, called underground coal gasification. This
is a fancy term for setting light to coal seams which are too deep or
too expensive to mine, and catching the gas which emerges. It's a hideous
prospect, as it means that several trillion tonnes of carbon which was
otherwise impossible to exploit becomes available, with the likely result
that global warming will eliminate life on Earth.
We seem, in other
words, to be in trouble. Either we lay hands on every available source
of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses,
or we run out, and civilisation collapses.
The only rational
response to both the impending end of the oil age and the menace of
global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives.
But this cannot happen without massive political pressure, and our problem
is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People tend to take to the
streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice
between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity,
I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.
In view of all this,
the notion that the war with Iraq had nothing to do with oil is simply
preposterous. The US attacked Iraq (which appears to have had no weapons
of mass destruction and was not threatening other nations), rather than
North Korea (which is actively developing a nuclear weapons programme
and boasting of its intentions to blow everyone else to kingdom come)
because Iraq had something it wanted. In one respect alone, Bush and
Blair have been making plans for the day when oil production peaks,
by seeking to secure the reserves of other nations.
I refuse to believe
that there is not a better means of averting disaster than this. I refuse
to believe that human beings are collectively incapable of making rational
decisions. But I am beginning to wonder what the basis of my belief
might be.
· The sources
for this and all George Monbiot's recent articles can be found at www.monbiot.com