Fossil Fuel was Amazing

We've been so lucky to live with this fabulous energy source.

I have been hearing and sometimes discussing the disputed notion of ‘peak oil’ for many decades. I can only put my interest in the topic down to the fact that the 1970’s oil crisis took place at a critically informative period of my youth.

The previous decade of the 1960’s was my childhood, an era of enormous confidence in the endless abundance of the fuel that powered our lives. Just accepted as the way things are, no questions asked. Coal, oil, gas. It was just stuff we used.

But events in the early 1970’s kicked that confidence in the happy sacks, I’m not going into the geopolitical history of the very corrupting relationship between the western powers in in particular the Arab states but let’s just accept that it wasn’t very benign.

The impact was fairly enormous, the price of Saudi oil rose from around $2.50 a barrel to $65 a barrel in a matter of months and there was a global shortage. OPEC members literally turned off the taps and the world we had all known and ignored stuttered to a halt.

Oil crisis in the USA, 1973

This was felt with particular drama in the USA where the up until the early 1970’s the USA in particular was self sufficient in hydrocarbons, but their supplies had run dry and they were importing billions of barrels from the Saudi regime.

And once again we got used to the normality of extraction, shiping and refining oil on a scale it’s really difficult to comprehend. Our entire economy, in fact the world order we all live in is still, today, 99% reliant on burning fossil fuel.

And this has been a truly beneficial period of human history.

Put aside for one moment, the downsides of burning trillions of tons of oil and gas. The positive impact this fuel has had on all our lives in the world’s developed economies has been spectacular, we have lived in unparalleled luxury and energy security for the last 100 plus years.

We haven’t needed to think about it, it’s just been there. Okay, some people might have been aware of the downsides but the vast majority of us nodded awkwardly when we heard the bad news, then shrugged, fired up the gas boiler to heat our homes, started the diesel or petrol car, went to the shops and bought food that had been grown using fossil burning machinery, then transported to us in fossil burning trucks.

It’s absolutely woven into our lives and it’s really only been in the last 10 years or so the problems facing us have become better known across the world.

All the efforts around renewable energy, electric ground transport, batteries were not inspired or driven by the idea we might be running out of oil. It’s entirely because we now fully understand the dire consequences of burning so many billions of tons of carbon emitting fuel every year.

But now there’s new information bubbling up. According to more and more academics, engineers and energy managers in the oil and gas industry, we passed what can be described as ‘peak oil’ decades ago. Although I have discussed the implications of economically unsustainable extraction of fossil fuel to burn, I didn’t fully understand quite how dire the situation is.

I have often heard and indeed used the cliché “the stone age era didn’t end due to a lack of stones” which implies that newer technologies will mean it makes economic and life improving sense to stop extracting hydrocarbons, it is now emerging that maybe in this particular case “the stone age era did end due to all the easy to find stones being used up.”

Okay, I admit the analogy doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but we really are running out of extractable oil. Up until about 30 years ago we had access to easily extractable oil around the globe.

In the early days it literally fired itself out of the ground, the Spindletop oil field in Texas was a very well known early example. After drilling unsuccessfully for years, they finally hit pay dirt in 1902 and gazzilions of gallons of crude squirted out of the ground for decades.

Spindletop in 1903

That pattern was repeated countless times, causing unimaginable damage to the areas where the extraction took place, and over the next 120 years, literally millions of people have died due to inhaloing the toxic gasses and lethal particulates that result from burning this toxic material.

In the early days of the North Sea oilfields, although the locale was far more challenging, the abundance of the oil fields made it worth it.

Same in the fouled and permanently ruined oilfields and social fabric of Siberia, of Venezuela, the Niger Delta, Azerbaijan, Angola, Qatar, Libya, the list is long and shameful.

All those oil wells are drying up, and extracting what remains is increasingly expensive.

The latest research from Edinburgh University and others is we will hit a point very soon, they are suggesting the early 2030’s when the value of the oil and gas being extracted is way less than the cost of extracting it. The global oil price will go off the scale, causing massive global problems.

This is something I hadn’t previously considered, all previous predictions of the end of oil have resulted in new technologies being developed which released further huge amounts of oil and gas. See ‘fracking’ in the USA.

But here’s an important caveat to the technology that helped the USA become, temporarily, energy independent.

How long does a fracking site produce economically viable amounts of oil or gas?

In the mid noughties all the predictions were they would produce for at least 50 years, this was when a multitude of companies involved in this industry raised finance to start drilling.

By 2018 the early estimates have been proven woefully optimistic. Each well produced about a third of what was predicted and the cost of extracting that oil, and the controversial use of toxic chemicals and vast amounts of water to do so increased that cost.

And while I’m on the subject, fracking wells require an average of 143,000 gallons of water to start operating. Isn’t that a lovely use of a vital resource

How many wells have the fracking industry drilled in the USA?

According to the Independent Petroleum Association of America, 1.7 million. According to every other source, over 2 million.

Abandoned fracking wells in Wyoming

Whatever the number, if you have to drill millions of wells to keep the supply you rely on, you are clearly getting more and more desperate.

90% of the companies operating in this wild west barely regulated industry are running at a loss. Literally 100’s have gone bankrupt already.

We’re not going to run out of oil and gas, but we have already run out of oil and gas that is cheap enough to go make extracting it remotely financially plausible.

The sooner we can wean ourselves off this amazing energy source, the better.