What is Peak Oil?
You may not have encountered the principles of Peak Oil in the media. Don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. There was a time when Climate Change suffered the same lack of exposure.
Peak Oil is not about “running out of oil” – we'll never run out of oil. There will always be oil left in the ground because either it's too hard to reach or it takes too much energy to extract.
Ponder on a fact that the economists conveniently gloss over – Regardless of how much money you can make selling oil, once it takes an oil barrel's worth of energy to extract a barrel of oil, the exploration, the drilling and the pumping will grind to a halt. Peak Oil is about the end of cheap and plentiful oil, the recognition that the ever increasing volumes of oil being pumped into our economies will peak and then inexorably decline.
It’s important to understand how our industrial way of life is absolutely dependent on this ever- increasing supply of cheap oil. From the start of the 1900s, plentiful oil allowed a coal-based industrialized society to massively accelerate its “development”. From that time, each year there has been more oil (apart from the two oil shocks in the 1970s when Middle East crises caused worldwide recessions). And each year, society increased its complexity, its mechanization, its globalized connectedness and its energy consumption levels.
The problems start when we’ve extracted around half of the recoverable oil. At this point, the oil gets more expensive (in cash and energy terms) to extract, is slower flowing and of a lower quality. At this point, for the first time in history, we aren’t able to increase the amount of oil that’s coming out of the ground, being refined and reaching the market. At this point, oil supply plateaus and then declines, with massive ramifications for industrialized societies. Very few people are paying attention to this phenomenon, and it’s easy to understand why.
Reused with permission from the Transition Network