It follows as night the day that the unquestionably finite nature of fossil fuels inevitably will cause significant changes in the global economy and our way of life.
But the continued lack of absolute certainty – which will continue for many years – about the timing and severity of the crisis offers room for diehard "denialists" to continue with their arguments that a world without oil that can be extracted viably is a myth.
With the final week of August marking the 150th anniversary of commercial oil development, peak-oil deniers have become even more forceful in their arguments.
They have launched spirited attacks on the "alarmists" in recent weeks, stoutly maintaining that there remains a frontier of undiscovered mammoth oil discoveries, and that extraction technology is advancing at such a rapid pace of increased sophistication that even the most challenging deep-sea deposits and complex geological formations can be tapped.
Michael Lynch is at the forefront of the peak-oil deniers. He is former director for Asian energy and security at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a late August op-ed in The New York Times, Lynch wrote that "Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 (U.S.) a barrel as new supplies come forward. But that may not keep the Chicken Littles from convincing policy-makers in Washington and elsewhere that oil, being finite, must increase in price."
Lynch’s core message is that scarce social resources are being misallocated in too-determined a quest for alternatives to fossil fuels.
"This is not to say," Lynch continued, "that we shouldn’t keep looking for other cost-effective, low-pollution energy sources – why not broaden our options? But we can’t let the false threat of disappearing oil lead the government to throw money away on hare-brained renewable energy schemes or impose unnecessary and expensive conservation measures on a public already struggling through tough economic times."
By coincidence for such denialists, major oil discoveries subsequently were announced off the Brazilian coast, in the Gulf of Mexico and, earlier this week, offshore Sierra Leone. But a closer look at each dims the initial euphoria.
Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil producer, is notoriously laggard at making the necessary heavy investments in bringing oil supplies to market promptly. The Gulf of Mexico petroleum "structure" is so geologically complex that the extraction costs will be exorbitant. Sierra Leone, like Nigeria, Sudan and other African production regions, is conflict-ridden.
Just the same, the surge of "denialist" noise, which has undeniable influence on certain lawmakers in the United States and Canada, seemed to merit a corrective from the peak-oil theorists. Their premise, roughly speaking, is that we have depleted half or more of the world’s oil supply and run out of easily accessible reserves.
Matthew Simmons, long the most prominent peak-oil theorist, offered a reminder in Foreign Policy this month that data from agencies as varied as the IEA and the U.S. Department of Energy continue to show alarming oil-depletion rates worldwide.
"The world will never `run out of oil’," Simmons writes, "but its flow is in decline. There may still be ample oil reserves for half of today’s use. But these remaining reserves are all very low-quality heavy oil, which is difficult to produce and hard to refine into usable petroleum products."
That’s a shot across the bow of the Athabasca tarsands, of course, the world’s only major heavy-oil production centre payday loans online. (Venezuela is a potential rival in size for heavy oil production, but its quixotic political regime has yet to allow oilsands development.)
Which gets us to where the so-called "alarmists" tip the balance in their favour. The world’s remaining oil reserves overwhelmingly are in politically hostile regimes or in remote locations where extraction is either enormously costly or technologically impossible.
Touted "rapid advances in oilfield technology," writes Simmons, are "the greatest myth of all."
Technology allowing us to tap oil several kilometres below sea level or in previously inaccessible pools on land by means of horizontal drilling are "now quite mature," says Simmons, who earlier in his career helped raise funds to develop those technologies. "Sadly, there are few new ideas in the oilfield pipeline."
An unhappy coincidence for "denialists" is a report this week by the top oil analyst for Australia’s Macquarie Bank, a long-respected merchant bank with investments worldwide. Iain Reid, head of that firm’s European oil and gas research unit, endorsed the peak-oil view, asserting that oil supply will peak this year.
The recent economic crisis that deniers point to as a helpful development in easing demand has in fact been a disaster, Reid says.
It caused major oil firms to postpone needed investment in new supply sources.
We saw that in our own oilpatch, where a planned $100-billion plus in heavy oil investments came to an abrupt halt.
Those developments will, of course, resume post-recession. Some Alberta megaprojects already are gradually coming back to life. The problem is that the delay will cause a severe "supply gap."
New oil sources will fail to come on-stream soon enough to satisfy skyrocketing demand in China, India and elsewhere in the developing world, to say nothing of a return to normal demand levels in industrial nations.
That, finally, might bring an end to our addiction to oil. Reid believes we soon will turn this debate on its head. We will stop talking about peak oil or peak supply, instead concerning ourselves with "peak demand."
Reid, who spent 16 years with Royal Dutch Shell and Amerada Hess sees demand eclipsing supply very soon, with a huge gap opening by 2015. That’s a good thing, he argues. It will drive up pump prices to unsustainable levels.
Oil currently trades at about $72 a barrel.
"Oil near $150 a barrel would very soon create another set of global economic drivers which would spell much lower demand in the future," says Reid. "In the very long term, we can see demand for oil falling quite substantially."
Reid’s presumption, of course, is that much more determined energy conservation will kick in as we approach that price level.
We did see it on a small scale during the recession, as motorists switched to public transit and smaller cars – and, Reid presumes, the acceleration of alternative-energy development.
For prominent peak-oil believers like Chris Nelder, the deniers would set us up for long lines at filling stations and cold houses in winter.
"If we let outlier critics like Lynch lull us into a false sense of security about future oil supply," Nelder wrote in The Business Insider this month, "we won’t begin soon enough on the decades-long effort to leave oil before it leaves us. And we will pay for it dearly."
dolive@thestar.ca
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