Peak Oil is You
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Page added on June 7, 2014
The Stone Age Didn’t End Because We Ran Out of Stones
“The Stone Age didn’t end because humanity ran out of stones.” — Ronald Bailey
We used to be afraid of something called Peak Oil. Peak Oil was the idea that oil production had reached its zenith, or would soon, and was poised to plunge; we inevitably faced a drought of the black gunk. In 2007, CNN reported:
The world has reached the point of maximum oil output and production levels will halve by 2030 — a situation that will eventually lead to war and disaster, a report claims.
The physicist Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Some time has passed and we can see how this particular prediction has panned out.
In 2006 the world produced about 72 million barrels of oil a day. Last year (despite an ongoing financial slump) the world produced about 73 million barrels of oil a day. If this is a decline, we’re doing it wrong.
We aren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel. Huge new reserves have been discovered. 6 trillion barrels were found in the Green River Formation on the Colorado / Wyoming border. Another 233 billion barrels were found under some place called Coober Pedy, Australia. To put that perspective, little Coober Pedy has about as much oil as Saudi Arabia. Colorado has 30 times as much.
It wasn’t just oil — new sources of all sorts of petroleum have been found. Fracking, an environmentally controversial but undeniably effective way of sucking natural gas up from deep underground, pushed the price of that gas down so low that oil imports were noticeably affected as big power-generating companies switched to cheaper gas. Just last month, a Japanese company started mining methane clathrate from the sea-bed. Methane clathrate, nicknamed fire-ice, is by far the world’s most abundant petroleum source. There’s more fire-ice on Earth than there is oil, gas, and coal put together and up until now, it’s been completely untapped.
Peak Oil has been pushed off for the foreseeable future.
Various people have been claiming we were going to run out at various times since about 1870. Superficially, the fear makes sense. There has to be a finite amount of oil, so there has to be a limit. Even if the Earth were nothing but one titanic droplet of oil, it would still be theoretically possible to run out.
Still, the fear of Peak Oil is basically childish, and I’ll tell you why in a bit.
Some of the same people who worry about Peak Oil also worry about Peak Water. The Earth almost is one big droplet of water. If this planet were perfectly smooth, its surface would be covered by an ocean two miles deep. There are 60 million gallons of the wet stuff for every person alive.
And we don’t use up water. We don’t burn it, we don’t freeze it. Irrigate plants with it and it runs back to the ocean; boil it and it joins the clouds and rains back down on your head. Even if you drink it, you just pee it out again a few hours later.
Of course, the Peak Water people aren’t worried about water generally, only about clean water, which is a little less silly, but not much. The technology for cleaning water is just that, technology, and technology famously marches on. Last month, Lockheed-Martin announced they had developed a water filter that was 100 times more effective than the current best filter at removing salt from water, making sea-water drinkable. This new filter is essentially manufactured, and I’m not kidding, from pencil-lead and Scotch tape.
It’s possible that the Lockheed-Martin filter won’t be workable in practice — too difficult to mass-produce, too fragile, something — but it demonstrates that the problem is solvable. Water can always be purified; the only question is how much will it cost, and the answer seems to be: not much.
Peak Water is nonsense, Peak Oil is nonsense, Peak Fish (another thing people actually go on about) is nonsense. I’m sure someone somewhere is worried about Peak Trees, Peak Rare Earth Metals, Peak Helium, and hell, probably Peak Glass and Peak Asphalt. All utterly impossible.
Why am I so sure? All these things are resources, and resources are by definition finite. Why can’t we run out?
Economics.
When you burn gasoline in your car, you aren’t doing it out of hostility to gasoline. You aren’t trying to eliminate gasoline from the Earth. You are burning gasoline because it’s cheaper and more convenient than burning coal or wood or Gutenberg Bibles for fuel. If it were economically more efficient to use some other fuel — once all your costs, including the cost of the vehicle, the convenience, and so on are accounted for — you’d switch.
Whenever we start running out of oil, Adam Smith’s famously dextrous Invisible Hand starts working. The price goes up, oil-companies and wild-catters start digging for more; companies pay scientists to find ways to get oil out of more places, to get more oil out of each place, to get more gasoline out of oil, to get more miles out of gasoline; other companies pay scientists to find alternatives to the pricier oil. On the other side, consumers start to conserve oil, to walk instead of drive, to buy hybrids.
Every resource works the same way. As clean water becomes scarcer, it becomes more expensive, and technologies like Lockheed-Martin’s filter or like crop varieties that need less irrigation become worth developing and using. Ditto with fish: when wild fish become hard to catch, people find ways to raise them in tanks — or eat tofu instead.
Every imaginable resource, when it becomes rarer, it becomes more expensive and inevitably, people find way to produce more and to consume less.
Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine’s science editor, wrote “The Stone Age didn’t end because humanity ran out of stones.” The Stone Age ended because humanity found better — more economically efficient — technologies. The Oil Age will end, but not because we run out of oil, because because we will transcend it.
Guaranteed.
41 Comments on "The Stone Age Didn’t End Because We Ran Out of Stones"
Cloud9 on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 6:14 am
Mr. Bailey seems like a nice guy. If he is right then, I have a nice gun collection, and some silver dollars I can use as stocking stuffers. I have built s nice machine shop and calmed my nerves by gardening. My pension is secure and the current crony capitalist system will hold together forever. I need not worry about resource wars, exponential growth of debt and political and economic collapse or the lights going out. The guys who came up with limits of growth and the corresponding die off are complete loons.
Then again if Mr. Bailey is wrong, well then he is in deep doo doo.
Beery on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 6:29 am
So the fact that the Green River formation doesn’t contain oil, but rather kerogen, and that it cannot be extracted at anything like an economical rate, doesn’t faze the author. We ARE scraping the bottom of the barrel, almost literally, when it comes to kerogen, shale oil and fracking.
Peak oil is not about “running out”. It’s about the change to the downslope from the peak of production. That occurs 100 years or more from the point at which we run out. The fact that the author has no idea of this shows that he doesn’t understand the basic concept of peak oil.
And sure, the economics of oil depletion will ensure oil gets extracted and bought and sold. It will also ensure that the market for the oil shrinks to match the supply. In a world that runs on this stuff, that will be a problem – it will mean growing starvation for some and growing social and political unrest for others. The fact that the author cannot or will not see that is still more evidence that he doesn’t understand the dilemma of peak oil.
The author’s assertion that people can eat tofu is ironically reminiscent of Marie Antoinette’s infamous comment on the fact that French peasants’ were starving. I just hope that the author’s brand of mindless optimism doesn’t result in a situation that will make the French Revolutionary Terror look like a Sunday school picnic. During the French Revolution, aristocrats successfully “transcended” the era by the “technological improvement” of getting their heads cut off at the guillotine. If the author’s blithe reluctance to confront the dilemma of peak oil holds sway, a similar “transcendence” might be headed our way.
This article is mindless head-in-the-sand optimism at its best.
Dutch on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 6:57 am
6 trillion, really?
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Why-the-US-cannot-Extract-most-of-its-Oil-Reserves.html
For the moment it is more like zero.
You need water and new technology to extract stuff with eroei 4, that’s worse than oil sands.
Green River is dry.
platinumshore on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 6:57 am
And no mention of net energy. If oil is produced for energy needs, it makes no energy sense putting in more energy than you get back for these apparent ‘vast’ reserves. Only makes economic sense if you are playing land banking games eg buy land for X, re-estimated reserves up by Y (no third party reserve auditing needed in the states), produce a token amount of production to back up YOUR estimates, and then sell to someone else.. continues until the last sucker is left standing.
Davy, Hermann, MO on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 7:05 am
Nothing more than the lobby of plenty and human exceptionalism preaching all is well as the ship sinks. This chap has no comprehension of what you must read between the lines to understand the systematic implications of limits to growth, diminishing returns, overshoot of carrying capacity, limits to substitution and technology, environmental collapse of vital ecosystems, and finally the decent of the energy gradient. Reality is not a human construct. Reality follows laws of nature. Reality is not kind nor compassionate. This chap is in for a rude awakening
J-Gav on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 7:06 am
I always get a wry chuckle out of these guys who think ‘economics’ (+technology) can change the laws of physics and magically make resources infinite.
Pops on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 8:50 am
Like the EIA bos said when downgrading the Monterey:
“the rocks are still down there”
So I guess they’ll say the oil age didn’t end for a lack of rocks either.
Perk Earl on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 8:53 am
“The Stone Age didn’t end because humanity ran out of stones.”
It’s not called the stone age because we used stones for energy, so the comparison to the oil age is irrelevant. It’s an obvious strawman argument.
I first heard that comparison on CNBC some years ago and was aghast at such an obvious ploy to subvert our energy predicament being rolled out on a financial station that should have a lot more sense.
Beery & Dutch, you beat me to the punch on the Green River nonsense. How could anyone act so arrogant in an article that doesn’t even know the Green River is uneconomical?!
And what about the water bit? “Of course, the Peak Water people aren’t worried about water generally, only about clean water, which is a little less silly, but not much.” Just a little less silly? What, than claiming we have two miles around the world deep water to access. Sure, but desalination takes energy and the more we need to desalinate, the less energy we have for everything else. Someone needs to handcuff this guy to a post and explain to him what energy is, where it comes from and EROEI and not un-cuff him until he can recite exactly what energy is.
The trouble with people that think in black and white terms is their brain’s are not complex enough to understand complex issues. They should stick to doing crayon drawings with their infants.
rockman on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 8:58 am
“…idea that oil production…was poised to plunge”. Unfortunately starts off very poorly IMHO. Any one who understood oil production dynamics realized we weren’t going to “fall off a cliff”. It’s pretty clear that even if we’ve already reached conventional PO the higher oil price has generated increased fossil fuel. How long the plateau last depends upon future prices, economic growth, geopolitics and geology IMHO.
rockman on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 9:03 am
And I suppose it should be pointed out that we are currently in a Stone Age today for greater than we had before the industrial revolution. Thanks to fossil fuels mankind uses more rocks today than we were 100 years ago.
Dave Thompson on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 9:08 am
This only points to the fact that lots of people do not understand energy, where it comes from, how we use it in our everyday lives and the ramifications of EROEI.
SilentRunning on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 9:33 am
More hysterical cornicopian drivel.
“We’re not running out of oil, because I have redefined other things to be oil!!!!”
It’s like somebody about the Titanic screaming “the ship is not sinking because I have redefined sea water to be air!”
SilentRunning on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 9:35 am
Repeat after me “We can breathe the sea water! We can breathe the sea water!” (repeat until you have convinced yourself)
shortonoil on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 10:11 am
“The Stone Age didn’t end because humanity ran out of stones.” — Ronald Bailey
Every time I see this quote it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Our firm is a consulting group, and some of our clients are in the structural stone business. Rock of Ages, Omni, Colorado Marble, Penron, etc. I hate to tell this bird but the stone age never ended. The world’s stone producers extract, and fabricate more stone in one day than the world used in the million years before the Common Era. The authors are obviously “doing it wrong”.
Their ignorance obviously also flows over into petroleum. The hydrocarbon age is not ending because we are running out of hydrocarbons, it is ending because we have extracted most of the useable hydrocarbons. What is left is a puddle of black (green, yellow, clear) goo that can provide no benefit to the society; thus it will remain where it is, in the ground.
Such trash as this permeates modern society. The average Joe does no research, no analytical thinking, and makes the least number of decisions as possible. They just rely on some idiot that can post articles on the internet. Our ability to handle the coming end of the oil age, without burning down the rest of the world in the process, is seriously in doubt!
http://www.thehillsgroup.org/
Plantagenet on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 11:04 am
Was that column written by Pollyanna?
Juan Pueblo on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 11:45 am
I refuse to address the unmitigated BS written in the article.
But I will admit that sometimes I can’t stop myself from wasting my time reading this stuff. I am a glutton for punishment. How else can I explain my reading an article titled “The Stone …”? I hate that phrase.
bobinget on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 11:46 am
Dear PO Editor,
Another way to stir up a hornet’s nest, hit it with a long stick and quickly run away.
Go back after dark, pick up your stick and keep up the provocative work.
adamc18 on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 12:00 pm
The first sentence says it all; Attributing 1970s Saudi oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani ‘s saying about ‘The Stone Age….’ to some extremist political crank called Ronald Bailey is simply dishonest. Pretty much everything else that follows is either drivel or hilarious.
Matt on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 1:10 pm
No Worries the Feds can print more oil.
Northwest Resident on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 1:34 pm
Now we know why the human race is in such deep doo-doo. With “logic” applied in this sorry exercise in optimism contains neither fact or actual logic, and yet it expresses the beliefs of a large portion of the population. Methane hydrates? Obviously, no concern for or belief in climate change caused by mankind pumping carbons and other gases into the air. And why is it that deep thinkers like this writer refute the scientific findings of climate and other well-founded science and yet they place their hopium-based optimism in science leading the way out of the mess we have created for ourselves? The answer is because they believe what they want to believe and they dismiss and denigrate what they don’t want to believe. If they can find “science” that agrees with what they want to believe, then that is good science. If science refutes what they want to believe, then its just a bunch of liberal hogwash. Faith-based optimism — its going to kill us all if the “true believers” get their way. Somehow, I suspect that the writer of this article and those who suck up his BS as gospel fact are not going to be around for a lot longer. Look for them to go “full zombie” in the not too distant future.
Northwest Resident on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 1:40 pm
“And we don’t use up water. We don’t burn it, we don’t freeze it. Irrigate plants with it and it runs back to the ocean; boil it and it joins the clouds and rains back down on your head. Even if you drink it, you just pee it out again a few hours later.”
So, according to this writer, rapid depletion of aquifers upon which huge percentages of world wide food production and drinking water depend are “no big deal”. Because, of course, the water just recycles. What a total and complete moron this writer must be.
christian phillip on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 1:44 pm
you the writer are so diseased by optimism that I am sure by now that you must have a …personal relationship with dead jesus…humanity doesn’t deserve to escape its demise, after ruining this planet…neither of your sick optimist arguments (wrong skepticism) shall bring back the dead jesus, and unless that happens….you are really screwed, like the rest of us all…byyye
BillC on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 2:20 pm
Hopefully we have reached peak idiots.
I suspect this guy studied peak oil for 15 minutes and declares himself an expert.
bobinget on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 2:32 pm
That throw-away line about ‘new’ filtration material is called Grapheme, one atom thick and strong like Russian Voman.
Musher on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 3:20 pm
I can think of only one response, EROI. The issue is not gross – it’s net. We naturally go after the easiest, highest quality and most abundant deposits first and then work our way down the scale in terms of return on investment. In the 1930s the EROI on conventional oil production was up to 100-to-one. It’s now around 10-to-1, and going lower. That kind of math will kill you!
Dave Ranning on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 3:42 pm
Carp Fishing on Valium
meld on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 4:05 pm
Jesus…..this is some crazy jibberish. I wish I could get a front seat to this guys life, it would be better than any movie watching the insanity of his thinking process and his total lack of understanding. Economics isn’t a science dude, it’s tarot reading for the modern era except less accurate and less useful.
Newfie on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 4:11 pm
Obviously we’ll never reach Peak Stupidity either…
Norm on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 4:42 pm
Stupidity is a graph that climbs endlessly upwards, so it does not peak.
SINCE WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF STONES, THE AUTHOR CAN FILL UP WITH STONES, IN THE GAS TANK OF HIS HUMMER. I AM SURE THAT WILL MEET HIS NEEDS JUST FINE !!!
Norm on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 4:48 pm
hey…. the stone age didn’t end cause we ran out of stones…. so this means we will have unlimited gasoline forever? Just maybe, the author is stoned? 🙂
drwater on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 6:33 pm
“Last month, Lockheed-Martin announced they had developed a water filter that was 100 times more effective than the current best filter at removing salt from water”
Although this is only a sidelight to the larger issues, this statement is total BS. The best current RO systems are about 25% – 30% efficient. Even if you somehow magically get to 100% thermodynamic efficiency, it would only be slightly over 3 times as good as current technology.
shortonoil on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 6:49 pm
Your could write the names of all the authors who have a working knowledge of thermodynamics, who also write about energy, on the back of a postage stamp; with a crayon!
Norm on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 8:08 pm
(1980’s terminology) The author is a stonerhead. He got stoned, now the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. ‘i would not feel so all alone, if everybody must get stoned’ (bob dylan)
Makati1 on Sat, 7th Jun 2014 8:43 pm
He’s correct in that when the Age of Oil ends, it will not be because we ran out of oil, but because we ran out of oil that was economically/physically available. We are in a dying economy, with the West being propped up the East which still has a small positive growth factor, for now. Even that is soon to end. Then it is a gradual decline all the way to the bottom for all of us, assuming Mother Nature or a nuclear war doesn’t make it happen faster.
Mike in Calif. on Sun, 8th Jun 2014 12:37 am
rockman: Interesting idea that we never left the Stone Age.
We could say the same about succeeding ages defined by technology.
The Neolithic characterized by agriculture, never left it.
The metals Ages (Copper, Bronze, Iron).
The modern era proposes a number of technological “Ages”: Sail/Discovery, Machine, Oil, Industrial, Atomic, Space, Information and most recently the Social Age.
A distinction can be made for the names that reference resources instead of technology:
stone, metals, oil.
KingM on Sun, 8th Jun 2014 5:29 am
I consider myself an optimist on this board (a pessimist everywhere else) but as soon as I got to the 6T barrels in Colorado, I knew this article was nonsense.
forbin on Sun, 8th Jun 2014 6:15 am
back on the oil drum I used to point out that we have not left the stone age as far as building materials – sorry guys , late to the party again !
Also research seems to indicate that the primary resource of Flint was being mined ( by hand of course) deeper and deeper into the ground.
That speaks to me atleast that peak flint was happening …
” Whenever we start running out of oil… The price goes up..”
ah , ok we’re at $100+ oil now…..
” oil-companies and wild-catters start digging for more ”
Digging! yes we’re digging alright
And then the rest of the paragraph…
” …companies pay scientists to find ways to get oil out of more places, to get more oil out of each place, to get more gasoline out of oil, to get more miles out of gasoline; ”
Look around this is happening now ( not sure about the ” more gas” bit – condensates? but thats …)
” other companies pay scientists to find alternatives to the pricier oil ”
They are looking but no news yet…..
And the result of all this teccy stuff is actually ….
” On the other side, consumers start to conserve oil, to walk instead of drive, to buy hybrids.”
I’ll re-write that for him because he’s befuddled there…
” On the other side, consumers start to conserve oil, the rich to buy hybrids, the poor to walk instead of drive.”
Thats better.
Given the articles issue with basic facts I think the author has given us the future in this paragraph, its just we are living it now ….
Forbin
Sudhir Jatar on Sun, 8th Jun 2014 9:34 am
Some people like to live in utopia.
In India, many places have run out of water for various reasons.
If there is no peak, why are oil prices going down in spite of the recession? It’s because conventional oil has already peaked and cost of producing unconventional oil is high. Further, as the name implies, the oil is unconventional and hence is not going to last as long as the conventional oil has.
Cloud9 on Sun, 8th Jun 2014 1:58 pm
Here is a final thought: Stones are ballast. Oil is what moves the ship. Anyone who thinks they can fire up the boilers with stones is an idiot.
Keith_McClary on Sun, 8th Jun 2014 11:05 pm
“As clean water becomes scarcer, it becomes more expensive …”
At least he recognizes that replacements are more expensive and less desirable:
“Ditto with fish: when wild fish become hard to catch, people find ways to raise them in tanks — or eat tofu instead.”
Patrick on Mon, 9th Jun 2014 10:53 pm
@Michael Lorton: I learned a few weeks ago that there are still people nowadays who are convinced that the Earth is flat (the flat earth society), so your post does not surprise me at all 🙂