Lorne Gunter: There's no point trying to predict Peak Oil

I’m about to say something I probably shouldn’t: Frankly, I don’t know or care much about Peak Oil.

A wise man wouldn’t admit that, not because it isn’t a perfectly defensible position. It is — I can’t know in what year the world’s production of oil will reach its maximum and begin to decline. And neither can anyone else. So it seems pointless to spend a lot of time debating whether or not we have passed that point, are about to pass it or will not reach it for decades to come.

There’s a town in northern Alberta that has 400 residents and three churches of the same denomination. In the 1970s, the members of each were part of a single congregation, but they split into three distinct factions because they came to disagree vehemently over Christian eschatology — the theory of how the end-times predicted in the Book of Revelations will occur.

Will Christ’s second coming occur before the Millennium — the foretold golden age of Christian prosperity and dominance? Will it occur only after humans have established the Millennium on their own? Or is the whole idea of the Millennium more spiritual than physical?

This hamlet now has a church for each view, and each gaggle of adherents is passionately committed to proving its view right and the other two sinfully wrong.

Every time I brush past the Peak Oil debate, I get a sense the same sort of schismatic dispute is underway. That’s what makes it foolhardy to confess an apathy toward the subject. For those interested in it, Peak Oil is the issue of our time. They seem to spend as much time as they can pouring over oilfield flow rates, national production reports, drilling statistics and stray insider rumours (especially stray rumours) before writing protracted blog entries with scores of links describing how, despite the worldwide conspiracy to block the truth, the facts may now be revealed.

Unless one subscribes to the “Endless Oil” theory gaining momentum among Russian scientists — that hydrocarbons do not come from dead dinosaurs pressed for millions of years under rocks, but rather from the combination of intense heat and pressure 70 to 150 kilometres below the Earth’s surface — one has to accept that at some point oil, being a finite resource, will begin to run out.

The futility is in attempting to divine when that point will be reached. Given all the variables, both geological and economic, it is quite simply a waste of time to worry when, precisely, the moment of Peak Oil will arrive.

This is not a don’t-worry-be-happy sedative of a viewpoint designed to tranquillize ordinary people into not caring about our energy future.

Care. Care deeply. Use energy wisely, even sparingly. Continue the search for alternative fuels; at some point something will take the place of fossil fuels (unless the Russkies are right).

But the fight over Peak Oil is a fight over the unknowable. Like the residents of that small, factionalized Alberta town who have wasted years hating one another over answers to questions that are unlikely to be resolved in their lifetimes, the Peak Oilers are obsessed with a sideshow.

Prepare for an oil-less future. That’s smart. But stop worrying too much about when it will come. It will come when it comes. It will come when the economics of oil make it untenable as the lifeblood of our economy. At that time, one or more replacements will make economic sense that they don’t make now.

What replaces oil cannot be planned for with precision, though. It can only be guessed at. My guess is it will be coal. Really. We will electrify many of the machines and processes that now rely on oil. Solar and wind will remain too inefficient. So the easiest solution will be to clean up the burning of coal.

Still, I have seen enough predictions of doom and disaster to know two things: Oil will be around a lot longer than most Peak Oil prognosticators expect. We were first expected to reach oil’s peak in the 1970s and yet today there are three times as many proven reserves still left to use than were known then.

And second, large-scale transitions come unexpectedly, not according to timetables or government programs. So planning too much is futile. Human nature, consumer preference and the free market will determine the moment of Peak Oil.

National Post
lgunter@shaw.ca

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/03/19/lorne-gunter-there-s-no-point-trying-to-predict-peak-oil.aspx#ixzz0idMswhyP
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