Peak-oil theorists – they’re the ones who predicted $300-a-barrel oil, because new discoveries wouldn’t materialize – were fundamentally right after all. So that they say.
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No, not about the $300 price tag. Oil has become around US$30 a barrel and could live there indefinitely, but that detail, they explain, only helps prove their point. And no, not about the failure to locate new oil: The good thing about their theory, modestly revised, is it doesn’t rely on ever-diminishing supplies. To the contrary, peak-oil theorists got it right, kind of. Oil will still peak and individuals will still abandon oil, just not because we run out. On the contrary, the oil industry’s doom is going to be its everlasting supply.
For anyone who has trouble understanding this horror scenario, here is a short course from instructors for example Bloomberg Business and Thinkprogress’s Joe Romm, crowned Hero of the Environment by Time magazine. If you don’t have US$41 billion worth of savvy, as Bloomberg Business’s owner does, or perhaps a PhD from MIT as Romm does, you will need to see this explanation twice.
The peak-oil theory is valid, they explain, if peak oil is thought when it comes to demand, not supply. While the way to obtain oil won’t peak, interest in oil will, and soon, since nobody would like oil. The proof is abundant and obvious – everything’s trending this way – once you consider it. Take the automobile.
The oil industry’s doom is going to be its everlasting supply
Electric vehicles now take into account a mere one-tenth of one percent from the world’s one-billion cars and, based on OPEC, will only take into account one per cent in 2040. But that estimate might be way off, Bloomberg Business announced this week in “Sooner Than You believe,” its series that “examines a few of the biggest transformations in history that haven’t happened quite yet.”
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“By 2020, some planet and SUVs is going to be faster, safer, cheaper, and more convenient than their gasoline counterparts,” leading people to abandon gas vehicles in droves. A Bloomberg New Energy Finance chart shows world oil demand peaking about 2025 due to this “transport transformation.”
Even earlier, by 2023, electric cars could displace two-million barrels of oil each day, developing a glut that will cripple the oil industry in the same manner the arrival of shale oil led to a crippling glut of two-million barrels of oil each day. (Still with me?)
But it gets better (or worse, if you are rooting for that oil industry) because increasingly more barrels get displaced because the electric car gets control from the gasoline vehicle, in the same way colour TV took over from monochrome. By 2030, eight-million barrels a day get displaced; by 2040, when half the earth’s cars are electrified, 18 million barrels. If you think the oil market is on the ropes now, imagine it after 2030. The number of black-and-white TVs would you see at Best Buy?
The imminent demise from the gasoline vehicle joins other trends that make peak oil inevitable, peak-oil enthusiasts note, like Millennials’ rejection of the car culture and also the imminence of a breakthrough in car batteries which will let them propel vehicles 200-300 miles on a single charge.
Absolutely answer to all of this was the Paris global warming meetings, explains Romm, where world leaders promised to depart most of the world’s non-renewable fuels in the earth. As evidence that they will succeed, he cites that exemplar of environmental responsibility: China. “China understands the near future is low-carbon after which zero-carbon – so it plans to end up being the world leader in both the production and use of battery electric vehicles, just as it already has both in solar and wind power power.” Besides, global governmental action “is inevitable within the 2020s because the reality of skyrocketing global warming becomes increasingly obvious.”
Put each one of these imminences and inevitabilities together then one else becomes inevitable – the embrace by environmentalists of a new Peak Oil Theory.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.
