Are We Nearing The End of The Oil Age?

We use a lot of energy today, mostly from non-renewable sources. Oil accounts for 36% of total use and for around 90% in the transport system. Oil is such a compact source of energy – one cup provides enough to pull a small car up the Eiffel tower. Compare that to a chunk of wood the same size – it is mostly water! And one tank of fuel – 50 litres – contains the energy equivalent of 100 people working a whole day.

There is no known source of energy that is so convenient, compact and easy to transport, that can power the millions of vehicles and machines all over the world. Daily, investment decisions in transport fleets, roads, factories – you name it – are being made based on the belief that cheap, abundant supplies of oil will be around for the foreseeable future. Yet oil is non renewable, it has to run out sometime. Where are we on the time-line of the oil age?

E.L. Drake’s well of 1859 is one important starting point. Using a new drilling technique, he hit a pocket of oil under pressure and the first oil gusher was born. Until then, whale oil was the major source of energy for lighting etc. The discovery was fortuitous as whales were getting scarcer.

With the motor car and industrialisation in the 1930’s oil consumption started to grow, but it was the discovery of gigantic reserves in Saudi Arabia in 1938 that meant the oil age could take off, and at the end of WWII consumption accelerated.

The oil industry had attracted some of the most brilliant minds around. In 1946, Geologist M King Hubbert estimated that the age of oil would be short-lived. In 1956 he published a paper predicting that US oil production would peak in 1970 and that world production would peak in the early 2000’s.

Before the year 1970 had a chance to prove him right or wrong, in 1963 world discovery of oil reserves hit a peak. Since then less and less oil has been discovered.

Although Dr. Hubbert’s predictions were laughed at by the oil industry, true enough US oil production peaked in 1970. Nine years later, 1979 was the year world oil production peaked per capita. Since then, oil production has not kept pace with world population growth.

In the mid-1980s we started to produce more oil than we found, signalling the beginning of the end of the oil age stronger than ever. At the same time, the ecological footprint of man also exceeded Earth’s capacity.

Since the end of the 80’s, oil has become increasingly difficult to extract. Back in the 1800s one barrel of oil was needed to extract 100. Today we are looking at estimates of around one barrel to extract eight.

Around 1990 another major event happened: we passed the safe limit of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Scientists believe that concentrations above this level put us at risk of a major climate system collapse. Even if we burn no oil from now on, positive feedback mechanisms mean that concentrations of greenhouse gasses will continue to rise.

It might be of no comfort then, to know that since 2003 there have been no major discoveries of oil, and since 2005 world oil production has remained on a plateau of about 85 million barrels a day. Possibly giving us a foretaste of what living with oil shortage means, in 2007 the price of oil rose from what was already considered high, $50 a barrel, to over $145. A world economic recession followed. During recent years, more and more voices have been calling for urgent action to curb our, as President Bush put it “addiction to oil”.