Peak Oil vs Climate Change - which is scarier?

on Aug 13 in Climate Change, Peak Oil tagged by Trevor Hicks

I have roughly the same attitude about anthropogenic Climate Change and Peak Oil, the notion not that oil is “running out” per se, but that our ability to continue to grow our rate of extraction may have hit its limit.  That is, I think it’s probably happening but I’m not ready to push the panic button. Curiously if you think about which possibility is more worrisome, Peak Oil wins in a landslide.  Given that we have much, much more accurate data about how much oil is pumped than “global temperature” and we can see that global oil production hasn’t budged upwards since 2005 despite huge price increases, I’d have to rate the probability of Peak Oil as higher than Climate Change.  Certainly the time frame within which we have to worry about the problem is much, much shorter with Peak Oil and Climate Change.  And seriously, the consequences are much easier to figure out and are generally far worse from Peak Oil for the “American way of life” than Climate Change. So let’s tally that up, Peak Oil is more likely to occur and affect us much sooner with far worse consequences than Climate Change.  As I said, for me there is no contest about which potential problem is scarier and yet our politicians, globally, rarely bring it up at all.

One meme I’ve seen from Peak Oil skeptics lately is to point to the revolution in US natural gas production since 2006. At the time nobody believed that gas production could grow much and yet it has mushroomed thanks to technological improvements that permit the commercial extraction of shale gas. So why then shouldn’t we expect a similar technological improvement that will allow oil production to continue to grow? This article by John Kemp of Reuters is a good example and a good article.

Clearly we cannot count on our ability to discover new resources.  Not that some new hydrocarbon source can’t possibly exist, but assuming that the rate of discovery of new hydrocarbons will increase when it has been in decline for about 50 years now really is wishful thinking.  No, production increases would have to arise from better exploitation of known resources, as we did with shale gas. So what are the candidates?

Shale Oil or Kerogen? The number of molecules is vast, the US Rocky Mountains has an order of magnitude more of this stuff than the Saudis have oil. Unfortunately it’s incredibly energy intensive and environmentally devastating to extract and refine the stuff into usable product. It’s even worse than the tar sands on both counts. Both processes consume and spoil copious amounts of water. There’s no light at the end of this tunnel.

What about methane hydrates? These subsea deposits also are said to be in vast supply. Unfortunately they also lie in unconsolidated sands from which production is essentially impossible and there is mounting skepticism about just how much of this stuff is really out there anyway.

Are we suddenly going to find a new technology to raise production from known, conventional sources? Most of the time we can recover about a third of the original oil in place, maybe there’s some hope there.

The fundamental problem with all of these approaches, though, is that none of them show any promise at all for being able to produce hydrocarbons at a rate that will compensate for the the fact that our existing global oil production base is depleting at 6.7% per year according to the IEA. You could find a supertanker full of oil but it doesn’t do you much good if you only have a drinking straw to extract it (though it would last a LONG time).

So I’m not yet stocking up on survival gear or a year’s worth of dry goods or whatever. But I do think our priorities are completely screwed up regarding the potential energy issue that grabs the news headlines and the attention of our politicians.