Hey it's me and I want to talk about two words I keep hearing to try and explain how maybe
they're linked.
Peak oil and peak water.
So you may have heard of peak oil, but have you heard of peak water?
First off let's start with peak oil.
What on earth is it?
Well, demand for oil is not constant.
Globally, we actually use more of it every single year, because the world's economy is
growing.
Demand is rising.
Which means that we have to pull more and more oil from the ground year on year to accommodate
for growing demand so production actually increases every single year.
That means finding more oil fields, finding better ways to extract the oil, expanding
production.
We can do that, and we've been doing that for decades, but ultimately, oil is a finite
resource and it will run out.
The theory goes that oil production looks like this: it increases year on year so every
year we are able to produce a little bit more oil than the previous year until it peaks,
then we can't produce the same levels any more and it begins a year on year decline.
We produce less and less oil every single year.
Simple.
So when peak oil hits, there is still oil left - we haven't run out - we're just having
a harder time actually getting it out of the ground.
It's kind of like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, at first it's easy to do, but it
gets harder and harder as there's less in the tube it becomes more and more difficult.
Now - why is this a problem?
Well, when there's a limited supply of something that everybody wants and needs, its price
rises as the highest bidders outbid the little guy.
And everybody wants oil.
The demand is not going to go away.
You really can't overstate how important crude oil is to our modern existence.
Hitting peak oil, theorists argue, would mean that things we take for granted, things like
food, travel, heating, clothing would become prohibitively expensive, because their cost
is tied to the cost of oil.
Anything that needs energy to be produced or to be transported becomes tied to the cost
of oil, including water, which brings us nicely onto the idea of peak water.
So, everybody uses water right?
Well, to get water many countries pump it from ground aquifers to use it, nature replenishes
it with rainfall and snow meltwater.
Peak water is when you are pumping water from the ground at about the exact same rate that
nature can replenish it but if we go beyond peak water, we are over-pumping our water
supply, and the aquifer is going to empty.
So why is this a problem?
A lot of reasons.
Firstly, the water pumped from aquifers is used on our farms to grow food.
Research published by Earth Policy Institute shows that once you hit peak water, you pretty
much hit peak food and you can't produce anymore year on year.
For example, Syria, it hit peak water in 2001, and now their grain production has fallen
by 32% and as we learned before if the demand stays the same, and demand for food is always
going to stay the same, that means the cost of food rises.
Amazingly, the same research by the Earth Policy Institute suggested that the US, Mexico,
Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, India, China, and South Korea were beyond peak water in 2012.
All of those countries were pumping their aquifers faster than they replenish.
They are running out of water.
The problem even arrived in California, one of the largest wine producers in the world.
And farmers there, in California are having their water allowance cut because of a lack
of fresh water in California's aquifers.
"If we go back to 1988 the aquifer has lost about one and a half times the volume of Lake
Mead that's a huge amount of water."
"How much is left in the aquifer?"
"Let me see how I can sugar coat this.
I ran some back of the envelope numbers looking at how long it would take at those pumping
rates for the aquifer to be depleted and I got a number somewhere between 60-100 years.
So at the low end, 60 years that's frightening.
I think California is in trouble.
The combination of climate change, growth, and ground water depletion bells a train wreck."
There's another interesting example in Saudi Arabia.
They have been expanding their own food production, and they've only been able to do this by pumping
huge amounts of water from a very deep water table underground.
You can actually see Saudi Arabia's grain production expanding in these satellite photos
over time.
But Saudi Arabia is a desert and that water table doesn't really replenish.
This kind of domestic food production will have to stop in around 2016 when the water
literally runs out.