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In the early 2000s, news of the end of the oil age was everywhere. "No more oil!"
Yet, here we are a decade later, “Oil everywhere! We’ll never run out of oil!!”.
So which is it?
Right now the world produces a whopping 93 million barrels of oil every day, but more
than a trillion barrels still sit in Earth’s crust.
We’ve already gotten most of Earth’s “easy” oil, but new technologies like horizontal
drilling and hydraulic fracturing are giving us to access more and more of it.
But considering the impact of fossil fuels on the climate and environment, we have to
ask: When will we be done with oil?
If the history of energy is any guide, how much oil we pump up to the surface, and ultimately
into the atmosphere, depends a lot on what other energy options we have.
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In the 17th century, there were 820 million acres of virgin forest in the United States,
but after a few centuries of burning wood for heat, energy, and cooking, that number
had dwindled to just 138 million.
At some point in the mid-1800s we reached “peak wood”. Luckily we had an alternative
fuel that, at least at the time, promised to be environmentally friendly and save the
forests. Coal.
Likewise in 1846, thanks to the popularity of whale oil as a smokeless lamp fuel, we
reached “peak whale”.
Whales are a decidedly non-renewable resource. Our love of lamp almost drove them extinct.
"I love lamp. I love lamp." But it wasn’t simply dwindling supply and
increasing demand that saved the cetaceans. It was the discovery of a new lamp fuel called
kerosene, distilled from a black liquid that we’d recently learned how to pump out of
the ground.
If oil saving the whales seems like an odd idea, that’s because the history of energy
in America tends to be solving one problem by introducing another.
We used to think that tool use was our defining human characteristic… until we saw chimps
do it. Then we claimed language as our own, until we met a gorilla named Koko. But the
ability to intentionally manipulate energy to do stuff seems to be a distinctly “us”
thing. Although, there’s those beavers…
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Anyway, how a society uses energy is one of its defining characteristics. Humans first
harnessed thermal energy, and later kinetic energy, but there was no easy way to convert
one to the other… until the steam engine.
This ability to convert and control energy led to the Industrial Revolution, which was
a pretty big deal.
As a rule in history, as a society gets more advanced, it consumes more energy, and we’re
no different. The story of the 20th century is one of more energy, for more people, used
for more things.
But that’s not the only trend. The past centuries have seen a general trend
from wood to coal to oil to renewables, and today we get our energy from more sources
than ever before. Renewable energy in particular has grown in the past ten years.
We’re also getting more energy per unit of CO2 than ever before. We hear a lot about
reducing carbon today, but we’ve been on that path for a long time.
But even though more efficiency and less consumption means that we’re using fewer fossil fuels
over the past decade, total consumption has gone up faster, so emissions are still higher
than they were 4 decades ago, and fossil fuels are still #1 by a big margin.
U.S. energy use matches the rest of the world pretty closely. I’m not sure if that’s
a good or bad thing, but it means my problems are your problems are everyone’s problems.
Unfortunately, the Energy Information Administration projects that where we all get our energy
won’t change much over the next two decades, and, well, have you heard about this whole
climate change thing?
The history of energy transitions has been one of new energy sources taking the place
of dirtier scarcer ones., but considering that with the exception of nuclear, all of
our energy technologies date from the 19th century, inventing new energy sources is a
thing of the past.
But as CO2 levels continue to climb past 400 ppm, waiting for peak oil might not be an
option. For the first time in our history, we might have to invent a peak of our own.