Q: There is a grave problem with our dependence on fossil fuels, or rather many problems. Eric didn’t even discuss global warming.

A: I had a rather snide thing I was going to say about global warming I didn’t give for reasons of time. It would have gone something like, “Oil scarcity eventually will overcome oil over-use as a global problem, I believe. At any rate, whatever the mechanism, a warming cycle has been set off that will require at minimum hundreds of years to play out. Without more than a gut feeling, I think global crisis and war over fuel scarcity will precede and be a greater harm in near decades than global warming” with one possible exception: runaway +-feedback global warming. Rapid evolution of a Venus-like climate is of very low probability (again no proof, just gut feeling) but would wipe out almost everything within a few decades or even just a few years.

Q: My lingering question from the talk, is what are the arguments for the date of peak oil. We saw different estimates, and Eric thinks we are there now. WIthout seeing the evidence, I have one skeptical comment: If we were right now at the cusp of declining oil supply, why would the oil companies not be the first to see this, and themselves begin to exploit markets for substitutions of other products. That they are not suggests to me that the crisis may be further off, and that as it approaches we will see the investors getting ready for new markets in other sources of energy. As the price of oil rises, the oil companies will try to reap huge profits, but there will also be rising incentives for others to offer alternatives that are not now, even at $3/gallon gas, economical.

A: I said that (1) I DO NOT KNOW when world peak oil will occur; and (2) TODAY there is ZERO spare capacity of light sweet crude, the best oil for making fuels. I DO NOT KNOW if the CERA guys (see the link set I provided for Sept. 29 at Deep Blade), or EIA, or IEA are right and that the world will get to 100 million bpd in ten years. But for TODAY, there is NO SWING CAPACITY above 85 mb/d in light sweet crude. The only way spare capacity can appear is if demand comes down—which it might markedly in a worldwide recession.

The oil companies have changed their tune in just the last couple of years. They DO see this. Check out the site I mentioned in the talk but forgot to include in the link list: http://www.willyoujoinus.com/

That’s Chevron!! They say: “One thing is clear, the era of easy oil is over”. Exxon has issued reports in 2005 essentially confirming the Aleklett graph I passed out. Wood-McKenzie, the giant UK petrol consultants, discovered that, “that both 2001 and 2002 were very bad years for the world’s top ten oil explorers something which isn’t obvious from their company accounts.” The oil companies are entirely aware of exactly what is going on. So the premise of the question is incorrect, except yes, monopoly practices are employed to reap huge profits.

Sure, there will be changes in the nature of fuels that are used as price goes up, even the nature of oil itself. I made rather a big point about the Saudi signals that they will only be able to add capacity (or make up for depletion) with SOUR (high-sulfur) crude.

Beyond that, the existence of “alternatives” or “new technologies” has not and will never “replace” petrol-based systems of transport, indeed petrol-based civilization. The huge problem is that alternatives are not scalable, have below 100% energy return on energy investment, or just plain depend on oil to even work. lifeaftertheoilcrash.net has some interesting critiques in this area.

Q: I had a similar reaction to Y2K even though my wife was quite convinced we might have a major crash and that was that too many companies had too much to lose from the collapse of their computers not to fix the problem. As it turned out, and perhaps in part to all the publicity and worry the problems from Y2K were negligible.

A: The correspondence of generating conditions and potential harms from an oil crash versus the Y2K problem is just about ZERO.