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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Oil and Gas: Facing the Music Before it Stops
  • Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:44:02 -0600


Oil and Gas: Facing the Music Before it Stops
http://www.democrats.us/editorial/wise061704.shtml
By: Robert Wise

I'm glad to see the surge of interest in the coming peak of world oil
production, even though the prospect is grim. Once again, people are willing
to think about non-renewable resources and the consequences of an economy
based on them. After strong and effective conservation measures during the
Carter years, America lapsed into a don't-worry-be-happy attitude toward
energy. Now we seem to be waking up again.

Most of the new information stems from the work of two little-known
scientists, both deceased: petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert and systems
ecologist Howard Odum.

Hubbert's famous "peak" inspired several new books and a dozen websites about
the coming production peak, including the excellent "Hubbert's Peak" and "The
Party's Over." And here and there in these sources you see Odum's pioneering
work on energy and economic value.

Hubbert was a petroleum geologist who worked for several major oil companies.
At an industry symposium in the 50's, he analyzed US oil production,
predicting it would peak in the 1970's and go into irreversable decline. His
prediction was ridiculed by geologists and oil executives. But in fact the
peak arrived about 1970, with the trend of production closely following his
theoretical curve.

Hubbert also predicted, in 1974, that the peak of world production would come
in the mid-1990s. Petroleum geologist Kenneth Defreyes recomputed Hubbert's
model using the latest figures on oil reserves, and predicts a peak within a
few years of 2010.

Once past the peak of world production, there will never again be enough oil
in the pipeline to satisfy today's level of demand. There will be rising
prices, periodic shortages, inflation and recession - stagflation, as we used
to hear in the 1970s. But unlike the oil shocks of the 1970's, these trends
will go on for decades until oil and natural gas are no longer significant as
energy resources.

Economists say that higher energy prices will make alternative energy sources
economical. The next logical step would be "shale oil" or tar sands. But
funny things have happened on the way to the tar sands. As Deffreys recalls,
every time it seems that energy prices have risen high enough to make oil
shale extraction economical, the costs of extraction have climbed in
proportion! Describing this in "Hubbert's Peak", he seemed a little puzzled.

Howard Odum watched the same events unfold, and was not puzzled. His work on
energy costs and net yield convinced him that shale oil would never be
economical, because it would never yield more energy than was used in
extracting it. He testified against proposals for shale oil development in
Congress in the early 70's, but his warnings were discounted.

I joined one of Odum's seminars at the University of Florida in 1970. You
almost had to be in class with him to get the flavor of his thinking; his
writing had the bland, opaque quality of a polished PhD dissertation. Later
he worked with his wife to produce a series of textbooks, but never became a
popular author. His defining work was "Environmental Accounting", published
in 1996.

The title gives a clue to his basic insights. Throughout his career, Odum
struggled with concepts of the "quality" of a given fuel, "embedded energy",
net energy.. Plain "calories" do not tell the real value of a substance. But
he was criticized by colleagues for trying to contrast one form of energy
with another, when a calorie was a calorie was a calorie.

Odum's final answer on energy and value was a concept called "emergy": the
total cost of producing a given substance, measured in calories of sunlight.
It's an accounting concept, not a physical measure. Sunlight energy is taken
as the baseline, since it's only source of energy "income" to our planet.

Emergy (spelled with an "m") cost includes both the work done by nature and
the work done by man. When you start to audit nature's books this way, you
see clearly that some fuels are net losses and that some "free" goods are
created at great cost. You see how heavily every activity in our economy is
subsidized by cheap energy, even when it involves no fuel or electric power.

Emergy analysis, or its 1970's precursor, told Howard Odum that oil shale
would never work out. It told him that solar energy would not be useful
except in special situations- space heating or water heating in warm
climates- where it was worth spending excessive emergy in labor and materials
to collect some heat at the right place and time.

I believe that in a few years every college graduate will have heard of
emergy and the Hubbert peak, and everyone will have a better sense of the
value of nature's gifts. Hubbert and Odum left priceless legacies, and all
our names are in their wills.

Robert Wise is a software engineer from Merritt Island, Florida. He is also a
doctoral candidate in Geography.




  • [Livingontheland] Oil and Gas: Facing the Music Before it Stops, Tradingpost, 09/21/2004

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